Every theory has its pet names. What does Disability Studies think of literature, authors, and readers?
What is Literature?
Literature is the point at which art and society collide when it comes to our understanding of the body and the way it is represented. Our culture shapes the way that writers deal with bodies and, especially, the way they represent extraordinary bodies. From Tiny Tim to Captain Ahab, stereotypes of the saintly and/or the bitter cripple inundate the stories we read.
And, as good old Rosemarie Garland-Thomson shows us, disabled characters in literature have often been the occasion for non-disabled characters to learn lessons or to prove their virtue. The non-disabled characters draw inspiration from the example set by the disabled saint or prove their own worth by sacrificing all to care for the burdensome (and often bitter and ungrateful) cripple.
At the same time that literature serves to reflect social understandings of "normative" and "non-normative" bodies, it can also be used to question and even to change these very ideas. For example, in the age of modern eugenics, Huxley's Brave New World warns us against the idea that we have the ability or the right to use scientific knowledge to shape who comes into the world and how. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye laments the idea that only one kind of body is beautiful or worthwhile.
So, for disability studies, literature can be both an agent of the same-ol', same-ol' and a powerful instrument for change.
What is an Author?
The author is the one who is enmeshed in the many social, scientific, political, and cultural discourses of the body. She must negotiate these stories of the body because it is simply impossible to separate oneself from them. The author, therefore, is always shaped in some way by her society's understanding of the body.
At the same time, though the writer has no choice but to be impacted by these cultural narratives, how she responds to them is a choice. An author may, consciously or subconsciously, participate in and support the culture's dominant understanding of the "normal" and the "abnormal" body or she may disrupt them by violating, or at least questioning, those representations. But whichever she chooses, the author is always engaging in the culture's understandings of the body, of what it means to have a body, and of what that body should do, look like, or be like.
What is a Reader?
The reader, like the author, is someone who is enmeshed. The reader is wrapped up like a big spider in a gnarly web of stories, ideas, and perceptions of the body. How the reader understands the text and the way that it treats the "normal" and the "abnormal" when it comes to bodies, their appearances, and their functioning, will depend not just on the book but on the reader's own experiences in the living world beyond the book.
So, like the writer, the reader has to negotiate a sea of values, stereotypes, and worldviews when it comes to disability. And these perspectives will shape and be shaped by the book, either supporting or undermining what the reader knows, consciously or unconsciously, about bodies and how they do/should function.