THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL

Abject Love: Undoing the Boundaries of Physical

Disability

being a Thesis submitted for the Degree of PhD

in the University of Hull

by

Minae Inahara, B.A. honours (Newcastle Australia)

May 2006

Abstract
This thesis challenges the dominant image of physical disability as the
Other. I will build on the work of disability theorists such as Jenny Morris,
Susan Wendell and Robert Murphy to develop a conception that acknowledges
the significance of embodied subjectivity. In order to explain how and to what
purposes subjects come to be seen as the disabled and the Other, I shall
review existing theories involving disability, impairment, and the body. The
aim of this thesis is to undermine the able-bodiedness/physical disability
dichotomy. To achieve this, inspired by poststructuralist feminists like Judith
Butler and Julia Kristeva, I shall introduce and develop the idea that physical
disability is abjection, that is, something that society constantly attempts to
throw out because it unsettles carefully bounded conceptions of self. Without
denying the materiality of the disabled body, that is to say, without reducing
physical disability to discourse, the reconceptualisation of physical disability as
abjection opens up exciting new possibilities that have previously been
foreclosed in disability theory. If physical disability is abjection, then one
could accept ones disability differently, and thus, disrupt able-bodied norms.
The disabled is seen as the abject because it undermines boundaries between
the self and the Other, and as such, is always ambivalent. This thesis aims to
undo the process of othering physical disability, and to dismantle the
hierarchical binary oppositions of able-bodied/disabled and self/Other.

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Acknowledgements
I would first of all like to acknowledge my supervisor, Dr. Kathleen
Lennon, for her dedicated supervision that encouraged me to complete this
thesis and for her personal support. She helped to pull me through many
conceptual deadlocks. Without her, my dream to accomplish this thesis would
not have come true. I also acknowledge my supervisor, Prof. Gabriele Griffin
for her time and understanding.

Credit is also due to the Hull Philosophy Department as a whole for

accommodating me. Thank you to Suzie Locke of the Graduate School for her
generous help and quick e-mail responses. Many thanks to my friend, John
Nicholls, for proofreading my thesis and for his useful comments.

I am grateful to my partner, Michael, who has always been there even

when I was in Australia and Japan and who has always believed in my
intellectual ability, for his special support. He and I had many philosophical
discussions and sleepless nights during writing this thesis. Michael made it
possible for me to resume this thesis that I could not complete in Australia.
Without him, I could not complete this long journey of finding myself.

Thanks are due to both his family and my family in Japan for all their
support. In particular, I am grateful to my mother, Miyoko Inahara, who has
always accepted my differences and believed in my abilities, for her
understanding my situation and giving me the second chance to accomplish this
thesis in England. A special thank you goes to Michaels parents, Gavin and

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Joyce Peckitt, his brother and sister-in-law, Ken and Catherine Peckitt, my
grandmother, Shigeko Kinnaka, my sister, Hisami Nakamura, my brother-inlaw, Daisuke Nakamura, my niece, Kaho, my cousin, Miho Oka, all merely a
handful of the many relatives who supported me.

I also would like to thank my friends for their support to complete this
thesis and for giving me the experience of the world with them. They are:
Walter Bowman, Zo Coleman, Dr. Sandy Darab, Achini Dandunage,
Benjamin Green, Midori Hatanaka, Naoko Horikawa, Makiko Irokawa,
Chikako Ishikawa, Sanna Kallioinen, Dr. Alan Libert, Paula Lister, Mei-lin Liu,
Noriyuki Matsuuchi, Dr. Angela Melville, Tomoko Nakano, Prof. Takao
Nishimura, Yumiko Ono, Hikaru Otani, Dr. John Scott, Dr. Richard Smith,
Kristy Trajcevski, Megumi Uchino, Daniel Walters, Dr. Melanie Williams, and
many others for their very special friendships, and also to Prof. Shigenori
Wakabayashi who opened my eyes to see the world in different ways by
enlightening me on the martial arts.

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To Miyoko, the best mum in the world.

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Contents
ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................... 2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................. 3
CONTENTS....................................................................................................... 6
INTRODUCTION............................................................................................. 8
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT OF PHYSICAL DISABILITY ......................... 8
TOWARDS ABJECT LOVE: WHERE TEARS FLOW ............................................. 12
ROBERT MURPHYS THE BODY SILENT ............................................................ 14
THE INDIVIDUAL (MEDICAL) MODEL AND THE SOCIAL MODEL ..................... 18
TOWARDS FEMINIST DISABILITY STUDIES: CRITIQUES OF THE SOCIAL MODEL
................................................................................................... 22
THESIS FRAMEWORK ...................................................................................... 30
CHAPTER 1 - QUESTIONING THE ABLE BODIED MATRIX:
CONSTRUCTION OF THE IMAGE OF PHYSICAL DISABILITY ...... 35
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................... 35
THE PROCESS OF OTHERING PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES .................................... 38
1. The Myth of Able-bodiedness ................................................................. 38
2. The Second Body The Disabled Other .............................................. 42
FOUCAULT: DISCOURSE AND POWER .............................................................. 49
THE ELEPHANT MAN: THE ABLE-BODIED GAZE............................................. 56
CINEMA AND THE ABLE-BODIED GAZE .......................................................... 66
CONCLUSIONS: TOWARDS RESISTANCE .......................................................... 72
CHAPTER 2 - THE ABLE BODY AS THE PHALLIC BODY:
PSYCHOANALYTIC EXPLORATION OF PHYSICAL DISABILITY . 75
INTRODUCTION: .............................................................................................. 75
FREUD AND LACAN: ON THE BODY AND LANGUAGE...................................... 77
THE PHALLIC BODY AS THE ABLE BODY ........................................................ 88
IRIGARAY AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE ............................................................. 97
THIS BODY WHICH IS NOT ONE ................................................................... 103
CHAPTER 3 - EMBODIED VOICES: AN EXPLORATION OF JANE
CAMPIONS THE PIANO (1993) .............................................................. 111
INTRODUCTION: VOICE AND SPEECH ............................................................ 111
THE PIANO: PERSONAL REFLECTIONS ........................................................... 120
UNINTELLIGIBLE VOICES: FREUD, IRIGARAY AND KRISTEVA ....................... 125
THE PIANO: TOWARDS EMBODIED VOICES ................................................... 137
1. Silence: the Subversive Myth of Echo .................................................. 137
2. The Piano as Voice............................................................................... 144
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................ 160
CHAPTER 4 - PHYSICAL DISABILITY AND PERFORMATIVITY . 165
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................. 165
GENDER TROUBLE ........................................................................................ 168
1. The Performative Account of the Establishment and Maintenance of the
Heterosexual Matrix ................................................................................. 168
2. Account of Routes to Destabilisation of the Heterosexual Matrix ....... 173
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3. Rejection of Sex/Gender Distinction .................................................... 176

PERFORMATIVE APPLICATION TO DISABILITY THEORY ................................ 177
1. Performative Establishment of the Able-bodied Matrix....................... 177
2. Destabilisation of the Able-bodied Matrix through Performance ....... 185
3. Rejection of Impairment/Disability Distinction ................................... 187
MARY DUFFY: PHYSICAL DISABILITY, FEMININITY, AND PERFORMANCE .... 189
BODIES THAT MATTER: TOWARDS A COLLAGE OF PERFORMATIVITY ......... 195
DISABLED BODIES THAT MATTER: DUFFYS MAKING CHOICES .................. 200
WHAT ABOUT THE BODY? UNDOING THE PERFORMATIVE COLLAGE ........ 205
CHAPTER 5 - UNDOING THE OTHER: BETWEEN BOUNDARIES:
VIEWING STEVEN SPIELBERGS E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL
(1982) .............................................................................................................. 211
INTRODUCTION: A PERSONAL ENCOUNTER WITH THE ABJECT ..................... 211
JULIA KRISTEVAS THEORY OF ABJECTION .................................................. 214
BUTLERS ACCOUNT OF ABJECTION ............................................................. 225
AGAINST BUTLER: A KRISTEVAN CRITIQUE .................................................. 231
THE DISABLED BODY AS THE ABJECT BODY ................................................ 236
THE ABJECT IN E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL .......................................... 242
1. The Alien as the Othered Abject ........................................................... 242
2. Expanding the Domain of the Abject ................................................... 245
3. The Alien is E.T. ................................................................................... 249
4. Multiple Identifications ........................................................................ 251
5. Towards Incorporation ........................................................................ 256
CONCLUSION: WAYS OF UNDOING THE OTHER .......................................... 261
APPENDIX .................................................................................................... 266
BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................... 267
MOTION PICTURES ........................................................................................ 277
WEB RESOURCES .......................................................................................... 277

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Introduction

An Autobiographical Account of Physical Disability

Being in too much of a rush to meet the world, I was born prematurely
in Osaka, Japan. I either ignored, or was unaware of my expected date of
release and of my mothers plan to go to her hometown to release me. I do not
know why I exited my mothers womb five weeks early. I probably felt
cramped in a confined space and like most prisoners, wanted to come out to be
free. I shocked my parents. Of course, whilst present at this event, I do not
have any memory of this state of emergency of which I myself was the author.
I heard that a doctor who was present decided to put me into an incubator.
Unfortunately, the decision was wrong for me because the incubator did not
provide enough oxygen; I was anoxic. No one knew what was wrong with me
at that time. My parents came to realise that there might be something wrong
with me when I was six to eight months old, because my head was never
steady; I always held it to one side. My mother was worried about me because
I was not good at suckling and then I would vomit up all the milk I drank. My
mother took me to the hospital and finally, when I was about ten months old, I
was diagnosed as being afflicted with cerebral palsy.1 These stories were told
to me by my mother, when I was older.

Margaret Griffiths and Mary Clegg (1988), in Cerebral Palsy: Problems and Practice, cite one of the
most comprehensive definitions of cerebral palsy, which comes from the World Commission for Cerebral
Palsy:
Cerebral Palsy is a persistent but not unchanging disorder of movement and posture
due to dysfunction of brain, excepting that caused by progressive disease, present
before its growth and development are completed. Many other clinical signs may
be present. (Griffiths and Clegg, 1988: 11)
According to Blacks Medical Dictionary Fortieth Edition (2002)

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While there are definitions used by medical practitioners, there is no

one, uncontested general definition of cerebral palsy, which is really a set of
symptoms with one underlying cause that marks one out as having cerebral
palsy. Some people experience total paralysis, some partial paralysis, some
have speech, motor, or co-ordination difficulties. No individual with cerebral
palsy need necessarily experience the same symptoms as another, but there is
one exception: it usually involves some kind of paralysis of the limbs, be it
total, where no movement is possible or partial where the person is able to
perform at least some motor functions. Cerebral palsy affects my ability to
control movement and coordination, and in particular, the ability to produce
speech. It is a very complex condition and every individual with cerebral palsy
is affected in different ways, experiencing different symptoms. What we can
say is that cerebral palsy is believed to result from damage occurring to

Cerebral Palsy: The term used to describe a group of conditions characterized by

varying degrees of paralysis and occurring in infancy or early childhood. In some
80 per cent of cases this takes from the form of spastic paralysis: hence the now
obsolete lay description of them as spastics. The incidence is believed to be
around 2 or 2.5 per 1000 of the childhood community. In the majority of cases the
abnormality dates from before birth or occurs during birth. Among the pre-natal
factors are some genetic malformation of the brain, a congenital defect of the brain,
or some adverse effect on the foetal brain as by infection during pregnancy. Among
the factors during birth that may be responsible are trauma to the child or prolonged
lack of oxygen such as can occur during a difficult labour. This last factor is
considered by some to be the most important single factor. In some 10 to 15 per
cent of cases the condition is acquired after birth, when it may be due to
KERNICTERUS, infection of the brain, cerebral thrombosis or embolism, or trauma.
The congenital form is commoner in boys than girls, and a high proportion of the
cases are first-born children The disease manifests itself in many ways, through it
may not be recognized until the infant is two years old. The victim may be spastic
or flaccid, or the slow, writhing involuntary movements, known as athetosis, may be
the predominant feature. These involuntary movements often disappear during
sleep and may be controlled, or even abolished, in some cases, by training the child
to relax. The paralysis varies tremendously. It may involve the limbs on one side
of the body (hemiplegia), both lower limbs (paralegia), or all four limbs
(DIPLEGIA and QUADRIPLEGIA). Mental handicap (with IQ under 70) is
present in around 75 per cent of all children but children with diplegia and athetoid
symptoms may have normal or even high intelligence The outlook for life is
good, only the more severely affected cases dying in infancy. Although there is no
cure, much can be done to help these disabled children, particularly if the condition
detected at an early stage. Little can be done to help those who have severe mental
subnormality, but much can be done for those with normal intelligence by team
work, giving attention to education, physiotherapy, occupational therapy and speech
training. (Blacks Medical Dictionary, 2002:305-6)

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particular parts of the brain before, during, or after birth. In most cases, it is
impossible to determine what specifically causes it. What is so significant
about cerebral palsy that it needs explanation? The reason is that cerebral palsy
has influenced, and continues to influence, my ways of seeing the world; it
matters a great deal to me how I see myself and understand my place in the
world.

The way in which I see the world is based on the way in which I am
embodied.

For me, my experience of physical disability informs my

interpretation of myself, an interpretation that is based on those embodied

features that are related to my bodily movements and sensations. As a result, I
perceive the world as dependent upon the particularity of my body. A mutual
pact occurs between my body and its world, such that the way in which my
body can collaborate in the world is determined by the way my physical
disability is embodied. Consequently, I am embodied differently from others
and I see the world in a particular way, that is, in terms of experiencing my
bodily difference.

My physical disability affects the way in which I experience modes of

embodiment, such as walking, talking and sitting still. For example, owing to
my physical disability, I am not able to control my neck movements. When I
have a haircut, I always feel nervous because I know that I cannot stop my
neck flinching, and it is very difficult for my hairdresser to cut my hair.
Although I like being dressed up and having a nice hairdo, I just do not like
sitting in a chair at the hairdressers salon. Moreover, I have to look at my own
image in a mirror, casting my neck under a spell of immobility. I often

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imagine what I should do at the hairdressers, and I am also very aware of my

head moving involuntarily.

Since I am not able to position my neck as

expected in any of these ways, the nature of my experience of having a haircut

is shaped differently from others. While others seem to enjoy their time at the
salon, it is difficult for me to inhabit the same world that they do. Despite the
fact that I was primarily uneasy about my inability to control my neck
movement, I now accept it as a part of myself. My neck movement has
naturally adjusted over time to reflect the hairdressers skill.

I like my

hairdresser in England because she does not care about my neck movement;
she never makes me talk whilst giving me a haircut. She seems to know that if
I speak, my neck will move a lot. To me, the hairdressers salon had become
the place where I experienced my own vulnerability, in much the same way as
others may experience their vulnerabilities at a hospital where they cannot take
control of their own bodies. The point I am making here is that my embodied
experience informs my awareness of the world around me. My awareness can
only be understood by taking my body into account.

I trust that the explanation above provides an insight into how the ablebodied world, which many people habitually take for granted, ignores the
complexity, fluidity, multiplicity, and vulnerability of human embodiment.
This thesis emerges from my personal experience of becoming a disabled
subject. My physical disability, due to cerebral palsy, is central to this thesis,
which, at the same time, interrogates the category of the disabled. For a long
time I have wondered if I have a fixed identity as disabled. Why is it so
difficult for me to identify myself in this manner?

Throughout this thesis, I

look for an image of physical disability that I can identify with, an image that

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does not suggest pity or misfortune, but one that reflects the complexity,
fluidity, multiplicity, and vulnerability of all modes of embodiment.

Towards Abject Love: Where Tears Flow

This thesis can be best illustrated as a theoretical exploration of the

embodied self as it takes form in pleasure, pain, happiness, uneasiness,
emptiness, sadness, helplessness, and also, in the tears that sometimes roll
down my cheeks in all of these states of being. Tears are a crucial metaphor in
this thesis. We all shed tears at times when we feel sad, happy, confused, or
merely empty.

Tears are often considered as feminine, beautiful,

vulnerable and pure. So what is the significance of the tear? Would it be

possible to reconsider tears in feminist philosophical terms, connecting them
with notions of embodiment? Tears are fluid and may result in interpretations
that are dependent upon their emotional and social context. When we see
someone in tears we cannot simply interpret his/her mind and emotion. Or,
when we shed tears, we often do so because we cannot express what we feel in
words. Tears do not simply represent the fixed or rational part of the subject,
but portray the fluid and affective formation of it. In a similar way, tears take a
form that is both corporeal and beyond words: they are a bodily expression of
what is inexpressible in language, what is always fluid and occurs in the space
between the self and the other.

For a woman who has a speech impairment due to cerebral palsy, and
who comes from a non-English speaking country, tears may be regarded as
my embodied voice. They are often the only way I have to express complex,

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abstract feelings and emotions. I cannot articulate the meaning of my tears.

Just as I have difficulty translating my Japanese emotions into English, so too I
find it difficult, if not, on occasions impossible, to express what I see as
disabled emotions into able-bodied concepts.

In short, my physical

differences are interconnected, and become fluid; they are a flood of tears. I
have learnt that when I shed these tears, a person in front of me interprets the
meaning of my tears in ways that may be contrary to my intentions. This
bodily fluid is thus ever-shifting, volatile, and open to question. I shed tears
with an embodied intention, but I cannot see them/it. Another person may
interpret my tears for his/her own sense, but inevitably he/she is left wanting.
My tears do not express a sort of fixed thoughtfulness. They tempt him/her to
ask: What are you feeling? I therefore think that there is inevitably a form of
questioning, something that we attempt to interpret, but in the end it only fills
us with further questions. In these moments of fluidity, I discover myself as an
embodied subject, making possible the fluidity that Luce Irigaray (1985b)
terms a feminine alterity, and Julia Kristeva (1982) terms abjection: a space
beyond dualisms. The feminine and the abject are often linked to the body,
which is changeable and vulnerable.

Abject Love, the title of this thesis, takes its cue from the image of tears
and French feminist theories of feminine alterity and abjection. As a feminist
thinker, I suggest that the embodied subject that I draw in the image of tears
can conceive of herself beyond the mainstream representations of the disabled
body. I am concerned to find a space where a fixed image of the embodied
self can dissolve into fluidity, creating a space in which the disabled body is
excused from the regulations imposed by an able-bodied society.

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It is

important for me to find such a space.

More than this, it is a political

imperative that I aim to fulfil in this thesis. I need to explore the space where
physical disability may be conceived beyond the able-bodied norm that
inscribes the disabled other onto bodies that signify difference. I need to
illustrate an experience beyond the able-bodied claim of fixity that produces
boundaries that restrict participation for disabled individuals. As I will argue
throughout this thesis, such a space can found in cultural texts: cinema,
performance art, poetry, narrative, and photography.

I am not simply

interested in the ways in which these cultural texts may offer us different
types of cultural descriptions of the body. More specifically, I am concerned
with the ways in which cultural texts can, like the tears that have rolled down
my cheek throughout the researching and writing of this work, undermine the
fixed notions of the body.

I shall argue that these spaces allow for an

embodied experience, an experience that I shall also argue, explores the

process of becoming an embodied subject. It is my hope that this attempt to
find the space where tears flow, the space where my tears are most confused,
and my uneasiness is most intense, will lead to a different way of seeing
physical disability, and in so doing, forge a platform for a new theoretical
perspective on physical disability.

Robert Murphys The Body Silent

In The Body Silent, Robert Murphy (1987) gives an autobiographical

and anthropological account of his experience of becoming the disabled. He
was a professor of anthropology at Columbia University when he became

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physically disabled due to a spinal cord tumour. Murphy uses the analogy of
an anthropological field trip for his disabled experience. He states:

This book was conceived in the realization that my long

illness with a disease of the spinal cord has been a kind of
extended anthropological field trip, for through it I have
sojourned in a social world no less strange to me at first
than those of the Amazon forests. And since it is the duty
of all anthropologists to report on their travels . . . this is my
accounting. (Murphy, 1987: ix)

Thus, he wrote his book as an anthropologist and an impaired person.

Exploring not only his own experience of becoming disabled, but also social
constructions of disability, Murphy guides us to the anthropological trip, the
social and physical transformations of disability.

In the chapter four entitled The Damaged Self, Murphy starts with a
quotation from Franz Kafkas The Metamorphosis:

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams,

he found himself transformed in his bed into gigantic insect.
He was lying on his hard, as if it were armor-plated, back
and when he lifted his head a little he could see his
domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments
What has happened to me? He thought. It was no dream.
(Kafka quoted in Murphy, 1987: 85)

Murphy sees himself as Gregor Samsa in this quotation. He continues:

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From the time my tumor was first diagnosed through my

entry into wheelchair life, I had an increasing apprehension
that I had lost much more than the full use of my legs. I had
also lost part of my self. It was not just that people acted
differently toward me, which they did, but rather that I felt
differently toward myself. I had changed in my own mind,
in my self-image, and in the basic conditions of my
existence. (Murphy, 1987: 85)

Thus, Murphy argues that his physical disability changes his self-image, that is,
the way in which he sees himself. Also, he reads Kafkas literature from his
embodied perspective of becoming the disabled. Murphy explains:

not only are their bodies altered, but their ways of

thinking about themselves and about the persons and objects
of the external world have become profoundly transformed.
They have experienced a revolution of consciousness. They
have undergone a metamorphosis. (Murphy, 1987: 87)

He also states:

Disability is not simply a physical affair for us; it is our

ontology, a condition of our being in the world. (Murphy,
1987: 90)

Murphys work is crucial to me, because it offers me a question

concerning the becoming of an embodied subject. It also provided me with a
methodology. My task here is not to construct an identity for disabled people,
but to deconstruct it and to open up a theoretical framework for different ways
of reading and viewing cultural texts of physical disability. Although I will, as

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Murphy does, draw on my own experience throughout, this thesis is not simply
an autobiography. I sometimes look back on my childhood, or my experiences,
but only to illuminate or explain certain concepts. My aim is to open the reader
up

to

different

perspectives

on

embodied

subjectivity

that

may

challenge/disrupt dominant ways of thinking about physical disability. In this

respect, this thesis will follow Murphys honest method of writing. But, while
I found inspiring questions in Murphys book, along with a style of writing that
I believe is most appropriate, my exploration is underpinned by very different
approaches to his.

Murphy explores social assumptions about physical disability and the

disruptions that they impose.

He considers how his physical disability

transforms his identity, social status, and relationship to others like his wife,
colleagues, friends, and students. Murphy argues that, when encountering him,
his disability is either hardly articulated or totally ignored. Murphys physical
disability is regarded as taboo and, as something that has to remain disregarded,
thus remains silent. He points out the uneasiness of this nature of silencing or
ignoring disability.

While we do perceive something, what is perceived

remains concealed and unseen. Thus, Murphy argues that disability and its
suffering are socio-culturally banned from articulation.

Whilst Murphys

project is to explore the process of the silencing of disability in his experiences

of becoming a disabled subject, this thesis questions the process and explores a
method of undoing it. In order to perform this task, I shall explore theoretical
understandings of physical disability. I shall question the categories that reject
diversity and the complexity of differences. I shall seek to re-examine the
disabled in poststructuralist and feminist accounts and suggest a new kind of

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theoretical investigation. Such theoretical explorations, for me, question the

social construction of disability as fixed, and open up possibilities for
undermining it.

The Individual (Medical) Model and the Social Model

Over the past two decades, disability studies developed the debate about
disabled individuals and their disabilities, and established two major models:
the individual (medical) model and the social model of disability (Barnes,
1991; Finkelstein, 1980; Oliver, 1990 & 1996).

Firstly, the medical model of disability has developed from the

approaches normally taken towards disabled individuals by medical and
welfare professionals. These professionals are sanctioned by social institutions
to treat or look after disabled individuals.

Medical and social welfare

professionals have based their concepts upon the medical model. The World
Health Organizations International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities,
and Handicaps (ICIDH) defines disability as any restriction or lack (resulting
from impairment) of ability to perform an activity in the manner or within the
range considered normal for a human being (WHO, 1980: 28). Within this
context, which is generally regarded as the medical model, disability is
positioned within the individual with impairment.

In Mike Olivers Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice

(1996), it appears as the individual model that is contrary to the social
model. As Oliver claims, the medical model finds the problem with disabled

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individuals rather than with society, and it suggests that the way in which we
solve the problem is to change the disabled individual to fit into society, rather
than improve social conditions to accommodate the disabled individual. Oliver
explains:

There are two fundamental points that need to be made

about the individual model of disability. Firstly, it locates
the problem of disability within the individual and
secondly it sees the causes of this problem as stemming
from the functional limitation or psychological losses which
are assumed to arise from disability. These two points are
underpinned by what might be called the personal tragedy
theory of disability which suggests that disability is some
terrible chance event which occurs at random to
misfortunate individuals.

Of course, nothing could be

further from the truth. (Oliver, 1996: 32)

Thus, the individual (medical) model of disability describes the physical and
psychological restrictions in the lives of disabled individuals as resulting from
their impairments. This model seems to be linked to biological determinism,
which regards disability as a biological, thus unchangeable, condition, and
which reduces disabled individuals into a category of individuals whose bodies
do not move correctly, who appear to be different, or who perceive the world
differently. 2 Politically, most academics in disability studies have opposed
biological determinism and have introduced some form of social construction
into accounts of disability, thus generating a social model of disability.

Helen Crowley and Susan Himmelweit (1992: 60), in Knowing Women: Feminism and Knowledge,
explain biological determinism as: our biology determines the way in which we as individuals develop
both physically and psychologically, and this, in turn determines which roles we are able and choose to
play in society.

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The social model views the restrictions in the lives of disabled people
as resulting from environmental, behavioural and institutional structures within
society. Thus, the social model claims that disability is not an individual
problem, but a social problem. Oliver (1996) explains his position as follows:

Hence disability, according to the social model, is all the

things that impose restrictions on disabled people; ranging
from individual prejudice to institutional discrimination,
from inaccessible public buildings to unusable transport
systems, from segregated education to excluding work
arrangements, and so on. Further, the consequences of this
failure do not simply and randomly fall on individuals but
systematically upon disabled people as a group who
experience this failure as discrimination institutionalised
throughout society. (Oliver, 1996: 33)

In Olivers view, the social model of disability stresses the socio-material

conditions that yield disability. Disability is seen as a mismatch between
bodies and material environments, a mismatch that results in certain kinds of
bodies being made dysfunctional in certain environments.

In this model, disabled people are generally expelled by social

obstructions. For example, an employee who has a speech impairment is
disabled when an employer does not provide any reasonable accommodation,
such as a computerised equipment with which to speak; a wheelchair user is
disabled when a bus does not have a lift and a space for him/her; a deaf person
is disabled when an institution does not provide an interpreter; a student who
has a paralysis of his/her hands is disabled when a school does not give him/her
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special consideration like extra-time, or a computer when he/she takes an exam.

The social model of disability claims that the negative status of disabled people
is socially formed. It points out that disabled people are often made to feel at
fault about their differences, and that they have not been taught to accept them
as they are. Most importantly, the social model considers that discriminatory
social practices are what disables people.

Recognising this process of

disablement, the social model allows disabled people to question their positions
in a society privileging the able-bodied, and empowers them to stand up for
their human rights. Thus, the social model maintains that the problem is not
the disabled individual, but the deficiency of accommodations for all disabled
people.

The social model considers that the solution to the problem of disability
lies in the reorganisation of society.

It suggests that disabled peoples

particular and common difficulties are due to a multifaceted system of

institutionalised discrimination. Discrimination against disabled people is not
naturally established. It is learned through contact with the preconception of
others. Hence, to challenge discrimination against disabled people, we have to
question the able-bodied system.

This model regards the category of disability as a social construction,

criticising medical and conventional assumptions and paying attention to the
development of prejudiced practices (Finkelstein, 1980). Moreover, the social
model of disability has been considered as the big idea of the disability
movement and disability studies (Hasler, 1998 [1993]: 280). In other words,
whether or not one supports it, the social model of disability has become the

- 21 -

only way of demonstrating ones support for disability politics. Here, I would
argue that the social model of disability can be considered as strategic
essentialism, theorising as if the category of disabled people was a unity for
the propose of assembling disabled individuals into a disability political
movement.3 However, it is difficult for this model to either acknowledge or
take into account the diversity and specificity of embodied experiences of
disabled individuals (Morris, 1996; Wendell, 1996, and Crow, 1996). This
critique from feminist disabled studies has raised the question of differences
among disabled individuals that challenges the social models universalism.

Towards Feminist Disability Studies: Critiques of the Social

Model

The social model of disability allows disabled people to recognise

problems within society that obstruct their full participation and equal
opportunities. This model empowers disabled people to work together towards
considering the possibilities of their socio-economic involvement. However,
the main criticism of the social model is that it implies that disability could be
removed if society was transformed in ways that are suitable for all disabled
people. In this model, disabled people would be able to participate fully in
social life if all social environments were approachable for all people, and if all
tasks were arranged properly. In New Geographies of Illness, Impairment and

Gayatri Chakavorty Spivak (1988) uses the term strategic essentialism by which she means that
essentialism should be considered as a kind of tool to destabilize a narrative of the dominant group to
achieve solidarity for the purpose for political movement, even if only temporarily. In In Other Worlds:
Essays in Cultural Politics, Spivak (1988) examines Subaltern studies and states: Reading the work of
Subaltern studies from within but against the grain, I would suggest that elements of their text would
warrant a reading of the project to retrieve the subaltern consciousness as the attempt to undo a massive
historiographic matalepsis and situate the effect of the subject as subaltern. I would read it, then, as a
strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest (Spivak, 1988: 205).
3

- 22 -

Disability, Hester Parr and Ruth Butler (1999) express a critical view of the
social model:

However, acknowledging the undeniable value of the social

model, it is easy to forget that it too is not without fault
At present society plays the dominant role in constructing
disability, but the role of different physical and mental
impairments cannot be ignored by the social model if it is to
continue to be valued and respected.

(Parr and Butler,

1999: 4)

Thus, the social model of disability ignores the significance and nature of
impairment and the body. Moreover, in Disability Theory: Key Ideas, Issues,
and Thinkers, Carol Thomas (2002: 50) considers that the social model of
disability has had the following effect: that the personal experience of living
with impairment is not the concern of disability studies, and that intellectual
and political energies should be concentrated on understanding and tackling the
wider social causes of disability. Thomas (2002) argues that Oliver and
Barnes regard any theoretical consideration of impairment in disability studies
as establishing a threat to the social model.

In Encounters with Strangers: Feminism and Disability, Jenny Morris

(1996) develops feminist disability studies into the questioning of a social
model of disability that ignores our embodied experience. She states:

Generally, there was a concern amongst some disabled

women that the way our experience was being politicised
didnt leave much room for acknowledging our experience
of our bodies; that too often there wasnt room for talking
- 23 -

about experience of impairment, that a lot of us feel

pressured into just focusing on disability, just focusing on
social barriers. For many this feels a very dangerous thing
to say, in that we feel it makes us vulnerable to non-disabled
people, turning around and saying there you are then, we
always knew that your lives were awful because of illness
or incapacity, we always knew what a tragedy it is. (Morris,
1996: 13)

And, she continues:

[We] reminded ourselves that one of the reasons we

developed the social model of disability was to protect
ourselves from the feelings of pity directed at us by nondisabled people who felt they had the right to tell us how we
should feel about our experiences. In reality, such people
were projecting their own fears of loss and pain,
dependency and mortality onto us.

In the process of

defending

onslaughts

ourselves

from

these

which

undermined and disempowered us, which defined our lives

as not worth living, there was little room for anything other
than an assertion that it is external barriers, societys
prejudice and discrimination, which disabled us. (Morris,
1996: 13-4)

By focusing on embodied experiences of impairment in addition to the social

model of disability, she interrogates the way in which impairment and
disability are linked to each other. Morris does not simply encourage us to
reject the social model of disability, but claims that we need to critically
explore the way in which the social model of disability establishes a category
of people with disabilities. The uneasiness that Morris feels about the social

- 24 -

models exclusion of impairment serves to problematise the social category of

the disabled.

In Including All of Our Lives: Renewing the Social Model of

Disability, Liz Crow (1996) argues that impairment has been excluded from
the social models debates among disabled individuals. For her, it is significant
to acknowledge that the social model of disability cannot cure the body. Crow
states:

Many of us remain frustrated and disheartened by pain,

fatigue, depression and chronic illness, including the way
they prevent us from realizing our potential or railing fully
against disability (our experience of exclusion and
discrimination); many of us fear for our futures with
progressive or additional impairments; we mourn past
activities that are no longer possible for us; we are afraid we
may die early or that suicide may seem our only option; we
desperately seek some effective medical intervention; we
feel ambivalent about the possibilities of our children
having impairments. Yet our silence about impairment has
made many of these things taboo and created a whole new
series of constraints on our self-expression. (Crow, 1996:
209)

Crow examines why this silence about the body has taken place and why,
under the social model of disability, we are restricted from expressing our
impairments, pain, or bodies. She argues that we are not allowed to express
any negative feelings about our experience of our impaired bodies in the social
model. She suggests that we ought to consider both disability and impairment
in terms of our embodied experiences. Crow states:
- 25 -

We need to focus on disability and impairment: on the

external and internal constituents they bring to our
experiences.

Impairment is about our bodies ways of

working and any implications these hold for our lives.

Disability is about the reaction and impact of the outside
world on our particular bodies.

One cannot fully

understood without attention to the other, because whilst

they can exist independently of each other, there are also
circumstances where they interact. And whilst there are
common strands to the way they operate, the balance
between disability and impairment their impact and the
explanations of their cause and effect will vary according to
individuals situation and from time to time. (Crow, 1996:
218)

Crow also proposes a renewed social model of disability:

We need a renewed social model of disability. This model

would

operate

on

two

levels:

more

complete

understanding of disability and impairment as social

concepts; and a recognition of an individuals experiences
of their body over time and in variable circumstances. This
social model of disability is thus a means to encapsulating
the total experience of both disability and impairment.
(Crow, 1996: 218)

Thus, Crow argues that this lack of consideration of the body is the weak point
of the social model of disability, and suggests that we need to explore pain,
impairment, and the body. She agrees with Morris that the social model of
disability seeks to persuade impaired individuals to ignore their bodies and
their embodied experiences. Impairment cannot simply evaporate as the social
- 26 -

theory of disability strongly believes that impairment is not the issue, but that
social barriers are. In the social model, people with disability become more
confident about who they are and obtain an identity as disabled.

In The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability,

Susan Wendell (1996) also considers that those activists who support the social
model of disability seek to separate disability from impairment in order to
refuse the medical model of disability.

Like Morris and Crow, Wendell

considers that our experiences of impairment should be discussed within

disability studies. She states:

The more I learnt about other peoples experiences of

disability and reflected upon my own, the more connections
I saw between feminist analyse of gender as socially
constructed from biological differences between females
and males, and my emerging understanding of disability as
socially constructed from biological differences between the
disabled and the non-disabled. In addition, I was
increasingly impressed by the knowledge people with
disabilities have about living with bodily suffering and
limitation and how their cultures treat rejected aspects of
bodily life. It was clear to me that this knowledge did not
inform theorizing about the body by non-disabled feminists
and that feminist theory was consequently both incomplete
and skewed toward healthy, non-disabled experience.
(Wendell, 1996: 5)

Thus, our lived experiences of impairment need to be acknowledged and

articulated in feminist theories.

Wendell argues that the social model of

disability has sought to conceal how disability is linked to impairment, and

- 27 -

feminist theories of the body need to include disabled experiences, the

experiences that have been excluded so far. She also maintains that disability
cannot be undermined through discussion with a small number of disabled
representatives because a disabled individual hardly sees all of the problems
that apply to all people with disabilities that may be different from his/her
own (Wendell, 1996: 46).

Following Thomas, Morris, Crow, and Wendell, I propose that the

social model of disability does not allow for theoretical exploration of
embodied experiences among disabled individuals, and that this is due to the
simplistic separation of impairment (the body) from disability (social barriers).
In Pride against Prejudice: Transforming Attitudes to Disability, Morris (1991)
states:

The experiences of aging, of being ill, of being in pain, of

physical and intellectual limitations, are all part of the
experience of living. Fear of all these things, however,
means that there is little cultural representation that creates
an understanding of their subjective reality To deny the
personal experience of physical disability is, in the end, to
collude in our oppression. (Morris, 1991: 183)

We need a theory of disabled subjectivity.

In line with what has been

discussed thus far, it has to be both a political and a socio-cultural theory, since,
as the social model of disability has identified, disability is socially formed, but
also, as those feminists in disability studies claim, more is needed than the
social model.

However, embodied perspectives of disability are not fully

explored in either disability studies or feminist theory. Thus, I take issue with
- 28 -

the social model of disability, both for ignoring embodied subjectivity, and for
creating a homogeneous category of the disabled. My aim in writing this
thesis is to convince disability and feminist theorists to further explore the
complex embodiments and subjectivities of disabled individuals.

It is important here to draw attention to the difference between

materialist and discursive social accounts of disability. The social model of
disability maintains that disability is constituted by a lack of fit between
body and environment in a way that inhabits agency (Alsop, Fitzsimons, and
Lennon, 2002: 89).

The social model looks for developments and

transformations in social, economic, technological, and more generally,

material factors, as well as conflicts of material interests between the ablebodied and the disabled. It seeks to develop the possibility of materialist
theory to understand the able-bodied sources of the oppression of disabled
people. I believe that this social model of disability is essential for reforming
our understanding of disability, but it does oversimplifying our notion of
disability, and it suggests a common theoretical, political and social category of
all disabled people.

Although I acknowledge the political importance of the social model of

disability, I consider disability as a more fluid entity than such a materialist
account suggests.

Disability, for me, is discursively constructed.

The

categorisation of individuals according to their physical ability and form is not

neutral, but rather a political prioritisation of physical differences and abilities.
I do not reject physical differences, but I do question under what discursive and
institutional conditions a physical difference becomes the characteristic

- 29 -

properties of disability. We are formed either as able-bodied or disabled due to

the discourse around our physical differences. In this thesis, I shall interrogate
how the categories of able-bodied/disabled are formed, explore the impact on
embodied subjectivity, and examine the way in which they may be transformed.
The move from the social model of disability to discursive theories of
disability opens up new areas for rethinking of the categories. Instead of
establishing a model of disability, I shall explore new areas from which I shall
challenge the accepted categories.

Thesis Framework

This thesis offers an exploration of the different ways in which we can

theorise disability. Through the examination of different forms of theorising,
the aim is to examine the processes in which one becomes labelled within one
of the twofold categories: the able-bodied and the disabled, male and female,
heterosexual and non-heterosexual, white and non-white, and to interrogate
what the essence of these categories is. In particular, categories of the ablebodied and the disabled are called into question. Not all babies are ablebodied, but all human beings have bodies that someday stop functioning; I
suggest that we cannot simply assume which individual is able-bodied and
which individual is disabled.

This thesis is, therefore, different from theories of disability that take
the category of the disabled for granted and describe the socially prejudiced
relationship between the able-bodied and the disabled. Following feminist
disability studies, I call into question the categories of the able-bodied and the

- 30 -

disabled, and suggest that it is, in fact, impossible to assume what it is to be

able-bodied or disabled.

In this thesis, my discussion recognises that an exploration of my

disabled self cannot be separated from other characteristics of my subjectivity
such as femininity and Japanese-ness. I propose an exploration that regards
such categories of difference as interrelated, and I consider that these
categories of my physical difference are always the Other.

I seek to outline the different ways in which disability may be theorised

in relation to theories of the Other. Then, I will then evaluate these different
methods and undermine the boundaries between the able-bodied and the
disabled. I therefore consider this thesis to be an evaluation and exploration of
ways to develop feminist disability theory.

This thesis is organised into five chapters. In chapter one, I investigate

how the image of physical disability is constructed within able-bodied society.
Like femininity and racial difference, physical disability is often seen as the
Other.

Here, I shall discuss a range of theories that relay how we

conceptualise the Other.

Focusing on the impact of Michel Foucaults

accounts of discourse and power, and the use of his work within feminism,
cultural studies, and disability studies, this chapter examines the idea that one
identifies ones self as disabled through the discourses on disability that one
encounters. To illustrate these theories, I shall analyse David Lynchs 1980
film, The Elephant Man.

- 31 -

In chapter two, I shall move on to exploring psychoanalytic accounts of

the formation of embodied subjectivities. Reflecting on the work of both
Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan with regard to sexual subjectivities, I shall
develop the able-body as parallel to the phallic-body, with the disabled
body positioned by lack. I shall explore the ways in which Julia Kristeva and
Luce Irigaray seek to undermine the priority given to the phallic body, and reimagine the female body outside of its position as lack. I shall then develop
these ideas in relation to the disabled body that requires its own re-imagining.

Chapter three develops the idea of re-imagining the disabled body by

paying particular attention to voice.

The general use of the term voice

invariably regards speech as the articulation of the self. This chapter deals
with the different ways in which feminist theories challenge the Western
tradition of silencing womens embodied voices.

After exploring the

psychoanalytic account of a female voice as outlined in Freuds work on

hysteria and its implication for understanding the female voice, the discussion
incorporates the way in which Irigaray and Kristevas accounts of female
voices, as influenced by Freud and Lacan, can be applied to the issues of
disabled voices. Like female voices, disabled voices have traditionally been
silenced or neglected. Here, my aim is to explore the processes of silencing
embodied voices and to illustrate the way in which silenced voices can emerge.
In doing so, I shall analyse Jane Campions 1993 film: The Piano.

In chapter four, I shall move on to the work of Judith Butler. Butlers

performative account of gender questions conventional feminism, undermining
the universal category of woman. For Butler, there is no natural gender; rather,

- 32 -

the performance of gender forms its realness. Following her performative

account, I consider that disability as a social category is performatively
constructed and there is therefore no naturally given distinction between the
able-bodied and the disabled. In the light of this theory, the categories of ablebodied and disabled can be undermined by performativity; I explore the work
of the performance artist Mary Duffy in the light of Butlers account.
Although the performative account of disability helps to undermine the
polarisation of the able-bodied and disabled, I question whether Butlers theory
pays sufficient attention to the experiences of disabled embodiment. I also
question whether or not disability is constituted only discursively.

This

question is continued into the next chapter.

The final chapter (chapter five) looks at the way in which disability is
constructed by examining theories of abjection. In this chapter, I shall suggest
that the disabled body is an abjected body. There are two ways in which
abjection may be understood. Through a discussion of the debate between
Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, I shall consider whether abjection should be
recognised as a psychic process involved in the formation of the self, or
whether abjection should be discursively articulated and eliminated. Butlers
claim that abjection is simply a discursive product is questioned in this chapter.
I shall question whether the formation of abject subjectivities is purely
discursive. Adopting and adapting Kristevas account rather than Butlers, I
open up the possibility of undoing the processes of abjection.

With the

intention of illustrating this complex process of undoing the abject, I shall

analyse Steven Spielbergs 1982 film E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. The final
section of this chapter suggests the ways in which this thesis has attempted to

- 33 -

resist processes of othering, and develops ways of incorporating differences

among bodies rather than placing them in positions of opposition.

- 34 -

Chapter 1 - Questioning the Able Bodied Matrix:

Construction of the Image of Physical Disability

Introduction

What is a disabled person? Is a disabled person an obstacle, a barrier,

or an impediment, as the Japanese word, shou-gai-sha, suggests?4 Am I that
obstacle? If so, an obstacle to what? I have been pressured into being disabled,
my identity has been formed by the image of disability which society offers. In
this chapter, I shall explore how images of physical disability are formed.
These images are created by an able-bodied matrix that operates as a regulatory
system to constitute our identities.5 The term disabled conjures up images of
people who are different, less, and strange; the Other of the able-bodied. In
the able-bodied matrix, the term disabled provides a stereotype that hides
limitless physical differences and conditions. This chapter will assess the way
in which the able-bodied matrix produces the disabled Other.

Disability translates into Japanese as shou-gai that literally means obstacle-harm in Chinese
characters used in Japanese writing (kanji). Shou-gai-sha means disabled person or disabled
people in Japanese. Able-bodedness is ken-jyou that literally means healthy-normal in
Chinese characters used in Japanese writing. Ken-jyou-sha is able-bodied person or ablebodied people in Japanese. Not many people in Japan care about these literal meanings.
However, I was shocked at them when I learnt the meanings of these Chinese characters in
elementary school.
4

The concept of the able-bodied matrix is developed from Judith Butlers concept of the
heterosexual matrix, that is, the naturalization of patriarchy. She states: Consider not only that
the ambiguities and incoherences within and among heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual,
practice are suppressed and redescribed within the reified framework of the disjunctive and
asymmetrical binary of masculine/feminine, but that these cultural configurations of gender
confusion operate as sites for intervention, exposure, and displacement of these reifications. In
other words, the unity of gender is the effect of a regulatory practice that seeks to render
gender identity uniform through a compulsory heterosexuality. The force of this practice is,
through an exclusionary apparatus of production, to restrict the relative meanings of
heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality as well as the subversive sites of their
convergence and resignification (Butler, 1999 [1990]: 42).
- 35 -

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger (1990 [1972]: 9-10) states: an image is

a sight which has been created or reproduced. It is an appearance or a set of
appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first
made its appearance and preserved. In other words, an image is a feature of
socio-cultural experience, not nature.

Since images are socio-culturally

constructed, we embody ways of seeing, that is to say, the desires,

assumptions, and norms of the dominant culture. Berger describes a set of
concerns with images and with their relation to texts. He opens by claiming a
central position for the image in our perception: It is seeing which establishes
our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but
words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it (Berger, 1990
[1972]: 7). In the act of seeing, we position ourselves in the image we see,
dealing with a particular link to the Other. Berger (1990 [1972]: 64) insists
that women are represented in a different way to men, since the ideal spectator
is constantly presumed to be male and the image of the woman is intended to
flatter him. We may see that, within the dominant system, the viewer is
assumed not simply to be male, but also to be privileged in other ways:
Western, middle-class, heterosexual, and, as I describe in this chapter, ablebodied. Extending feminist theories that consider the socio-cultural position of
women critically, I shall examine the socio-cultural position of the Other, in
particular, the disabled.

The able-bodied matrix positions a particular type of individual. By

referring to those who have physical differences as the disabled, it groups
those individuals into a category whose members cannot participate in able-

- 36 -

bodied-based social activities because of their physical differences. The group

of those who are disabled are Other to the norm.

Those who produce and

maintain the categorising system are not initially the Other themselves. In
Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and The body, Lennard J. Davis
(1995) articulates the notion that I call the able-bodied matrix:

We live in a world of norms. Each of us endeavours to be

normal or else deliberately tries to avoid that state. We
consider what the average person does, thinks, earns, or
consumes. We rank our intelligence, our cholesterol level,
our weight, height, sex drive, bodily dimension along some
conceptual line from subnormal to above-average There
is probably no area of contemporary life in which some idea
of a norm, mean, or average has not been calculated. To
understand the disabled body, one must return to the
concept of the norm, the normal body. (Davis, 1995: 23)

He continues:

[The] problem is not the person with disabilities; the

problem is the way that normalcy is constructed to create
the problem of the disabled person. (Davis 1995: 24)

Following Davis, I have come to realise that we need to see both the
construction of the Other and the construction of the norm, and to understand
the relationship between these constructions: the system of able-bodiedness.

This chapter will provide an outline of a number of theories about how

we construct the Other and how we perceive it in a particular way. Following

- 37 -

this, I will give an example of the othering of physical difference by analysing

David Lynchs 1980 film, The Elephant Man. I feel that the construction of
disability is something that should be explored in a critical way, not only by
medical professionals, photographers, artists, other media producers, but also
by those who are perceived as disabled in their everyday lives.

The Process of Othering Physical Differences

1. The Myth of Able-bodiedness

The able-bodied matrix links physical perfection to ability and

attractiveness; this is what Naomi Wolf (1991) terms the Beauty Myth. 6 The
image of physical disability is connected to ambivalence, abnormality, and
asexuality. In the same way as the beauty myth is not about women at all,
but rather about mens institutions and institutional power (Wolf, 1991: 13),
the myth about physical disability is not about the Other at all, but about ablebodied institutions and their power. Thus, this myth is ideology. Wolfs
beauty myth seems to relate to Roland Barthess Mythologies (1972), in
which he asserts that myth reinforces the ideology of capitalist society. 7 The

The beauty myth is a collection of ideas including ideals of beauty being worldwide and
objective. This myth states that women have to embody these ideals, which the mass media
(society) identifies them to be. The mainstream culture suggests to women that they are not
happy unless they are beautiful, but it also suggests to all of us that we are not happy unless
we are able-bodied. Wolfs notion of the beauty myth, explores the impact of our maledominant culture upon women. She argues that women have obtained rights equal to men in
realms of education, professional careers, and voting. Consequently, Wolf (1991: 10-11)
proposes that the beauty myth is the last one remaining of the old feminine ideologies that
still has the power to control those women whom second wave feminism would have otherwise
made relatively uncontrollable. Taking into consideration that the beauty myth is womens
last struggle, Wolf (1991: 10) argues that women are going through a violent backlash against
feminism, observing the current issues in eating disorders, cosmetic surgery, and
objectification of female bodies.
7
Mythologies (1972) is a text which contains fifty-four short journalistic articles on a variety
of subjects. Although many articles are about political figures, they also focus on various
manifestations of mass media, such as films, advertisements, newspapers, magazines,
photographs, and so on. Barthes demonstrates that it is possible to read the media
representations of day-to-day life as full of meanings.
6

- 38 -

essence of myth, according to Barthes, is that it veils what are dominant

(capitalist) representations as truths of an essential nature, while for Wolf, the
beauty myth covers what are patriarchal representations as truth of an essential
nature. For Barthes, myth is the series of norms through which meanings are
formed to look as if they were universal and natural. Thus, myth is a social
manifestation.

For example, an advertisement for cosmetics is not only

representing an item for consumption, but it is also creating a myth about

femininity. Therefore, the concept of femininity establishes particular norms
of women and the female body as being universal.

Wolf (1991: 10) notes that because of feminism, women in Western

culture have more power and social control than they ever had before.
However, in terms of how women feel about themselves physically, they are
worse off than their grandmothers. Despite the fact that it has been historically
shifting, the attribute of beauty is claimed to exist universally and changelessly
(Wolf, 1991: 12). In this culture, women must attempt to embody the beautiful,
and men must desire to possess the beauty (Wolf, 1991: 12). Thus, Wolf
(1991:12) argues that the beauty myth is the last, best belief system that keeps
male dominance intact.

In the beauty myth, women are assumed to be

attractive to men, and women feel that they should make themselves beautiful
in order to obtain and maintain their relationships with men. Women apply the
beauty myth to the particular parts of their bodies that make them female, and
that are perceptible both to women themselves and to men, such as the breasts,
the face, and the body figure.

- 39 -

In Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body,

Susan Bordo (1993) discusses the issues of eating disordersShe argues that a
woman controls her relationship with society through her body, but society
controls her position in it through her body (Bordo, 1993: 166). By shaping
their bodies physically through make-up, diet, cosmetic surgery, and eating
disorders, women make themselves objects to be looked at. Bordo states:

Through the pursuit of an ever-changing, homogenizing,

elusive ideal of femininity a pursuit without a terminus,
requiring that woman constantly attend to minute and often
whimsical changes in fashionfemale bodies become
docile bodies bodies whose forces and energies are
habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation,
improvement.

Though the exacting and normalizing

disciplines of diet, makeup, and dress central organizing

principles of time and space in the day of many women
we are rendered less socially oriented and more
centripetally focused on self-modification. Through these
disciplines, we continue to memorize on our bodies the feel
and conviction of lack, of insufficiency, of never being
good enough. At the farther extremes, the practices of
femininity may lead us to utter demoralization, debilitation,
and death. (Bordo, 1993: 166)

Bordo discusses womens uneasiness at not being in control of their bodies.

She demonstrates how powerless women are to control their obsession with
bodily perfection, an obsession that is impossible for all to obtain and maintain.
The body can be understood as an image for the self, and society assesses our
value based on physical appearance. In this context, plastic surgery could be
regarded as the most specific example of womens submission to the ideal. As
- 40 -

Bordo argues, the patriarchal matrix makes women obsessed by their

relationships with their bodies. Thus, reappreciating both Wolf (1991) and
Bordo (1995), I assert that the myth about the able body, similar to the beauty
myth, is ideology, and that we dwell in the world of representations that
maintain power structures and a certain body politics. I will develop the term
able-bodied myth as a particular way of reading able-bodiedness as a social
construction with real consequences in the construction of subjectivity.

In The Myth of Bodily Perfection, Sharon Dale Stone (1995: 413-24)

discusses the socio-cultural myth of bodily perfection. Able-bodiedness is a
relative concept in relation to our social and cultural perspectives.

Stone

argues that our images of body or physical difference that arise are central to
our feelings about ourselves. For her, the myth is that any body can be perfect.
Actually, no one can have a perfect body in any of the desired ways. Stone
argues that, as our culture forms and reforms what the ideal should be, it
becomes clear that there is no universal standard. Perfection is subjective,
since its meaning depends upon our socio-cultural and personal values. The
one who is assumed to be almost perfect is merely defined by a particular
group of people. Thus, a universal standard of perfection is a myth.

The ideal concept of the human body is socio-culturally formed, like

Leonardo da Vincis sketch of the Vitruvian Man. The essentialist depiction
of such bodies is of geometric proportion and symmetry, or in this instance, of
a body seemingly able-bodied, taut, upright, male, an image projected as selfevidently, invariable, normal, vigorous and healthy (Imrie, 1999: 27). The
universal portrayal of bodily perfection is fictional.

- 41 -

No one body can be

perfect because, unlike the Vitruvian Man, we are living and our bodies are
changeable. I argue that the myth of bodily perfection or able-bodiedness
reduces the multiplicity and fluidity of human bodies into a single disabled
Other. This myth is the collection of norms, routines, and standards through
which a particular formation of the body is rendered universal, and allows the
provisional or ambiguous meaning of able-bodiedness to appear to be natural
or normal.

2. The Second Body The Disabled Other

The idea of the Other has been explored primarily in relation to

women as the Other (de Beauvoir, 1997 [1949]) and in relation to cultural
representations of racial differences (Said, 2003 [1978]).

In The Second Sex,

Simone de Beauvoir (1997 [1949]) makes the first reference to women as the
Other. This Other is essentially different from men, in that men have
demarcated it as what they are not. Thus, other (with small letter o) simply
means different, expelled, and opposite, while the Other (with big letter O)
indicates the theoretical and political standpoint of being different from the
norm, and involves the central claim that Otherness is projected on to women
by, and in the interests of, men (Kitzinger and Wilkinson, 1996: 4). Thus, the
Other is an essential concept theorised by de Beauvoir to explain how women
are formed as the inferior and the strange to men in patriarchal culture.

Man identifies himself and others through their categorical relations,

and forms his own identity through a process of demarcating others. For man
to identify himself, he has to position himself as the subject, and woman as his

- 42 -

object.

Woman becomes objectified.

The subjectivity of the objectified

woman is ignored. Thus, de Beauvoir maintains that woman needs to take up

the status of the subject. By being coerced to become the Other, woman is
also forced to see herself as such, and to base her own identity on not-man.
According to de Beauvoir:

[Humanity] is male and man defines woman not in herself

but as relative to him: she is not regarded as an autonomous
being She is simply what man decrees; thus she is called
the sex by which is meant that she appears essentially to
the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex - absolute
sex, no less.

She is defined and differentiated with

reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the

incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is
the Subject, he is the Absolute she is the Other. (de
Beauvoir, 1997 [1949]: 16)

Thus, de Beauvoirs paradigm is the subject (self)/other dualism. The self is

positive, the subject of Western philosophy, and is always male. She argues
that the Other, who exists for the self in an unfair relationship, is female and
feminised, occupying a lesser position. The Other is not equal to the self,
and is regarded as a projection of all that the self rejects, such as lack,
negativity, passivity, and silence. She claims that, in order to delineate their
identity as the superior, men had to affirm themselves as the director of nature,
which includes women. The relationship of men to women is a relationship of
norm to the Other, and is always a power relationship, a binary opposition.
The Other is always different from the norm.

- 43 -

Women are not seen as a separate entity but as a not-man. Women are
labelled in relation to men, but the obverse is not the case. This otherness is
the negative social condition, that is, femininity, which affirms womens
inferiority to men. Formed by patriarchal society, women begin internalising
this otherness, that is, the notion of their lesser status. She states:

[What] peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that

she a free and autonomous being like all human creatures
nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men
compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose
to stabilize her as object and to doom her to immanence
since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and for ever
transcended by another ego (conscience) which is essential
and sovereign. The drama of woman lies in this conflict
between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (the
ego) who always regard the self as the essential and the
compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential.
(de Beauvoir, 1997 [1949]: 29)

Women are the Other since they are differentiated by men and by women
due to the internalisation of the patriarchal order. Mens identities are fixed
through the process of othering women. De Beauvoir argues that patriarchal
practices of objectifying women force them to internalise a male perspective
on their bodies. Similarly to de Beauvoir, Berger (1990 [1972]: 46) states:
she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two
constituent yet always distinct elements if her identity as a woman. Since
women are defined in relation to men and are not able to express themselves
on their own terms, women become dependent upon men for their female
identity. De Beauvoir states:

- 44 -

The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness

itself.

In the most primitive societies, in the ancient

mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality that of

the Self and the Other. This duality was not originally
attached to the division of the sexes; it was not dependent
upon any empirical facts. It is revealed in such works as
that of Garnet on Chinese thought and those Dumezil on the
East Indies and Rome. The Feminine element was at first
no more involved in such pairs as Varuna-Mitra, UranusZeus, Sun-Moon, Day-Night than it was in the contrasts
between Good and Evil, lucky and Unlucky auspices, right
and left, God and Lucifer.

Otherness is a fundamental

category of human thought. (de Beauvoir, 1997 [1949]: 167)

She continues:

Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One

without at once setting up the Other over against itself. If
three travelers chance to occupy the same compartment, that
is enough to make vaguely hostile others out of all the rest
of the passengers on the train.

In small-town eyes all

persons not belonging to the village are strangers and

suspect; to the native of a country all who inhabit other
countries are foreigners; Jews are different for the antiSemite, Negroes are inferior for American racists,
aborigines are natives for colonists, proletarians are the
lower class for the privileged. (de Beauvoir, 1997 [1949]:
17)

A similar self/Other distinction appears in anti-racist work that

discusses black men as the Other, in particular, those writings questioning

- 45 -

colonisation. Black men are regarded as the Other subjected to the Western
law. In many societies, black men have been relegated to the position of the
Other, colonised by various forms of Western domination. In Black Skin,
White Masks (1968), Franz Fanon illustrates his personal experience as a black
intellectual in France and explores the ways in which the relationship between
colonisers and colonised people is naturalised.

Due to his academic and

cultural background, Fanon conceived of himself as French, and the confusion

he felt after his first encounter with French racism formed his theories about
culture. He developed his psychological practice with the conception that
racism produces negative paradigms that obstruct the black man by subjecting
him to a universalised norm of whiteness, and thereby estranging his
consciousness.

Fanon also saw that in speaking French, the colonisers

language, he was internalising the colonisers values that equated blackness

with the Other. In such a condition, he maintains, the black man wants to see
himself as white and therefore becomes estranged from himself. When black
people were attributed with immature and savage qualities, it was crucial to
argue that it was a white and racist culture that was destructively and
negatively constructing such images of black individuals.

For Fanon, to be colonised through a language has broader

implications for his self-consciousness: To speak means to be in position to
use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it
means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization
(Fanon, 1968: 17-18). Thus, speaking in French means that the black man
accepts, or is coerced into accepting, the collective consciousness of French
that identifies his blackness with the Other. In an attempt to escape the

- 46 -

connection of blackness with the Other, the black man puts on a white mask,
or considers himself as a universal subject equally participating in a society
that advocates equality, supposedly abstracted from personal appearance.
Cultural ideals are internalised into consciousness, creating a fundamental
disjuncture between the black mans consciousness and his body. Under these
conditions, the black man is inevitably alienated from himself. Fanon claims
that the category of white depends on its fixity through its opposite, that is,
black. Neither the category of white nor the category of black exists
without each other, and both came into being by colonial invasion.

The theme of how the Same serves to define the category of the
Other is further explored in Edward Saids Orientalism (2003 [1978]). Said
argues that the history of the western world is one of misrepresentation of, and
domination over, the East.

He calls into question the assumptions that

construct the nature of the Orient.

He exposes the positioning of non-

westerners as the Other within Western discourse, and points out a range of
ways in which racial otherness is constructed and maintained through
regulatory discourses about that very Other. Said starts by asking questions
about the category of the Orient: what does it have as its features, and how do
we know who it incorporates?

Moreover, who decides what is in this

category? In Western discourse, the Orient is always the Other of the West,
thus, excluded from Western culture.

It is a universal category that thus

excludes notions of differences among non-Western people. According to Said,

what is viewed as the Orient, is a huge are that spreads across many countries
and cultures. The Orient includes most of Asia, as well as the Middle East and
Africa. The image of this simple Orient, which can be explored as a fixed

- 47 -

wholeness, is one of the most influential notions of Western discourses. Said

argues that we need to consider the Orient as multiple and discontinuous, not as
a single category with essential characteristics.

The Other, therefore, is formed from images, discourses, and

representations of what the privileged and dominant group does not want to
become or cannot attain. This Other is then projected onto groups of people.
The process of othering, however, undermines the subjectivity of such people.
The Other is seen as an object, without, or with, restricted subjectivity. I
suggest that the disabled are constructed as such an Other. Otherness is
projected onto a disabled subject in the interests of the able-bodied such that
he/she is constructed as lesser or abnormal the second body! The disabled is
all that the able-bodied is anxious to avoid, and all that the able-bodied may
nevertheless become. As the Other, the disabled exists as he/she is perceived
by the able-bodied, and the disabled has no role in fixing the content of his/her
categorisation. This leads to a split within the consciousness of those who are
labelled disabled. The disabled continually beholds his/herself. He/she is
always accompanied by his/her own image of him/herself.

From earliest

childhood, he/she has been influenced and forced to assess him/herself

repeatedly from the point of view of the able-bodied. Thus, the disabled
becomes both the spectator and the spectacle within him/her. The able-bodied
looks at the disabled, and the disabled watches him/herself being looked at.
The look of the disabled subject at him/herself is the internalised look of the
able-bodied.

In this way, the disabled subject regards him/herself as the

Other, yet, at the same time, as Fanon illustrates, claims for him/herself the
status of universal subject.

- 48 -

Foucault: Discourse and Power

The way in which disability is represented within culture is central to

the coming into being of disabled subjectivities. Foucault makes the claim
that: the notion of a subject who exists prior to language and is the origin of
all meaning is an illusion (McNay, 1996: 49). Thus, a subject has no prediscursive essence, but is brought into being through discourse. Discourses are
anything which can carry meaning. For Foucault, discourses are historically
and socio-culturally constructed meanings and knowledge claims. Discourses
are tied up with power. Power is circulated throughout the discursive system.
This power moulds subjects into normal as opposed to abnormal forms. Power,
in its many forms, circulates whenever discourses are employed. Discourses
do not yield a single opposition between self and other, but produce multiple
ways in which oppositional difference is marked. Foucaults purpose is to
open up possibilities for considering difference through the critical analysis of
norms. In History of Sexuality, Vol.1: An Introduction, Foucault (1990 [1978])
states:

[It] is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined

together. And for this very reason, we must conceive
discourse as a series of discontinuous segments whose
tactical function is neither uniform nor stable. To be more
precise, we must not imagine a world of discourse divided
between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or
between the dominant discourse and the dominated one, but
as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into
play in various strategies... We must make allowance for

- 49 -

the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be

both an instrument and an effect of power

Discourse

transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also

undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it
possible to thwart it there can exist different and even
contradictory discourses within the same strategy
(Foucault, 1990 [1978]: 100-1)

Foucault (1990 [1978]) examines the system of discourses on sex. He defines

the regime of power - knowledge pleasure that sustains the discourse on
human sexuality in our part of the world (Foucault, 1990 [1978]: 11). For him,
discourse connects language to practice, or more importantly, knowledge to
power. Discourse forms, categorises, and creates the object of knowledge in a
clearly defined way whilst eliminating other ways of seeing as unintelligible.
Foucaults notion of discourse involves the production of knowledge and truth
through language. Thus, for him, discourses are productive and subjectivity is
formed by our relationships to them. We understand others and ourselves
through discourse. Power and knowledge, for Foucault, are indissoluble and
necessarily linked to each other. Discourses develop particular types of power
relations, supporting, for example, the position of those counted as experts or
authorities such as accountants, academics, lawyers, medical professionals,
psychiatrists, and teachers. In short, to know what to do in different conditions
is to engage in complex networks of power.

In both History of Sexuality, Vol.1: An Introduction (1990 [1978]) and

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979), Foucault offers a
complex notion of power that he terms biopower, which he located in the
nineteenth century when various techniques were developed for governing both
- 50 -

human bodies and populations.8 Foucault investigates the complex and shifting
system of relations between power, knowledge and the body, governing the
historically particular process of becoming a subject.

He questions the

assumption that power is an essentially destructive and oppressive force that

functions simply through the systems of law and restriction. In Foucaults
view (1990 [1978]), this juridico-discursive concept of power has its origins
in the practices of pre-modern societies. He maintains that power in such
societies was exercised by a monarchical authority that practiced total
domination over the inhabitants through terrorism or public demonstrations of
torture. Nevertheless, since the seventeenth century, as the rise of populations
progressively became the main interest of the state, new systems of power that
focused on the management and regulation of human life emerged. In the
complicated narrative that Foucault explores, power works in two ways. One
way is related to regimented government as a whole. The other way is what
Foucault (1979) calls disciplinary power that pursues the human body as an
object to be controlled and educated.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1979) examines the practices of

discipline, punishment, and treatment related to disciplinary power.

He

maintains that these practices were established in institutions like prisons,

hospitals, military bases, schools, and factories, but nevertheless have been
employed more generally as systems of social control. The main characteristic
of disciplinary power is that it is applied directly to the body.

These

disciplinary practices submit physical performances to a process of continuous

8

Foucault explains that many power relations in modern states are practiced discursively upon
the human body. He states, The body is also directly involved in a political field; power
relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to
carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs (Foucault, 1979:25).
- 51 -

surveillance and inspection that allows a constant control of the subjects

behaviour. The goal of these practices is to manipulate the subjects physical
abilities and to promote its efficiency and docility:

What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that

act on the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements,
its gestures, its behavior. The human body was entering a
machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and
rearranges itThus, discipline produces subjected and
practiced bodies, docile bodies. (Foucault, 1979: 138-9)

It is not, however, only the body that disciplinary systems focus on. Foucault
considers disciplinary power as productive of certain types of subject as well.
In Discipline and Punish, he describes the way in which surveillance
recognises the psyche as well to induce a mental state of conscious and
permanent visibility (Foucault 1979: 201). Thus, continuous surveillance is
internalised by subjects to construct their own selves.

Foucaults notions of surveillance and the gaze of power show how

the process of normalisation works via the example of the panopticon. The
panopticon was originally a prison designed by Jeremy Bentham that allowed
guards to watch all the prisoners at the same time. By extension, this term is
used to explain any systematic or institutional technique to monitor large
numbers of people. In Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture,
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright (2003 [2001]) explain Foucaults concept
of the panopticon:

- 52 -

The panopticon is an architectural model, originally for a

prison, that can be seen as a metaphor for the way in which
power works. In the panopticon model, a central guard
tower looks out on a circular set of prison cells, with the
activities of each cell in full view of tower. In this model,
this building design produces regulatory behavior, because
whether or not there are actually guards in the tower (this
cannot be seen by prisoners), the prisoners will feel that
gaze upon them and regulate their behavior accordingly.
Power thus is most effective when it is invisible and
unverifiable (when the prisoners unable to verify if the
tower guard is watching or not). The point of panopticon is
thus not that active surveillance can affect behavior, but
more importantly that the structure of surveillance, whether
it is active or not, produces conforming behaviour. It thus
acts as a powerful metaphor for the way that the circulation
of power produces particular kinds of behavior. (Sturken
and Cartwright 2003 [2001]: 98-9)

This constant gaze controls the prisoners, affecting not only what they do, but
also how they see themselves. Thus, surveillance is a process of keeping them
under close supervision.

Foucault uses the panopticon to describe the ways in which subjects

monitor and normalise their own performances. Since one is not certain
whether one is being seen, this system becomes ones own guard; one becomes
the regulator of ones own subjection. Foucault argues that norms, for example,
educational, medical, and legal, are pervasive.

These norms are

internalised. With this internalised gaze, one disciplines oneself. Thus, the
goal of the panopticon is to produce one who is docile. This is one of the
main techniques through which a society holds power over its subjects.
- 53 -

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault (1990 [1978]) examines how

Western society has governed sexuality since the seventeenth century.
Foucault looks at the historical production of discourses on sex.

In the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a range of discourses on sexuality in

medicine, psychology, and biology were revealed. Sex became an object of
regulation through governmental, scientific and medical examinations.
Scientific and medical discourses established the truth about sex; about what
constituted normal sex through scientific medical examination. The effect
of these forms of knowledge and social practice was the creation of a norm that
related to sexual practices.

Sex became normatively restricted to the

procreative purpose.

As soon as the categories of the normal and the abnormal were

determined, a range of socio-political systems focusing on treating and
reforming abnormal behaviours could be implemented, for they would be in
the best interests of both the individual and society.

Therefore, Foucault

proposed that in the modern state, the behaviour of both individuals and
populations is persistently governed through the principle of the normal, a
principle ensured by a number of practices within criminology, medicine,
psychology and psychiatry. These techniques are justified by the need to
normalise the abnormal. In the modern state, one becomes the internalised
agent of ones own normalisation and subjection to the norm that claims to
expose the truth of ones identity.

- 54 -

Biopower is a system of knowledge controlling ones body by

producing an illusion of a normal subject and body.

Biopower makes a

distinction between the normal and the abnormal so that things are considered
as one way or the other. Throughout Foucaults works, categories of madness,
homosexuality, and illness are produced from social and medical practices, and
people are understood, and understand themselves, in terms of them. Biopower
subjects the material body to particular norms. Foucault theorises the systems
of power from which these inscriptions and projections proceed and considers
the body as discursively produced in reference to such norms. The subject, for
Foucault, has no identity prior to its subjection to such processes of
representation.

Reappropriating Foucaults works, I propose that the able-bodied

matrix may be considered as a discursive system controlling the living bodies
of people who become categorised as normal or abnormal in relation to it. In
this system, an able-bodied individual may be considered as a hidden or
faceless gaze that observes and categorises the disabled Other. This Other
then internalizes that gaze.

Influenced by Foucaults work, the following

section explores the able-bodied matrix (the able-bodied gaze) as modern

disciplinary power in David Lynchs 1980 film The Elephant Man.

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The Elephant Man: The Able-bodied Gaze

The Elephant Man (1980) is often considered as providing a

stereotypical image of a physically disabled person (Darke, 1994). This film
portrays the life narrative of John Merrick (John Hurt), the nineteenth century
Londoner known as The Elephant Man. This young man, who had been a
spectacle in a freak show, was eventually rescued by Surgeon Frederick Treves
(Anthony Hopkins).

The doctor educates Merrick and introduces him to

London society. Under Treves medical and personal care, Merrick changes
from a sensational freak to a patient and a witty pet of the aristocracy.
However, his dream of becoming a normal man is never achieved. At the end
of the film, Merrick passes away. This film represents a disabled person in an
ultimately negative way. The Elephant Man, John Merrick, cannot accept
himself with a facial deformity. He struggles through his life as the Other,
and, in the end, he dies alone. In considering why disabled protagonists are
often deceased by the end of the film, providing The Elephant Man (1980) as
an example, Paul Longmore (1987: 70) states that this implies that it is better
to be dead than disabled. Longmore states:

[These] stories put the responsibility for any problems

squarely and almost exclusively on the disabled individual.
If they are socially isolated, it is not because the disability
inevitably has cut them off from the community or because
society has rejected them. Refusing to accept themselves
with

their

handicaps,

they

(Longmore, 1987: 71)

- 56 -

have

chosen

isolation.

The above quote claims that The Elephant Man (1980) produces the myth of
physical deformity (disability) fixedly positioned within an individual model of
disability, which sees the disabled person as the problem and he/she is to be
adapted to fit into the social world as it is.

The American medical anthropologist, Joan Ablon (1995) examines the

impact of David Lynchs The Elephant Man for those who have
neurofibromatosis 1 (NF1), the so-called The Elephant Mans Disease.9 In
one of Ablons interviews, a neurologist, who sees many patients with NF1,
states:

[The Elephant Man] scared the hell out of patients,

particularly parents who would go crazy thinking that their
child would grow into this monstrosity. (Ablon, 1995:
1485)

One genetic counsellor also states:

I think that the Elephant Man is the biggest disservice ever done to
people with NF1. Everyone comes wondering if they look like that.
(Ablon, 1995: 1485)

Furthermore, one woman with NF1 states:

The most irrational worry, and I recognize that it is irrational, is that

Im going to look like the Elephant Man. I think the more rational
fear is that Im going to grow so many more of these neurofibromas

In The Proteus Syndrome: the Elephant Man Diagnosed J. A. Tibbles and M. M. Cohen, Jr
(1986) explain that although first thought to have neurofibromatosis, Merrick is now believed
to have had Proteus syndrome.
9

- 57 -

and they might become malignant, that I will die as a result. (Ablon,
1995:1485)

In this film, John Merrick is constantly fixed as the Other, due to his
physical (facial) difference. The visibility of his different body is serving to
define the whole person. In the film, there are three able-bodied gazes that
serve to construct his disability: (1) the gaze in the freak show; (2) the medical
gaze; and (3) the public gaze. In all three gazes John Merrick can be seen as
being the abnormal and the Other.

Firstly, I explore the gaze upon

Merricks body in the freak show. The freak show exposes societys need to
control physical difference and to place it in a socially comprehensible position.
In his study of freak shows, Robert Bogdan (1988 & 1996) provides a detailed
understanding of historical and social practices of looking at the Other.
Bogdon (1988) explores the transformation of discourse in American cultural
history from seeing those who are physically different as delighting the
spectator and arousing their curiosity, to seeing them as pathologically
abnormal.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the freak show was a
place for the exhibition of extraordinary bodies (Bogdan, 1988). During this
era, disabled people were presented with the possibility of displaying
themselves to an audience fascinated by their otherness. The freak show was
a particular term referring to the formally organized exhibition of people with
alleged physical, mental or behavioural difference at circuses, fairs carnivals or
other amusement venues (Bogdan, 1996: 25). Bogdan (1996) argues that
while these freak shows were often the place for the mistreatment and
dehumanisation of disabled individuals, in some cases, these shows provided
- 58 -

an acceptable sanctuary from the medical gaze.

In her examination of cultural representations of physical disability,

Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1996 & 1997) looks at the phenomenon of freak
shows in American culture, arguing that the interpretation of people with
physical difference as freaks is a historically and socially constructed
classification rather than being based on a scientific classification of the human
body. Thomson (1997: chapter 3) argues that for one hundred years (18351940) the freak show was one of Americas popular styles of entertainment,
and that the freak was viewed as miraculous. The freak shows of the
nineteenth century offered a strategy for isolating and coping with the chaos
suggested by physical differences. Those who were congenitally and
anatomically abnormal or ethnically different were featured in sideshow
attractions. Public spectators paid to see convoluted and staged appearances of
these freaks. Symbolic narrative, exotic costumes, and dramatic lighting and
music, served to highlight and exaggerate the abnormal characteristics of the
freaks. 10 This enforced what Thomson terms the cardinal principle of
enfreakment: that the body envelops and obliterates the freaks potential
humanity. She continues, When the body becomes pure text, a freak has
been produced from a physically disabled human being (Thomson, 1997: 59).

Thomson also explains that in the mid-nineteenth century, however,

Another example of the freakish body is Mary Shelleys 19th century fictional character of
Frankensteins creature that is repeatedly represented in the cinema. In Shelleys book, Dr.
Frankenstein produced a creature called the monster from the body parts of dead people. The
Elephant Man and the creature of Frankenstein have similarities. Physical differences in both
are not simply represented as a freak, but medicalised or scientifically categorised as the
Other.
10

- 59 -

Americans were starting to shift from a family-based society in rural areas to

an urban society that relied on social institutions. The meaning of the freak
shifted.

At that time, P.T. Barnum brought the freak show to its peak by

capitalising on the search for scientific knowledge and extraordinary forms of

human being (Thomson, 1997: 58-9). Thomson states:

The scientists and philosophers cabinets of curiosities

were transformed into the medical mans dissection table.
The once marvelous body that was taken as a map of human
fate now began to be seen as an aberrant body that marked
the borders between the normal and the pathological
(Thomson, 1997: 57).
By the end of the [nineteenth] century, medicalization rather
than freakdom legitimated such notions as white supremacy
and such political practices as colonialism, eugenic
legislation, and compulsory institutionalization or
sterilization. (Thomson, 1997: 78)
The extraordinary body bias shifted from its earlier visible,
public position as strange, awful, and lurid spectacle to its
later, private position as sick, hidden, and shameful,
producing finally the fully medicalized freak who after
1940 was removed from the stage platform to the teaching
hospital amphitheater, the medical text, and the special
institution. (Thomson, 1997: 78)

Following Thomson, I move to the second model of the able-bodied gaze in the
film, that is, the medical (clinical) gaze.

By focusing on the two main characters, the surgeon Treves and John
Merrick, there are many hospital scenes in which we can clearly see the
development of the modern doctor-patient relationship. Treves uses scientific
knowledge to control Merrick through examination. In the hands of a medical
professional like Treves, Merricks physical deformity is medicalised as
physical disability.

The image of physical disability has been formed in

- 60 -

relation the medical aim of categorising and assisting the disabled. Hence, the
medical gaze upon Merricks body is different from the gaze upon the Elephant
Man at the freak show. Here, what we can clearly see is that this pivotal
turning point, from the freak show to the hospital, has continuity in terms of the
spectacle of physical difference: the Elephant Man is transformed from an
object of public curiosity to an object of scientific inquiry.

The film portrays the historical process of medicalisation of the human

body, but it also bolsters the notions of normality and abnormality. Foucault
(1975) develops the concept of the medical gaze in The Birth of the Clinic: An
Archaeology of Medical Perception, and argues that the medical practitioners
gaze upon the patients body is characterised by the power of diagnostic
determination of normality.11 The notion of being healthy is constructed and
places the patient in relation to normality.

For Foucault, the concept of

normality (or being healthy and able-bodied) has political and social
implications. If one has cerebral palsy, to all intents and purposes, one is not
normal. The Birth of Clinic relates to Foucaults other studies of madness,
where, he argues, madness negates the socially acceptable notion of what is
normal, and which puts one in need of the asylum. Likewise, in the domain of
medicine, the clinic develops. Foucault states:

The years preceding and immediately following the

Revolution saw the birth of two great myths with opposing
themes and polarities: the myth of a nationalized medical
11

In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul
Rabinow (1983 [1982] : 12-5) assert that Foucault explores the system in medical institutions
which maintains discourse, practices, the gaze, and understanding the subject and its object.
They also consider that Foucault demonstrates that medical discourse, practice, and experience
have been made coherent by clarifying that they are scientifically and systematically formed.
- 61 -

profession, organized like the clergy, and invested, at the

level of mans bodily health, with powers similar to those
exercised by the clergy over mens souls; and the myth of
a total disappearance of disease in an untroubled/
dispassionate society restored to its original state of health.
(Foucault, 1975: 31-2)12

No one could challenge this medical discourse. Thus, Foucault develops his
specific notion of how the medical gaze positions ones body as a scientific
object within the power structure of medical discipline.

In a London Hospital scene in The Elephant Man, Treves is depicted as

an insensitive professional surgeon who distances himself through medical
discourse. Merricks body becomes the medical object in an emphasis on
Treves diagnosis: the very nature of which is destined to lead to a partial and
inhibiting view of the disabled individual (Brisenden, 1998: 20). Merricks
body is seen as a matter of abnormality. The medical gaze is established
through the doctors perspective, which examines physical difference and has
historically and socially influenced our ways of seeing the disabled body.

In

the film, the medical gaze perpetuates the notion that Merrick, as a disabled
person, requires medical care as a long-term condition in his life.
Reappropriating Foucaults notion of the clinical gaze, the social value of this
medical gaze is also promoted by the development of representations. The film
allows the audience to gaze upon the body of John Merrick with a medical gaze.
Here, the medical gaze becomes the public gaze.

The Revolution, for Foucault, is the French Revolution. The French is the historical event
that instigated the modernity that had been processing for half a century before 1789.
12

- 62 -

In Independent Living and the Medical Model of Disability, Simon

Brisenden (1998) states:

Disabled people are seen as weak, pathetic and in need of

sympathy when they are referred to as cripple. A person
with cerebral palsy, when referred to as a spastic, has to
suffer the indignity of being equated with a raving,
dribbling, idiot these are the fact beyond the medical
fact. What we have to get to, instead of this, is the real
person inside of the image of disability. (Brisenden, 1998:
21)

After John Merrick is released from the freak show, he is smuggled on

board a steamship to England and catches a bus to London. When he arrives at
Victoria station, he is dressed in a cape and hood.

He is harassed and

unmasked by juveniles. He runs away, but pursued by the hostile crowd, is

eventually driven into a corner like a frightened animal. In this scene, he cries
out: I am not an animal, I am a human being. He collapses at the station.
The police come to disperse the crowd around his body, and take him to the
London Hospital. The hospital becomes his sanctuary. His rehabilitation is
short lived, however, because the disability or disease causing his bodily
deformities is accelerating; John Merrick is twenty-seven years old and dying.
He, however, tells Treves, I am happy every hour of the day, and, I have
gained my Self. Merrick is happy to be in the medical institution. In this way,
Lynchs version of the Elephant Man reinforces the institutionalisation of
physically disabled people (Darke, 1994).

Darke (1998: 191) argues that

medical-model cultural representations of impairment like The Elephant Man

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are socially constructed and mediated artefacts re-presenting society for

society in an entertaining and socially accessible and soothing (ideological) and
reinforcing form.

In the scene where John Merrick is invited to tea at the Treves house,
Merrick outwardly shows his emotion in front of Mrs. Ann Treves. He cries at
this meeting with her because he has never met a beautiful woman from the
upper class before. On the one hand, this scene could be considered as evidence
of Merricks humanity. Nevertheless, in my view, by contrasting Merrick with
Mrs. Treves, Merrick is further marginalised, and his bodily abnormality is
further portrayed as a destructive or disruptive force. This is highlighted in her
reaction to him at the tea (Darke, 1994: 337). Her shock enables the viewers
of the film to feel pity, sympathy, and regret for his personal history, but also
reinforces the horror of his appearance. Although Mr. Treves might have told
Mrs. Treves about Merrick, she could not bring herself to treat him as an
ordinary human being (Darke, 1994: 338).

In a later scene where John Merrick goes to the theatre with Mrs.
Treves, others in the audience, who are from the upper classes, acknowledge
his courage for appearing in public by applauding him. However, as Darke
(1994: 338) suggests, they cannot accept his real desire to be equal to them as
human beings. In The True History of the Elephant Man, Howell and Ford
(1980: 206-8) reveal that when the real life John Merrick went to the theatre
there was no standing ovation.13 Rather, his was a secret visit to the theatre. It

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would seem, therefore, that for John Merrick, being treated as fully human was
only ever a dream. In reality, he was always marked as the Other due to his
physical appearance.

Darke (1994: 339) suggests that in The Elephant Man the closing scene
of John Merricks life, is perhaps the most problematic scene in respect of the
suggestion of eugenic ideals of death being preferable to physical disability for
himself and society. By analysing this film from his disabled perspective,
Darke sees that it is better to be dead than to be disabled. He states:

[In] the Western industrial societies, which constantly focus

on the standard of beauty, John Merrick cannot survive.
Indeed, he dies by suffocation in his attempt to sleep as a
normal human being. In short, in this case, the fate of
being disabled or deformed is played out in all its
normalising and eugenic fame (Darke, 1994: 340).

Darke indicates the stereotype of misfortune in the film. He regards the film as
a normality drama that specifically uses abnormal (impaired) characters to
deal with perceived threat to the dominant social hegemony of normality
(Darke, 1998: 184). Thus, this normality drama genre often represents disabled
characters as the Other and locates them in a medical model paradigm
(Darke, 1998: 188).

The body, in particular, the facial disfigurement, of John Merrick upsets

13

Michael Howell and Peter Ford (1980) wrote a sympathetic account of Merricks life. In
their book, Merrick, like any other man, had many hopes and dreams. His congenital
deformity prohibited him to be like, live like, and sleep lying down on his back like other ablebodied men. They described that, through all of his years of sufferings, Merrick was terrified,
yet compassionate about his condition. He appreciated the hospital staff and his new friends
who helped him; they posted some photos of how Merrick looked when he was in the London
Hospital.

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the able-bodied gaze that the audience of this film projects into the spectacle of
physical difference. As Thomson (1997: 61) mentions, in such representations
of otherness, including freak shows, questions such as what is it? intensify
the difference between the audience and the extraordinary body.

In the

cinematic representation of the extraordinary body, physical disability is a

disruption in the visual, auditory, or perceptual field as it relates to the power
of the gaze; the disruption, the rebellion of the visual must be regulated,
rationalized, contained (Davis, 1995: 129).

Thus, the able-bodied gaze

predetermines physical difference as the abnormal and disabled body.

Cinema and The Able-bodied Gaze

The notion of the able-bodied gaze, as it applies to cinema, is first developed in

Martin Nordens work, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical
Disability in the Movies (1994).

Norden argues that visual anxiety in

mainstream Hollywood cinema takes possession of, and reproduces, a binary

structure of able-bodied speculating/disabled spectacle whereby the viewer is
assumed to identify with the able-bodied gaze upon the disabled. The ablebodied gaze is considered as a physically and psychically determined way of
seeing the Other, denying any viewing possibility of cultural transformation.
Nordens study reconstructs the formation of unequal viewing relationships
between the able-bodied and the disabled. This anxiety, he argues, must be
upset in order to promote a different way of seeing.

Norden (1994) provides a starting point for analysis of disabled

characters in mainstream cinema. Norden (1994: 1) states: most movies have

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tended to isolate disabled characters from their able-bodied peers as well as

from each other. This aspect, according to Norden, is suggested not only in
the mainstream film narrative but also in the way that filmmakers and film
directors have illustrated the disabled characters relating to their social
situations, and have frequently used tools, such as darkness, stormy
environments, fences, cages and windows, to suggest a physical and
symbolical separation of disabled characters from the rest of society (Norden,
1994: 1).

Considering the film-created isolation in The Elephant Man, John

Merrick is incarcerated in a small cage at the freak show. This isolation

enables the audience to dis-identify from John Merrick the disabled
character. More significantly, Norden (1994: 1) states: Audience positioning
within the films becomes a critical issue, for more often than not moviemakers
photograph and edit their works to reflect an able-bodied point of view.
Norden explains:

By encouraging audience members to perceive the world

depicted in the movies, and by implication the world in
general, from this perspective and thus associate themselves
with able-bodied characters, this strategy has a two-fold
effect: it enhances the disabled characters isolation and
Otherness by reducing them to objectifications of pity,
fear, scorn, etc. in short, objects of spectacle as a means
of pandering to the needs of the able-bodied majority, and it
contributes to a sense of isolation and self-loathing among
audience members with disabilities. (Norden, 1994: 1)

Thus, mainstream films have regularly encouraged audiences to see disabled

people in terms of fear, uneasiness, or shock, as the Other who deserve to be
alienated from society. Norden (1994) surveys hundreds of Hollywood movies
- 67 -

and discovers that their images maintain the status quo, holding disabled
people as inferior in an isolated place. He offers a critical explanation of
physically disabled characters who manifest or embody the stereotypes that
have been characteristic of social relations with their physically disabled
minority. Thus, Norden (1994) investigates the able-bodied gaze towards the
disabled body on the screen and the able-bodied spectatorship; how ablebodied people read the cinematic image of disabled people. The able-bodied
gaze is not only an inappropriate way of generalising the disabled people; it is
also a biased way of viewing that maintains the social dominance of a certain
gaze that perceives the Other.

The able-bodied gaze is motivated by such negative feelings as fear,

uneasiness, and shock. Nordens concept of the able-bodied gaze has some
similarities to Laura Mulveys (1975) influential concept of the male gaze. The
male gaze is motivated by such positive feelings as pleasure and desire, as well
as negative feelings.14 Both Mulveys and Nordens studies of the dominant
gaze focus on how viewing subject positions are constructed by film texts
rather than by questioning the viewing practices of women and disabled
individuals respectively in specific social conditions.

In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey (1975) focuses on

14

Exploring the power structure of the gaze in the cinema, Mulvey illustrates that Freud
suggests scopophilia, that is, the pleasure involved in looking at other bodies as extremely
fascinating objects. In the gloom of the movie theatre, it is distinguished that one may look
without being seen either by those on the screen or by other spectators in the cinema. Mulvey
argues that most viewing positions specify for the viewer both the voyeuristic process of
objectifying female bodies and the narcissistic process of identifying with an ideal ego seen
on the screen. Mulvey asserts that in a male-dominant society, pleasure in looking at the film
representation has been split between active/male and passive/female. Mulveys work is only
reflected in the dominant models of film. Traditional Hollywood films not only constantly
bring into focus male protagonists in the narrative but also presuppose male spectators.
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the relationship between cinematic images and spectators. She argues that, in
classical Hollywood films, men have the active viewing position while women
have the passive viewing position.

Women are the object of mens visual

pleasure. She analyses how these films, as a representation of patriarchal

culture, control our viewing practices in ways that make the male gaze positive
and that make female body passive. Mulvey sees that women, as objects of
this male gaze, view themselves from a male perspective.

I believe this

argument is similar to Simone de Beauvoirs view. Both Mulvey and de

Beauvoir consider the viewer, whether it be society or a cinema spectator, as
male, and it forces women to internalise the male gaze and to see themselves as
the Other.

The able-bodied gaze, as Norden maintains, has some similarities to the

male gaze.

In the able-bodied gaze, the disabled refers to that which is

understood as the binary opposite to the able-bodied. Like women, disabled

individuals are forced to internalise the dominant gaze in order to see
themselves as the Other.

However, the able-bodied gaze has some

differences from the male gaze. The female body is identified as an object for
desire, while the disabled body as an object of revulsion: If the male gaze
makes the normative female a sexual spectacle, then the stare sculpts the
disabled subject into a grotesque spectacle. The stare is the gaze intensified,
framing her body as an icon of deviance (Thompson 1997: 26). Norden
argues that traditional Hollywood films often present able-bodied characters as
active, supervising subjects, and treat disabled characters as passive,
pathological, and monstrous objects of anxiety for able-bodied people in the
narrative and in the audience. They do not allow disabled protagonists to be

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desirable subjects. These films objectify people with physical disabilities in

relation to the dominant able-bodied gaze by presenting the disabled as a
spectacle and the able-bodied as an explorer of the Other.

Thus, the

construction of the disabled is obsessively subject to discourses of the ablebodied norm and isolates physical disability from the practice of looking.

Our gaze is subject to discourse. The able-bodied matrix enacts a

normalising gaze that keeps sight of the human body and its behaviour and
disciplines it. When we look at a man with a facial deformity, we see an
abnormal and disabled person because discourse, in this case medical discourse,
has conditioned us, the onlookers, to see the appearance of his deformity as
pathology. This discourse-conditioned gaze is also internalised within those
who are categorised as the Other.

In The Elephant Man, John Merrick is

looked upon with the able-bodied gaze, but he also looks at himself through the
able-bodied gaze. When Merrick looks at the reflection of his face in a mirror,
he screams at himself. He is always a spectacle, and asks himself What is
wrong with me?

He continually stares at himself.

accompanied by his own image of the Elephant Man.

He is continually

He comes to consider

the spectator and the spectacle within him as the double, integral, but particular
conditions of his identity as the Other. The Elephant Man engages these
theories of the dominant gaze by providing us with cinematic images that
remark on Merricks position as an image of the Other, and as an internal
viewer of this image. In the film, the able-bodied gaze is not something we
have or practice, but is a socially and institutionally enforced relationship into
which we enter.

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In Disability Between Discourse and Experience, Susan Reynolds

Whyte (1995) examines how the representations and discourses of physical
differences have constructed the Elephant Man phenomenon from an
anthropological perspective. She states:

His disorder clouded the expressiveness of his face and the

clarity of his speech: his class background and his social
position first as a freak and then as an object of charity also
limited the extent to which he could express his experience
and thus come to terms with his misfortune. We know little
of how Joseph Merrick articulated the Elephant Man: his
own stories about his affliction are buried in the
representation of others. (Whyte, 1995: 276)

Likewise, I argue that the assertion of the particular nature of disabled, The
Elephant Man, ignores, marginalises and inevitably misrepresents those with
NF1 who do not identify themselves within the conditions of that identity. For
me, the films appeal to the disabled Other neglects the differences between
disabled subjects and it makes these differences a negatively fixed pattern
rather than a possibly fluid figure.15

15

I recognise that there could be other readings of this film. (e.g. It can be read as a transition
from freak to human or from freak to patient. It also shows a doctor liberating a freak from
servitude as a circus performer to the more comfortable environment of the hospital.) In
Doctors in the movies Glenn Flores (2004) explores how doctors are represented and names
the top 10 best portrayal of doctors in the films and the top 10 most useful films for in medical
education. In the report, Elephant Man (1980) ranks sixth in the list of the best portrayal of
doctors. Thus, this film can be read as a positive image of the doctor as a healer and as an
ethical man to look after his patient.
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Conclusions: Towards Resistance

In this chapter, I have argued that the able-bodied matrix is a regulatory

system that controls ones body and behaviour.

I have considered able-

bodiedness as a regulatory norm. It is not simply a feature or fixed condition

of the body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialise ablebodiedness and accomplish this materialisation through a compulsory
reiteration of norms. The disabled is the Other. However, we cannot imagine
a single body or a single otherness. It is defined in terms of what it is not.
Thus, the disabled are defined in terms of what is not the able-bodied.

When Foucault (1990 [1978]) examined how biopower is used to

normalise the subject, he proposed that there is a disruptive power to challenge
the norm; that is to say, resistance. Resistance arises from relationships of
domination and subordination by the means of challenging the normative order.
This normative order often falls back on fixed identities; there is no ambiguity
as to whether one is either male or female, heterosexual or homosexual, ablebodied or disabled. However, those who are considered outside of the norm,
lack fixity, for Foucault. Their unity is simply a product of the normalising
gaze. Foucault considers that such others as not one fixed or essential group,
but as possessing ambiguity. Indeed, for Foucault, neither self nor other can
escape ambiguity.

Foucault claims that resistance itself is connected to power relations but

that it is not an opposition to power. Rather, resistance exists because power

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exists; it is a necessary component of power relations. Following on from the

idea that power is a positive force is the idea that all power relations are
potentially reversible and unstable.
resistances

will

inevitably

Wherever domination is imposed,

arise

(McNay,

1994:

101).

In

Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977,

Foucault (1980) states:

[There] are no relations of power without resistances; the

latter are all the more real and effective because they are
formed right at the point where relations of power are
exercised; resistance to power does not come from
elsewhere to be real, nor is it inexorably frustrated through
being the compatriot of power. It exists all the more by
being in the same place as power; hence, like power,
resistance is multiple and can be integrated in global
strategies. (Foucault, 1980: 142)

For Foucault, discourses produce subjects within relations of power that

potentially or actually involve resistance (Weedon, 1999: 119). Resistance is,
in my view, the method used by those who are categorised as the Other to
question the dominant culture. On this reading, the disabled is to be considered
not only as the essential object of the able-bodied matrix, but also as the site
where the able-bodied matrix is questioned. In Art or Lies? Representations
of Disability on Film, Tom Shakespeare (1999: 165) argues: the legitimate
critiques of what Norden has called the cinema of isolation, and what Darke
has labelled normality drama is in danger of being extended into simplistic
and overcensorious readings of almost every film including impairment. He
states:

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[Disability] discourses are more complex and multi-faceted

than might appear. While there can be a basic consensus
about ways in which images can be exploitative and
stereotyping, it is dangerous to develop hard and fast rules
of representation, against which the disability credentials of
a particular film can be read off straightforwardly. While
disability activists, like feminists and others, always have
the right to condemn specific treatments, it is unduly
prescriptive and censorious to draw up narrow criteria of
what constitutes correct imagery and this only serves to
limit artistic creativity. (Shakespeare, 1999: 170)

Thus, Shakespeare argues for complexity or fluidity of disability discourses.

Furthermore, he proposes that we need to open up the possibilities for
multifaceted readings of disability imagery. Following Shakespeare, I suggest
that the disabled can produce new discourses that resist able-bodied discourses.
These discourses of resistance are not docile in the way that the able-bodied
matrix requires, but rather, they provoke and are socio-culturally subversive. I
will explore some of these discourses in the following chapters.

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Chapter 2 - The Able Body as the Phallic Body:

Psychoanalytic Exploration of Physical Disability

Introduction:

In the previous chapter, I explored the able-bodied matrix that governs

our consciousness. That is to say, the dualistic aspects of what categorises one
in terms of physical differences by establishing the Other. In this chapter, I
utilise psychoanalytic theory to explore and undermine the negative
conceptualisation of physical disability within able-bodied culture.

In

Locating physical disability in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis:

problems and prospects, Robert D. Wilton (2003: 369-389) uses
psychoanalytic theory to examine the negative value of physical disability
within able-bodied culture, and its link to questions of sexuality and death. In
particular, Wilton pays attention to castration theory to consider the ablebodied reduction of the physically disabled body to a castrated body. However,
in this chapter, I shall develop a psychoanalytic account of physical disability
in order to open up possibilities for physical disability beyond its position as
castrated able-bodiedness.

Psychoanalysis, to me, is not simply about sexuality. Psychoanalysis

locates sexuality at the heart of psychic life. I propose the appropriation of
psychoanalysis

to

explain the construction

of the identities,

bodied/disabled, in a way that parallels the male/female dichotomy.

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able-

In Feminism, Theory and The Politics of Difference, Chris Weedon

(1999) defines psychoanalysis as follows:

Psychoanalysis is concerned first and foremost with the

acquisition of what is assumed to be healthy, mature,
gendered

subjectivity.

The

basic

psychoanalytic

presupposition that gendered subjectivity is acquired rather

than inborn accounts for much of the attraction of
psychoanalytic theory for feminists. (Weedon, 1999: 80)

I agree with Weedons definition of psychoanalysis.

The appeal of

psychoanalysis is that it is equipped with a theoretical apparatus allowing us to

understand any categorisation, for example, gender, disability or race, as a
psychic as well as a social formation, rather than an anatomical and
physiological formation.

Thus, this chapter draws upon psychoanalytic

assumptions about sexual difference and explores the parallels between sexual
difference and physical difference, more specifically, between the feminine and
the disabled.

Psychoanalysis has been essential to French feminist theories of sexual

difference, such as Luce Irigaray (1985a and 1985b), Julia Kristeva (1982 and
1984), and Helene Cixous (1980 and 1981).
prominent for disability theorists.

However, it has not been as

I believe that disability needs to be

conceptualised and reconceptualised in a variety of ways. Psychoanalysis can

be employed as a means of theorising physical disability in relation to the ablebodied.

In this chapter, I shall draw attention to Irigarays theory of

subjectivity in order to argue against the masculine-able-bodied-based theory

of subjectivity found in Freud and Lacan.
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Freud and Lacan: On the Body and Language

In this section, I shall begin by examining Freudian theory, starting with

Freuds concept of the ego, and proceeding to Lacans reconceptualisation of
Freuds notion within the context of language.

Pursuing a discussion of

Lacans concept, I will suggest how psychoanalytic theory can assist in

exploring parallels between gender and physical (dis)ability, and subordination
of the Other.

In The Ego and The Id (1961 [1923]), Freud argues that the psyche
consists of three parts, the id, the ego and the superego. As maintained by
Anthony Easthope in The Unconscious (1999: 44), the id, the ego, and superego are translators terms; Freud, in fact, used the terms it, I, and over-I.
According to Freud, the id consists simply of mechanisms such as sexual drives
and physical instincts. The id is an unconscious system that operates on two
energy sources: one is libido, that is, the life energy, the other is thanatos,
that is, anger or death energy. A person is born with the id. In short, the id
illustrates pure and basic drives to satisfy instinctual needs. Easthope (1999:
44) also states The id is the reservoir of libido or psychic energy which is
tapped off in the form of the ego and the super-ego. In this revised conception
the super-ego now has a separate task of performing as the voice of conscience
and censorship. The super-ego is a revision of the ego that exercises control
in order to determine the completion of the ego; it is the moral sense. It
determines what is socially and culturally acceptable as the norm.

The

superego is the moral supervisor that connects ones unconscious and

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conscious mind, and stands in opposition to the desires of the id.

Thus, the

ego seeks to maintain these two energy sources in equilibrium.

The ego

generates the superego that supervises the ego as it is influenced by the

boundless urges of the id. The human infant acquires a sense of right and
wrong, a psychic model of the parents ideals and norms.

The superego

develops through interactions between the infant and the parent, and between
the psyche and the social world. Hence, the id, the ego, and the superego are
interrelated.

Freud (1961 [1923]: 26) states, The ego is first and foremost a bodily
ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.
The ego operates as a negotiator between the body and the drives of the id. I
support Freuds view that the ego is an embodied sense of self, and that the
body of which one has a felt sense is not necessarily contiguous with the
physical body as it is perceived from the outside (Salamon, 2004: 96). Freud
accepts that the ego is related to the body. In The World, the Flesh, and the
Subject: Continental Themes in Philosophy of Mind and Body, Gilbert and
Lennon (2005) state:

[For] Freud, the contours of the body are structured by

emotion and desire (the ensuing bodily image is therefore
not something which could be captured simply by the
drawing a picture). It is not that an already structured
anatomical body produces our sense of it, our body image.
Rather the body becomes formed by being invested with
affects. (Gilbert and Lennon, 2005: 57)

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Thus, a body image forms by affective investment in body parts. The ego is
not only a type of perceptions based on bodily sensations, but also contains
imaginary associations. This concept of a bodily ego seems to link outer and
inner perceptions.

Freud suggests that the ego is developed from bodily

sensations, and it derives from the body as well as being an image of the
psyche. Freud regards (1961 [1923]: 26) it as a mental projection of the
surface of the body, besides, as we have seen above, representing the
superficies of the mental apparatus. Elizabeth Grosz states:

The ego is like an internal screen on to which the

illuminated images of the bodys outer surface are
projected. It is not a veridical map, a photograph, but a
representation of its degrees of erotogenicity, of the
varying intensities of libidinal investment in different body
parts. The ego is an image of the bodys significance or
meaning for the subject; it is as much a function of fantasy
and desire as of sensation and perception. (Grosz, 1992:
37)

Freud highlights the significance of infant and early childhood experiences in

the formation of subjectivity. He proposed that an infant generally passes
through a series of psychosexual stages. Each stage is categorised by the part
of the body from which the infant obtains a pleasurable sensation. In the first
stage, the pleasure is obtained through sensation in the mouth in sucking
his/her mothers breast; this is the oral stage. The infant is reliant upon his/her
mother during this stage. The infant feels that the source of pleasure is outside
him/herself. In the second stage, the infant becomes a child. The childs
concern shifts to the incitement of the anus through maintenance and discharge

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of faeces; this is the anal stage. The process of toilet training and the mothers
treatment of defecation processes in this stage are considered to have an impact
on the childs subjectivity. In the third stage, the phallic stage, manoeuvring of
the genitals, the penis or the clitoris, becomes the main source of bodily
pleasure. Children, male and female, desire the body of the mother.

Following these stages of bodily pleasures that male and female infants
share, children enter into the Oedipus complex that serves to determine their
gendered identity. The boys recognition of his mothers lack of a penis is
primarily an issue of insecurity and confusion for him. He suffers a castration
anxiety where he assumes that the mother has lost her penis somehow, or that it
has been severed, and that this could also happen to him. Furthermore, he also
assumes that his father is aware of his desire for his mother, and fears that his
father will castrate him. Thus, he represses his desire for his mother and
identifies with his father. The girl recognises her lack of a penis and interprets
it as a sign of deficiency. For her, the phallic stage is described as her desire
for a penis, that is, penis envy, which later articulates itself in jealousy of her
mother and causes an aversion from her mother and a turning toward her father,
first in the expectation that he will possibly provide her with a penis, then
substituting the desire for a baby for the desire for a penis. Freud, therefore,
assumes sexual difference derives from a recognition of the female body as
lacking. The childs sexual and antagonistic desires are connected to those
who are significant in the environment, generally his/her parents. This Oedipal
moment is the moment of recognition of sexual difference, problematic as it is.
Freuds account remains bodily without being biological. It concerns the affect

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which becomes attached to different bodily forms. Crucially for him, this is the
affect which is associated with the presence or absence of the penis.

Like Freud, Lacan (1997 [1977]) considers that the subject is always
fragmented, consisting of a conscious mind and an unconscious connection of
physical (sexual) drives. Lacan offers a linguistic model for understanding the
subjects entry into the social world.

Lacans emphasis is thus less on the

bodily basis of the ego than it is on the ideological structures that, particularly
through language, make the subject come to understand his or her relationship
to himself and to others.

Lacan developed a tripartite model of the psyche, revising the Freudian

model of the psyche as consisting of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the
real.16 The imaginary is the realm of the imagination, images, and fantasies.17
It is the domain of affects. This is a pre-linguistic realm by means of which the
first steps towards selfhood are made. As the domain of affect, it remains in
play throughout ones adult life (Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1988 [1986]: 81).
The symbolic is concerned with interactions of symbols, language, and its
meanings; it is through language that one can represent desires and feelings and
it is through the symbolic that one can be represented and constituted
(Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1988 [1986]: 81). The symbolic is, thus, the realm

16

See Malcolm Bowie (1991) Lacan, London: Fontana Press. In particular chapter 4
Symbolic, Imaginary, Real and True (p.88-121) for more developed explanation of
Lacanian threefold model of the psyche.
17

In Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition: Self and Society from Freud to Kristeva,
Anthony Elliott (1992: 125) states: The imaginary for Lacan is that aspect of psychical
organization which is formed in and through pre-Oedipal experience. It is a ream of being in
which the division between subject and object does not exist. In fact Lacan claims that from
this imaginary merging of self and other it is possible to redramatize the genesis of the ego.
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of language, and as such one is constructed as a subject through language.

Finally, the real, the most obscure of the three categories, seems to include the
realm of the indescribable, that which cannot be represented. This is where one
encounters death and indescribable pleasure (Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1988
[1986]: 166). The real is an inaccessible stage from which the subject has been
eternally detached by acquiring language. Only as an infant is one close to this
stage, a stage in which there is nothing but need. Thus, Lacan explains the real
as a domain of wholeness that is lost through ones language acquisition. The
real is the stage where an infant has a sense of wholeness before it enters the
mirror stage. In this period, the infant is not aware of any distinction between
itself and objects that satisfy its needs. The real haunts ones unconscious
through ones adult life. The real operates in conflict with the imaginary and
the symbolic.

Any attempt to return to the real, for Lacan, leads to the

disintegration of subjectivity and the onset of psychosis.

In the first stage of human development, an infant is dominated by a

disorganised mixture of instincts and needs. This part of the infantile relation
to the mother is a fascination that often goes beyond the pleasure principle.
Lacan (1997 [1977]: 282, 319-21) calls this fascination jouissance.18

Between the age of six to eighteen months, the infant enters a

transitional stage, that is, the mirror stage. The mirror stage gives rise to
identification with its own image (what Lacan calls the Ideal-I or ideal ego).
For Lacan, the mirror stage is about the childs very first recognition of itself as
18

Although Lacan does not explain what exactly jouissance is in his own texts, Bruce Fink
(1995: 60) has an explanation of jouissance: Jouissance is thus, what comes to substitute for
the lost mother-child unity, a unity which was perhaps never as united as all that since it was
a unity owing only to the childs sacrifice or foregoing of subjectivity.
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I, although at a moment before it is objectified in the dialectic of

identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal,
its function as subject (Lacan, 1997 [1977]: 2).19 Lacan states:

The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is

precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation and which
manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial
identification, the succession of phantasies that extends
from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I
shall call orthopaedic (Lacan, 1997 [1977]: 4)

Upon stumbling before a mirror, the infant is unexpectedly assailed with an

image of itself as whole, whereas formerly it experienced existence as a split
being with biological needs.20 The image itself in the mirror is explained by
Lacan as the ideal-I (Lacan, 1997 [1977]: 2). This ideal-I, for Lacan, offers
an image of wholeness which constructs the ego. The instant recognition of a
whole image of self that appears in the mirror to neutralise an infants original
sense of the body as not demarcated from its mother. 21 This image in the
Lacan explains the mirror stage: We have only have to understand the mirror stage as an
identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that
takes place in the subject when he assumes an image whose predestination to this phaseeffect is sufficiently indicated by the use, in analytic theory, of the ancient term imago.
(Lacan,1997 [1977]:2)
19

20

Prior to the mirror stage the infant experiences a whole in the sense that it and its mother are
not demarcated. Within this its own body is just a mass of different sensations which are not
integrated together. It means that the infant has its nostalgia of its own lack (biological needs),
and that the infant develops its own self. The infant gains a horrified recognition of its
vulnerability.
In this sentence, an infants original sense of the body is the Real that is primordial
experience or unification of his/her mother. It is whatever is prior to any attempt to represent it
in a system of symbols (language). The infant entry into language is related to its separation
from the mother. Before separation, there is a plenitude based on the union of mother and child.
After separation, the mother becomes the infants first object - that is, its first experience of
absence, or lack. For the mother, on the other hand, the child is a substitute for the missing
phallus: she has a sense of fulfilment in light of her close bond with the infant. Without
separation, however, the formation of language is inhibited. Here the infant passes from an
imaginary state of fusion with the mother into the realm of the others and language/culture.
Before the mirror stage, there is no separation between the self and the other.
21

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mirror is the image of unity. It becomes a process of identification of internal

self with that external image. The mirror stage thus represents the infants first
encounter with subjectivity, with spatial relations, an external sense of unity,
and a sense of self and others.

Lacan (1997 [1977]: 1-7) differentiates the ideal I and the ego ideal,
the former is related to the imaginary, the latter is related to the symbolic. The
ideal I is the model of wholeness that the ego attempts to imitate; it influences
one in the mirror stage. Seeing an image of him/herself forms a conflict
between the ideal image in the mirror and the confused reality of his/her body,
thus establishing the logic of the imaginary formation that dominates his/her
psychic life permanently. Lacan explains that the ego-ideal occurs when one
sees him/herself as if from that ideal point; to look at his/herself from that point
of wholeness is to see his/her life as lacking and empty.

During the mirror stage, the infant sees its reflection in a mirror and
identifies that it is a person segregated from its mother. This identification is a
misidentification because what the subject sees in the mirror is only an image
that gives the fantasy of wholeness, but this misidentification is essential for
furthering the process of becoming a subject.22 In Jacques Lacan: A Feminist

The subjects association with the mirror image is a complex one for Lacan as the reflection
(or representation) is an ensnarement and lure as much as a pleasure (Grosz, 1990: 37).
Elizabeth Grosz argues that the subject is constructed by the image, and fascinated by the
specular double (Grosz, 1990: 37). There is a difference between what the subject sees and
feels. The subject sees itself as a unified totality, a gestalt in the mirror and yet experiences
itself in a schism, as a site of fragmentation (Grosz, 1990: 39). The process of (mis)
recognition is ambiguous since it is an image of both delusion and accuracy (Grosz 1990:
39). Grosz states:
22

In identifying with its mirror-image, the child introjects it into the subjects
ego; yet the subjects relation to the image is also alienated. The image both
is and is not an image of itself The child identifies with an image of itself
that is always also the image of another (Grosz, 1990: 40).
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Introduction, Elizabeth Grosz (1990) clearly sums up the major characteristics

of Lacans concept of the mirror stages:

1. it marks the childs first recognition of lack or absence;

2. it signals the moment of the childs recognition of the
distinction between self and other;
3. it represents the childs first concerted attempts to fill the
lack by identifying with its own specular image;
4. the specular image is a totalized, complete, external
image a gestalt of the subject, the subject as seen from
outside;
5. the visual gestalt is in conflict with the childs
fragmentary, disorganized felt reality;
6. the discordance of the visual gestalt with the subjects
perceived reality means that the specular image remains
both a literal image of itself and an idealized representation,
more complete than it feels. The mirror image thus
provides the ground for the ego ideal, the image of the ego
derived from others, which the ego strives to achieve or live
up to;
7. the specular image positions the child within a
(perspectivally organized) spatial field, and, more
particularly, within the body, which is located as a central
point within this field;
8. the mirror stage initiates the child into two person
structure of imaginary identifications, orienting it forever
towards identification with and dependence on (human)
images and representations for its own forms or outline;
9. the ego can be seen as the sedimentation of images of
others which are libidinally invested through narcissism by
being internalized;
10. the ego does not uphold reality to the demands of the id;
it systematically misrecognize reality (Grosz, 1990: 48).

Once the child enters into the symbolic stage and accepts the rules and
dictates of society, it is able to deal with others. In The Function and Field of
Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, Lacan (1997 [1977]: 30-113) argues
that the system of language acquisition is related to the Oedipus complex. As
maintained by Lacan, in the process in which the child becomes aware of the
In Groszs context, the self-reflection in the mirror both is and is not self-image. There is the
dilemma of intercommunicating between its self-image and itself. The self-image seems to be
captured in the system of confused (mis-) recognition that Lacan describes as a feature of the
mirror-stage (Grosz 1990: 39).
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implication of the phallus as the sign of both identity and difference, the child
comes to understand the binary division of meanings in language (Alsop,
Fizsimons, and Lennon, 2002: 51). In other words, Lacan suggests that the
process of becoming a subject through the Oedipus complex is the way of
recognising social strictures and of following the system of language in which
the child understands the self in relation to others. Lacan states:

It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the

support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of
history, has identified his person with the figure of the law.
(Lacan, 1997 [1977]: 67)

Thus, the symbolic is made possible because of the childs recognition of the
Name-of-the-Father that regulates both the childs desire and the linguistic
system.

In Jacques Lacan, Anika Lemaire (1996 [1977]) looks at the

definition of the phallus:

The term Phallus, as used by Lacan, is not to be confused

with the real, biological sex, with what is called the penis.
It is an abstract signifier, which, like any symbol, goes
beyond its materiality and beyond what it represents...
Lacan says that the Phallus has a signification which is
evoked only by paternal metaphor (Lemaire, 1996
[1977]: 86)

Thus, the phallus, in Lacanian terms, is the symbolic meaning of both what a
man is and what a man is not. In Psychoanalysis and Culture: Contemporary
States of Mind, Rosalind Minsky offers a clear explanation of the phallus in
Lacans theory:
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The phallus, a sign of power within patriarchal societies

which is not to be confused with the visible penis (although
this is presumably what the child does at one level) is the
central term in Lacans theory. It symbolizes to the child
that there is a division between the sexes, and later that
those who have rather than lack it are privileged.
(Minsky, 1998: 68)

Thus, for Lacan, the phallus represents both a desire for power and a fear of
loosing it. Ones self (identity) can only be established in the symbolic as a
consequence of the particular reading of sexual difference (Minsky, 1998: 689).

For Minsky, Lacan proposes that one must recognise the illusory

wholeness of the phallus and the myth of all identities based on either having it
or not having it.

In The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in

Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that Symbols in fact envelop the life of man in
a network so total that they join together, before he comes into the world, those
who are going to engender him (Lacan, 1968: 42). He continues, Man
speaks therefore, but it is because the Symbol has made him man (Lacan,
1968: 39). Thus, the symbolic order operates as the way in which the subject is
constructed.

Lacan constantly maintains that one has no choice about

identifying ones self with the intentional implications of culture, since it is

only through ones initiation into pre-existing discourses that one can become a
subject.

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The Phallic Body as the Able Body

Freud uses the penis as the essential marker of male sexuality; it is used
to theorise both male and female sexualities. Woman does not have a penis
and her position is characterised by the penis holder: man.

Likewise, the

disabled does not have an able-whole body, and the disabled position is
characterised by the able-bodied. Like masculinity, able-bodiedness is linked
to activity and dominance, while, like femininity, disability is viewed as
passive and submissive.

For Lacan, the phallus is positioned within the

symbolic; it is a privileged signifier.

It is that, by reference to which,

subjectivity is formed. In this section, I will be primarily concerned with how

bodily and emotional experience in childhood is transformed symbolically into
the unconscious ways in which we live out our lives as able-bodied or disabled,
as well as male and female within society and culture.23

What psychoanalytic theory does in the context of theorising embodied

subjectivity is to indicate the origin of otherness that categorises us within
culture.

The significance of psychoanalytic theory is that it allows us to

theorise the ways in which ones subjectivity is differentiated, or gendered, in

Freuds theory regarding the psychosexual development of a gendered subjectivity does

generalise. Disability may not be generalised but the development process of becoming an
embodied subject is similar to psychosexual development that Freud theorised. All disabled go
through similar stages of development, but this does not mean that all disabled people go
through these stages in exactly the same way, there may be differences between disabilities. As
Robert Murphy explores his experience of becoming a disabled subject, even in adulthood,
there is a developmental process of becoming a disabled subject, a process which is psychoembodied. The link of identity of a body which has significance linked to our relations with
others. This is so even for those who become disabled later in life. Other bits seem to describe
a process for those who are seen as disabled from early childhood. Here parallel to the oedipal
moment which is a moment of recognising sexual difference is a moment of recognising
difference in terms of able-bodied/disabled; with privilege given to the able-bodied. What
happens when people become disabled later is some kind of crisis. They have an identity fixed
in opposition to the disabled and now have to negotiate a new significance for their body
reflected back those from around them.
23

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terms of sexual and physical differences.

In Freuds theory of gendered

subjectivity, otherness is often considered as femininity that develops through

an awareness of lack when girls compare themselves with boys. Masculinity,
on the other hand, develops through an awareness of salience when boys
identify themselves with their father.

By utilising Freud to develop a

psychoanalytic account of physical disability, I shall focus on three main

points: (1) bodily ego, (2) the privilege of the penis, and (3) the role of
castration for men and women.

Firstly, as Freud maintains, the ego is a bodily ego. The shape of that
body is originally formed by sensations. It is not that a previously formed body
that creates the sense of itself already exists. The body becomes available to us
due to its potential for pleasure and pain. Later, our bodily ego can be formed
from the attachment of other kinds of significance to bodily parts.

The

disabled ego starts to take form when the subject begins to acknowledge certain
features of the body as having special significance.

For example, my neck

becomes significant because it is a source of pain, and therefore plays a greater

part in forming my sense of my own physicality, at least more than my elbow
does. It is the focus of attention from others that gives it a particular status.

Secondly, Freud emphasises the significance of the penis, a particular

bodily form. During the Oedipal stage, the child distinguishes his/her sexual
difference as a consequence of the significance of presence or absence of the
penis. In a parallel way, I suggest that the able body is privileged. I suggest
that the childs sense of being able-bodied or disabled also rests with the
recognition of certain bodily differences as significant. For instance, like the

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clitoris that is, for Freud, considered as an absence of the penis, that is, more
feminised than other parts of the female body, my neck is more disabled than
other parts of my body. I am aware that the categorisation of my body depends
on certain bodily structures. Where one does not have an able body, one
perceives ones body as lacking. In this situation, ones desires and wishes are
attached to the able body. The able-body is the focus of desire; these desires
and wishes offer a psychological foundation for ones future characteristics.

Both able-bodied and disabled individuals become what they are

through a sequence of identifications which build upon an originally
ambivalent base. The disabled Oedipal development is not simply parallel to
the able-bodied, rather it is widely different. The disabled must give up his/her
able-bodiedness. Thus, the power impotence that the disabled experience due
to their lack of an able body, and their revulsion of their disabled body for not
providing them with one forces them to enter into a conflicting relationship
with the disabled body. It is the recognition that one lacks able-bodiedness.
Finally, the desire for able-bodiedness must itself be given up. For the ablebodied, the castration complex forces a repression of desire for dependency and
an identification with the able-bodied, giving rise to the able-bodied superego.
However, there is no such system for disabled people. Disabled individuals
whether through their own choosing or social convention are trained to desire
an impossibility able-bodiedness. But since it is an impossibility and as such
cannot be achieved they easily acquire a lack of self-esteem. Recognising the
lesser quality of the disabled body, they connect themselves with a sense of
lack, and also renounce a more positive position for their own bodies.

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I now turn to the way in which the Lacanian account can be adopted to
explain the construction of able-bodied/disabled subjectivity. As I mentioned
in the previous section, Lacan developed his theory of the mirror image from
Freuds theory of a bodily ego, assuming that the subject comes to
(mis)recognise itself in the image in the mirror. In very early childhood, one
lives in the real, a stage formed by a sense of wholeness, which, for Lacan, is
its unification with the mother, and by lack of a discrete sense of ones own
body. The sense of self that emerges from the mirror stage is formed by
identification with the image, the image of a self that is complete, fixed, and a
coherent and discrete whole.

Ones gratification in taking this mirror image for itself is in part

encased by the image having an apparent unity and coherence which is in
tension with the fragmented sense of self.24 The image is an expectation of
what one will turn out to be. It is this imagined wholeness that creates the
appropriation of a body in segments. Reappropriating Lacan, the illusionary
almost-perfect image that one sees in the mirror is imaginary wholeness, and
can be equated with able-bodiedness. The image in the mirror is in itself
misrecognition. To acquire such an image is essential for the formation of
ones subjectivity, but it leaves the self with a sense of lack because the image
is only a representation; it co-exists with a sense of self in bits and pieces.
Thus, in the imaginary order, one becomes other than itself is moreover,
continually threatened by its own otherness (Elliott, 1992: 129).

24

The

Prior to the mirror stage, the infant experiences a whole in the sense that it and its mother are
not demarcated. Within this its own body is only a mass of different sensations which are not
integrated together. The encounter with the mirror begins the sense of itself as a discrete
material entity, but via identification with something outside. This remains in tension with the
mass of unintegrated sensation which is the experience of the body from inside.
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significance of the imaginary here lies in Lacans account of how physical

difference comes to be formed by the effects of boundary, language and
identification imposed on the subject by others rather than materialisation
through biology.

In Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, Lennard J.

Davis (1995) provides a Lacanian understanding of disabled subjectivity:

[The] disabled body is a direct imago of the repressed

fragmented body.

The disabled body causes a kind of

hallucination of the mirror phrase gone wrong. The subject

looked at the disabled body and has a moment of cognitive
dissonance, or should we say a moment of cognitive
resonance with the earlier state of fragmentation. Rather
than seeing the body in the mirror, the subject sees the
repressed fragmented body; rather than seeing the object of
desire, as controlled by the Other, the subject sees the true
self of the fragmented body This repressed truth of selfperception revolves around a prohibited central, specular
moment of seeing the disabled body (Davis, 1995:
139)

Davis assumes that the disabled body appears in the imaginary as a fragmented
body. For him, the imaginary body of the disabled subject is experienced as a
lack. However, I consider that Davis reading of the imaginary is, perhaps, too
simple. To me, the disabled imaginary shifts. As I mentioned in the previous
section, Lacan illustrates the mirror stage as a drama where both the self and
the other within the subject act themselves out. As a complex formation, the
imaginary is influenced by ambiguous bodily feelings of antagonism,

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happiness, desire, hate, and love, and is thus, complex. The imaginary is not
fixed, but fluid. It questions the certainty of self-image of what I am. Thus,
there is not a single imaginary for the disabled subject. I consider that the
ambiguity regarding the disabled imaginary is like that over Irigaray and male
and female imaginaries. Most disabled people will share the way of imagining
and feeling about disabled bodies which is dominant in the culture; in the same
way that most women will share a male imaginary of their bodies. But what
we are seeking in both cases is a re-imagining, a new imaginary of the disabled
body. Thus, Disabled people share the able-bodied symbolic with able-bodied
people. Disabled people internalise the normative concept of the able body,
too.

In relation to the imaginary, the ideal body that forms the basis of
identification, is the whole, coherent, stable, intelligible and able body. This is
the basis of the ego ideal. For me, the ego ideal is an able body. This forms
the basis of an imaginary desire for wholeness. However, the imaginary which
attaches to our body is also formed by the image of that body which is reflected
back by others. Here, what gets reflected back, is a body that is not whole but
is broken or lacking. This then fails to correspond to the ego ideal.

For me, it is not simply the having or not having of the whole body that
categorises embodied subjectivity under able-bodied norms, but rather the way
in which its presence or lack of the whole body functions as a signifier. Thus,
the way in which one can make sense of bodily difference is by possession of a
sign, the whole body, of able-bodied power that allows one to position oneself
within the order of able-bodied culture. Fear of the disabled is a fear of the

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lack of this power that the able body, as signifier, assures the able-bodied. For
Lacan, the sense of self comes from the whole network of signification, which,
like any signifying system, can never be completely fixed.

I use Lacans

notion of the symbolic order to demonstrate that the able-bodied society is

structured like a language; we only acquire our positions and meanings in
society by fitting into a system based on regulations of linguistic exchanges. In
order to engage in social interaction, we have to acknowledge the system of
constituting differences, and this insists on subjugation of the desire for ablebodiedness.

The disabled child recognises him/herself as lacking or different, that is

to say, castrated. Position within the symbolic is organised around the ablebodied signifier. The disabled child has no position, no mark of threatened loss
on the body with which to signify an entrance into the symbolic order. While
all our subjectivities are structured around the terms of lack no one really has
able-bodiedness this lack is projected onto the disabled who operate as a kind
of prop to maintain the illusion of wholeness for the whole of society. This is
defined by institutionalised able-bodiedness. As the lesser opposite of the ablebodied, the disabled body supports the fantasy of bodily wholeness, i.e.: ablebodiedness.

In Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Teresa Brennan explains:

The phallus is the mark of lack, and difference in general

and sexual difference in particular. As the mark of lack, it
refers to the fact that the subject is not complete unto itself.
It is here that the symbolic father and phallus connect; the
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former breaks up the illusion of unity, and the latter

represents that break. As the mark of difference in general,
the phallus is allied with the logos, with the principle that
the recognition of difference is the condition of logic and
language alike. That is to say, thinking as such requires
difference. This beings us to a crucial Lacanian claim that
sexual difference is the crucial one in being able to speak,
thus think; and, mutaits mutandis, that speaking is crucial
to sexual difference.

The visual recognition of sexual

difference is a channel connecting the heterogeneous

experience of the feeling, sensing body to something that is
alien to it: the differential structure of language; in turn,
that language lets it name the difference. (Brennan: 1993
[1989]: 4)

I contend that the phallic body is the able body. The able body is structured in
the symbolic. It is a phallic sign of power within able-bodied societies. The
disabled body, which is parallel to the female body as lack, is constructed by
this phallus, that is, able-bodied/castration-disabled dualism.

The disabled

subject is given a position in the symbolic. This is the position of Other to a

privileged able-bodied subject where the privileged position of the phallic body
is given to the able-bodied subject.

It is a construction of lack from the

perspective of the able-bodied.

Other writers have also used psychoanalysis to relay an account of

disabled subjectivity. Robert Wilton (2003) states:

For Freud, disability stands in for castration.

The

disabled body, like the female body, is positioned as

deficient, with psycho-social consequences flowing from

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that physiological deficiency.

For Lacan, castration is

replaced by symbolic castration, with lack inscribed on to

the disabled body.

Yet the tendency to universalize

cultural norms suggests that the able-body, like the phallic

body, can be positioned as an unproblematic and sustained
source of privilege. (Wilton, 2003: 381-2)

Thus, Wilton argues that the disabled body, like the female body, is castrated,
and the able body, like the phallus or the male body, is seen as the normal. In
this context, psychoanalysis, as well as medical discourse, is based on the
assumption that in order to be whole and to develop a normal ego, disabled
people, like women, have to surrender themselves to their lack and abnormality
(Wilton, 2003: 382).

In Wiltons view, the able body is represented as dominant and active.

The able body is a representation of the whole body and a symbol of absolute
power. The able body is utilised to highlight the symbolic implication engaged
in the process of being the able-bodied subject. In this sense, the able body is a
conceptual signifier. Thus, this psychoanalytic account of the able body offers
a non-biomedical theory of normality.25

The possession or lack of the able body fixes the social categories of the
able-bodied and the disabled.

In Wiltons account, the able-bodied is

25

I consider that there are interrelations of different identities and subjectivities. Identities are
not just added on. The point here is that the different kinds of identity do not get fixed
independently of each other. They have an impact on each other. Being identified as disabled
impacts on ones identity as male or female. For example, for men where the normative ideal
is strength to be identified as disabled means that their masculinity is somehow called into
question. For women, whose normative ideal is beauty and attractiveness, to be identified as
disabled impacts on their femininity to suggest they are not proper women.
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considered as a whole, fixed, normal form as opposed to the horrifying

ambiguity of the disabled body.

The question that then arises is: what

possibilities are available for those who have been so positioned? A refusal of
the fixity of the symbolic is one move. For some, like sexual difference
theorists and those recreating identities as disabled, the important move is to
construct a representation of femininity/disability that is positive. Another
move is to refuse the binary of the privileged term and other. In order to
explore ways out of the apparent determinism of psychoanalytic theory, I will
employ Luce Irigarays theory of sexual difference and female subjectivity. I
will argue for the power that psychoanalytic theory possesses for those in
search of answers to questions of the formation of disabled subjectivities.
However, following Irigaray, I will also explore ways of undoing the binary
positioning that Freud and Lacan suggest.

Irigaray and Sexual Difference

In This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray (1985b) challenges Freud and
Lacans studies of psycho-sexual development and suggests an alternative
account

of

female

sexuality

which

is

separate

from

masculine

conceptualisations of sexual difference. According to Irigaray (1985b: 25):

Womans desire would not be expected to speak the same language as mans;
womans desire has doubtless been submerged by the logic that has dominated
the West since the time of the Greeks. In the Western masculine discourse
woman is traditionally a use-value for a man, an exchange value among men;
in other words, a commodity (Irigaray, 1985b: 31).

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While Freud and Lacan considered that the male genitals are identified
as one, as the phallus, and paid no attention to other aspects of male sexual
pleasure, Irigaray argues that the female genitals are not one. For Irigaray,
there is no single term for the female genitals in terms of a binary opposition.
What is the opposite of penis? The female body, in particular, the female
genitals, unsettle the fixity of the binary oppositions that construct patriarchal
thoughts.

Irigarays refusal of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis implies a

denial of any fixed position between the sexes: mans desire and womans are
strangers to each other (Irigaray, 1985b: 27). Thus, femininity is based upon
sexual difference and can only be resolved through sexual difference.
Irigarays definition of female sexuality (1985b: 28) is based on the female
body that is considered not as one sexual organ, but as a plurality of them.
Irigaray (1985b: 31) argues that the female body should not be reduced to one
sexual organ since this reiterates the masculine logic of the primacy of the
phallus. Irigaray insists on the need to create other definitions of the feminine,
which resists the one constructed by patriarchy. It is this otherness to come
which is positioned sexually in the female body. Irigaray (1985b) argues that
both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity are linked
to their theories of sexuality.

In giving a critique of Lacans mirror stage, Irigaray (1985b: 129)

questions why Lacan gives attention to a flat mirror, which reflects women
only as absence. In short, with such a mirror, everything we see is defined as
either a male body or a not-male body. The woman only appears as not-male,

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as lack, or simply as the Other; she cannot see herself in this flat mirror. The
entry to the symbolic order, or phallogocentric culture, is dependent upon the
woman remaining as a blind spot so that the man constructs his subjectivity on
the basis of her absence. This shifts womans identity to no place, which is
outside of the binary oppositions. Thus, woman remains untheorised as there is
no apparatus by which to theorise woman. According to Lacan, all we can
say is that woman is subsumed to not-man. This leads us to Irigarays main
claim, as Margaret Whitford (1991: 159) points out: the feminine is always
defined as mans other, the other of the same. 26 In other words, [the] only
woman we know is the masculine feminine, the phallic feminine, woman as
man sees her (Tong, 1997 [1989]: 226).

Irigaray argues that women are

possible nominees for digression and segregation from the normative order of
universality: sameness (Tong, 1997 [1989]:227). The process of othering
sexual differences is possible due to the socio-culturally constructed body of
those shifted by the binary system. Irigaray argues that all identities come
from patriarchal thoughts with the emphasis on visibility, rationality, fixity,
wholeness and sameness.

In Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One,
Irigaray (1985a & 1985b) has two intentions. The first is to reveal
phallogocentrism as establishing and maintaining the entire system of
articulation and meaning, that is, language. The second is to seek to create a
feminine

system

to

offer

positive

sexual

identity

for

women.

Phallogocentrism is a notion designed to create fixity by articulating that social

26

In her study of psychoanalysis and Western philosophy, Irigaray sees sameness everywhere.
Her critical study of Freudian psychoanalysis is, in particular, significant, since she criticizes
his theory of female sexuality. (Tong, 1997 [1989]: 227). Irigaray argues that woman is not a
reflection of man, she is the Other.
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categories of gender are simply the one, that is, man, as he is the essential
figure and maintains the essential position while woman is defined in terms of
man. Irigaray (1985a: 133-46) argues that philosophy is gendered. The main
subject is always male. Irigaray (1985a: 133) states: any theory of the subject
has always been appropriated by the masculine.

For her, the Western

tradition of phallogocentrism establishes a masculine and fixed identity,

produces the normative logic, and establishes binary systems. The effect of
this tradition makes autonomous difference unachievable. Phallogocentrism
establishes identity in relation to the phallus, and excludes all differences that
do not match the phallic standard. With this logic of the phallus, all differences
are out of sight. This phallic standard allows for a sense of balance between
the one and all differences, however, the one remains the standard that governs
the politics of difference. The one is the ideal or the phallic: man.27

As women are unable to maintain value in the symbolic that defines

itself with reference to the phallic, they can only become an object for phallic
power. In Lacanian perspective, one is formed in the mirror stage, and
sexually categorised by entry into the symbolic order. However, Irigaray holds
the reverse of Lacans view of the symbolic order as fixed. Irigaray assumes
that symbolic, that is, language, systems are flexible and mostly established by
power relationships that are changeable. Irigaray challenges Lacans account
that the phallus is an essential signifier of the symbolic order. Irigaray states:

27

The term oneness is defined in the publishers note and note on selected terms of This Sex
Which Is Not One: The universal standard and privileged form in our systems of
representation, oneness expresses the requirements for unitary representations of signification
and identity. Within such a system, in which the masculine standard takes itself as a universal,
it would be impossible to represent the duality or plurality of the female sex and of a possible
language in analogy with it.(Irigaray, 1985b: 221)
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For one sex and its lack, its atrophy, its negative, still does
not add up to two. In other words, the feminine has never
been defined except as the inverse, indeed the underside of
the masculine. So woman it is not a matter of installing
herself within this lack, this negative, even by denouncing it,
nor of reversing the sexual economy of sameness by turning
the feminine into the standard for sexual difference; it is
rather a matter of trying to practice that difference Is it
possible that the difference might not be reduced again
might not be reduced once again to a process of
heirachization? Of subordinating the other to the same?
(Irigaray, 1985b: 159 emphasis in the original text).

Irigaray wants to produce a new symbolic system specifically for of womens

own that rejects symbolic hierarchies. If women simply long to become like
men, it means accepting a masculine discourse that naturally rejects women. In
its place, women have to obtain their own expression, an expression that is not
the masculine. Irigaray also states:

[Women] merely equal to men would be like them,

therefore not women. Once more, the difference between
the sexes would be in that way cancelled out, ignored,
papered over.

So it is essential for women among

themselves to invent new modes of organization, new forms

of struggle, new challenges If women allow themselves
to be caught in the trap of power, in the game of authority,
if they allow themselves to be contaminated by the
paranoid operations of masculine politics, they have
nothing more to say or do as women For my part, I
refuse to let myself be locked into a single group within
the womens liberation movement. Especially, if such a
group becomes ensnared in the exercise of power, if it

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purports to determine the truth of the feminine, to

legislate as to what it means to be a woman, and condemn
women who might have immediate objectives that differ
from theirs. (Irigaray, 1985b: 166)

Irigaray seeks to create different narratives to situate alongside the masculine

discourse and to be equal to the other discourse, rather than declaring a
universal validity of one discourse over the other. Irigaray maintains:

It clearly cannot be a matter of substituting feminine power

for masculine power. Because this reversal would still be
caught up in the economy of the same, in the same
economyin which, of course, what I am trying to
designate as feminine would not emerge. There would be
a phallic seizure of power. [Even] though everything is
in place and operating as if there could be nothing but the
desire for sameness, why would there be no desire for
otherness? (Irigaray, 1985b: 129-30 emphasis in the
original text)

To resituate the masculine by resting on a hierarchy would reduce women back

into the position of the patriarchal system. This would be equivalent to
accepting the masculine as the dominant discourse, accepting the legitimacy of
its discourse over all others because the patriarchal discourse itself is
power. Thus, Irigaray rejects the sameness (or oneness) of Western culture,
and opens up possibilities of exploring desire for otherness.

For Irigaray, the imaginary and symbolic are intertwined. The social
imaginary associated with woman is derived from masculine ways of
imagining her. These masculine ways of imagining the female are reflecting in
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womens ways of imagining themselves. What is needed is not only new ways
of conceptualising women, but new ways of imagining them. That is, the way
the female body is felt, emotionally related to, needs changing.

Irigaray insists that the feminine, as she theorises it, does not imply an
essential femininity. She does not suggest a fixed, essential nature for women.
She claims that she is not accepting the psychoanalytic polarisation of
male/female. Instead, she seeks to reposition difference and femininity. For
her, the feminine represents a multiple and fluid difference, that is, it is beyond
the binary oppositions.

However, I do not think that Irigaray seeks to

completely dismiss psychoanalysis, but rather recognises its biased and

conditional nature.

She claims that since this psychoanalysis has

conventionally materialised as a way of reasoning that was formed within and

by limited groups of people who are male, white, middle class, it cannot
explain the diversity of subjectivity.

By reclaiming psychoanalysis in the

feminine, Irigaray suggests that she will be able to explain embodied and fluid
subjectivity. In the following section, I shall utilise Irigarays theory of the
feminine to look at different insights into physical disability as complexity,
fluidity, and multiplicity.

This Body Which Is Not One

In our culture, the imaginary body is an able body. The able-bodied has
established its representations that are the projection of able-bodied
subjectivities.

In order to call a new image that represents the disabled,

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disabled people need to gain their own subjectivity in able-bodied society.

Able-bodiedness needs fixed representations of identity.

Within an able-

bodied symbolic, in which the able-bodied takes itself as normal, it is

impossible to illustrate the multiplicity of the disabled. Rephrasing Irigarays
main claim (1985b: 23) that: Female sexuality has always been
conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters; I maintain that the
disabled has always been conceptualised on the basis of able-bodied
parameters.

In Breaking the Boundaries of the Broken Body, Margrit

Shildrick and Janet Price (1999) state:

In a reworking of the separation of self and other, there can

be no understanding of, for example, able-bodied, unless
there is already an implicit distinction being made that to
be able-bodied is not to be disabled. Yet because ablebodied carriers within it the trace of the other a trace
which must be continually suppressed if able-bodied is to
carry a delimited meaning such closure is not possible.
(Shildrick and Price 1999: 439)

And, in The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability,

Susan Wendell (1996) states:

Our real human bodies are exceedingly diverse in size,

shape, colour, texture, structure, function, range and habits
of movement, and development and they are constantly
changing.

Yet many cultures, especially modern

commercial cultures, do not seem to absorb or reflect these

simple facts. Instead, they idealize the human body; the
ideals change from time to time, but there always seems to
be ideals. (Wendell, 1996: 85-6)
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Here, the able-bodied, or the ideal body, is the site of question in the
recognition of the disabled. The fixity of the able-bodied is always uncertain.
Inspired by Irigaray, I accept the disabled body in a fluid way that aims to
undermine able-bodied parameters.

Following Irigarays claim that the ambiguity of female sexuality does

not fit into male notions of sexuality, I argue that the complexity of the
disabled body does not fit into the able-bodied norm of subjectivity and its
disabled Other. She seeks to open psychoanalysis and culture to a question
that has never been asked, the question of sexual difference and the possibility
of establishing different subjects.

I wish to open it to the question of

differently able-bodied subjects.

Davis (1995) asks how physical disability is positioned if it always

relates back to the able-bodied norm. Davis (1995: 38-9) points out that in the
Freudian model, the concept of normalcy is always enforced in terms of the
body, sexuality, unconscious, pleasure, and desire. In the able-bodied model,
the privileged able body is based on looking because: [disability] presents
itself to normal people through two main modalities function and
appearance (Davis, 1995: 11).

Davis (1995: 11-2) explains two main

modalities: In the functional modality, disability is conceived of as inability to

do something walk, talk, hear, see, manipulate, and so on... The question of
appearance is the second major modality by which disability is constructed.
The person with disabilities is visualised, brought into a field of vision, and
seen as a disabled person. Able-bodiedness is based on having both a certain

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function and a particular appearance that are privileged. It is explicit and

therefore it is superior. In contrast, physical disability cannot be articulated;
therefore, it is inferior and becomes equated with having no function. In other
words, able-bodiedness is based on having both fixed appearance and clarified
functions while physical disability is based on lack.

The able-bodied/disabled binary disregards all aspects of physical

differences, pains, and pleasures. I ask the similar question that Irigaray poses;
what is the opposite of the able body? Like the female genitals, the disabled
bodies are changeable, fluid, since they disturb the fixed construction of what
is the able-bodied one. Disabled bodies are not one. For example, both my
partner and I have cerebral palsy, but our symptoms are very different from
each other. He can do what I cannot do, and vice versa. While I have speech
impairment and coordination problems, he has mobility problems and walks
with a limp. When we went to a local pub for a drink, he ordered a bottle of
beer for me as well as a glass of red wine for himself, and carried our drinks to
the table where I was sitting. At that point in time, I heard someone whispering
about us behind my back, Look! Poor him, she should help him carrying
over! I felt guilty about it. However, the lady behind me did not understand
my disability at all. I do not have a limp, but I cannot carry a glass without
spilling. I wonder if physical ability for all individuals was not limited to ablebodiedness or to a single definition of what constitutes physical differences.
For her, limping and a walking stick were the signification of what is not the
able-bodied. But, for me, my partner is able-bodied in this context. This
assumption about limping as incapable-of-carrying-the-drink and not limping
as able-to-carry-the-drink has to be questioned here.

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In this case, the lady thought that my partner has no ability-to-carry-the

drink in relation to her able-bodiedness. She, like Freud, who saw womens
clitoris as a castrated penis, understood my partners ability as a castrated
ability, that is, disability. For her, he was recognised as the defective or lack.
Like Irigaray, who claims that the complexity of female sexuality does not fit
into masculine notions of sexuality, I argue that the complexity of disabled
ability does not fit into able-bodied notions of ability. I realised our own
abilities within our disabilities. In this context, the disabled is not the Other
to the able-bodied, but the diverse or the self-exploring. This diversity or selfexploration could overwhelm the logic of sameness in able-bodied
understanding of ability and its fixed body.

This disabled multiplicity or

fluidity helps to expand the conceptual possibilities.

Since the one has always been defined as able-bodied and masculine,
I, as a disabled woman, reconsider my identity and explore the possibilities for
a disabled female subject.

The demand for equality presumes that the able-

bodied is the norm, a norm that I have to achieve. Why do I allow myself to be
assessed by any norm which excludes myself? The able-bodied symbolic sets
up the schematics of binary opposition that compel the disabled to struggle for
equality or superiority in relation to the able-bodied.

Able-bodied culture has relegated the disabled into the Other and has
excluded the disabled from the construction of the symbolic. If disabled people
are denied as subjects, how can they change socio-cultural discourse in either
its imaginary and/or symbolic elements? Irigaray argues that the imaginary is

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a male imaginary; I consider that the imaginary reflects the able body.
Irigaray questions Lacans attention to a flat mirror that regards female sexual
organs only as lack; I ask why this flat mirror reflects disabled bodies simply as
lack. The disabled cannot see him/herself in this mirror, which operates as a
reflection only for the able-bodied. The able-bodied symbolic is maintained by
the disabled lingering in this blind spot. Thus, the able-bodied can form his/her
identity on the basis of the disabled lack, assuring the able-bodied illusions of
fixity and wholeness that deny the disabled identity as it makes such an identity
unintelligible. If the disabled could reveal his/her own identity, not determined
by a binary opposition to the able-bodied, and if the disabled could establish
physical difference and support a non binary disabled identity, the able-bodied
identity would be undermined. However, exploring this masked identity is not
easy at all, for the disabled would not be assumed to use the same system of
articulation as the able-bodied.

In her poem, Tomorrow Im Going to

Rewrite the English Language, Lois Keith (1995 [1994]) expresses the
impossibility of describing her strength in terms of the able-bodied imaginary
and symbolic:

Tomorrow, I am going to rewrite the English Language.

I will discard all those striving ambulist metaphors
of power and success
And construct new ways to describe my strength.
My new, different strength.
Then I wont have to feel dependent
Because I cannot stand on my two feet.
And Ill refuse to feel a failure
When I dont stay one step ahead.
I wont feel inadequate if I cant
Stand up for myself
Or illogical when I dont
Take it one step at a time.
I will make them understand that it is a very male way
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To describe the world.

All this walking tall
And making great strides
Yes, tomorrow I am going to rewrite the English Language
Creating the world in my own image.
Mine will be a gentler, more womanly way
To describe my progress
I will wheel, cover and encircle.
Somehow I will learn to say it all.
(Keith, 1995 [1994]: 57 in Mustnt Grumble: Writing by
Disabled Women)

Here, Keith exposes the difficulties expressing her bodily specificity within an
able-bodied system and suggests a new way of articulating and imagining her
own body. Rather than reinforcing a distancing from the disabled body of her
own, Keith regards physical disability as a body that opens up the possibility
for blurring boundaries, thereby envisioning new creative prospects within that
relationship and also, in far broader terms, beyond.

If the disabled wishes to obtain an identity of his/her own, the ablebodied imaginary and symbolic structure to which the disabled has been
subjected must be undermined. While able-bodied people can actively invoke
the symbolic order in identifying themselves as its standard, disabled people
are positioned in the negative or passive condition, that is, a condition of not
being able to identify themselves, since the symbolic order is alien to them.

In my reading of Irigaray, my intention in this chapter is to provide a

means by which disabled people may redefine and reimagine themselves.
Disabled people need to be able to express themselves to themselves in a way
that is different from able-bodied people in order to be themselves as sociocultural beings who can develop positive relationships with each other. In the

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next chapter, I shall explore the emergence of a feminine and disabled voice by
exploring Jane Campions cinematic production of The Piano (1993) and by
utilising French feminists who are influenced by psychoanalysis, like Luce
Irigaray and Julia Kristeva.

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Chapter 3 - Embodied Voices: An Exploration of Jane

Campions The Piano (1993)

Introduction: Voice and Speech

This chapter seeks to resist the dominant use of the term voice that
regards speech as the articulation of the self. It reflects my own experience
of living within society and relates to how I have been emotionally engaged
with my embodied voice, which is not always intelligible to others due to a
speech impairment caused by cerebral palsy. In the Symposium, Plato, (172a 223d), through Socrates, introduces the view of a female thinker called Diotima.
Since she is not present at the debate, her speech is reported by Socrates.
Here, Plato is presenting Diotima in a certain way. He links her to pregnancy
and birth; thereby reinforcing a view of the philosophical mind as a strictly
male domain. But, these are not Diotimas own words. From Plato onwards,
womens voices have been absent or disembodied in philosophical and other
discourses. My aim in the chapter is to explore the processes of silencing and
exclusion and to illustrate the means by which silenced voices can emerge.

In Articulating Self: Difference as Resistance in Black Girl, Ramparts

of Clay and Salt of the Earth, Linda Dittmar states:

In the straightforward, biological, and acoustical sense,

voices are our birthright. Most of us are born with the
necessary organs and are served well by them through
lifetimes of speaking, groaning, laughing crying, or singing.
But once we think of voice as a vehicle of human

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utterance of expressed opinion, judgement, and will the

notion of birthright holds little sway. That is, once, we
think of vocal articulation as a symbolizing activity people
use to interpret experience and negotiate their access to
well-being, the important issue turns out to be not our
innate ownership of this tool but our ability to use it.
(Dittimar, 1994:391)

My criticism of Dittmar arises from her deliberate act of ignoring unintelligible

voices. For her, our voices should naturally become speech in virtue of our
being subjects. In this context, a person like me cannot be heard in social space
without someone who can translate my voice into their speech.

Dittmars approach to silence as lacking and absent is pervasive. It

seems that the articulation of woman's voice is a significant question, but she
never overcomes the many generations of patriarchal and able-bodied
interpretation. Dittmar argues that the female subject should be articulated and
coded in speech, and for her in this manner, women can be political. However,
I pay more attention to the embodied voice than to disembodied speech:
Diotimas speech.

David Appelbaum broadly determines the boundaries of

voice and speech:

Human suffering strips voice of speech and restores it to

itself.

Speech is a substitute for suffering human

incompleteness and a replacement for the task of becoming

complete. Voice minus suffering equals speech. Speech is
a negative whose subtraction is a plus. Unphonemic voice
reveals suffering and suffering reveals whence voice comes.
Voice begins in the midst of suffering, when the expanse of

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existence will brook no repression. (Appelbaum, 1990: 1345)

Appelbaum also asserts his critical definition of what speech is:

Speech is no child of a human relation, the organic with the

mental, but a child of supernal command.

Like all

messengers of divine imperative, speech is on a messianic

mission: to transform reality in the light of an ideal
Speech makes stories up which we come to accept to true.
(Appelbaum, 1990: 59-60)

Here, Appelbaum argues that speech is disembodied. Speech, for him, is an

expected narrative of articulate objects and movements in human society.
There is an association with masculinity in the term speech that increases
with power. Thus, for Appelbaum, voice is an embodied sound while speech
is the disembodied word. Voice is corporeal and incomplete, while speech is
intelligible and complete in terms of human communication.

He provides a

critical explanation of the repression of the embodied voice, and suggests

certain methodologies for undermining the domination of speech. In his study
of voice, speech can be one of many processes of voicing the self.

In Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western culture,

Leslie Dunn and Nancy Jones (1994: 1) pay attention to the audible voice in
an attempt to demonstrate how it has been a site of womens silencing, as well
as an instrument of empowerment. They state:

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Too often voice is conflated with speech, thereby

identifying language as the primary carrier of meaning.
However, human vocality encompasses all the voices
manifestations (for example, speaking, singing, crying, and
laughing) each of which is invested with social meanings
not wholly determined by linguistic content. (Dunn and
Jones, 1994: 1).

It is voice in this sense that I wish to explore in this chapter. I shall locate a
space for the embodied voice, departing from speech.

In order to better

articulate the notion of the voice, I shall look at Sigmund Freuds concept of
hysteria, Luce Irigarays concept of mimicry, and Julia Kristevas concept of
the semiotic, highlighting voices autonomy from speech and language. In this
context, the voice can be heard not only as linguistic and socio-cultural but also
as corporeal and expressive.

By laying emphasis on feminine writing and the

semiotic, I shall express my concern with the embodied voice, and pay
attention to its non-verbal articulations, as Roland Barthes (1977: 181-3) terms
the grain of the voice.

The feminine and the semiotic, particularly in

feminist criticisms of philosophy, challenge the discourses of binary

oppositions such as speech/voice. The fear of the unintelligible, the emotional,
the embodied, and the feminine expressed by patriarchal culture is, I propose,
the stabilisation of a fear, a pleasure, and a desire. Through these concepts, I
shall examine the creative grain of the voice with an ear for the embodied voice.

The question of voice is central to Western philosophy, with the

difference between speech and writing being fundamental. According to the
French poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida (1976), setting speech to
have control over writing is crucial to supporting assumptions of
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phonocentrism in Western philosophy.28 Speech in Western culture is always

seen as being a precursor to writing, somehow more unforced, closer to the
presence of the speaking subject.

Writing is described as attached to, or

representative of speech; it is a less authentic form, cut off from the reality of a
direct meaning.

Phonocentrism, from Walter Ongs perspective, needs

elaboration.

Walter Ong, in his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of

the Word, (1982) engages with phonocentrism, which gives speech the
privileged medium of meaning. Ong (1982: 16-30) draws together works of
his own and others to examine the differences between literary cultures and
primary oral cultures that do not have a writing system, or are considered as
primitive. He examines how the transformation from an oral-based level of
communication to a textual base shifts the way in which humans consider the
status of speech. Identifying essential differences between oral and textual
processes, he explains what he calls a secondary orality, which was a major
issue to emerge in Western society in the 1980s (Ong, 1982: 135-8). This
secondary orality, controlled by electronic means of communication (e.g.,
television, radio, and telephone), combines circumstances from both the
writing technique and the oral technique.29 I argue that this binary between

Grosz (1989: 27) has a clear and simple definition of phonocentrism: [Phonocentrism] is,
governed by an opposition granting primacy to speech over writing. According to Grosz,
Lacan states that the unconscious is structured like a language presumes that language is
identical to speech, whereas if he had understood Freuds formulation of a model for the
unconscious in Note Upon of Mystic Writing Pad(1925), he, too, could have seen that the
unconscious is structured like/as writing.
The unconscious is graphic rather than
phonetic.(Grosz 1989: 27)
28

Ong (1982) looks at the 1980s effects of electronic communication (telephone, radio, and
television/ oral based). Thus, he does not examine the 2000s effects of computer-mediated
communication (the Internet, e-mail, chat, and digital media/ mixture of textual and oral
modes).
29

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speech and writing is at the heart of Ongs study in a way that simplifies orality
and essentialises the outcome of literacy.

Ong (1982: 36-57) critically explains oral cultures in his third chapter,
which is titled Some Psychodynamics of Orality. He illustrates primary
oral culture in comparison to writing culture, as additive rather than
subordinate (37), aggregative rather than analytic (38), redundant or
copious (39), conservative or traditionalist(41), close to the human
lifeworld(42), agonistically toned (43), empathetic and participatory rather
than objectively distanced(45), homeostatic(46), and as situational rather
than abstract (49).

His characterisation of speech is indeed simply

differentiated from writing.

Ong (1982: 82) reminds us how speech is

generally regarded as natural and writing as artificial, although in particular

cases, he acknowledges that to say that writing is artificial is not to condemn it
but to praise it (Ong, 1982: 82). However, his bias is determined. He makes
indirect reference to written text as silent/fixed/dead and to speech as
active/fluid/lived (Ong, 1982: 81 & 101).

The terms writing and speech are constructed in a binary opposition,

a pair of contrasted conditions each of which is contingent upon the opposite
for its definition. This leads to the supposed interdependence of inner voice
and spoken voice, the natural form of expressing or externalising consciousness.
I argue that Ongs idea of two separate voices is just as socially constructed as
the mind/body split. Furthermore, I contend that this privileging of speech is
called into question by the fact that speech too has to deal with the way in

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which any message is constructed by speakers, writers, texts, listeners,

spectators, and readers.

Ong (1982) strongly asserts that there is no way to express the self
naturally in writing, while speech is wholly essential to all human beings. The
weakness in Ongs argument is rendered visible in his assumption that every
person in every culture is physiologically or psychologically able to speak, and
thereby, to think. He also emphasises that writing is technology that is
consciously and reflectively constructed (Ong, 1982: 81-3), and that spoken
words are always modifications of a total, existential situation, which always
engages the body (Ong, 1982: 67). It may seem as if Ong is simply describing
the negative side of muteness and speech impairment in a society in which both
are repressed. The primacy of speech as the manifest voice of the self can be
understood in symbolic terms as a manifestation of power in a society in which
speech mostly governs social communications.

Yet, even here, problems

remain.

As a person with speech impairment, I have a serious problem with

Ongs naturalisation of speech. When I speak in either Japanese or English, I
have to think of which or what words I can pronounce better and consciously
produce articulate sounds due to my speech impairment. For me, learning to
speak involves the most challenging practice, while writing (typing) occurs
with far less suffering than does speaking. Writing does not restrict me in selfexpression, and it flows. Speaking is practiced by concentration, and it takes
time for it to become free and fluid. I would suggest that the well-known

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philosophical study of writing by Jacque Derrida (1976) is perhaps the most

compelling response to Ong's work.

In his major work, Of Grammatology (1976), Derrida proposes to shift

beyond conventional models of writing that characterise its narrative to
develop a new theory of writing, and to progress in the different ways of
writing. 30

He critically analyses the assumption that the speakers body

authenticates his/her speech. In such an assumed situation, speaking would

come before writing; since the writer is absent at the reading of his/her text,
he/she is not present to empower it. We assume that speech is directly related
to thought, and that writing is an extension to speech, thus, standing in for it.
Derrida criticises what he sees as a romantic bias; speech is the presence of
consciousness and writing is the representation of speech among classical
philosophers and modern theorists alike, such as Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau,
Hegel, Husserl, and de Sassure, who privilege speech over writing.

When I speak, the link between my words and the meaning I intend to
convey remains restricted by my corporeality. In other words, I cannot speak
out what I really want to say.

Writing, in contrast, seems to drive a gap

between the writer and his or her expression. Cut off from the awareness that
would secure their meaning, words progress to take on indeterminate meanings,

30

Derridas Of Grammatology (1976) is a study of the relationship between speech and writing,
and is an exploration of how both speech and writing develop as structures of language. He
argues that writing has traditionally been regarded as derivative from speech, and that this
approach has been considered in many philosophical, linguistic, and scientific studies of the
origin of language. Derrida describes that the bias towards speech has valued speech over
writing as proximate to truth. Derrida maintains that the development of language happens
through an interaction of speech and writing, and that this interaction requires that neither
speech nor writing can be supposed to be essential to language itself. Conventional
examinations of language argue that speech has existed before writing. Derrida opposes this.
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and to be perceived in unexpected ways. When I write, the link between my

words and my repressed voice is released from my physical difference. My
repressed voice is no longer restricted by my body, but starts to point beyond
myself to other voices. To question the connection between sound and the
repressed voice is to open up many possibilities for me to have different voices.
Derrida distinguishes between phonocentrism, the traditional Western
obsession with speech, and logocentrism, the obsession with writing.

He

argues that Western philosophy is based on phonocentrism, because it

encourages us to view speech as determinate, due to the fact that it is
consciously spoken. Derrida, in his work, rejects the privileging of speech and
concentrates on the power of writing to have a life of its own, to undo what is
intended, that is to say, deconstruction.

However, as Appelbaum (1990) points out, Derridas discussion of

speech and writing as separate forms with all writing as one synchronous group,
also has problems. Derrida ignores the voice in the position he takes in the
speech/writing opposition. Appelbaum states:

Derrida acknowledges nothing of the audible, acoustic

dimension of vocal experience. All voicings could as easily
be subvocal This voice that escapes the written or spoken
page is deeply organic and fraught with the problem of
human suffering In all deference to Derridas masterful
exploration of hiding, when we encounter the sound that we
sound as ourselves, we recognize that this voice remains
concealed in his study. (Appelbaum, 1990: xiv)

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Thus, with uneasiness, Appelbaum suggests the new possibility of freeing the
corporeality of voice from the space of hiding and positioning it soundly before
our acoustic perceptions. In other words, Appelbaum invites us to hear our
corporeality in the voice. He urges us to resist the process of silencing the
repressed voice, a process that stems from the Western philosophical tradition,
which tries to disembody all traces of the corporeality of voice.

The Piano: Personal Reflections

I shall explore the embodied voice as it is represented in Jane

Campions 1993 film The Piano.

This film has generated a large body of

critical responses, some of which are represented in Jane Campions The Piano
edited by Harriet Margolis (2000) and in other articles. It is one of those rare
films that has attracted the attention of scholars outside of film and cultural
studies.31 Spectators seem to view this film in various ways. Margolis states:

For many women, then, the film had remarkable practical

consequences.

For many men, its story of a womans

sexual awakening supposedly holds little interest. For

many feminists, male or female, The Pianos tale of sexual
bartering and supposed choices is not what it is touted to be.
And many sensitive to racism and colonialization take
offense at its representation of Maori the indigenous
people residing in the South Pacific islands that they named

31

There are many articles on this film. Pihama (1994) critically looks at the film from a Maori
womans perspective. Pihama argues that this film depicts Maori women as the negative, and
influences the public gaze at Maori women. In sociology, Norgrove (1998) also criticises the
film from a post-colonial perspective. In feminism, Attwood (1998) and Gillett (1995)
examine the construction of the female body, voice, gaze, and desire in the film. In psychology,
Van Buren (2000) argues the similarities between one of her clients and the film: voluntary
muteness and schizoid withdrawal as an outcome of cultural and personal fear of female desire.
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Aotearoa, and that the British colonized as New Zealand

(Margolis, 2000: 2).

The sexual and racial stereotypes in this film can be addressed in different
ways.

Many feminist scholars and film critics consider that The Piano

demonstrates heterosexual romanticisation, the pre-existing desire of male

characters to control the fears aroused by a female protagonists silence. My
own interest in the film varies from any of these interpretations. For me, this
film reconfigures the link between gender and voice and between (dis)ability
and voice, and resists the social devaluation of silence, unintelligibility, and
non-verbal articulation.

The setting of The Piano is early nineteenth century colonial New

Zealand. The protagonist Ada (Holly Hunter) is a mute. She, with her nine
years old daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin), and her piano, arrives from Scotland
to an arranged marriage. Ada is forced by her father to marry Stewart (Sam
Neill), an English coloniser. Stewart refuses to transport her piano and it is left
behind on the beach. Finding the absence of the piano unbearable, Ada strikes
a bargain with an illiterate neighbour, Baines (Harvey Keitel), who organises to
transport it from the beach. Ada can get her piano back if she allows him to
perform particular acts while she is playing it: one key for each lesson.

When I first saw The Piano, I was inspired by Adas voice since I had a
similar voice, that is, the resonance through an electric musical instrument and
my body. I have been playing the electric organ and musical keyboards to
express my emotions, since I was six years old. My parents made me learn
how to play the electric organ to facilitate my finger movement. As I have
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mentioned before, I have mild athetoid cerebral palsy and I have some
difficulty controlling movement, and in particular, my speech. I often move
involuntarily when I feel emotional distress.

However, my electric organ

became more than a tool for finger exercises. It became my voice. My mother
recognised my voice when I played it. When I played a piece of music, for
example, Greensleaves on the electric organ in a minor key, she heard my
melancholy voice. Using music in this way was a very powerful tool to help
me express my feelings in ways that speech, for me, sometimes cannot. Thus,
to me, the embodied voice has the right to be heard, touched, seen, and more
importantly to be accepted as a mode of social communication.

In The Piano, Ada is burdened by the assumption of needing-to-betranslated by her daughter, Flora, through sign language, to a speaking world.
This is done mainly for her husband, Stewart. Deeming the silence that comes
with being married to a man who does not hear her hidden voice, Ada finds a
way out of this deep silence. Ada introduces her husband and his neighbour,
Baines, to her piano. While her husband ignores it, Baines recognises it as
Adas voice, even as part of her body. The piano becomes Adas connection to
Baines who hears her embodied voice. For Ada, the piano becomes her means
of communicating, of expressing herself, much like my relationship to my
organ. Adas voice does not and cannot ever appeal to her husband, whose
entire communication system and through that, his world, is based on speech.
Most substantially, Adas piano represents a different idea of a voice that is
embodied.

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Recently a number of writers have addressed this films aesthetic

treatment of muteness and disability. In his article, Keys to the Imagination:
Jane Campions The Piano, Peter N. Chumo II (1997) argues that Campion
expands her cinematic medium to create a reflection on silence and the piano as
artistic expression. Chumo looks at Adas different expressions (piano playing,
sign language, and her daughters verbal translation) as artistic transformation
of voice. He has a good description of Adas voice: [she] expresses herself
not through the keys of a typewriter but rather through the keys of her beloved
piano (Chumo, 1997: 73).

While the keys of a typewriter can textualise the

matter-of-fact information that a typist expresses, the keys of the piano can
externalise that which the pianist feels. Thus, Chumo considers Adas piano as
art, which is essential to her, but not to Stewart.

In this context, Stewart

presumably prefers a typewriter to the piano. Stewart cannot read Adas voice,
because her piano music has no fixed text and she cannot express her emotion
in any language. Throughout his essay, Chumos main point is that it is Adas
piano, not Ada herself, nor her body or fingers, that make her voice her own.
Chumos artistic notion of Adas voice is fluid but not embodied. I wish to
emphasise that Adas voice is embodied.

A good example of different voices, one that, like the typewriter,

Stewart would be at least willing to listen to, is the artificial speech of the
world-leading physicist Steven Hawking.

His voice is a function of an

electronic device. This extension of his inner self turns speech into perceivable
sounds through the use of computer technology. Describing her experience of
hearing Hawkings different speech, Sandy Stone explains:

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Hawking has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which makes it

virtually impossible for him to move anything more than his
fingers, or to speak.

A friendly computer engineer put

together a nice little system for him, a program that displays

a menu of words, a storage buffer, and a Votrax allophone
generator i.e., an artificial speech device.

He selects

words and phrases, the word processor stores them until he

forms a paragraph, and the Votrax says it. Or he calls up a
prepared file, and the Votrax says that. (Stone, 1995: 395)

The Votrax externalises his inner-voice (speech). From the interrelationship

between Hawking and the Votrax, his speech is transmitted. Without him, the
Votrax has no speech, and without the Votrax, Hawking cannot lecture or make
his ideas audibly perceivable to his audience. In Campions film, Adas piano
is like Hawkings Votrax. Without the piano, Ada is not complete, not a whole
person. Her piano is linked with who she is in a complex way in that the piano
is a significant part of Ada. It can be seen as a voicing device, but not as a
speech device. Both Hawkings Votrax and Adas piano challenge traditional
images of people with speech impairments. However, the Votrax is different
from Adas piano; it is less challenging to the able-bodied notion of speech as
the articulating self (Dittmar, 1994: 391).

In reality, there are many desirable objects of voicing, such as

computers, musical instruments, microphones, telephones, and so on. What is
the normal voice? Indeed, with the development of new computer technologies,
we can choose the communication medium for each case. In her discussion of
the cyborg, Donna Haraway (1991) challenges the binary opposition between

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ability and disability.32 She reminds us that we are all relying to some degree
on the technology that one is using. Haraways cyborg discourse is widespread
where writers reconsidering the relationship between humans and technologies.
However, this discourse has hardly addressed cyber voices.
possession of extending ones ability.

I consider it as a

The desire to be heard is part of the

larger process of embodiment, the ability to go beyond physical disability.

Certainly for me, it is empowering.

The repressed voice emerges from the

body through the object; it extends the body. Thus, the desire to be heard
makes my voice political. Moreover, voice prostheses, such as the Votrax for
Hawking, and the piano for Ada, empowers their repressed voice.

Unintelligible Voices: Freud, Irigaray and Kristeva

Although Sigmund Freud has been criticised by many feminists for his
biological determinism, his essentialism, his masculine models as the normal,
and his theory on sexuality as the determining factor in our identity, it is not
necessarily the case that his work on female sexuality should be rejected
outright.

To some extent, Freuds work can be read as opening a possibility

for womens sexuality and their sexual difference.

Here, I will focus on his

concept of hysteria.33 In Studies on Hysteria, Freud with Josef Breuer (1953-

32

Haraway (1991) uses the metaphor of the cyborg to discuss the relationships of science,
technology, and women. She holds that cyborg (high-technological) culture challenges and
breaks down the dualism of Western philosophy (the mind/body, self/other, male/female
dichotomy). Humans are no longer able to think of themselves in these terms, or even, strictly
speaking, as biological existences. To some extent, humans have become cyborgs,
intermixtures of man and machine, where the biological part and the mechanical part become
complexly entangled to the extent that they cannot be separated.

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65 [1895]) argues that hysteria develops from traumas in the female patients
personal history. His study on hysteria is one of the essential investigations of
psychoanalysis, transforming our understanding of female sexuality and voice.

In Studies of Hysteria, Freud starts challenging the dominant

nineteenth century perspectives of hysteria as an anatomical dysfunction, and
claims that it needs be considered as a psychosomatic disorder. He suggests
that hysteria is the product of a traumatic experience that is consequently
expelled from consciousness. Repressed reminiscences of unsettled trauma are
unconsciously shifted into physical symptoms, such as queasiness, coughs,
paralysis, limps, or linguistic distortions, which project as bodily images of
psychic torment. In other words, distress is transformed into physical symptom
that project as mimetic signs of dissatisfaction. For instance, hysterical
paralysis can be understood as a sign of feeling helpless, and it demonstrates
repressed desires. In a lecture involving his concept of hysteria, Freud stated:

the hysterical neurosis can produce its symptoms in any

system of organs and so disturb any function. Analysis
shows that in this way all the so-called perverse impulses
which seek to replace the genital by some other organ
manifest themselves: these organs are then behaving like
substitute genitals. The symptoms of hysteria have actually
led us to the view that the bodily organs, besides the
functional part they play, must be recognized as having a
sexual (erotogenic) significance

Countless sensations

Initially, the term hysteria was used to articulate a connection between particular anxiety
disorders and diseases of the female sexual and reproductive organs. It was assumed that there
was a fixed connection between these physical pathologies limited to the female sexual organs
and particular symptoms. Due to this connection, hysteria has generally been considered as a
pathology to which women are fully subject. If it is established in an anatomical or
physiological source that is the womb (called hystera in Greek), the disease itself would only
take place in the female body.
33

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and innervations which we come across as symptoms of

hysteria in organs that have no apparent connection with
sexuality are in this way revealed to us as being in the
nature of fulfillments of perverse sexual impulses in
relation to which other organs have acquired the
significance of the sexual parts. (Freud, 1991 [1973]: 34950)

For Freud, hysteria is the manifestation on the patients body of her desire to
flee from the patriarchal order. Hysteria, for Freud, makes the unintelligible
voice audible and embodied.

In theorising hysteria, Freud demonstrates a figurative nature to the

hysteric voice. In Silences from the Deep: Mapping Being and Nonbeing in
The Piano and in a Schizoid Young Woman, the feminist psychiatrist, Jane
Van Buren (2000: 139-161), points to the similar conditions between one of her
clients and Ada. She argues that both schizoid withdrawal and wilful muteness
can be considered as an outcome of the social, cultural and interpersonal fear of
womens desire. Van Buren (2000) suggests that the female voice is intensely
influenced by a network of representations hidden in the unconscious, that try
to veil, sidestep, and mend the hole (vagina) in the body. As psychiatrists, both
Freud and Van Buren find a voice for those women who are not able to
articulate in speech.

Like Freud, Irigaray considers hysteria to be a nonverbal expression or

a mode of bodily communication that reveals a veiled message. Irigaray states:

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Hysteria: it speaks in the mode of a paralyzed gestural

faculty, of impossible and also a forbidden speech It
speaks as symptoms of an it cannot speak to or about itself
And the drama of hysteria is that it is inserted
schizotically between that gestural system, that desire
paralyzed and enclosed within its body, and a language that
it has learned in the family, in school, in society, which is in
no way continuous with nor, certainly, a metaphor for
the movement of its desire . (Irigaray, 1985b: 136-7)

Irigaray sees hysteria as a mode of resistance to patriarchal law and positions it

outside of the symbolic order. Irigaray describes hysterias power to question
the symbolic order in terms of mimicry. For her, the hysteric imitates a socioculturally imposed femininity. She claims:

Both mutism and mimicry are then left to hysteria.

Hysteria is silent and at the same time it mimes. And
how could it be otherwise miming/reproducing a
language that is not its own, masculine language, it
caricatures and deforms that language: it lies, it
deceives, as women have always been reputed to do.
(Irigaray: 1985b: 137)

The hysteric is stuck between silence and mimicry, repressed desire and a
language that does not belong to her. There is a need to find a connection
between that speech of desire which at present can only be identified in the
forms of symptoms and pathology and a language, including a verbal
language (Irigaray, 1985b: 137). In a society dominated by phallogocentrism
and constructed around a strict male/non-male opposition, One must assume
the feminine role deliberately. Which means already to convert a form of

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subordination into an affirmation, and thus to thwart it. (Irigaray, 1991: 124
edited by Whitford). For Irigaray, mimicry is neither a concept nor a notion,
but a manoeuvre, a way of temporarily undermining the masculine discourse
before the feminine writing and reading of philosophy can establish itself. 34
Through the continuation of mimicry, Irigaray hopes that women will create
their own discourse by mimicking dominant modes of action excessively in the
overstated figure of what is expected to be a woman. Thus, by mimicking
them, the hysteric contests phallogocentrism, that is, the symbolic order.

For Irigaray, hysteria is creative since it offers a way to articulate what

is unintelligible or ignored, and expresses feminine desires outside of the
symbolic.

It points towards a concept of the body as a source of a different

articulation, what Irigaray calls feminine writing. Following Irigaray, I give

emphasis to the creative, fluid, and multiple nature of the female voice, which
allows women to speak as women, to try to recover the place of her
exploitation by discourse to resubmit herself to ideas about herself, that
are elaborated in/by masculine logic, but so as to make visible, by an effect of
playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a
possible operation of the feminine in language (Irigaray 1985b, 76).

The source of the re-imagined feminine, for Irigaray, is a re-imaging

of the female body.

Irigaray criticises Freud and Lacans effacements of

female specificity, such as the labia, the uterus, the vulva, the lips, the breasts,

34

In the last part of This Sex Which Is Not One (Irigaray, 1985b: 220), there is a section of
publishers note on selected terms. Mimicry is: An interim strategy for dealing with the realm
of discourse (where the speaking subject is posited as masculine), in which the woman
deliberately assumes the feminine style and posture assigned to her within this discourse in
order to uncover the mechanisms by which it exploits her.
- 129 -

the menstrual blood, and utilises the multiplicity of female genitals to form her
reconceptualising of womans own design. She makes her own version of the
Freudian claim anatomy is destiny. Women, for her, do not have just one sex
organ, the phallus, but have multiple sex organs. Irigaray bases her concept of
sexual difference on biology, specifically as a rewriting of biology.

Thus,

Irigaray, in my view, describes women as having sexual organs, multiple

presences, rather than the lack that they represent in the phallic formation of
sexual relations. For Irigaray, female sexuality equals multiplicity. Women
themselves cannot be defined in phallic terms. Irigaray claims therefore that
the feminine voice is based on the body, and, in particular, the experience of
female pleasure.

Her notion of the two lips leads us to reconsider the

feminine as a language of plurality of meaning. She states:

There will always be a plurality in feminine language. And

it will not even be the Freudian pun, i.e. a superimposed
hierarchy of meaning, but the fact that at each moment there
are always for women at least two meanings, without one
being able to decide which meaning prevails, which is on
top or underneath, which conscious or repressed.
For a feminine discourse would undo the unique meaning,
the proper meaning of words, of nouns, which still regulates
discourse. (Irigaray, quoted in Cameron, 1992: 171)

Here, Irigaray explains multiplicity of meaning as one of the major features of

the feminine voice, precipitated by womens different physical formation. She
also assumes that it is less expected of women to position themselves as the
subject of discourse by expressing themselves indirectly, and not as I.
Irigarays writing, or her voice, is significant: her two lips speaking together

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have invoked shifts from essentialism to anti-essentialism and from simplicity

to complexity. For Irigaray, it is not merely the lips that speak, but also the
genital lips, that is, the labia.

In her work, the lips fluctuate between a

metaphoric and a referential meaning, and they form a challenge to Lacans

phallus. The lips, for Irigaray, show the interrelationship of the female body
and discourse, demonstrating that the labia are seen separately from the cultural
meaning of the lips. Irigarays fluid subject flees from fixed positions as a
resistance to male desire.

Like Irigaray, Julia Kristevas concept in Revolution in Poetic

Language (1984) is anchored in psychoanalysis, but unlike Irigaray, she
understands that the position of the subject in the process of entering the
symbolic order is not determined by ones sexual difference (anatomy), but by
ones identification with the mother. Presupposing that girls are more directly
related to the mother than boys, Kristeva argues that feminine subjects
maintain more durable bonds than do masculine subjects to the pre-symbolic
stage and the imaginary figure of the mother. For her, the specificity of the
feminine discourse is connected to the emotional aspects of language, such as
music, dance, poetry, art, rhythm, tone, and silence. These disrupt the rational
patterns of language. These pre-symbolic aspects are what Kristeva terms the
Semiotic.

Kristeva (1984) distinguishes two modes of the signifying process, that

is, the semiotic and the symbolic, and claims that subjects are both semiotic
and symbolic. In giving her exposition of this distinction, Noelle McAfee
states:

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The semiotic is the extra-verbal way in which bodily

energy and affects make their way into language.

The

semiotic includes both the subjects drives and articulations.

While the semiotic may be expressed verbally, it is not
subject to regular rules of syntax. Conversely, [t]he
symbolic is a mode of signifying in which speaking beings
attempt to express the meaning with as little ambiguity as
possible The two modes, however, are not completely
separate: we use symbolic modes of signifying to state a
position, but this position can be destabilized or unsettled by
semiotic drives and articulations. (McAfee, 2004: 17)

Kristeva seeks to answer not only the question of exactly how language comes
to mean (signify), but also the equally important question of what it is that
resists intelligibility and signification (Moi, 1986: 90). More importantly, she
brings the body back to language by claiming that bodily energy makes its way
into language.

The semiotic constructs and deconstructs the symbolic.

Without the symbolic we would have only chaos, whilst without the semiotic,
language would be absolutely void. Thus, this swinging between the semiotic
and the symbolic is creative and indispensable. As maintained by Kristeva, all
types of languages (speech, writing, poetry, music, dance, etc.) have both
symbolic and semiotic elements, and it is the dialectic between these elements
that makes the language meaningful:

These two modalities are inseparable within the signifying

process, and the dialectic between them determines the type
of discourse (narrative, metalanguage, theory, poetry,
etc.) involved; in other words, so-called natural language
allows for different modes of articulation of the semiotic
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and the symbolic. On the other hand, there are non-verbal

signifying systems that are constructed exclusively on the
basis of the semiotic (music, for example). But, as we shall
see, this exclusivity is relative, precisely because of the
necessary dialectic between the two modalities of
the signifying process, which is constitutive of the subject.
Because the subject is always both semiotic and symbolic,
no

signifying

system

he

produces

can

be

either

exclusively semiotic or exclusively symbolic, and is

instead necessarily marked by an indebtedness to both.
(Kristeva, 1984: 24)

Here, Kristeva shows that to experience, both utilise and receive, meaning
depends on both semiotic and symbolic elements. While the semiotic points to
a direct and embodied aspect of meaning, the symbolic represents the aspect of
socio-culturally mediated meaning in experience.

Here, I shall pay more attention to the semiotic than the symbolic. One
of the simplest semiotic expressions is the scream. The scream generally
takes place in circumstances where and when emotions are intensely involved.
The scream is associated with strong feelings of distress, rage, pain, or fear, but
occasionally also with strong feelings of bliss and pleasure, the kind
phenomena that Kristeva associates with the semiotic. The scream is the
embodied voice of the subject in process. Its meaning cannot be defined
simply.

For me, it is one of the most powerful expressions of corporeal

transformation within the subject.

This semiotic modality in the scream

transgresses the symbolic so that the symbolic becomes ambiguous.

This

implies a possibility of expressing aspects of an embodied being that are

unintelligible in the symbolic. Only through the semiotic, which transgresses
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the symbolic but never eliminates it, can we express these aspects that are
unintelligible. Kristeva states:

Poetic mimesis maintains and transgresses thetic unicity by

making it undergo a kind of anamnesis, by introducing into
the thetic position a stream of semiotic drives and making it
signify. This telescoping of the symbolic and the semiotic
pluralizes signification or denotation: it pluralizes the thetic
doxy. Mimesis and poetic language do not therefore
disavow the thetic, instead they go through its truth
(signification, denotation) to tell the truth about it.
(Kristeva, 1984: 60)

It is this transgression of the symbolic that makes transformation possible. The

unspoken and unspeakable expressions threaten the symbolic order from inside.
Thus, Kristevas notion of the semiotic leads to subversion of the symbolic
order. The semiotic materialises as excess tension within symbolic language,
specifically as ambiguity, emptiness, disruption, and silences in the symbolic
order. For example, the hysteric is a subject who allows the jouissance of
semiotic motility to undermine the symbolic order.35

The hysteric who does not submit to the symbolic order is categorised
as deviant. Kristeva argues that the hysteric is politically dynamic, because she
is often illustrated by her connection to the semiotic, and she makes men listen
to her embodied voice. In The True Real, Kristeva states:

35

Jouissance, in the Lacanian sense, refers to pleasure, in particular, sexual pleasure.

Jouissance is complex, fluid, unstable, and cannot be controlled. Like Irigaray, Kristeva sees
jouissance in terms of the feminine, and argues for the potential of jouissance to both reflect
womens pleasure and to disrupt the symbolic order.
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This heterogeneous semiotic encounter (sound/vision, preobject/sign) is a hallucination that marks the insistence of the
true-real, an archaic and salutary attempt to elaborate the
irruption of the real that leaves a hole in the symbolical weft
of hysterical discourse. This hallucination recurs periodically,
in order to indicate, like an icon, an unutterable jouissance
that endangers the symbolic resources of the speaking being.
The hallucination icon, which becomes obsessive by virtue
of its repetition, challenges what may be structured as a
language (Kristeva, 1986: 230)

Since language, or the symbolic, presents such a difficulty for women, the
semiotic, and womens connection to it, characterise female difference and
form alternatives for women.

This semiotic connection relates women to

creative formation and to maternity.

Kristeva (1984) utilises Platos term chora to refer to a fluid and

interim expression constituted by bodily movements of the mother.

John

Lechte explains Kristevas notion of the chora:

The chora is a kind of place or receptacle The chora is

connotative of the mothers body an unrepresentable body.
The mother and the body as such in fact go together for
Kristeva.

The mothers body becomes the focus of the

semiotic as the pre-symbolic manifestation especially

in art, of what could be called the materiality of the
symbolic: the voice as rhythm and timbre, the body as
movement, gesture, and rhythm. (Lechte, 1990: 128-9)

Thus, Kristeva illustrates how an infants psychical condition is directly

connected to its mothers body, and links the chora, as the mothers body, to
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the semiotic. The chora is a bodily space where all significations are semiotic.
I find that Kristeva sees the semiotic as a creative way of expressing bodily
rhythms and pleasures that direct the formation of the symbolic and is
connected to, in particular, the maternal body.

In considering Kristevas concept, I argue that the hysterical voice can

be identified with the semiotic.

This hysterical connection between the body

and expression bears some examination. Constructing the symbolic and the
semiotic as two opposing elements is ambiguous. Hysterical symptoms can
have constructed or deconstructed political effects and implications. While the
hysteric could be psychoanalytically interpreted as a deviant, she is, and has
been seen, as political. I believe that we can establish a connection between
the body and expression if we conceptualise the body as expressive, and
expression as a form of the body. I suggest that the hysteric seeks to project
semiotic elements in her body to express her desire.

In this section, I have argued that Freud, Irigaray, and Kristevas

discussions of unintelligible voices, that is, mainly hysteria, are based on
conceptualisations of the articulating process. For Freud, it is about finding a
voice of the hysteric; for Irigaray, it is about expressing her desire outside of
the symbolic; for Kristeva, it is about an expression anchored in the body. The
status of the unintelligible voice has been transformed.

In the following

sections, I will read The Piano with a listening ear for the feminine and the
semiotic. Following both Irigarays and Kristevas manoeuvres of criticising
the mainstream way of articulating the self, I will first examine Ada, the
protagonist, as a silent woman as this is demonstrated in the first half of the

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film. I will then look at Ada and her voice as the feminine and the semiotic
that are evident in the second half of the film. The second half of this analysis
will also encompass my major discussion of the embodied voice. Thus, I will
suggest a new concept of voice as the process of becoming.

The Piano: Towards Embodied Voices

1. Silence: the Subversive Myth of Echo

The Piano (1993) begins in the dark shadow of a fence. The spectator
perceives, in this opening image, a woman signifying her condition of
incarceration. The womans incarceration is signified by the dark fence created
by her fingers held up in front of her eyes. A perspective shot, the film is
showing the viewer the shadowy gaze of Ada, that is, her life as seen through
her eyes. The narrative of the film starts with a voiceover from Ada that comes
not in her speaking voice, she has not spoken since childhood, but in the voice
of a small girl:

The voice you hear is not my speaking voice, but my

minds voice.

I have not spoken since I was six years old. No one knows
why, not even me. My father says it is a dark talent and the
day I take it into my head to stop breathing will be my last.
Today he married me to a man Ive not yet met. Soon my
daughter and I shall join him in his own country.

My

husband said my muteness does not bother him. He writes

and bark[s] this: God loves dumb creatures, so why not be!

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Where good be bad, Gods patience for silence affects

everyone in the end.

The strange thing is I do not think

myself silent, that is, because of my piano. I shall miss it on

the journey. (Campion & Pullinger, 1994: 3)

To establish a personal contract between the spectator and Ada, the spectator
hears the speech of a mute woman and needs to acknowledge the personal
link to her repressed voice in order to set foot in her life story. There are two
articulated voices belonging to Ada; her daughters verbal translation of her
sign language represented in the conventional voice of the narrator, that is,
speech, and Adas cinematic voice heard only at the beginning and end of the
film.

Throughout the film, Adas husband, Stewart, depends on Floras

translation, that is, on sounds of speech. This is a lovely pun within the film,
for her translations are more like a voice-over on the silent image, the language
of Ada. In Feminism and Linguistic theory, Deborah Cameron (1992 [1985])
describes womens marginality in speech, in particular, in the manners of the
traditional Anglo-Saxon wedding reception:

In terms of visibility, the roles are distributed evenly

between women and men, with a woman the bride
mostly visible of all. Yet the women are ritually silent.
The brides father proposes a toast to the happy couple, and
the groom replies on their behalf.

He toasts the

bridesmaids and the best man replies for them. Men speak,
women are spoken for: here we have an epitome of women
being seen and not heard. (Cameron, 1992 [1985]: 207)

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This ritual context is applied to Ada. As in the wedding example, she is silent
in front of her husband. However, I consider that there can be other ways of
thinking about womens silence.

Womens silence is often considered as

irrationality or passivity. The Piano creates a complex image of a mute woman.

I want to contrast it with the Greek-mythological narrative of the speechless
woman, Echo.

A beautiful nymph, Echo, has one defect: she cannot help talking and
always has the last word in every discussion or argument (Bulfinch, 1921:
Chapter 13). The goddess Juno punishes Echo by removing her power to
initiate any speech, but permitting her to have the last word in the sentence in
which others speak. As a result, she becomes speechless in that she cannot
generate her own words. When she sees Narcissus, a beautiful youth, Echo
falls in love with him. She cannot talk to him in the softest tones, and cannot
convince him to talk to her. She waits with impatience for him to speak first.
Narcissus ignores her with indifference because she cannot speak. The myth
suggests that women are speechless and helpless. Echo fades away due to her
shame in not getting, and in being misunderstood by Narcissus. If she had her
voice, she would have been able to entice him. When Narcissus rejects Echo,
she loses her body and becomes only a reflection of the others voice, in Guy
Rosolatos term (in Silverman, 1988), an acoustic mirror.

In An Impossible Response: The Disaster of Narcissus, Claire Nouvet

(1991) understands the myth of Echo as a critique of the way in which the
female subject is socially constructed. Rejected by Narcissus, Echo loses her
body and becomes the Other:

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Although Echo is now a sound, the text still posits her as a

subject capable of containing a sound. But since Echo has
lost her body, since there is no-body left, how can the
sound be in her?

The disembodiment kills Echo, the

other, by exposing the subjective other as the deceptive

embodiment of an echoing Other. (Nouvet, 1991: 114)

In Nouvets reading, Echo is the way in which the female subject comes into
being as a mystery of four-dimensional alienation. By making this observation,
Nouvets work highlights the inability of Western people to listen to the
Other voice expressed in the perception of muteness. This disembodiment of
the voice is problematic. Echo is the victim of a patriarchal society where, if a
woman tries to speak over men, she loses her body, her love, and her sexuality.

Helene Cixous (1981) in her article on the silent woman, Castration or

Decapitation?, argues that the socially imposed silence on women is
paradoxically linked to the assumption that disordered women cannot stop
chatting. In patriarchal society, silence is understood as the absence of speech
that articulates the self and the world.
because she is castrated.

For Echo, the silence is negative,

The only way in which Echo can speak is by

appropriating masculine speech.

In order to regain the speech she lacks, Echo

has to renounce her body. In order to come into contact with Narcissus, to be
recognised, Echo must speak like a man.

Echo, as a disordered woman, is

excluded from the social contract. A significant factor here is the difficulty of
obtaining the embodied feminine voice.

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For Ada, on the other hand, the silence is her choice and speech is not
needed.

Silence, for her, can be viewed as a refusal to speak about that which

is unspeakable, her jouissance, or as mimicry, a strategy of resistance. Unlike

Echo, Adas silence is subversive. Here, I shall explain how her mimicry
operates.

Adas silence can be linked to the traditional methods used to

represent the feminine. Accepting the restrictions imposed by traditional form,

she seems to assume the feminine role deliberately and to resubmit
herself . . . to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic,
but so as to make visible, by an effect of playful repetition, what was
supposed to remain invisible (Irigaray, 1985b: 76). This manoeuvre allows
Ada to advance the power of the female voice by exaggerating our
stereotypical expectations of her husband.

As Margaret Whitford (1993

[1989]: 106-126) in Rereading Irigaray has pointed out, Irigaray neither

seeks to clarify and stabilise an unintelligible state nor to establish an essence
of women, but rather she seeks to overwhelm the lack of woman unlabelled as
woman. All of this has been demonstrated in Adas silence that gradually
disrupts their marriage because it is so closely linked to what is expected to be
traditionally feminine.

Thus, mimicking the passivity that women are

supposed to have, it becomes assertive and powerful.

Caroline Molina (1997) in Muteness and Mutilation: The Aesthetics of

Disability in Jane Campions The Piano contests a negative assumption of
muteness and states:

The heroine Adas vocal disability reflects her deliberate

rejection of conventional forms of human communication,
and the film repeatedly raises the issue of the value of
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silence (or music) as opposed to conversation (verbal,

visual, and mental) as alternative varieties of human
expression In tension with its counterpart, piano music,
and its opposite, speech, muteness also becomes a
surprisingly powerful medium of sexual seduction and a
metaphor for the dialectic between art and life. (Molina,
1997: 267)

Here, Molina challenges the myth of Echo. Molina (1997: 267) explores the
way in which, unlike the society described by Nouvet, Campion endows her
mute heroine with a striking eroticism. Molina (1997) argues that although
this film does not completely eliminate the stereotypical image of femininity
and disability, its dramatising of Adas muteness offers its spectator new ways
of seeing muteness outside the social model of physical disability. Her work
also begs the significant question of communication and of understanding the
Other who does not have the normal speaking voice.

In The Piano (1993), Stewarts speaking voice can be viewed as the

patriarchal symbolic, transcending Adas silence and her suppressed sexuality.
If the Echo myth rests on a process of feminising the silent voice, her own part
of this process, her longing or frustration is removed from the male-dominant
interpretation of words.

Unlike Echo, Adas silence is wilful rather than a

medical symptom of deviance or Junos judgment for being overbearingly

wordy. This cinematic representation of a mute woman creates an aesthetics of
silence rather than showing a social aspect of muteness. Campion makes her
spectator become an explorer of Adas voicing process. When Ada is silent,
her daughter, Flora, interprets her sign language, speaks for her, and, in
particular, negotiates her relation to her husband, Stewart.
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The spectator

experiences the dual process of understanding Adas voice through either

Floras speech or its cinematic caption of their signed discourse. When Ada
does not have her piano, Flora can be subversively considered as a mother
figure and the conveyer of rational speech while Ada can be seen as a daughter
figure and the irrational body. In the realm of silence, like Irigarays notion of
mimicry, Campion holds up a new model of femininity. She establishes silent
identity as socially constructed rather than naturally given: Ada refuses the
Echo model of femininity, and, by inference, the myth of feminine tragedy.

Following Irigaray, Adas silence can be considered as a form of voice

against the symbolic order. It exists outside of the symbolic. Adas silence has
the potential to resist and subvert the symbolic in what Irigaray terms
mimicry. In the same way that Irigaray assumes that the hysteric mimes an
imposed femininity, I consider that Ada mimes an imposed femininity. By
mimicking the phallogocentric form of femininity to excess, what is socioculturally expected but to such an excessive level that the outcome is the
opposite of submission, Ada challenges the symbolic order.

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2. The Piano as Voice

In The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and

Cinema, Kaja Silverman (1988) addresses the classic Hollywood representation
of woman where female characters are designed to tolerate the burden of lack,
while male characters are formed so as to obtain the power of wholeness and
fixity.

Silverman explains that the synchronised operation of the male gaze,

and the male voice generally, objectifies the female body and silences the
female voice. In other words, she explores the politics of synchronisation
between acoustic and visual images in classic Hollywood films.

Silverman

also argues that women are imperilled contradictorily by the silence because
speech constructs the sense of the self. Examining classic narrative films,
Silverman finds that women must be disembodied, like Echo, to obtain an
intelligible voice, that is to say, a speech.

For Silverman (1988: 48-9), the male voice has control of the narrative
cinema; the male voice-over establishes a fixed sign of gender, or rather,
masculinity. Silverman argues that the female voice is related to spectacle and
the body while the male voice is invisible. This dualism is represented in
classic Hollywood films as the disembodied male voice against the
synchronized female voice (Silverman, 1988: 39). Silverman states:

When the voice is identified in this way this presence, it is

given the imaginary power to place not only sounds but
meaning in the here and now.

In other words, it is

understood as closing the gap between signifier and

signified. Even more important, at least within the context

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of this discussion, Western metaphysics has fostered the

illusion that speech is able to express the speakers inner
essence, that it is part of him or her. It locates the subject
of speech in the same ontological space as the speaking
subject so that the former seems a natural outgrowth of the
later. The fiction of the authenticity of cinematic sounds
thus promotes belief not only in presence but in selfpresence. (Silverman, 1988: 43)

Thus, following Lacan, Silverman considers voice as speech, which leads us

into the symbolic order. The symbolic order establishes the materialisation of
the male voice at the cost of silencing the female voice. This silencing of the
female voice is the process of disembodying her voice. Women are designed
to lose the voice that they have never really acquired, while men become the
power of speech which they always have. Silverman (1988: 52-71) claims that
the female voice is linked to interiority, while the male voice is socio-culturally
and cinematically acknowledged as exteriority, that is to say, an authoritative
speech.

However, Campions depiction of Ada undermines this tradition of

silencing. The first section of the film portrays the cinematic tradition of the
female voice as lacking. Ada appears to be the ghost-like figure that can be
made to communicate through the speaking medium of Flora or cinematic
captions. However, the second section, and the synchronicity of the first and
the second sections, present a very different image of woman as ambivalent,
and also impart a transformation of the female voice as embodied. As will be
explored in later sections, Ada twists her voice out of her piano and makes
expressions beyond the speech we, as her spectators, assume.

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The male,

English, speaking voice, Stewarts voice, no longer controls Ada. Exploring

Adas voice shows the way in which Campion has undermined the tradition in
cinema that Silverman draws attention to.

Silverman shows the way in which the female voice and sexuality have
been socially constructed, psychically shaped by cultural influences, and
restricted through the male gaze and voice. Silvermans account of the female
voice assists in describing the ways in which Adas female sexuality is shaped
by culture and by a marriage that disadvantaged Ada by silencing her voice.
Thus, Silvermans theorisation of the female voice guides the argument of the
contradicting myths about female sexuality and the female voice, as the woman
conforms to and questions her oppression. Adas married experiences follow
the struggle with the complexity of the social construction of female-silenced
voice and the corporeality of her voice.

(a) The Semiotic Voice: between Ada and the Piano

Like Irigaray and Kristeva, I agree that Ada undermines the

phallogocentric paradigm that claims that we must enter into the symbolic
order. Because of this paradigm, Adas piano becomes unintelligible; it is what
cannot be articulated in the symbolic order. Ada makes a connection between
the piano, her voice, and her body.

She connects them to her sexuality,

showing that her sexuality and desire are not intelligible within the symbolic
order.

To understand how she makes this connection, I need to go back to

Kristevas concept of the semiotic. Adas piano creates a fluidity that fits with
Kristevas notion of the semiotic. Adas fluid, unintelligible, and pre-symbolic

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voice is transformed into tunes, rhythms and touches.

She expresses her

repressed desire through her body by playing the piano and utilises a bodily
discourse to articulate what is otherwise unintelligible. Playing the piano is,
for Ada, a means of expressing this desire, which opens up the possibility for
jouissance. By examining the relationship between the loss of the piano and
the repossession of it, I suggest that, like hysteria, this film stresses the
significance of finding, regaining, and transforming the voice, and that it points
to the embodying potential of subjectivity.

After Adas begging, Baines reluctantly takes her to the place where the
piano is the beach. She continuously plays the piano. She withdraws from
the symbolic order and becomes lively and voiced. Her voice is evoked when
she plays the piano, suggesting that Ada, by shifting into the semiotic, flees the
symbolic order, her arranged marriage, that causes her silence. Thus, the piano
is the semiotic that is associated with rhythms, tones, and movements. It is also
associated with Adas body. In playing the piano, Ada reaches her emotion,
energy, and voice. I see the piano as the semiotic in relation to speech.

Ada is incorporated with the piano, which makes her speak; it makes
the muted to be heard. This poetically disruptive use of the piano flees from
the control of the symbolic through sounds that are created from rhythms and
tunes of the semiotic chora.

As discussed earlier, Kristeva sees the semiotic

chora as a receptacle. Its role is primarily to make a space in which language

can operate. Adas revitalisation of this semiotic chora is disruptive of the
patriarchal symbolic since it breaks the norm by evoking a different sense of

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self in which the mother of the feminine, and emotions associated with her, are
core rather than marginal.

Following Kristeva, I believe that the subject may acquire access to the
semiotic chora through creative, musical, and poetic practices.

Kristeva

considers that we have our origins in the semiotic chora, evoking a fluid
perception of meaning and self which stimulates emotions lost in the symbolic.
Ada seeks to rupture the patriarchal symbolic by recalling this lost semiotic,
the piano.

The piano, for Ada, is the maternal, the semiotic, and the chora.

Showing the piano on the beach, Campion cinematically establishes the

prenatal phase, which is both embodied and acoustic. A similar tendency
exists in the depictions of a typical infants sensory experience.

Silverman

explains:

The fantasy of maternal-voice-as-sonorous-envelope takes

on a different meaning dependent upon the psychic
lookout point; viewed from the site of the unconscious,
the image of the infant held within the environment or
sphere of the mothers voice is an emblem of infantile
plenitude and bliss.

Viewed from the site of the

preconscious/conscious system, it is an emblem of

impotence and entrapment. (Silverman, 1988: 73)

Silverman (1988: 72) considers the fantasy of the maternal voice that embraces
the infant like a blanket of sound. The maternal voice that the infant listens
to, its mothers voice, is ambiguous, not intelligible. The sound of Adas piano,
like the maternal voice, can be considered as an echo and an aural reflection of
her interiority in the external world.

Through her performance, Adas voice

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conveys a powerful message to Baines; a message that is not intelligible. To

fully understand this voice, Baines gradually engages with Adas piano and
thereby engages with the materiality of the voice/body of Ada.

Ada is both in the semiotic and the symbolic because she seeks to
undermine the split nature of the subject in patriarchal society. Campion
engages in Kristevas account of the semiotic and the symbolic, demonstrating
Adas desire. I see The Piano as a film about lacking or possessing a voice
which does not fit in the symbolic order. Ada shows her desire to flee from the
symbolic order.

The Piano depicts the destructiveness of the semiotic.

Kristeva claims that, to be subversive, the semiotic has to cooperate with the
symbolic. Adas piano is instigated not by withdrawing into the semiotic but
through an expression of the semiotic within the symbolic. The sound of her
piano evokes the semiotic within the symbolic.

For both Kristeva and Ada,

the disruption of the symbolic through the semiotic is, therefore, a way of
resisting phallogocentrism and socio-culturally prescribed femininity.

Adas merging with the piano is the embodiment of her voice in process.
Her piano is characterised by a bodily and emotional flow that expresses
beyond symbolic speech.

This means that, in Adas piano playing, the

expression is engaged by the semiotic responses to the fixed articulation of

speech. Adas piano is, in Kristevas terms, revolutionary. This revolutionary
aspect means that the piano questions the dominant on an inner psychological
level, and on a social or political level. In this context, I consider the piano as a
discourse with possibilities to provoke transformations, not only in the inner
life of Ada, but in her relationship to a man as well.

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(b) Fetishism: Baines Relation to the Piano

Moving towards the second part of the film-narrative of Ada in her

sexual relationship with Baines, I shall consider her piano, that is, her fluid
voice, in more depth. The question of what the voice is, leads me to explore
the mysterious devices of expression, recognition, and voicing, which establish
communication. This aspect moves the question of the voice through the
existence of the piano further, exploring the way by which the piano is
repressed within her arranged marriage. Although mute, Ada expresses her
repressed voice through her piano playing; she is drawn towards Baines, the
uneducated white settler who has the facial tattoos of the Maori. His whiteskin-black-mask seduces Ada by promising to return the piano that her
husband, Stewart, has exchanged with him for the land. The film entices the
spectator to believe that Adas piano playing has been a substitution for her
repressed sexuality.

Ada needs the piano to voice her repressed self, and the piano needs
Ada to produce expressive harmonies. Ada, with the piano, is voicing, and the
piano with Ada is no longer an object. Her touch brings the piano to life. Ada
is completely mute without her piano, but the piano sets Adas repressed voice
free. Adas repressed voice is only possible through the piano that articulates
her desire to be heard. The desire to hear is expanded to include Baines in his
sexual relationship with Ada.

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Inspired by Adas piano playing, Baines makes an arrangement to see

her regularly. Adas husband is desperate to fence his land in, and to put his
stamp of personal ownership on it. Stewart is the direct opposite of the Maori
people and of Baines.

Stereotypically, he represents the colonising white

mans capitalistic possession of land, whereas, Baines, the apparently native

Maori, considers the land as a spiritually shared resource of all people in the
community. Campion weaves this colonial context into Stewarts character.
The exotic-white Baines takes advantage of Stewart's greediness for landpossession and exchanges 80 acres of his own land for Adas piano. Stewart
has sold his wifes voice and sexuality. Furthermore, he demands that she
gives Baines piano lessons. Baines reaction can be described via the Freudian
psychoanalytic notion of fetishism (Freud, 1927). Baines substitutes the piano
for the missing voice. As long as this obsession is in place, Ada is part of
Baines sexual pleasure. Ada does not challenge Baines sexual domination
because her piano has been taken over. Thus, although the piano covers Adas
muteness, its sound of desire proves Baines understanding of her need. In
other words, Baines fluctuates between the opposing views that Ada has the
voice and that she does not. This fluctuation, I argue, saves Baines from
denying Adas difference.

When Adas piano arrives at his cottage, Baines asks an old man to tune
it. The old man is aware of the smell of Adas perfume from the piano keys.
Baines takes care of Adas piano and even tunes her voice. In one dramatic
scene, Ada and Flora visit Baines for his piano lesson. Flora sits down at the
piano and starts playing. She says, Its in tune! Ada, who has been standing
outside, suddenly comes in, as if starved for the piano sound. She sits down at

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the piano and plays a few chords, looking at Baines. He asserts, I just want to
listen. Baines has no interest in piano lessons. However, he is interested in
Ada, who finds him extremely offensive. Nonetheless, she enters into a sexual
exchange. That is, she will gradually get her piano back, black key by black
key, if she allows him to sexually touch her body while she plays. Ada, who is
forced to submit to this sexual contact with Baines in order to repossess the
piano that Stewart sold, is doubly abused by both men. However, Ada's need
for the piano goes beyond her passion and displeasure. She is incarcerated and
Baines uses her in an unequal relationship between rape and forced prostitution.
Despite the repulsive ignorance and the sexual abuse of it all, however, the
spectator is able to perceive Ada's sensual and psychical pleasure as Baines
raises the prize, more piano keys in exchange for more sexual desire from Ada.

In order to understand Baines relationship to Ada and her piano,

fetishism needs some explanations. In Fetishism, Freud (1927) suggests that
fetishism develops out of a serious mode of castration anxiety when a young
boy first recognises that his mother does not have a penis. For Freud, fetishism
is formed, in particular, as a masculine deviation that involves receiving sexual
pleasure from the connection of a female body with a fetish, commonly a
lifeless or incomplete object, such as a shoe, a plait of hair, or a certain type of
costume. In Of Female Bondage, Parveen Adams (1993 [1989]) defines
fetishism:

is of the essence of the perversions. There, there is

always fetishism and fetishism always concerns disavowal.
This disavowal is the refusal to recognize that the mother
does not have a penis. He who refuses to recognize the
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absence of the mothers penis may then avow its material

existence in some other part of the body or in some object.
This material element that thus consecrates the disavowal is
the fetish. Notice that the fetish is the means of denying
that there is a sexual difference between the mother and the
father. (Adams, 1993 [1989]: 251)

In The Piano, Baines fetishism is a fascination with an inanimate object, the

piano, or body part, her missing voice, that is not essentially sexual in nature,
and the need for its use in order to obtain sexual pleasure. In other words, the
fetishistic value of the piano demonstrates Baines refusal to accept Adas
silence, her femininity, as lack of speech. Through the fetish, Adas different
voice is converted by Baines in order for him to keep hold of the idea that Ada
can voice herself.

Baines fetishism fits into Freuds account. The piano as a fetish object
is inanimate, sexually glorified and inappropriate for normal sexual acts. It is a
substitute for Ada. In this fetishism, Baines attention is apprehended by a
fixation on the piano as a fetish object. The piano is used during Baines
masturbation and is also integrated into sexual activity with Ada in order to
produce sexual excitation. After Ada leaves his cottage, Baines takes off his
shirt, he is naked, and delicately wipes her piano with the shirt. He moves
behind the piano and rubs it very gently as if he would touch Adas body. His
body is now attached to her piano. Baines can see the piano as an extension of
Ada and her voice.

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(c) The Extended Corporeality: the Embodied Voice

The piano is Adas body. This concept is contrary to the Cartesian

logic. Ada connects to the piano as if to her body. In this section, developing
Merleau-Pontys idea of corporeality, I shall argue that our voice is, in many
ways, imperceptible to us. We are not aware of the ways in which we utilise
our voice. This changes when we lose our speech skills or a language to
communicate with. Through lack of speech we begin to notice our embodied
voice. In fact, this lack both reminds us that we have a voice and also that we
do not habitually perceive that we do have a voice. It may be considered as a
phenomenological insight into the specificity of our lived experience.

In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty (1998 [1962])

argues against the conception of the subject as a disembodied subject. His
concept of the subject-in-the-world includes the notion of embodiment.
Merleau-Ponty seeks to reject the dualisms of Western philosophical traditions
and he establishes an embodied self. Rather than separating perception or the
body from culture, Merleau-Ponty claims that perception has already been
formed within our own culture. This destabilisation of the boundaries between
the object and the self, the ambiguous subject who is a person that can be
both subject and object, is central to Merleau-Pontys work.

Even more

significant for me is the notion of embodiment as central to our being a person.

As explored by Merleau-Ponty, it is through the body that we have

access to the world. Deeds and perceptions are intertwined. The process of
embodiment is formed by habits and learning. Language is an effective model

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of this. When I am faced with a page of newspaper written in Japanese I

understand it immediately. I do not have to translate it or think about it to
understand its meaning. This is because I have learned Japanese as a child.
My body and perception operate in Japanese. All perception is, to some extent,
like learning language for Merleau-Ponty.

Perception is active and is

connected to other forms of action. It shapes and is shaped by our actions in

the world. My perception is not mediated, but rather, it is sensible and engaged.
It is not the separate sense of a reflective self, but a situated perspective from
within that engages me. It is the specific activity of reading Japanese which
shapes the way in which my perceptual ability interrogates what I see. Thus,
being embodied as Japanese is a part of my body, and a part of my senses.

With the idea of intertwining, the concept of the flesh becomes

relevant. Merleau-Ponty utilises the term flesh to denote the way in which the
body experiences the world. In relation to the flesh, we obtain an immediate
contact with others and the world. As Elizabeth Grosz explains:

The flesh is reflexivity, that fundamental gap or dehiscence

of being that Merleau-Ponty illustrates with a favourite
example, the double sensation, an example that clearly
illustrates the various gradation between subjectivity and
objectuality.

Between

feeling

(the

dimension

of

subjectivity) and being felt (the dimension of objectuality)

is a gulf spanned by the indeterminate and reversible
phenomenon of the being touched of the touching, the
crossing over of what is touching to what is touched, the
ambiguity which entails that each hand is in the (potentially
reversible) position of both subject and object, the position
of both phenomenal and objectual body. (Grosz, 1994: 100)
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Thus, there is a gap between touching and being touched, a gap between the
subjective and objective aspects of our existence. Touching and being touched
are not merely different elements of being in the world because, as Grosz
argues, they are reversible. As Merleau-Ponty explains:

I can identify the hand touched in the same one which will
in a moment be touching... In this bundle of bones and
muscles which my right hand presents to my left, I can
anticipate for an instant the incarnation of that other right
hand, alive and mobile, which I thrust towards things in
order to explore them. The body tries... to touch itself while
being touched and initiates a kind of reversible reflection.
(Merleau-Ponty, 1998 [1962]: 93)

Here, Merleau-Ponty suggests that the hand that he touches, while it is

touching an object, is not simply an object, but a corporeal part that can
reverse the present situation. One cannot touch him/herself, or even someone
else, without this acknowledgment, and the consciousness of what it feels like
to be touched, influences the experience of touching.

Merleau-Ponty offers the example of a blind mans stick as an

extension of the body. In reality, the blind man senses the world through the
stick and is not really conscious of the stick as such, but rather of what it
touches. In this way, the stick is a mode of perception like the eyes or ears.
Merleau-Ponty considers it not as a tool used by the blind man but as an
extended body part or sense organ:

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The blind mans stick has ceased to be an object for him,

and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an
area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of
touch, and providing a parallel to sight. In the exploration of
things, the length of the stick does not enter expressly as a
middle term: the blind man is rather aware of it through the
position of objects than of the position of objects through
it

To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be

transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them

into the bulk of our own body. Habit expresses our power
of dilating our being in the world, or changing our existence
by appropriating fresh instruments. (Merleau-Ponty 1998
[1962]: 143)

Nevertheless, the stick is not simply an extended sense; it also establishes the
blind man as blind. His body is extended not only in the sense of the lived body
upon which Merleau-Ponty focuses.

Using Merleau-Pontys theory of the lived body, I shall develop his

concept for considering the reversible condition of voicing and hearing as
embodiment. Our embodied subjectivity is never positioned simply in either
our being touched or in our touching, but rather in the interconnection of these
two elements, in a consciousness that is mapped upon our bodies. Exploring
Ada and her piano, I have also suggested that an intersubjective notion of
embodiment might involve the piano being incorporated. Not only does
Merleau-Pontys notion of the reversibility of perception explain the perceived
intimacy of Ada, but the piano is always voiced/voicing by her, and vice-versa.
Merleau-Pontys notion breaks down the subject/object (Ada/the piano)
dichotomy.

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Adas piano is, thus, intercorporeal embodiment. Merleau-Pontys

concept of the reversibility, intercorporeality, describes the condition of flesh
involved with various, constant, and changeable interconnections to other
bodies, tools and natures. Ada moves her hands over the piano in order to
create the sound. The tactile experience of Ada is just as significant as the
sound; the sensations are embedded in Adas body.

The piano may be

compared to a prosthetic device. This prosthetic device becomes a matter of

sensitivity that extends the possibility of touch. Adas body movement is
required to create the projected voice in motion. It creates a direct connection
between Adas movement and the pianos sound. She identifies with the piano
and she uses her own body as a mediator.

In the embodied relationship

between Ada and her piano, her experience is formed through a musical
instrument and her subjectivity merges with the piano, as in the example of the
blind mans stick.

In The Body as Embodiment: An Investigation of the Body by

Merleau-Ponty, Miho Iwakuma (2002: 76-87) explores the disabled body
from Merleau-Pontys perspective. Considering his notion of an extension of
the bodily synthesis as a process of embodiment, Iwakuma (2002: 78)
discusses the example of ones adjustment to his/her impairment, in particular,
a pianist with a visual impairment who considers his piano as a part of his body.
She states:

His assertion is not just figurative or metaphoric speech: the

piano is an extension of his body. He has embodied the
piano as a part of his identity and, without it, he would lose
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who he is. His identity or wholeness cannot be completed

without this instrument. (Iwakuma, 2002: 78)

Like the pianist in the example, I consider Ada has embodied her piano as a
part of her body. In both cases what is regarded as body is neither simple nor
fixed, but rather multiple and fluid. What matters is the relationship between
their bodies and between parts of bodies: the piano.

Language, for Merleau-Ponty, is not inside the subject, but envelops the
subject in things as if it pre-existed in the world. This notion is developed
through his theory of the body. For him, language is an articulation of the body,
and, like Kristeva, he brings speech into a broader realm of articulations. For
Merleau-Ponty, and similarly for Appelbaum (1990), speech is one of many
ways of articulating the body; it is an attunement to the world that includes
other human beings.

Language is part of an intersubjective world.

This

intersubjective element requires an intersecting and integrating of positions that

makes communication possible. Merleau-Ponty claims that communication
needs a mutual understanding of self and other, and this intersubjectivity is
embodied.

Merleau-Ponty would suggest that the mediated object (the piano) can
involve itself in an intersubjective relation with the spectator/Ada/Baines.
Merleau-Ponty states:

For the senses communicate with each other. Music is not

in visible space, but it besieges, undermines and displaces
that space Sensory experience is unstable, and alien to

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natural perception, which we achieve with our whole body

all at once, and which opens on a world of inter-acting
senses. (Merleau-Ponty, 1998 [1962]: 225)

Thus, the senses are contextual, trapped within the specificities of the body,
time, and space; they are embodied subjectivities. In other words, the senses
are not universal or simply natural. Following Merleau-Ponty, I suggest that,
as a sensory articulation, the piano is incorporated into Adas corporeality and
Baines and Floras senses, but not Stewarts. For this reason, the piano is an
element of an embodied sense. Her voice, the sound of the piano, indicates a
need to reconsider the constitution of our verbal articulation.

Conclusion

Towards the end of The Piano, Stewart stands outside the cottage where
Ada and Baines passionately make love. Rather than being disgusted by her
passion for Baines, it appears to have aroused Stewarts sexual curiosity; he
wants to sexually invade her all the more.

Stewart boards up all the windows

of his house and imprisons Ada and Flora. Without listening to her piano or
understanding her repressed voice, Stewart just wants Adas body as a sexual
object. However, Stewart cannot accept her as she is. He says to Ada, I want
to touch you. Why cant I touch you? Stewart looks back at her and asks:
Dont you like me?

The next morning, Ada removes one of the piano keys,

and uses a heated needle to burn a message into the wooden key: Dear George
you have my heart, Ada McCrath (Campion and Pullinger, 1994: 182). Here,
writing and voice come together like a tattoo. She asks Flora to take her
message to Baines and says: It belongs to him. The piano becomes signed,
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named, and established as her whole voice. Thus, physically and emotionally
the piano appears to be a continuation and extension of Ada. This idea is
expressed metaphorically through this important moment of tattooing her piano
key. It is a moment that gives an inkling of the films celebration of a strong
Ada-Piano-Baines bond that exists beyond the arranged marriage. However,
dressed in her angel wings, Flora refuses, and takes Adas voice to the wrong
person, Stewart. Soon after, Stewart walks through the forest with his axe in
his hand.

When Stewart enters the house, he slams the axe into the table,

shouting, I trusted you! He then slams the axe into the piano. Powerless to
obtain her love back from Baines, Stewart exposes his jealousy in his demoniac
state by chopping off Adas finger! He severs her ability to articulate herself,
or her sexuality, with the axe.

Throughout the film, Stewart has never heard Adas piano. For that
reason, he attacks the piano not because it is Adas means of expressing herself,
but rather he attacks it as a substitute for her sexuality. By attacking first the
piano and then her finger, he wants to de-sexualise Ada. However, Ada, who
may feel she has been castrated of her voice, her finger and the piano,
experiences complete muteness through the attack. What this exposes is that
Adas sexuality, her exploration of her own and of anothers body and pleasure,
is a way of voicing herself. In this scene, both Ada and her piano are spoiled
by Stewart. Here, Ada becomes completely mute. Flora, a witness to the
price of Adas act of betrayal to the marriage, screams in terror, but even more
expressive is Ada's silence. Ada is silent. When the camera gazes at Ada, just
after her finger is chopped off, the piano music stops. Thus, the film effect
gives Ada a power of silence. Silently, she walks unsteadily a few steps into a

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mud-covered pond and with her hoop skirts ballooning around her collapses in
the mud. Flora is made to deliver the finger, instead of the piano key, to Baines.
Thus, the piano and Ada are interconnected with each other.

In the final scenes, Ada makes a choice of what to do with her piano
that is being ferried with her on a Maori canoe. Adas piano is both point and
process: it is a reconstruction of Ada and her voice. Ada sings to her daughter
and Flora translates Adas voice for Baines: She says throw the piano
overboard.

Flora continues: She doesnt want it. She says its spoiled.

Baines is shocked, and tells Ada that he will mend the missing key. He also
says: You will regret it. Its your piano I want you to have. Flora shouts at
Baines: She does not want it! Finally he asks the men on the canoe to
remove the ropes from the spoiled piano. However, while watching her piano
slipping into the deep sea, Ada moves her foot into the centre of the ropes coil.
Soon, her foot is pulled away by the unwinding coil of rope. She gasps as her
whole body is pulled away into the sea by the ropes force and the pianos
weight.

She suddenly starts struggling in the water. Then, she frees herself

from her shoe that is attached to the piano. For me, this scene represents Adas
incarcerated experience with the imposed husband and embodies the freedom
from the arranged marriage. The spoiled piano may be seen as her body raped
by Stewart, and in the deep sea, she is baptised and cleansed; she starts her life
again. This scene can be considered to be a ritual of rebirth. Adas voice-over
speaks out:

What a death!
What a chance!
What a surprise!
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My will has chosen life.

Still, it has had me spooked, and many other besides.

At night, I think of my piano in its ocean grave, and

sometimes of myself, floating above it.

Down there

everything is so still and silent that is bulls me to sleep. It is

a weird lullaby and so it is; it is mine. (Campion and
Pullinger, 1994: 214)

Throughout the film, I questioned whether my voice is disabling my

communication with others. Like Ada, I can communicate with some people
who accept my difference. Thus, my voice is not disabled. However, for those
people who see my difference as helpless, or the Other, my voice becomes
disabled, and to them my voice creates ambivalence. The Piano has enabled us
to reconsider our voice as extended corporeality. Adas piano opens new
possibilities for people with speech impairments to voice themselves in their
own ways.

Difference becomes disability when a person with difference becomes

unheard or invisible in the realm of communication, and disability becomes
ability if we can accept his/her difference. The absolute rejection of difference
yields disability.

The Piano (1993) challenges the able-bodied notion of

muteness as being without voice. Instead, it reveals an embodied voice, that is,
Adas touch, her choice of love.

While we often find ourselves in the closure of speech, there is a more

fluid articulation of ourselves, the feminine and the semiotic that is not speech
and lies under its dominance. If we could become more open towards this

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embodiment of our voice, we may find that Irigarays utopian prospect is

possible. This new communication generates a development of the embodied
self that is not fixed. She is fluid. My physical and vocal fluidity creates many
ways of articulating myself. I embody my voice, but the voice comes from a
disabled woman who flees from the cell of the phallic able-bodied world/prison,
and from the attempt of phallic able-bodied boundaries to prescribe my desire.
For a disabled woman, there is no fixed voice; there is only and always the
body, expressed as a physical inscription that is unintelligible, enigmatic, and
unheard in fixed speech. I do not want to be a woman like either Diotima or
Echo; I wish to be seen I wish to be heard and to be present at the debate.

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Chapter 4 - Physical Disability and Performativity

Introduction

In previous chapters, I have explored how the able-bodied matrix

demarcates our bodies into binary categories that are either the same or the
Other, either normal or abnormal, either whole or lack, and either fixed or
fluid. Some of these binary oppositions are ability/disability, white/non-white,
and masculinity/femininity.

All of these dichotomies echo the binary

opposition of man/woman, which is sexualised and gendered. It takes the male

as the unconditionally privileged one. The categories of able-bodied/disabled
have been used to articulate and maintain an oppositional relation between
bodies. This is based on the subordination of the disabled as it is always the
disabled that carries negative characteristics. Such a system of regulation
takes the able-bodied as its norm. In this chapter, I shall further investigate this
system of regulation by exploring the work of Judith Butler.

I shall examine the significance of Butlers performative accounts to

develop my own theory of the reification of physical disability.

Butlers

theories of performativity propose ways in which identities are formed in

discourse. While influential in feminism and gender studies, little effort has
been made to understand identities as performative in the exploration of
physical disability (Samuels, 2002). This chapter undertakes to develop this
perspective.

Focusing on Mary Duffy, an Irish disabled performance and

visual artist who questions female and disabled identity in her creative work,
the purpose of this chapter is two-fold: to read Duffys work through Butlers

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theories, and to draw Butlers theories closer to Duffys understandings of her

own disabled female body.

I shall start by exploring Butlers Gender Trouble: Feminism and the

Subversion of Identity (1999 [1990]) where, exploring Foucaults theory that
discourse operates as a regulatory power that constructs the subject it governs,
she develops a performative theory of gender. For Butler, performativity is a
discursive practice that acts out, or constructs, that which it identifies, through
citation and repetition of social norms.36 I believe that she conceptualises the
possibility of a shift in heterosexual notions of masculinity and femininity.
Butler, in her discussion of drag, argues that we can destabilise gender norms
through re-signifying the ideals of gender. I employ her performative account
of gender to explore the performativity of physical disability.

Later, I shall survey Butlers 1993 book Bodies That Matter: On the
Discursive Limits of Sex where she develops her theories by making use of
the work of Jacques Derrida. Here, her concern with performativity pays
attention to the realm of ambivalent bodies, discussing which material and
discursive conditions make bodies either conceivable or inconceivable. Butler
seeks to theorise the system that establishes and maintains particular bodies
as the Other, and the possibilities for resisting and subverting this system.

I need to distinguish between performance and performativity:

Performance: just the claim that it is the doing which yields the identity, not something that lies
behind.
Performativity: it is linked to the term iterability. This is an account of how the meaning of
any terms is not ever fixed or determinate. It is always open to re-signification in different
contexts. For Butler, this is how change comes about. There is no fixity and in different
contexts different significance can be given to terms.
36

- 166 -

Physical disability as an identity category is often used in disability

studies.

However, unlike gender identity, disabled identity has been

constructed, but hardly deconstructed or criticised. In her article Critical

Divides: Judith Butlers Body theory and the Question of Disability, Ellen
Samuels (2002: 58-76) proposes that the application of Butlers performative
theories to disability has to be developed not only sociologically, but also
philosophically. Samuels considers two main reasons why many disability
scholars have not applied Butlers theories to disability studies:

1) they (we) saw Butlers work as irrelevant to their (our)

scholarly goals and 2) they(we) saw Butlers work as
contrary to those goals.

Disability scholars are not a

monolithic group, of course, and various writers may have

had different reasons for excluding Butler. Yet, the existence
of a broad tendency invites further inquiry as to the
original tendency of the field of disability studies as a whole,
and suggests the pertinence of interrogating the way in which
Butler has now become more commonly used in the second
waves of disability studies publications. (Samuels, 2002: 612)
Applying Butlers account in which our bodies are materialised through pregiven performances, and reading Duffys work, I shall reconceptualise physical
disability as performative in nature. In other words, this chapter will begin the
task of deconstructing the boundaries between the able-bodied and the disabled.

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Gender Trouble
1. The Performative Account of the Establishment and
Maintenance of the Heterosexual Matrix

In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1999

[1990]), Judith Butler starts by claiming that sex and gender cannot be
differentiated, more specifically, she explains how gender is socially
constructed such that it takes on the appearance of being something natural,
something given with our anatomy (Alsop, Fitzsimons, and Lennon, 2002:
97) . Butler examines a number of discourses about gender that presuppose
that biological sex, as a cornerstone of gender, establishes the identity of
women as the gendered category of those subjects who are born with a female
body and socially constructed as feminine. Butler adopts Simone de Beauvoir,
Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva to explore the Other in terms of the
masculine and heterosexual norms. Butler agrees with de Beauvoirs feminist
manifesto (1997 [1953]: 295) that ONE is not born, but rather becomes a
woman. However, Butler further argues that this process of becoming a
woman occurs under a socio-cultural pressure to become gendered and that this
pressure does not come from biological sex. Through her survey of these
French feminists, Butler explores gender categories as the effect of discourse.
These feminist theories are her starting point for first explaining and then
destabilising the socially naturalised discourse on gender, sex, and sexuality.

Butler also examines Monique Wittig who sees heterosexuality as a

regulatory practice from a lesbian and materialist feminist perspective. In her
essay One is not Born a Woman, Wittig (1997: 312) states: a lesbian has to

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be something else, a not-woman, a not-man, a product of society, not a product

of nature, for there is no nature in society. This statement opens up the
possibility of exploring a theoretical blind spot with feminism. This blind
spot is a theory of the lesbian. The lesbian, for Wittig, is the subject that is
beyond the heterosexual categories of sex, since a lesbian is not a woman
reproductively, institutionally, politically, or theoretically. As maintained by
Wittig, to refuse to be heterosexual is to refuse to be characterised politically as
either a man or a woman. Although Butler appreciates Wittigs rejection of
the natural category of women and the prospect of exploring a new subject,
Butler criticises Wittigs radical standpoint, which she considers as a
separatist prescriptivism (Butler 1999 [1990]: 162), that is to say, Wittigs
argument that all women should become lesbians to be free from the
heterosexual or patriarchal system.

Butler, developing Wittig, considers heterosexual material practices as

productive of the meaning of what it is to be gendered within cultures which
adopt them (Alsop, Fitzsimons, and Lennon, 2002: 98, emphasis in the
original text). Developing this, Butler utilises Foucaults concept of a modern
regime of sexuality constructed by sexologist and psychoanalytic discourses,
and social practices of the bourgeois class in the nineteenth century, which
presume that sex and gender are connected, identifying pathological inversions
such as homosexuality and transsexuality.

Inspired by Foucault, Butler supports the position that sees gender as a

relation among socio-culturally constructed subjects in definable contexts. 37

37

A detailed discussion of Foucaults approach is outlined in chapter 1 of this thesis.

- 169 -

She considers gender not as a fixed essence in an individual, but rather as a

social construct which varies in different contexts and at different times.
Foucault considers that we only acquire subjectivity through discourse, which
includes language and everyday practices that carry meaning. For him, there is
no authentic self, only practices that construct the self and produce an
oppressive norm. It is this notion that Butler applies to the construction of
gender and the body. Butler states:

[Acts], gestures, and desires produce the effect of an internal

core or substance, but produce on the surface of the body,
through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never
reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such
acts,

gestures,

enactments,

generally

construed

are

performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they

otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured
and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive
means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it
has no ontological claim apart from the various acts which
constitute its reality....

In other words, acts and gestures,

articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior

and

organizing

gender

core,

an

illusion

discursively

maintained for the purposes of regulation of sexuality within

the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality. If the
cause of desire, gesture, and act can be localized within the
self of the actor, then the political regulations and
disciplinary practices which produce that ostensibly coherent
gender are effectively displaced from view. The displacement
of a political and discursive origin of gender identity onto a
psychological core precludes an analysis of the political
constitution of the gendered subject and its fabricated notions
about the ineffable inferiority of its sex or of its true identity.
(Butler, 1999 [1990]: 173-4, emphasis in the original text)
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Butler also states:

The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense,
an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene.
Hence, gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a
script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but
which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and
reproduced as reality once again. The complex components
that go into an act must be distinguished in order to
understand the kind of acting in correct and acting in accord
which acting ones gender invariably is. (Butler, 1990
[1988]: 277)

Thus, gender, for Butler, is not something that we have or are; it is something
which we do or act out. It is only through performance that a gendered self
exists. There may seem to be an authentic self, or a gender essence, but there
is an effect of discourse. There is a prearranged norm that we impersonate
defectively and each gender is only as authentic as any other. Authenticity
as gender is constituted by the performance and how properly we imitate.
Butler states:

[Gender] proves to be performative that is, constituting the

identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a
doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to
preexist the deed ... There is no gender identity behind the
expressions of gender; that identity is performatively
constituted by the very expressions which are said to be its
results. (Butler, 1999 [1990]: 33

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Thus, for Butler, gender, as a normative discourse of bodily performance, is

nothing more than a bodily style which is demonstrated as either masculine or
feminine.

There is no inner core of gender which originates gendered

performance.

This establishment of what Butler calls the heterosexual matrix

maintains homophobia as the fear of ambivalent desire that becomes a part of
the formation of subjectivity. The heterosexual matrix is considered natural
and produces the fixed assumption that homosexuals are abnormal. Rather
than presuming the natural in the demarcation of bodies into two sexes, Butler
proposes that this demarcation should be seen as part of a system within which
bodies are only intelligible as binary-sexed. By the heterosexual matrix, I
understand the particular ways in which, in a restricted context, only certain
bodies are intelligible. The system of intelligibility operates together with
labelling practices. In this way, the system leads, but does not completely
manipulate, our dualistic perceptions of defining ourselves and others.

Butler questions the heterosexual matrix where homosexuality must be

seen as the Other in relation to the normative heterosexual. The heterosexual
matrix, Butler maintains, is a socio-cultural structure for perception that makes
sex, gender and desire intelligible. Repeated practices of heterosexuality form
a naturalised connection between gender, sex and desire.

Since the

heterosexual matrix makes the naturalised connection intelligible, homosexual

acts become unintelligible and abnormal. Thus, Butler argues, the construction
of the heterosexual discourse is based on the repetition of its norm.

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2. Account of Routes to Destabilisation of the Heterosexual Matrix

For Butler, gender is constituted solely from the performance of

gender. Since the performance is not biologically given, Butler questions and
rearticulates the normative intelligibility. By drawing attention to the synthetic,
restricted, and performative characteristics of gender identity, she seeks to
destabilise the fixed and heterosexual definition of gender. It is, therefore
significant, when Butler, in order to denaturalise and destabilise the fixity of
fundamental (heterosexual) relations, explores drag as a fluid figure. Dressing
and acting like a woman, the person in drag disturbs the simple system by
exposing dissonances and making it visible that there is no universal
connection between the sex of the body, desire, and gender identity. For Butler,
drag deconstructs dichotomies and hierarchies between woman and man,
nature and culture, body and mind, and between sex and gender. It also breaks
down the link between identities and differences. Drag intervenes in a sociocultural desire to understand gender as a natural system of two sexes; two
mutually exclusive categories of male and female.

Drag is entangled in a system of intelligibility that constructs

identification and abjection and shifts its position between the two poles of
gender, masculinity and femininity. Butler develops her notion of drag from
Mary Douglass concept of purity and danger that helps to make clear the ways
in which the Other of the norm is seen as unintelligible. As stated by
Douglas (1969: 115 in Butler, 1999 [1990]: 168), the body is a model that can
stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries
which are threatened or precarious. In this claim, Douglas (1980 [1969])

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suggests that all social norms are unstable at their boundaries and that all
boundaries are subsequently changeable.

Butler is interested in disrupting the heterosexual matrix. She argues

that drag, intentionally or not, plays a significant role in this potential
subversion of gender identity. While drags parody of gender identity is not
subversive in itself, there are some situations where particular types of gender
parody can be disruptive. Conversely, most gender repetitions become
disciplined and redistributed as ways of reinforcing socio-cultural hegemony.
Butlers notion of deconstructing the heterosexual matrix requires an
investigation of drag as a parody. If a drag artist is the one who appears to
have achieved the singularity of femininity, then he is the one who recognises
the paradox of his inside-out in order to achieve this illusion. Butler uses
Esther Newtons work on drag to argue that the structure of impersonation
reveals one of the key fabricating mechanisms through which the social
construction of gender takes place (Butler, 1999 [1990]: 174). She maintains
that drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space
and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a
true gender identity (Butler, 1999 [1990]: 174).

Butler cites Newtons

description of drag as follows:

As its most complex, [drag] is double inversion that says,

appearance is an illusion. Drag says [Newtons curious
personification] my outside appearance is feminine, but
my essence inside [the body] is masculine. At the same
time it symbolizes the opposite inversion: my appearance
outside [my body and my gender] is masculine but my
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essence inside [myself] is feminine. (Newton, 1972: 103

cited in Butler 1999 [1990]: 174)

For Butler, drag apparently performs the differences between the body
of the performer, gender identity, and the gender being performed. She states:
In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender
itself as well as its contingency (Butler, 1999 [1990]: 175, italicised in the
original text). In drag, the reiteration of the performance of gender institutes
the ambivalence of the very category that it forms. For, if drag is a site of
repetition of gender norms, drag is always shifted by the reiteration that
maintains it.

The claim here is essential to considering the workings of

performance: the assumption is that reiteration can cause destabilisation.

Reiteration cannot maintain consistency. As far as performance requires the
reiteration of duplicity, it makes perceptible the ambivalence of identity which
leads to its disruption. Drag involves both the construction of the original and
the construction of a copy; it both does and undoes its identity. Drag both
embodies its own body and re-embodies a woman-like appearance to produce a
new identity. This is the subversive potential of drag; it is not in its skill to
mimic, but in mimicry which is a reiteration with a difference.

The

performance of drag is positioned in the distinction between the anatomical

body of the performer and the gender performed, between the original and the
copy, and between maleness and femaleness. The standard of drag relies upon
heterosexual norms of gender identity, but it also exposes the changeable
structure of gender itself. Butler claims that drag is the parody not of the
original itself, but of the notion of the original. As Butler (1999 [1990]: 189)
argues, The task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to

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repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very

gender norms that enable the repetition itself.

3. Rejection of Sex/Gender Distinction

Butler maintains that feminists often reject the notion that biology is
destiny. They give an account of patriarchal society which presumes that
masculine and feminine genders are constructed, by culture (not biology),
upon male and female bodies given biologically. Butler however states:

[Gender] is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the

discursive/cultural means by which sexed nature or a
natural sex is produced and established as prediscursive,
prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture
acts. (Butler, 1999 [1990]: 11)

For Butler, gender is sex, which is also socio-culturally constructed,

and there is no sex/gender distinction. Butler argues that both sex and gender
might be either programmed or reprogrammed, depending upon discourses. In
other words, for Butler, sex and gender are phantasmatic cultural
constructions which contour and define the body (Salih, 2002: 49). Butler
argues that biological sex is itself a construction, mediated by our cultural
understanding of gender. For Butler, there is no access to a body which is not
simultaneously a socio-culturally constructed shape of that body. Butler (1993:
5) states: If gender is the social construction of sex, and if there is no access to
this sex except by means of its construction, then it appears not only that sex
is absorbed by gender, but that sex becomes something like a fiction, perhaps

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a fantasy, retroactively installed at a prelinguistic site to which there is no

direct access. Sex, for Butler, is revealed not only as a constructed norm but
also a norm that can shift. In other words, there is no sex as a natural category,
but only as a gendered (socially constructed) category. Thus, sex is gender.

Performative Application to Disability Theory

1. Performative Establishment of the Able-bodied Matrix

The social model of physical disability, theorised mainly by the

disabled scholar Mike Oliver (1990 and 1996) has criticised the medical
models notion of individual pathology. He claims that physical disability is
the product of socio-economic construction and focuses on the discrimination
and oppression of disabled people in our society.38 Like Simone de Beauvoir,
Oliver would argue that one is not born, but rather becomes, disabled. In other
words, no bio-medical or psychological essence fixes disability. The feminist
development of the distinction between gender and sex informs Olivers
elaboration of a social model that makes a distinction between disability and
impairment. It is society that constructs the category, intermediate between the
whole body and the no body, which is represented as disabled. The
intervention of society can establish one as the disabled. Considering the
disabled body as the lack in need of mending, Oliver argues that the
medical model of physical disability conceals the process by which a disabled
identity becomes formed. He maintains that disabled people are a socially
oppressed group. Olivers social model distinguishes between the impairments
which people have, and the oppression which they socio-culturally experience.

38

Refer to the discussion of the social model of disability in the introduction of this thesis.
- 177 -

Thus, he considers disability as social oppression, not the figure of

impairment.

In this section, I shall explain how physical disability is socially

constructed such that it takes on the appearance of being something natural,
something given with our anatomy. In previous chapters, I examined various
discourses about physical disability that presuppose that physical difference, as
a foundation of physical disability, establishes the identity of disabled people.
These disabled people are seen as the group of those subjects who are born
with an impaired body and socially constructed as physically disabled. To this
extent, I agree with Olivers social model of disability. However, where Oliver
emphasises the material aspects of the way in which disability is socially
constructed, the layout of our living spaces, for example, I wish to explore the
discursive and performative aspects of social formation.

I argue that this

process of becoming a disabled subject may be explained using performative

notions and drawing on Butlers analysis. In doing this, I shall go further than
Oliver by suggesting that the category of impairment is also socially
constructed. In order to do this, I shall explore various theories of physical
disability and impairment as a means of firstly explaining and then
destabilising the socially naturalised discourse about them.

The criticism of essentialism in disability studies together with gender

studies has been informed by queer disability feminism. In Compulsory
Bodies: Reflections on Heterosexuality and Able-bodiedness, Alison Kafer
(2003: 77-89) examines some comparisons between Adrienne Richs (1987
[1986]) notion of compulsory heterosexuality and Robert McRuers (2002)

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notion of compulsory able-bodiedness. 39 Following Rich, who influenced

heterosexual feminists to analyse heterosexuality as a political institution,
Kafer suggests that able-bodied feminists should examine able-bodiedness as a
political institution. Being a disabled woman in this reading is performative
and reflects a power relationship that is socially established and maintained.
Like Butler, who questions the essential category of woman, Kafer questions
the essential category of disabled people. She states:

Similar to the label women, the term disabled cannot

easily be accepted as a self evident phrase referring to a
discrete group of particular people with certain similar
qualities.

We is a particularly unstable term when

speaking of disability; it is very difficult to decide

definitively who the term does and does not include. (Kafer,
2003: 78)

Kafer claims that able-bodied feminists label of women does not include
disabled women, and that able-bodied feminists ignore disabled womens
experience within feminist theory and practice.

However, I argue that,

similarly to able-bodied feminism, Olivers social model of disability that sees

disabled people as a single social group, ignores other differences based upon
gender, race, ethnicity, class, and age and incorrectly essentialises the social
experience of disability.

39

Kafer argues that able-bodied feminist theorists have not examined their able-bodieddominant position and have not incorporated disability as a subject of examination in their
work. Why is this? Able-bodied feminist theorists often explore their female otherness to
men and conceive the subject of their studies from a feminine or the Other perspective.
Thus, due to what Kafer (2003: 77) terms the political institution of able-bodiedness, ablebodied feminist theorists have difficulties in writing from a position of dominance; they do
not write about disability. There are parallels here with the criticisms of Black feminists.
- 179 -

In The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on

Disability, Susan Wendell (1996: 35) also develops a social theory to define
disability. She explores socio-cultural and political aspects of disability, but
she does not make the fixed distinction between impairment and disability
which is important for Oliver.

Wendell argues that disability is a social

construction; she suggests that the biological and the social are interactive in
creating disability. Both are interactive regarding disability in two senses:
first, social factors, such as war, violent crime, and mass-production of
pesticide and other chemicals, effect our bodies to create illness, impairments,
and disabilities; and second, social arrangements can make a biological
condition more or less relevant to almost any social situation (Wendell, 1996:
35-6). She claims that a group identity is not formed by disabled individuals;
there is a multiplicity of perspectives formed by the disabled individuals. For
her, disability is not something in a body perceived as being separate from its
environment. Social norms that are constantly reproduced in physical and
social formations set up the boundary between ability and disability.

In Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, Lennard

Davis (1995) proposes the concept of normalcy. His study of normalcy in the
able-bodied culture is, to some extent, similar to Butlers study of gender in the
heterosexual culture. Davis (1995: 23) states: To understand the disabled
body, one must return to the concept of the norm, the normal body.

The

norm, for Davis (1995: 24-25), is the ideal that is connected to the figure of the
divines body that is not attainable by a human. He states, one can never
have an ideal body.

Conversely, as maintained by Davis (1995:25), the

grotesque as a visual form was inversely related to the concept of the ideal and

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its corollary that all bodies are in some sense disabled. Developing this
argument, I view the able-bodied matrix as the construction of a norm within
culture. In order to explore this, I merge Butlers performative theory of
gender with Daviss work on normalcy.

If we follow Butler, (dis)ability, like gender, is not a fixed essence in

an individual, but rather a social construct which varies in different contexts
and at different times. The category of physical disability is required to
produce the illusion of the whole body and to establish the zone of the ablebodied. If Butler was to consider (dis)ability, it would not be something that
one has or is; it would be something which one does or acts out, and it is only
through the performance that the norm of an able-bodied self can exist. The
reason why I often bracket dis in front of ability is because disability is a
social category itself, like the feminine, the categorised Other. When I use
(dis)ability, it is a norm, like gender that one mimics imperfectly, and
(dis)ability is only as (in)accurate as any other for (in)accuracy as
(dis)ability is constituted by how (in)correctly one performs. In this sense,
(dis)ability is always a doing.

As Butler suggests that gender only exists when it is performed to a

script, (dis)ability can also be considered as a script. Understanding Butlers
theory of gender as constructed through both psychoanalytic discourses and
institutional practices, we can consider that one is shaped by disciplinary
practices such as postures, walking, speaking, performing, and writings, that is,
the norm. Thus, (dis)ability, as a normative discourse of bodily performance,
may simply be the bodily materialisation which is established as either the

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able-bodied or the disabled, and which does not require an inner core of
(dis)ability. Like Butler, Davis sees that able-bodiedness is a norm which
one is enforced to both desire and to idealise.

Using Butlers performative theory of gender, I argue that disability

and its identity are constructed by the regulatory practice of able-bodiedness
that entails the establishment of disabled others. The able-bodied matrix is
seen as natural and produces the assumption that able-bodied and disabled
individuals should not be seen in the same way. A performative theory of
disability can also claim that a perception of human bodies, as either ablebodied or disabled, is a socio-cultural inscription. Rather than presuming the
natural in the demarcation of bodies into two categories, I suggest that this
demarcation should be seen as part of a system within which bodies are only
intelligible as able-bodied.

The able-bodied matrix is a system of

intelligibility that operates together with labelling practices. In this way, the
system leads but does not completely determine our perceptions of ourselves
and others.

Davis (1995) questions the construction of normalcy where the

disabled is always seen as the Other in relation to the normal. Normalcy,
Davis (1995: 49) maintains, is a configuration that arises in a particular
historical moment.

Moreover, normalcy is recognised only through the

supposition that being able-bodied is natural. The disabled body is reiterated in

the everyday discourses of physical disability.

For example, when I attended

a Japanese class at elementary school, my teacher often counted me out as she

assumed that I would stutter and could therefore not read aloud; she picked me

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to answer the question instead of reading. No one in the class complained

about this special treatment. I accepted this treatment too. My speech was
considered as the Other, and the abnormal. The repetition of this treatment
made me perform disability. This performativity of not-reading-aloud in the
class became natural for my teacher, my classmates, and myself. In another
case, when I dined out with an able-bodied friend, the waitress did not came to
me and take my order. The waitress asked my friend What would she like to
order? and ignored my agency. However, I let my friend order. Thus, this
performativity of non agency also becomes natural for the waitress, my friend,
and myself.

Similarly, Susan Stocker describes her performativity of

wheelchair user:

When I suddenly found myself in a wheelchair, with the

distinct perspective of someone, sitting down in a world
where conversations went on a few feet above me, this was
socially challenging: it made it more difficult to participate.
People saw me differently and I felt this acutely. (Stocker,
2001: 49)

Thus, disability should not be considered as an essential condition, but as

performatively constituted. Both (dis)ability and (ab)normalcy are not a source
for performance, but a set of performances.

In response to performative routines that establish the able-bodied as

bodies that have agency, and the disabled as bodies that have no agency, I shall
challenge these regulatory norms by attending to the way able-bodied society

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excludes my agency.40 I remember recently going unaccompanied to see my

medical doctor. He talked to me as if I am a small girl. He asked Where is
your mother, today? He assumed that my mother should have been with me.
Obviously, this performative routine establishes the constructed position in
which my mother speaks for me. Since these assumptions are incorporated into
my physical disability, my performativity of what I should do seems apparent.
The performative account suggests that my body is a changeable frame, a shape
that is politically constructed, and a representing practice within an able-bodied
culture. From this account, the disabled body is materialised through the
performance of able-bodied norms. Thus, with Butler, both Davis and Stocker
agree that a performative measurement of discursive practices has constitutive
influences in which disabled bodies inform able-bodied norms.

Similarly, in Breaking the Boundaries of the Broken Body, Margrit

Shildrick and Janet Price (1999: 432-444) apply Butlers work on gender to
disability, and argue that disability is performative. Their task is to question
the discursive construction of all seemingly stable categories, and, by
rephrasing Butler in Imitation and Gender Insubordination (1991: 2),
Shildrick and Price (1999: 443) state: disability secures its self-identity and
shores up its ontological boundaries by protecting itself from what it sees as the
continual predatory encroachments of its contaminated other, ability.

In

other words, the concepts of able-bodiedness and physical disability are

mutually dependent upon the very concept of normalcy for their legitimacy.

40

The question of agency is an issue for Butler. Given that there is no self outside of discourse
how can we act to being about change? It looks as if we just wait for iterability to take its
course. Yet, she clearly thinks political agency is possible. Thus, this remains a tension in her
account.
- 184 -

2. Destabilisation of the Able-bodied Matrix through Performance

Physical disability, as I have discussed above, may be constituted by

the performance of normalcy. The performance, as Butler maintains, is not
biologically given because the normative intelligibility is questionable. Here, I
shall draw attention to the performative characteristics of disability identity,
and seek to destabilise the fixed definition of the normal.

In order to

denaturalise and destabilise the able-bodied matrix, this section addresses

Lennard Davis notion of CODA (Child of Deaf Adults) as a figure. He
explains his particular position:

The answer to whether I am a person with disabilities or not

is, as the fortune-telling Magic Eight-ball says, unclear. I
was born into a family with Deaf parents. My first word
was uttered in sign language. The word was milk, a sign I
made through the slats of my crib. I grew up in a Deaf world,
in a Deaf culture, and with a Deaf sensibility. So in that
sense, I am not deaf (hearing-impaired) but I am Deaf
(culturally Deaf). I am what is now referred to as a CODA
(Child of Deaf Adults), and as such I consider myself similar
to people who have grown up in a bicultural family. (Davis,
1995: xvii)

Singing like a Deaf person, CODA is a person who disturbs the simple
definition by revealing dissonances and making it clear that there is no
essentially natural and universally normal connection between impairment and
disability. To me, CODA deconstructs dichotomies and hierarchies between a
Deaf and a hearing person, nature and culture, and between impairment and

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disability. CODA questions the assumption of being deaf as simply being a

hearing impairment. He continues:

This is an identity I did not take on easily.

My initial

response to Deafness was to define myself as hearing. My

parents wanted me to be hearing and that is what I wanted. I
grew up and fled my restricted home for the greater freedom
of Columbia University when I was just seventeen. I did not
want to trail Deafness with me, and like many other CODAs,
I did not look back. (Davis, 1995: xvii)

Thus, Davis experience as a CODA is ambivalent. I argue that CODA, like

drag in Butlers work, intentionally or not, plays a significant role in a potential
subversion of Deaf identity. While CODAs mimicry of Deaf identity is not
subversive in itself, there are some conditions where certain types of Deaf
mimicry can be disruptive. If CODA is the one who appears to have achieved
the singularity of deafness, then he/she is the one who sees the inconsistency of
his/her inside-out in order to achieve this illusion.

CODA subverts the

distinction between hearing and deafness and effectively mimics both the
cultural model of Deaf and the notion of a true identity as a hearing person.
Davis explains his double inversion as a CODA:

In my growing up, I identified with the Deaf, and yet, to be

completely honest, I never wanted to be deaf. I wanted to be
hearing, to do what hearing did, and in many ways I sought
to leave deafness behind me. But I discovered that what I
was fleeing was not deafness per se, but the deafness
constructed by the hearing world. (Davis, 1995: xix)

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Here, Davis apparently demonstrates the differences between the hearing, Deaf
identity, and the deafness itself being constructed. In identifying with the Deaf,
he reveals the structure of the hearing norm. Here, I suggest a subversion of
the assumed consistency between (dis)ability, discourse, and identity. Unlike
drag that is constantly constructed as the Other of both the norm and the
masculine, Davis, as a CODA, is constructed as the Other of both the deaf
and the hearing. . For, if CODA is a site of reiteration, that is, if he acquires
the Deaf identity through a particular reiteration of itself, then CODA is always
shifted by the reiteration that maintains it.

CODA makes an inconsistent shift: Davis invokes both the construction

of CODA and the construction of the Deaf; he both does and undoes his
identity.

He both embodies his hearing and re-embodies a deaf-like

performance to produce a different identity. The concept of CODA describes a

crucial paradox of the able-bodied matrix; it involves both the construction of
hearing and the construction of deafness.

Following Butlers notion of drag,

CODA can destabilise and reclassify hearing norms through a process of

imitating the Deaf. By expanding Butlers model of drag to the notion of
CODA, I suggest that norms or identities are performative and changeable.

3. Rejection of Impairment/Disability Distinction

In On the Subject of Impairment, Shelly Tremain (2002: 32-47)

argues that social model theorists (in particular, Mike Oliver) often reject the
notion that bio-medicine (biology or impairment) is destiny. But, they then

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suppose that disability is constructed by society upon impaired bodies by

formulating the same destiny simply as inevitable. The result of the social
model, like the bio-medical account, is to make the disabled body become
docile. In the terms of the social model, impairment neither equals, nor
causes, disability; rather, disability is a form of social disadvantage, which is
imposed on top of ones impairment (Tremain, 2002; 41). Following both
Foucault and Butler, Tremain considers that physical disability in the social
model theory is socio-culturally and politically constructed and naturalised, but
it is not naturally related to impairment.

If so, the distinction between

biomedical impairment and socio-cultural disability may be challenged.

Disability, for Tremain, is the discursive means by which a condition of
impairment is established and maintained as prior to culture, as a politically
unbiased materialisation that the socio-cultural builds upon. Tremains concept
of physical disability, when seen as a radical form of social constructionism,
insists that the impairment/disability distinction is itself political, and therefore
a discursive formation of power.

For Tremain, physical disability is impairment that is also socioculturally constructed, and there is no impairment/disability distinction. Both
impairment and physical disability might be either encoded or re-encoded
within discourses.

As Tremain argues, the disciplinary practice of able-

bodiedness in which the disabled subject is trained and alienated from ablebodied people constructs the illusion of impairment as its prior-to-culture fact
or naturalised condition in order to develop its regulatory powers. Tremain
states:

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The testimonials, acts and enactments of the disabled subject,

are performative in so far as the prediscursive impairment
which they are purported to disclose or manifest has no
existence prior to, or apart from, those very constitutive
performances. That the discursive object called impairment
is claimed to be the embodiment of natural deficit, or lack,
furthermore obscures the fact that the constitutive power
relations which define and circumscribe it have already
delimited the dimensions of its reification. (Tremain, 2002:
42)

In other words, impairment is itself a material construction mediated by our

understandings of disability, and there is no impairment as a natural category,
but rather as a disabled (socially constructed) category.

Disability is a

categorical system of connecting our bodies with social norms. There are
similarities between Butlers rejection of sex/gender distinction and Tremains
rejection of impairment/disability distinction.

Mary Duffy: Physical Disability, Femininity, and Performance

The work of Mary Duffy, an Irish performance artist, photographer,

and autobiographically-creative writer, is an effective illustration of Butlers
concept of performativity. She destabilises both the normative able-bodied and
gendered matrix. Like Butler on gender, I shall question the assumption that
certain human performances are natural, illustrating the ways in which ones
trained performance of what we normally associate with ability is forced upon
us by normative able-bodiedness. Duffy uses her body, through performance
art, photography, and other autobiographical texts, to expose her armless body

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and questions the fixed notion of what constitutes a whole body. 41 In this
section, I shall discuss Duffys performance art and photography through the
performative account of physical disability that I have explored earlier. Duffy
performs a non-narrative individual show and addresses the sexual fascinations
of the armless body. Rosemarie Garland Thomson has a clear description of
Duffys performance:

Her performances begin with a totally darkened room that

wipes away all ocular options, clearing the audiences visual
palate. For an almost uncomfortable period of time, the viewers
see nothing. Amid the darkness, a series of enigmatic black
and white images seem to float up; they are piles of smooth
stones that increase in number as each image changes to the
next. During this prolegomenon, this critical introduction, the
clusters of stones grow and the sound of a chugging train that
transforms into a beating heart begins to accompany the images.
The suggestion of embryonic development and fetal heartbeat
becomes clear. Then out of the darkness the form of Mary
Duffy suddenly appears, spotlit from the front and against a
black backboard. The scene dramatically obligates all visual
alternatives except Duffys ultra-white form, forcing the
audience to look at her completely naked body, posed as the
classical nude figure of the Venus de Milo, the quintessential
icon of female beauty (Thomson, 2000: 335-6).

By analysing Duffys work, Thomson (2000) considers that Duffys

performance art addresses the narrative of What happened to you?, and
speaks to able-bodied viewers.

As a result of exposing her body, Duffy

produces a politics of staring. In the able-bodied context, Thomson (2000:

41

Refer to Appendix p.264

- 190 -

335) states: The disabled body summons the stare and the stare mandates the
story, and she continues: This stare-and-tell ritual constitutes disability
identity in the social realm. For her, staring is a sort of process of excluding
the disabled body from the able-bodied matrix. Asking the important question
of why a disabled individual purposely empowers the stare-and-tell routine
that stabilise his/her otherness, Thomson argues that Duffys performance art is
a manifesto for intensely radical affirmations and illustrations where she is in
charge of the conditions of materialisation. Duffys work presents a mode for
positive identity politics and an opportunity to protest cultural images of
disabled people (Thomson, 2000: 335).

Thomson demonstrates that, by

controlling her viewers staring, Duffy undermines the cultural assumption of

disabled people as a simple identity category. She states:

The viewer becomes the starer trained by the social order to

see Duffys body as a pathological lack, a deviation from the
norm that has either been hidden away in which in the
asylum or displayed in medical photographs with a black bar
over the eyes to obliterate personhood.

Hers is the

sensationally abnormal body glimpsed furtively in the

tabloids and yet proscribed as an object of proper bourgeois
looking

But Duffys body also evokes the familiar

contours of beauty. Duffys simultaneously starkly disabled

and

classically

beautiful

body

elicits

confusing

combination of the rapt gaze and the intuitive stare.

(Thomson, 2000: 336)

Thomson also suggests that there are two contrasting ways of looking at
Duffys body. This is realised firstly by staring at the disabled body and by
gazing at the erotically female body, and secondly through the synthesis of the

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stare and the gaze that destabilises the narrative of What happened to you?
Duffys work undermines socio-cultural conjectures about physical disability
and femininity by contrasting and incorporating both identity categories. By
integrating the looking and the narrative, her body and discourses of physical
disability and femininity operate together in a deed of identities, that is,
performativity. Duffys body is connected to the discourse, operating as a
material site that fabricates performativity of disability and the Venus de
Milo.42

In Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge, Petra

Kuppers (2003: 52) considers Duffy as a highly visible disabled performance
artist, using her own body as model for her work. Kuppers argues that
disabled characters (for example, John Merrick in The Elephant Man) in
mainstream representations are often devalued as the Other, positioned
outside the main realm of culture, or rendered invisible (in the end, the
character is deceased) by the discourse of able-bodiedness. On the other hand,
physically disabled people in the lived world, as maintained by Kuppers (2003),
are overly visible, that is, directly labelled by their physical difference.
Kuppers claims that a disabled performer, like Duffy, has to intervene between
these two realms of culture that are segregation from, and revealing to, public
space. She states:

Disabled performers have successfully and visibly taken up the

medium of performance to expand the possibilities of images,

42

Venus de Milo, disfigured statue of a beautiful woman. The observer, or admirer, is

presented with a figure that must represent a beautiful woman, despite being damaged. Would
this be done if the original model was in fact armless and the assumed damage was really a true
reflection of the real woman?
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spaces and positions for their bodies.

In their work with

bodies in public spheres, they attempt to break through

stereotypes of passive disability. (Kuppers, 2003: 49)

Duffys body comes to be seen as a series of meanings that are constructed by

social conceptions; the able-bodied and heterosexual matrix classifies her body
and its meaning in a web of norms. Duffy engages in the mode of performance
to open up the possibility of a new image of her body by controlling her own
stage. She uses darkness, brightness, silence, and sound as a means of making
contact with her audience. Duffy states:

I have been surrounded all my life by images of a culture

which values highly physical beauty and wholeness, a culture
which denies difference. My identity as a woman with a
disability is one that is strong sensual, sexual and fluid,
flexible and political. (Duffy, 1989: 6-7, quoted in Kuppers,
2003: 52)

Duffy performs, simultaneously, as a disabled woman, and as the Venus de

Milo, in order to establish ambivalence with regard to her armless body. On
her stage, her body reaches the standard of Western beauty by connecting it to
the Venus de Milo the Greek ideal figure. Following Butlers ideas, it can be
argued that Duffy accomplishes a subversion of compulsory able-bodiedness
by performing or re-signifying the classical, armless-nude figure of the Venus
de Milo.

It is important to recognise that the domain of Duffys performance is

fundamentally different from the domain of the freak show. In freak shows,

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the disabled body looses its political power because it is devalued as the
Other by the able-bodied norm. Indeed, when Duffys body is seen as the
Venus de Milo, her body is robbed of its disability in shifting socio-cultural
meanings. In addition, demonstrating such openness in her work destabilises
the fixed meaning of the disabled body, and both connects and disconnects it
from a border between disability and femininity. The policing of the disabled
body is precisely the sort of boundaries that Duffy resists.

Thus, Duffy

addresses how ambivalence of the boundary between the able-bodied beauty

and the disabled freak. Her spectators are moved back and forth between
facing Duffys living body, and perceiving the body through remembrance of
the sculpture of the Venus de Milo that has formed a standard for female
beauty. I consider Duffys work as a form of questioning the norm. Like
Butlers example of drag, as a synthesis of both freak and classical beauty, her
performance positions her body as both the ideal and the rejected. In carrying
out this performance on the stage, Duffy confronts many contradictions within
the norm. This intersection between two oppositional images is an extremely
complex site from which to explore the double formations of the body and
identity that are mixed up within many of the able-bodied concepts of what the
normal is.

One of Duffys photographic works (1997: 182) is a black and white

portrait of her naked and sexual hyper-white body standing straight and
contrasting against a black background. In this photographic image, Duffy
becomes a statue of a woman. This statue can be interpreted in many different
ways. If the viewer is not aware of Duffys armless-ness, he/she might see this
image as an artistic creature, but not as a lived body. Duffys photographic

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work demonstrates an amorous image and a complete object being looked at.
As a result, if we view Duffys photographic work as the classical nude figure
of the Venus de Milo, then her disabled body becomes hard to believe, and if
we see her work as the manifestation of the armless body, then this image of
the Venus de Milo fades away. It becomes an optical illusion, like the Rubin
Vase/faces figure.43 Duffy states:

I began by creating my own images and in so doing, I had

begun to create my own reality as a proud, disabled woman.
For ten years now, I have been looking at and exploring
different aspects of how my disability affects my life. All of
it is challenging for me and very difficult I have been
stared at all my life [By] standing there stark naked and
vulnerable, it feels like I am holding up a mirror to your
voyeurism and saying, So you want to look, do you? I will
give you something to look at. (Duffy, 1997: 183)

Bodies That Matter: Towards A Collage of Performativity

In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, Judith Butler

(1993) develops the Derridian account of performativity and reconsiders
gender identity. She starts by criticising John L. Austins (1962) use of the
performative. The performative, for Austin, is a semiotic gesture, which is
both being and doing, and it is intelligible within a system that is socially
constructed and semiotic. Butler uses one of Austins own examples of a
performative in a wedding ceremony, in particular, she relates: I pronounce

43

When one looks at the figure one will recognise either a vase or two facial profiles. Usually,
there is one object that projects from the background, however, in this figure, the vase (the
object) and two facial profiles (the background) are reversible. I found the similar illusion in
Duffys photographic work.
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you husband and wife, which brings about a new state of being. This event
produces the reality, rather than reflecting an already fixed reality. The priests
statement of representing a heterosexual couple as husband and wife is what
makes them become married. In the event, the priest shifts the status of this
couple within the public sphere. As Butler (1993: 13) describes, Within
speech act theory, a performative is that discursive practice that enacts or
produces that which it names. Thus, a speech act forms that which it names
by relation to the norm that is reiterated and then performed in the statement.
Nevertheless, as Austin himself reveals, this performative depends upon a
social system that renders it intelligible, naturalised, fixed, and normalised.

Butler develops her notion of performativity by using Derridas critical

reading of Austins work. For Derrida (1986 [1967]), speech is always within
writing, and there is no core of meaning and no self-generated transparent
meaning that is able to fix the relation between signifying subjects and
signified objects. Questioning her first notion of performativity in Gender
Trouble, Butler develops Derridas understanding of performativity as
citationality and reconsiders the notion of gender performativity. Butler writes:

Performativity is thus not a singular act, for it is always a

reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it
acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or
dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition.
(Butler, 1993: 12)

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Thus, the norm that controls the body cannot replicate and maintain itself;
rather, the norm has to be repeated in order to be replicated and maintained.
For Butler, gender performance is not a singular act by a subject who simply
decides which gender to become, but rather it is a forced reiteration of the norm
that constructs the sexed and gendered subject. Nevertheless, this claim that it
is essential for the norm to be reiterated in order for it to sustain its efficiency
means that the norm is never fixed nor finalised. Butler explains:

There are for the most part compulsory performances, ones

which none of us choose, but which each of us is forced to
negotiate Such norms are continually haunted by their own
inefficacy; hence, the anxiously repeated effort to install and
augment their jurisdiction. (Butler, 1993: 237)

Derridas notion of citationality allows Butler to reconsider the paradox of

subjectivation that she grasps from Foucault. Butler (1993: 15) states: the
paradox of subjectivation (assujettisement) is precisely that the subject who
would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms.
One is conflictingly both subject to the system of power that restricts and
forces ones performance of the norm, and simultaneously permitted to adopt
the position of a subject in the system. This makes it difficult to see how
resistance and destabilisation may occur.

However, Butlers theory of

performativity transcends Foucaults theory of subjectivity to the extent that it

offers citationality as that which intervenes between the system and the subject
that is shaped and forced by it. By blending Derridas notion of citationality or
iterability into her theory of performativity, Butler moves beyond Foucaults
contradiction of power and discusses the complex relationship between the

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heterosexual matrix and the homosexual subject who contests the system. This
notion allows Butler to see the connection between the sexed subject and the
social norm that governs the system. For one to be normal, there must be a
norm to which normal matches, but also it must not seem as though it is only
a citation of that norm. In summary, performativity is a discursive practice
that acts out or produces an identity that constructs through citation and
reiteration of the norm.

Butler, however, wants to destabilise the status quo of the heterosexual

matrix. For her, If we repeat performances in different contexts then different
meanings can emerge which can undermine and subvert dominant ones
(Alsop, Fitzsimons, and Lennon, 2002: 104). However, we cannot always
predict when meanings will be subversive. That is why, in Gender Trouble,
Butler had seen drag as simply subversive. However, in Bodies That Matter,
she argues that drag is not necessarily or complexly subversive.

Butler argues that if sex and sexuality (desire) are considered as

performative reiteration that has been inscribed in sexual differences, this
reiteration promotes the possibility for subversion.

Butler uses Derridean

(deconstructive) techniques to reveal the gaps in social norms and cognitive

structures that are often assumed to be unquestionable and natural, and then
opens the possibility for subversion.

Normative systems are not simply

established, but are repeated in a way that reverses and shifts their original
connotations. For Butler, however, reiteration does not have to be docile. In
my reading of Butler, reiteration upholds the opportunity for a performative
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collapse that opens up the possibility for the subversive re-symbolisation of

these dualistically fixed systems.

Once gender norms have been revealed as regulatory narratives, then

the fixity of one real gender to a particularly sexed body is itself exposed as a
narrative. Gender can be seen as a compulsory reiteration of the heterosexual
norm that reconstructs itself with every reiteration. Whilst one cites a norm in
its reiteration, one also reveals the routine of gender norm. Reading Bodies
That Matter, I suggest that gender should be acknowledged as a collage. In
my view, a collage is not simply an artistic method that is basically the
recitations of already-existing materials as a new complex whole, that is to say,
a work produced by gluing together pieces of newspaper, magazine, other
textual materials, or photographs to a flat surface to construct an artistic image.
Rather, it is illustrative of Butlers notion of performativity that explains the
synthesis of the fragments of the subject as opposed to the essentialist account
of identity that marks the essence of the subject. For, as a synthesis of various
copies, collage challenges the very notion of an essence, and thereby makes us
rethink the boundaries in which our identities are categorised. In the following
section, I shall explore a poem written by Mary Duffy. I maintain that collage,
as a model for reading physical disability, may allow the subversion of the
able-bodied matrix, particularly with its synthesis of fragments of the disabled
subject.

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Disabled Bodies That Matter: Duffys Making Choices

In a series of her autobiographical poems, Making Choices, Duffy

(1994) speaks about her performativity of being or becoming a physically
disabled woman. This series is a good illustration of how political, complex,
sexual, and multiple a disabled womans identity is, indeed, a collage. Duffys
work that I shall discuss here is about her armless body, and speaks about both
her experience of bodily boundaries and uneasiness. Unlike her performance
art of mimicking the Venus de Milo and her photographic work that I explored
earlier, Duffys poem encourages me to understand her armless-ness as
distinctive and simultaneously exposes her struggles to achieve and undermine
the able-bodied norm. In reading this work we cannot simply replace the
concept of gender with that of physical disability. Rather, what is explored is
the complex incorporation between identity categories. In Duffys case this is
femininity and physical disability.

When femininity and disability are

reiterated, each in the context of the Other, neither conforms to an original

norm.

Making Choices consists of eight poems: somebodys daughter

CHILD, my own WOMEN, sisters LOVE, sisters DEPENDENCE,
WHOLE, HOLE, making choices DOUBT, and

making choice

DIGNITY. All of these poems are mercilessly honest about the subjectivity
of a physically disabled woman within an able-bodied matrix that Duffy is
nonetheless attempting to subvert. However, as well as complexity, there is
love and pleasure in her poems. Here, I have selected the second poem, my
own WOMEN for further exploration:

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my own
WOMEN
I am growing up,
and you think that I will never go away,
that I will always live with you
be washed and dressed by you
the perfect offspring who never leaves the nest.
you teach me to be independent,
to be strong,
to have my own opinions,
to earn my own living.
neither of us knows
that one day, I will dress and wash myself
and live independently.
but I havent been programmed or conditioned
to be anyones wife,
lover,
or mother,
you didnt teach me to serve anybody,
to wash and peel potatoes.
you appreciate my intelligence,
creativity, wit, sharpness
and humour.
you call me maire cook
by refusing to inoculate me against rubella,
you ignore my sexuality.
(Duffy, 1994: 26 in Mustnt Grumble: Writing by Disabled Women)

This poem does what Janet Price and Margirit Shildrick (2002: 62) describe as
[addressing] disability from the perspective of the embodied subject. It
allows the reader to see Duffy as the Other of the able-bodied feminine even
as it challenges such standards of able-bodiedness. This work of Duffys
identity as a disabled woman leaks from her inside, while the able-bodied
matrix from outside of her identity seeps in. In other words, Duffy in this piece
of poetry has turned her gaze inward, questioning the specificity of her body.
Duffys shifting position between femininity and disability in the poem

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provokes an awakening of uneasiness and curiosity of being a woman without

arms.

The interpretation of you is uncertain. You could be her mother, or

the able-bodied matrix. Surprisingly, Duffy does not use the term disability
to describe her physical condition in this poem. Without using the specific
terms, her poem opens up many possible questions about femininity, sexuality,
independence, able-bodiedness, and her life in relation to her physical
difference. In the able-bodied matrix, an able-bodied woman has to become a
wife, a lover, and a mother who can wash and peal potatoes. Duffy, as a
disabled woman, is frustrated by both the able-bodied matrix and patriarchy.
Questioning both the able-bodied and masculine power, her poem argues that
she, in this instance, is not prepared to answer the needs and desires of a
disabled woman. Even though Duffy writes I am growing up/and you think
that I will never go away/ that I will always live with you/ be washed and
dressed by you/ the perfect offspring who never leaves the nest, she is very
certain of her objective to explore an alternative to the prescribed notions she
has had to live her life with. Here, Duffy uses only first and second person
pronouns. The reader may imagine that you can be her mother, the ablebodied matrix, or Duffy herself, in the matrix. Unlike the pronoun she, the
pronoun you that Duffy uses in this poem, is not sexualised or gendered.
Duffy states that she is the perfect offspring who never leaves the nest. This
is not straightforward. Duffy is being ironic and undermines the idea of what it
is to be a perfect offspring. She is too perfect in this respect.

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Duffy continues: you teach me to be independent/ to be strong/ to

have my own opinions/ to earn my own living. What she expresses here is
that a series of able-bodied injunctions establish and maintain the boundaries of
impairment through the threat of failing to be normal. For Duffy, identity as
a disabled woman is seen as sort of denial of becoming the able-bodied. Is the
writing about what she is not a way of subverting it, or is it supporting and
perpetuating the able-bodied female ideal?

Does she redefine able-bodied

culture in her own terms and take control of it? Or, is she seeking to be as
close to it as possible in order to be less on the outside and closer to the inside?
Here, we can see the complexity and unpredictability of the repetition of norms.

We have accepted the norms of dominant culture; we have attuned

them to fit into our condition. By doing so, we have the chance to redefine
these norms in our own way. Butler discusses the notion of proper terms of the
heterosexual matrix, and states:

There is no subject prior to its constructions, and neither is

the subject determined by those constructions; it is always
the nexus, the non-space of cultural collision, in which the
defined to resignify or repeat the very terms which constitute
the we cannot be summarily refused, but neither can they
be followed in strict obedience.

It is the space of this

ambivalence which opens up the possibility of a reworking

of the very terms by which subjectivation proceeds and
fails to proceed. (Butler, 1993: 124)

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By adopting able-bodied cutures ways of perceiving as her own, Duffy

undermines the able-bodied norm and in this process, she acts to reverse and
displace the norm as Butler (1993: 123) describes.

I consider that Duffy is in the situation of a particular ambivalence that

suggests the contrary condition of being caught up in the able-bodied matrix
that she has constructed, and then, that she resists. Both of Duffys situations
exist simultaneously, forming and reforming the lively character of her
disabled femininity.

Duffy experiences physical disability as emotionally and continuously

embedded in her body. Hence, her struggle is not simply the unintelligibility of
her bodys performance in terms of social norms, but a conflicted quest of her
own identity experienced as being established in matter and constructed
through her corporeality.

Duffy embodies and performs her own specificity.

For Duffy, her formation of corporeality is formed by her inability of

performing the ideal formation of the female body. Duffys conflicts here
between two positions of embodiment, disability and femininity, are not simple
antagonisms. It is rather the case that both Duffys performance art and poetry
show the inter-action of both categories of her bodily differences. I suggest
that she gives us a way of perceiving the body that both recognises the value of
its specificity and accepts the social mediation of our performances. In the
final section of this chapter, I shall explore how the specificity of corporeality
may be merged with the performativity of Butlers account.

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What About the Body? Undoing the Performative Collage

For Butler, bodies are theorised and practiced as discursive

phenomena. Butler denies a theoretical distinction of sex from gender, or of
biology from socio-culture, but her ideas have been criticised for failing to pay
sufficient attention to the materiality of the body and experience of
embodiment. Oliver (1996: 35) argues that disablement is a result of social
oppression and nothing to do with the body. However, his theory has been
criticised for its over-socialisation of aspects of impairments and disability,
the overlooking of effects of impairments and the rejection of the concept of
normality in the sense of average human functioning (Terzi, 2004: 155).
Some feminist disability theorists, such as Jenny Morris, Shelly Tremain,
Susan Stocker, and Alison Kafer, argue that social model theorists have failed
to consider the experiences of those who experience pain as a consequence of
their impairments, or who necessitate, to a large extent, assistance beyond
public access.

Jenny Morris (2001), in Impairment and Disability:

Constructing on Ethics of Care That Promotes Human Rights, questions her

previous position as a social model theorist, and states:

[We] have sometimes colluded with the idea that the

typical disabled person is a young man in a wheelchair who
is fit, never ill, and whose only needs concern a physically
accessible environment. In fact, the largest group of disabled
people are those with learning difficulties (that is, cognitive
impairments), and most disabled people with a physical
impairment are women, are over the age of 60, have a
chronic or progressive condition such as arthritis or multiple

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sclerosis, and feel unwell a lot of the time, and if they use a
wheelchair they only do so occasionally. (Morris, 2001: 9)

Morris describes physical disability and disabled peoples experience, and

seeks to recognise corporeal specificities. Morris argues that not all disabled
people have the same experience, because there are different degrees to which
an impaired individual becomes socio-culturally disabled. Furthermore, there
are different degrees to which a disabled individual is bio-medically impaired.
These criticisms also seem able to be directed at performative accounts. In
insisting on the constructedness of both impairment and disability being only
role-played by the body itself seems to be ignored.

Consequently, the

experiences of those suffering from bodily pains, or other corporeal restrictions,

seem to be ignored. I argue that socio-culture intermingles with biology, and
that biology is a source for performativity, but it is not itself fixed.

It too is

performative, formed, deconstructive, and lived. There is a corporeality that is

not always taken into account, but which is connected to the performative. In
reality, the performative is itself inscribed by the body.

In Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, Jay Prosser

(1998) articulates his experience of sexual transition from a female body to a
male body. He argues Transsexuality reveals the extent to which embodiment
forms an essential base to subjectivity; but it always reveals that embodiment is
as much about feeling one inhabits material flesh as the flesh itself (Prosser,
1998: 7). He seeks to explore the embodiment of border crossings. Prosser
maintains that lack of attention to the body is a limitation of Butlers
performative theory of gender. Prosser wants to make room for describing the
transsexual body. He explains that corporeality is an important and disturbing
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issue for many transsexuals who submit themselves to difficult and painful
surgery in order to change their mode of embodiment. Whilst Butler suggests
the performative limit that remains indefinable through the destabilisation of
the norm, Prosser suggests that there is a material limit that remains inevitable.
Yet both thinkers demonstrate that the biological and socio-cultural categories
of our bodies are not separate entities, but are closely entangled, even when
they appear to be in conflict. Materiality is not destiny, yet it cannot be simply
accommodated by a performative account.

Materiality imposes particular

limits on performative or discursive possibilities beyond socio-cultural

influences. To claim this, however, is not to deny that our understanding of
materiality is socially mediated, I shall offer an example that illustrates the
ways in which the changeability of corporeality renders the question of a
purely discursive body problematic.

Many of the athletes in the Paralympic games are healthy individuals

who have trained their bodies to perform extraordinary feats. In many ways,
they parallel bodybuilders because they also change their bodily forms.
Paralympic athletes are recognised as physically disabled, however, like
bodybuilders, they shape their bodies through training. They are the product of
corporeal performativity. More obviously, they not only disrupt the conception
of able-bodiedness, but they also conflict with the norm by merely adding to
the presently accepted figures of the differently able.

To consider the extent of this performativity, I need to compare

Paralympians with impaired people whose conditions are curable.

The

impaired person who turns to the medical establishment to obtain treatment that

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makes her or him into an able-bodied person is quite different from the
Paralympic athlete who denies, or is denied, being able-bodied and acts out
disability in a particular context. An able-bodied identity turns on a notion of
authenticity, an original body that fixes identity. The identity of Paralympic
athletes reveals another possibility. Most of them believe that they are not only
disabled, but also differently able-bodied, and they are identified as such by
others. Thus, the performativity of Paralympic athletes who perform their
ability is different from the transformation of impaired people who desire to be
the able-bodied. The point is that neither disability nor impairment is a fixed
entity. We not only categorise others but form, perform and transform our own
embodied identities within different contexts.

Our bodies are not merely

biological material providing a sheet of cartridge paper for the collage of

identity to be created upon. Our bodies can be reformed and transformed to
embody discourses about impairment or disability. The bodies, which I have
explored here, are not simply either biologically given or discursively
constructed, but simultaneously corporeal and discursive.

In Putting Myself in the Picture, Jo Spence (1988) explores her own

experience as a breast cancer patient, focussing on mastectomy.

In one

photographic image, she produces a picture of herself with the caption

Property of Jo Spence written on her left breast before the operation (Spence,
1988: 157). Spence, like Prosser, links this operative and post-operative to an
understanding and participating gaze that seeks to touch, not recoil from,
bodily change (Davis, 1995: 149). Confronting her own bodily change due to
the operation and aging, she questions all assumptions of normalcy, beauty,
and ideals. She confronts the materiality of her body at the same time as

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deconstructing and reconstructing the meanings that mediate our relationship to

it. Spence (1988: 172) explains phototherapy as a range of possibilities which
can be brought into play at will, examined, questioned, accepted, transformed,
discarded.

Spence takes control to form and reform herself.

Her

photographic work shows her transformation into a different body and contests
the notion of the normal body. The transformation of her body must be
understood in its socio-cultural context, but its corporeality cannot be ignored.
Spence states in a dialogue with the British disabled activist and photographer,
David Hevey:

Having been diagnosed, I abandoned what I though I knew,

which was a series of stereotypes about cancer. Id only
experienced them through other people and it was
something I couldnt bear to think about... The medical
profession is God, yet in my family, the doctors never
delivered the goods... It wasnt acknowledged like that,
because, like many non-disabled people, they were held
in check by drugging: this is how the bronchitis, depression,
arthritis and so on were dealt with. (Hevey, 1992: 120121)

Thus, Spence seeks to reject the idea that medical discourse is productive of
her identity. When a doctor diagnoses a patient and says it is a cancer, the
doctor is informing an already distinguishable condition of the patients body.
Spence also states:

Explaining

my

experience

as

patient

and

the

contradictions between ways in which the medical

profession controls womens bodies and imaginary bodies

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we inhibit as women, was most exhilarating. Learning new

and more subtle strategies, beyond aggression and
dogmatism, has delighted me and shows me I am moving in
a more healthy direction. (Spence, 1988: 156)

Unlike Butler, but along the lines of Prosser, Spence considers the materiality
of the body, recognises the importance of corporeality, and adapts the socially
conceptualised perspective of her bodily experience. The consideration of
corporeality requires us to rethink Butlers lack of attention to the specificities
of the physical body. I suggest that the body as lived is specifically formed as
a way of experiencing particular corporeal conditions.

What I have explored in this chapter is a performative

recognition of the corporeality of our embodied identities as ways of
experiencing different bodies. My identity, for instance, is constituted as ways
of highlighting my corporeal specificities, such as cerebral palsy, femaleness,
and Japaneseness. My corporeal specificities are, what Alsop, Fizsimons, and
Lennon (2002, 181) call biology-as-lived. Thus, I value the materiality of
my body and its main part in my identity without slipping back to essentialism.
Indeed, the binary structure between the discursive and the material is itself
destabilised.

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Chapter 5 - Undoing the Other: Between Boundaries:

Viewing Steven Spielbergs E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
(1982)

Introduction: A Personal Encounter with the Abject

When Steven Spielbergs E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial was first released

at the cinemas in 1982, I was ten years old. I assumed it was just another
science fiction or horror film about aliens; I did not intend to see it at all. I
suspect this is because I started being called E.T. in the classroom at my
elementary school.

My classmates used this film as an excuse to draw

attention to my disabled body and voice. They even asked me to point my

index finger towards them as if I was E.T. One day I cried in front of the boy
who, I thought, was making fun of my physical disability by using the film
representation of E.T. However, when I did finally watch the film, my viewing
experience was simultaneously laden with identifications and repudiations of
the complex image of abjection portrayed in the film. I felt very confused at
seeing this abject image of the small alien creature on the screen because I had
a similar experience in my school life. Thus, when I confronted this small
alien, I also confronted myself. This may have been the first occasion when I
wondered if I read cultural texts in a different way from my classmates.

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (2002 [1982]) is a science-fiction fantasy

film and Steven Spielbergs very personal masterpiece.44 The film is about the

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friendship between a curious, fatherless, suburban boy and a lost,

compassionate and bewildered visitor from another planet who is accidentally
left behind on Earth. According to Spielberg (2002 [1982]), this film was
intentionally shot from a lower camera angle, that is, from a childs or the
small aliens perspective. His intension was to encourage younger spectators
to identify with the characters, to simulate how intolerable and threatening
adults appear to children, showing them from the waist or knees down, and to
make adult spectators experience their own childhood again.

Indeed, even

today, this film makes me feel my own childhood again.

In hindsight, I believe that my classmate who called me E.T. may

have not meant to associate me with the alienation of abjection but was perhaps
suggesting a more positive way of reading the abject. It is possible that my
physical and vocal differences, due to cerebral palsy, were fascinating to the
ten-year-old boy.

He experienced both fear and curiosity in viewing my

physical and vocal differences, but his viewing experience was not necessarily
the process of othering my cerebral palsy in a particular way. Synchronously
with the ten-year-old protagonist in the film, Elliott (Henry Thomas), who
experiences the process of transforming (and accepting) difference with a lost
visitor from another planet, I, as a spectator, also experienced that process. As
well as my own process of transforming an image of my physical difference,
my classmate may also have gone through the process of transforming it.

44

The DVD, I watched for this chapter is the special edition for its twenty-year anniversary. It
is a longer version with additional scenes deleted out of the 1982s original, sound re-mastering
and digital effects to enhance E.T.s facial expressions, the spaceship, E.T.s lost-his-way in the
forest, and so on. However, the film narrative itself is same as the original. This DVD has
some additional explanations from Spielberg, the scriptwriter, producers, actors, and other staff.
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This chapter seeks to theorise the disabled subversion of the ablebodied matrix by using Julia Kristevas theory of abjection and to find new
models to undo the boundary between the normal and the abnormal.

In

particular, it examines the subversion between the able-bodied and the disabled.
As described earlier, my classmates reaction to my physical difference, in
parallel with Elliots reaction to E.T.s physical difference, and more
significantly, my reaction to E.T.s and my own physical differences, are
ambivalent and mixed. This ambivalent and mixed feeling about differences is
integral to this chapters main thrust abjection.

The mixed emotion of

repulsion and fascination evinced in these reaction is

Kristeva maintains,

characteristic of what she describes as abjection, an attitude in which things are

repudiated and yet held on to(Gilbert and Lennon, 2005: 106).

This

ambivalent emotion is characteristic of the theoretical tool that is essential to

my understanding of the disabled body.

In Powers of Horror: An Essay on

Abjection, Kristeva (1982) theorises abjection by emphasising the possibility,

multiplicity and fluidity of identities and differences constructed between
legitimate boundaries. In order to illustrate why I favour a Kristevan approach,
I shall critique Butlers account of abjection in Gender Trouble: Feminism and
Subversion of Identity (1999 [1990]) and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive
Limits of Sex (1993) by utilising Kristevas theory as found in Powers of
Horror: An Essay on Abjection. In understanding Kristevas theory of the
abject, I shall take a critical and political stance. Abjection, in my reading of
Kristeva, is to be understood as an ever-changing process of becoming a
subject.

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Drawing on Kristevas theory of abjection, I shall draw attention to the

possibility of undermining the boundary between the self and the Other and
between the able-bodied and the disabled. To me, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
created an imaginary world where I might be able to become an embodied
subject and accept my own physical difference. I find this film fascinating
because it pushes me beyond the boundary. I shall explore how boundaries are,
or can be, undermined. The images of the small alien and my own body were
shifted from the edge to the centre of subjectivity. In this chapter, I shall
explore the shift from self-denial to self-acceptance of my own physical
disability. I suggest that my viewing experience of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
constitutes a part of my subjectivity, and that my embodiment of physical
difference constitutes my mode of seeing the film in multiple ways. Thus, I
propose to reconsider the notion of abjection as a theoretical tool that can be
used creatively to explore my own physical difference.

Julia Kristevas Theory of Abjection

Julia Kristevas work is different from Luce Irigarays work in many

senses. Whereas Irigaray has a propensity to discuss the issues of sexual
difference and distinguish the feminine outside of the masculine symbolic,
Kristeva examines the issues of difference, rather than specifically sexual
difference, and refuses to accept any clear distinction of the feminine from the
masculine.

Kelly Oliver (1993), in Julia Kristevas Feminist Revolution

considers that Kristeva:

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[avoids] sexual difference because she does not want to

perpetuate traditional accounts of binary sexes by focusing
on the limiting way in which sexual difference operates in
Western culture. She does not, however, avoid a discussion
of sexual difference altogether. She locates the beginnings
of sexual difference in the childs relation to its mother.
(Oliver, 1993: 97)

By pursuing Kristeva in this way, I seek to discontinue traditional accounts of

binary oppositions which pay attention to the restrictive way in which the
Other is socio-culturally formed.

I shall explain Kristevas theory of

abjection first, and then move on to utilise it in an exploration of physical

disability.

In this section, I shall illustrate one of the main processes of becoming

the subject; what Julia Kristeva terms abjection, that is, the condition of
expelling what is not the subject and thus establishing a contour of a constantly
fluid subject. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristeva (1982) is
interested in how boundaries around the subject and objects emerge; those
boundaries that allow one to experience oneself as detached from the maternal
environment. As maintained by Kristeva, the abject exists at the boundaries of
the self, that which is neither subject nor object. The abject is constituted by
bodily materials such as blood, urine, and bodily fluids, materials that remind
us that we have been derived from the maternal body. The abject has a
compelling impact upon the body itself, often causing bodily reactions such as
vomiting. Ultimately, it threatens the logic of the subject/object binary.

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Kristevas concept is based on the assumption that a childs sexual

identity is formed through a struggle to separate from its mothers body
(Oliver, 1993: 97). The identity, the contour of the subject, is not the result of
the establishment of the Other nor the object in the Freudian sense that leads
to the demarcation of the conscious and the unconscious.

Rather, it is

constructed through the childs first encounter of its own body, experiencing
pleasure in feeding and cleaning, and thus occurs in connection to its caregiver,
generally, its mother. This encounter establishes the first boundary between
what I is and what not-I is. Kristeva (1982: 1) states: The abject is not an
ob-ject facing me, which I can name or imagine Nor is it an ob-jest, an
otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. The abject has
only one quality of the object that of being opposed to I. Expelling what is
not the self, abjection is a process of establishing boundaries of subjectivity.
But, abjection is never expelled completely. It always remains on the edge of
consciousness, disturbing the ever-uncertain contour of subjectivity. Thus,
Kristeva explores the site of the subject and questions the idea of a fixed
identity that is based upon the Other as a result of pushing the abject out of
the subject. She argues that abjection is often portrayed as ambivalence, an
ambivalence that presents itself as a feeling that can be transferred to an object
and acquired by the subject.

Our boundaries of the self are temporarily disrupted as we engage the

unbearable site of being not yet, or no longer yet (Kristeva, 1982: 12).
Abjection establishes the subject/object distinction by eliminating something
that was once part of the subject. It is essential for an ego, the sense of self, to
come out. Since the abject is not completely repressed, it does not dissipate

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from consciousness but stays at the edge of consciousness as a prompter of the

subjects vulnerability. The abject is that part of subject (which cannot be
categorized as an object) which it attempts to expel. The abject is the symptom
of the objects failure to fill the subject or to define and anchor the subject
(Gross, 1990: 87).

Thus, we feel uneasiness and shock when we confront

images of the abject because of their ambivalence, whether the abject is outside
or inside, a part of ourselves. We identify ourselves in opposition to the abject
that nauseates us, and it is that disruption of the boundary between the self and
the other that threatens. The abject is, in fact, similar to ourselves.

Kristeva, in particular, claims that the mirror stage, as Lacan sees it,
may constitute the I, however, she considers that, prior to this stage, the infant
seeks to separate itself from others in order to acquire boundaries between
itself and others. As may be seen in the arguments developed in chapter two,
for Lacan, the infant primarily forms his subjectivity through identifying
something that looks like him, and then through rejecting something that is
strange to him, and this infant is male. Kristeva, on the other hand, suggests
that the Lacanian masculine subject needs to be questioned.

According to

Kristeva, abjection first takes place when the infant is in the imaginary
unification with its mother prior to the mirror stage. At this stage, the infant
does not have any sense of the self, it has not acquired subjectivity.
process of abjection assists it in acquiring a contour of the subject.

The

In Julia

Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity, Sara Beardsworth (2004) explains

how Kristeva defines abjection:

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Abjection, then, captures a condition of the subject that is

sent to its boundaries where there is, as such, neither
subject nor object, only the abject The psychoanalytic
account of presymbolic subject formation illuminates this
thought by presenting abjection as a structure that
composes the fearsome beginnings of otherness, where
there is as yet no other, and no space for the ego to come
into being.

What abjection means here is the struggle to

set up such a space, a struggle, precisely, with what is not

parted from, and which threaten to collapse that space:
paradigmatically, the mothers body. (Beardsworth, 2004:
83)

Abjection materialises when identity formation is occurring, when the child is

separating itself from the mother, and when the sense of self is threatened.
Kristeva considers that prior to the mirror stage, one starts to distinguish
oneself from others in order to acquire boundaries between self and others.
This is achieved through a process of rejecting what seems to be a part of
oneself, abjection: I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the
same motion through which I claim to establish myself (Kristeva, 1982: 3).
In Freuds Oedipus and Kristevas Narcissus: Three Heterogeneities,
Beardsworth (2005: 54-77) explains two main transformations in Kristevas
theory of subjectivity:

[One] is the alterations in subjectivity that belong to our

separation from nature, or psychic autonomy, which is
necessary for relation.

The other is the alternations in

subjectivity that belong to our continuing to be part of

nature.

This is equally necessary for relation since the

breach in separation turns on our exposure, vulnerability,

and dependence, whose acknowledgment is necessary if the
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negotiation of pain, loss, and death is to be possible.

(Beardsworth, 2005: 73)

Thus, for Kristeva, this ambivalent process of becoming the subject, that is,
abjection, is essential. Separating what is regarded as the Other to the self, it
is a process for recognising the boundaries of subjectivity. Noelle McAfee
explains:

What is abjected is radically excluded but never banished

altogether. It hovers at the periphery of ones existence,
consistently challenging ones own tenuous borders of
selfhood. What makes something abject and not simply
repressed is that it does not entirely disappear from
consciousness. It remains as both an unconscious and a
conscious threat to ones own clean and proper self. The
abject is what does not respect boundaries. It beseeches
and pulverizes the subject. (McAfee, 2004: 46)

For Kristeva, subjectivity is not constituted simply in the symbolic realm. She
brings the psychic impact of bodily processes back into the Lacanian discourse
and focuses on the significance of the body in the constitution of subjectivity.

Whereas Lacan considers identification through the mirror stage,

Kristeva sees identification as abjection, that is, self-recognition of its body.
Kristeva, challenging Lacans notion of the imaginary self, highlights the
significance of an embodied self.

For her, one needs to embrace the

ambivalence between the self and the Other and to recognise the
changeability of oneself. The abject is unable to establish and maintain itself in

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the symbolic order. The abject, as a psychic formation, is a negotiator between

the self and the Other in the process of becoming a subject.

In Strangers to Ourselves, Kristeva (1991) elaborates on the concept of

abjection in a socio-political context. She regards abjection as an imaginative
position that makes one perceive oneself as the Other. She considers
abjection as a process of undoing or dismantling the Other. This is the
Other that I have come to perceive after viewing E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
(2002 [1982]) as something that destabilises my own otherness; I shall explore
this in later sections of this chapter. Kristeva suggests that attitudes against the
Other are held in order to avoid acknowledge that otherness is within us.
What Kristeva is arguing is that prejudices held against the other are a
protection against recognition of the otherness within so we need to
acknowledge ourselves as foreigners. She writes:

Living with the other, with the foreigner, confronts us with

the possibility or not of being an other. It is not simply
humanistically a matter of our being able to accept the
other, but of being in his place, and this means to imagine
and make oneself other for oneself. (Kristeva, 1991: 13)

She also states:

[The] foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our

identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which
understanding and affinity founder. By recognizing him
within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself
The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my

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difference arises, and he disappears when we all

acknowledge ourselves as foreigners (Kristeva, 1991: 1)

Kristeva argues that the individual struggles to see otherness within him/herself.
We are strangers to ourselves. Kristeva (1991: 7) considers that the stranger is
constantly in motion and does not belong to any place, any time, any love.
The stranger both facilitates and disallows a clear and fixed boundary between
the self and the other. Kristevas notion of strangers to ourselves echoes the
Freudian notion of the uncanny or unheimliche.

According to Freud (1990

[1919]), the uncanny develops its horror not from something completely
strange but from something strangely recognisable or recognisably strange
that overwhelms ones effort to detach oneself from it: the uncanny is that
class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long
familiar (Freud, 1990 [1919]: 340).

McAfee (2004) describes:

Freud thought that many of the subjects desires had to be

denied, submerged in the unconscious, in order for
subjectivity and civilization to develop. Freud addresses
the continual possibility of the return of the repressed,
but so long as it doesnt return, it is well out of site. There
is no such luck with the abject. It remains on the periphery
of consciousness, a looming presence, as weve seen is the
case with filth and death. So, too, with the mother. In fact,
this fear of falling back into the mothers body,
metaphorically at least, of losing ones own identity, is
what Freud identified as the ultimate source of the feeling
of uncanniness or, in German, das Unheimliche (literally,
the un-home-like). (McAfee, 2004: 48)

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The uncanny is not simply about horror, but strangely about nostalgia.
Something is uncanny because we may recognise it as something very close to
us but not ourselves. The maternal body is uncanny, for Kristeva, because it
takes us back to the pre-symbolic. Yet, at the uncanny stage of identification,
that is, the process of abjection, we are confused because we seek to reject and
identify with our (m)other, and therefore we are the Other to ourselves. The
uncanny, the abject for Kristeva, is the mixed sense of self and otherness. The
(m)other is separated from her baby (the self) since she is separated from
possessing the selfness for her baby her babys life. The (m)other provides
the uncanny in terms of positioning it in our subjectivity. The uncanny is
disturbing precisely because it focuses upon a simultaneous feeling of
identification and rejection, a sense of being both embodied and disembodied,
and both being the self and the Other. The uncanny emerges when we
unexpectedly stumble upon a position of what has been suppressed by the norm
or the symbolic order, that is, the (m)other, or the otherness, within us.

The uncanny deconstructs the fixed sense of self that seems to be

separable from the Other. It connects the abject, as Kristeva theorises, to the
place where the self and the Other, the subject and the object, can no longer
be clearly differentiated. Kristeva explains a place of ambivalence, for Freud
das unheimliche and for Lacan jouissance, where the abject is neither identified
nor desired, but simply considered as a volatile being. Thus, for Kristeva, the
ego is not the fixed subject, but the ego is fluid in relation to the abject, the
archaic part of the self, and internal otherness. Kristeva mentions that this fluid
sense of the self originates from a stage before birth. Thus, abjection is our
nostalgia for the unification with the (m)other: Abjection preserves what

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existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence

with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be
(Kristeva, 1982: 10).

Kristeva considers that we cannot, with certainty,

identify what the abject is, whether it is, or it is not. But, we can recognise that
it might be something strangely familiar, something uncanny.

Kristeva (1991: 183) pursues Freuds perspective that the archaic

narcissistic self, not yet demarcated by the outside world, projects out of itself
what it experiences as dangerous or unpleasant in itself, making of it an alien
double, uncanny and demoniacal. Moreover, she continues:

In this instance the strange appears as a defense put up by a

distraught self: it protects itself by substituting for the
image of a benevolent double that used to be enough to
shelter it the image of a malevolent double into which it
expels the share of destruction it cannot contain. (Kristeva
1991: 183-184)

For Kristeva, strangeness is not simply the Other, but the abject, and the abject
is not essentially antagonistic to the self. Kristeva (1982) regards the abject as
a fluid realm, surrounding boundaries where no place of demarcation can be
drawn. Kristeva (1982: 4) considers that abjection is what disturbs identity,
system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between,
the ambiguous, the composite. She explains:

We may call it a border; abjection is above all ambiguity.

Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off
the subject from what threatens it... abjection acknowledges

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it to be in perpetual danger Abjection preserves what

existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the
immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated
from another body in order to be... (Kristeva, 1982: 9-10)

Thus, Kristeva considers abjection to be essentially ambivalent. Toril Moi

(1986: 238-9) emphasises Kristevas theory of the abject:

Neither subject nor object, the abject may be defined as a

kind of pre-object or, perhaps, as a fallen object... The
abject, then, represents the first effort of the future subject to
separate itself from the pre-Oedipal mother. Nausea, distaste,
horror: these are the signs of a radical revulsion (or
expulsion) which serves to situate the I, or more accurately
to create a first, fragile sense of I in a space where before
there was only emptiness. The abject does not fill the void
of the pre-subject, it simply throws up a fragile boundary
wall around it.

In this sense the abject (the object of

revulsion) is more a process than a thing. Stressing the fact

that the abject is not per se linked to dirt or putrefaction,
Kristeva insists that it can be represented by any kind of
transgressive, ambiguous or intermediary state. (Moi, 1986:
238-9)

Moi considers that the abject is linked to the semiotic that incorporates the nonsignifying elements of signification, and that it is prior to any binary
differentiation establishing and maintaining the symbolic and the subject.
Therefore, the abject characterises identity. For Kristeva, the abject is the
condition of possibility of any fluid ego or any subject/object distinction. Thus,
Kristeva suggests that one is both subject and object at once. One establishes

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oneself as the Other who finds this ambivalence unpleasant, even while the
Subject is formed upon it.

When examining examples of the abject that are already complex in

themselves due to their conflicting nature, Kristeva (1982) considers that the
subject or a part of the subject becomes unfamiliar to itself. In conclusion, for
Kristeva, abjection, as a process of defining what a subject is that never entirely
completes, disturbs subjectivity by intimidation to undo what has been formed
and othered.

Thus, ones identity is never fixed and completed. What is

terrifying about the abject is the possibility of the return of the expelled or
repressed parts of the subject. The very notion of the abject rejects the idea of
a fixed (rational and normal) subject which is the foundation of Western
philosophy since Plato. If we understand Kristevas concept of abjection, we
may never make any claims that identity is fixed or has anything to do with
rationality. I shall explore this by analysing Judith Butlers reading of Kristeva
in the following section.

Butlers Account of Abjection

In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler

(1999 [1990]: 169-70) establishes her account of abjection. The abject
designates that which has been expelled from the body, discharged as
excrement, literally rendered Other. This appears as an exclusion of alien
elements, but the alien is effectively established through this expulsion (Butler,
1999 [1990]: 169). For Butler, the abject establishes the seemingly fixed
contour of identity. I argue that Butlers account of abjection cannot provide us

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with an account of subject formation that explains how to accept and to undo
the Other.

Butler regards discourse as the only mechanism capable of

constituting the subject (or indeed anything); she does not believe that the
subject is capable of undermining discursive formation.

In Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive limits of Sex, Butler

(1993: 3) suggests a different approach to abjection to Kristevas. She considers
the abject as the unlivable and uninhabitable other of a passably normalised
subject. Butler (1993: 2) sees the way in which subjects are constructed by
reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that
it names. As explained in the previous chapter, this system of citation that
Butler derived from Derrida, suggests the reiterated and ever-changing
provision of the subject with the normal. Those who perform (mimic) well
become the subject, however, those who fail to perform (mimic) correctly
become the abject. The reiteration of the abnormal precedes the materialisation
of the Other and makes the abject a position within the symbolic order that,
for Butler, is formed by the dominant discourses prevalent in society. The
process of abjection occurs through the performative reiteration of what the
normal is not and this reiteration affects the body. The unintelligible body, as
well as the intelligible body, is an effect of these discourses. For Butler, those
who are not heterosexual fail to represent themselves as a real subject in the
heterosexual matrix; they fail to perform themselves as a heterosexual subject.
Thus, they become the abject since they do not recite the models in a way that
society recognises as the heterosexual norm. Butler maintains that the Other
of the heterosexual fall into abjection through their performances. Thus, Butler,
unlike Kristeva, claims that the abject exists in the symbolic; it is produced by

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the heterosexual matrix.45 Butler (1993) states:

This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus

requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject
beings, who are not yet subjects, but who form the
constitutive outside to the domain of the subject. The abject
designates

here

precisely

those

unliveable

and

uninhabitable zones of social life which are nevertheless

densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the
subject, but whose living under the sign of the unliveable is
required to circumscribe the defining limit of the subjects
domain; it will constitute that side of dreaded identification
against which and by virtue of which the domain of the
subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and life.
(Butler, 1993: 3)

Butler claims that there is no simple binary relationship between subject and
abject, and she regards abjection not as a permanent contestation of social
norms condemned to the pathos of perpetual failure, but rather as a critical
resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy
and intelligibility (Butler, 1993: 3). Butler maintains that the domain of the
abject consists in that which the normal subject is not, the unliveable conditions
of abjection that circumscribe a whole domain of the Other of the norm.
However, the abject maintains the truth of the heterosexual. The heterosexual
is as intelligible as its constitutive deeds. Butler argues that the abject is
formed through the constant repetition of what the subject is not. However, for

When Butler says a position is unthinkable, she does not mean that it is outside of the
symbolic; she means something which in terms of prevailing norms is constructed as it were
unthinkable. Yet she points out it must be thinkable to have been judged to be outside of the
norms. Thus, norms proceed needing to an outside to them which they officially claim is
unthinkable; but which nonetheless has been thought.
45

- 227 -

me, Butler, by reducing the abject to discourse, ignores the psychic and bodily
processes involved in the formation of subjectivity.

For Butler, abjection can be intelligible by its insufficient performance

of the normal. Butler (1993: 13) argues that this lack, or insufficiency, is the
contrary to the dissimulated citationality that permits a subject to materialise
as the source of its discursive effects. The citational practice by which the
subject is formed and activated remains open-ended. For Butler, the discourse
of the abject is specified not as the subject, but as the Other. Gail Weiss
(1999), in Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality, reviews Butlers
account of abjection:

In Bodies that Matter, Butler explores some of the diverse

shapes and codings abjection takes on in order to reveal the
constitutive role the process of abjection and exclusion play
in the formation of the subject. Naming the abject other,
compelling the abject other to exist as the abject,
excluding the abject other from certain privileges, regions,
and social practices, are strategies we employ, Butler argues,
to distance ourselves from the recognition of our own selfalienation and self-repudiation.

Through these forces of

abjection and exclusion, the abject is provided with a

concrete identity and occupies a place, whether that place be
a prison, a refugee center, a ghetto, a concentration camp, or
another yet to be constructed zone of uninhabitability; in
short, a place society can dispose of its excrement. (Weiss,
1999: 95)

Thus, for Butler, the abject is the Other that society seeks to reject in order to
maintain the normal.
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In Butlers Corporeal Politics: Matters of Politicized Abjection,

Natalie Wilson (2001: 109-21) argues that in Butlers work, abjection is
politicised and this politicised abjection is the very boundary of being pushed
out of the norm. Wilson states:

Butler presents abjection as a discursive process a process

that provides an outside against which to construct
normative

bodies.

This

claim

calls

for

radical

renegotiation of who/what counts as a body that matters in

society, for a discursive reclamation of the abject body.
(Wilson, 2001: 114)

Thus, for Butler, abjection, like gender, is discursive and performative. A reexamination of abjection in the symbolic opens up possibilities for a subversive
re-articulation of the symbolic boundaries where the abject is positioned as
simply not a subject. Butler argues that it is essential for the abject to become
a discursively intelligible subject so that the abject can obtain its own identity.
Butler (1993: 3) argues that new discourses of the abject may be considered as
a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic
legitimacy and intelligibility.

If the abject is a citation that repeatedly

produces the norm, then the abject is a performance that forms the illusion of
an essence of it. In The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Butler
(1997) sums up:

The subject is sometimes bandied about as if it were

interchangeable with the person or the individual. The
genealogy of the subject as a critical category, however,

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suggests that the subject, rather than be identified strictly

with the individual, ought to be designated as a linguistic
category,

placeholder,

structure

in

formation.

Individuals come to occupy the site of the subject (the

subject simultaneously emerges as a site), and they enjoy
intelligibility only to the extent that they are as it were first
established in language. (Butler, 1997: 10-11)

For Butler, the subject is a linguistic or discursive construction, and the abject
is simply a position within discourse.

In short, Butler (1993) positions the abject outside of the domain of the
subject. For her, the abject indicates the intolerable domain that is inhabited
by those who cannot fit into the norm that is the subject.

Thus, Butler

questions fixed identity. For her, identity is established through a process of

abjection. She seeks to remove the domain of the abject that establishes and
maintains the boundaries between the self and the Other.

Butler (1993)

states:

For there is an outside to what is constructed by discourse,

but this is not an absolute outside, an ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse, as
a constitutive outside, it is that which can only be thought
when it can in relation to that discourse, at and as its
most tenuous borders. (Butler, 1993: 8)

Butler argues that the abject is a discursive effect, and as such, belongs to the
symbolic as opposed to the pre-symbolic realm. The idea that the abject is
characterised by anything more than discourse is alien to Butler. That it could

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have extra-discursive characteristics, that is to say, that there is something

about the abject which is outside of discourse, is simply impossible because
the abject is located in the symbolic. When she considers how discourse is to
redefine and remove the abject, it is clear that a particular figure of the abject is
already established. Butler reconfigures the abject, ultimately removing the
theoretical power Kristeva gives it, as that which constitutes a place where both
the self and the Other exists together. In my view, Butler seeks to remove the
domain of the abject by reducing it to discourse. In this manner, Butler alters
the notion of the abject beyond all recognition.

Whilst Butler provides us with a particular account of how discourse

of the abject is formed, and how such discourse comes to be connected to ones
abjected identity, she fails to present an account of the psychic processes that
are engaged in the construction of the abjected identity. Here, I disagree with
Butlers discursive account of abjection because it ignores the significance of
the psychic processes of becoming a subject. Thus, I contest whether the
removal of abjection is in fact necessary in questioning the politicised positions
of the Other.

Against Butler: A Kristevan Critique

As I have explored earlier, Kristeva and Butler differ in the theoretical

and political implications of their accounts of the abject.

While Butler

understands Kristeva to be responsible for establishing a boundary between the

self and the Other, Kristeva would be critical of Butler for seeming to remove
a space between the self and the Other altogether. Kristeva specifies an

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account of the abject in which there is a process of becoming the subject

through abjection.

However, the abject, for Butler, is always already

constituted in and through the Other and positioned as the Other by means
of the symbolic. However, I argue that the abject is not what Butler (1993)
terms a constitutive outside established by the discursive restriction.

Butler interprets Kristevas account of abjection as gendering

ambivalence as the feminine or the maternal. However, Kristeva does not draw
up the boundaries of the abject as fundamentally gendered or othered, but she
believes that the abject undermines the boundary between the self and the
Other. I accept that Kristeva sees abjection as an illustration of psychic and
bodily processes that undermine any concept of an essentially fixed subject.
Thus, abjection is a useful illustration of what she terms the subject-inprocess. Kristeva argues that it is impossible to define what the abject is or to
differentiate between the self and the Other. She also theorises abjection in
order to propose that all differences between the self and the Other are
psychical and bodily; they are interpreted as something extra-discursive.
However, Butler wants a complete removal of the abject. Unlike Kristeva, she
regards the abject as a discursive category.

Butler regards abjection as explaining differences discursively;

differences, which are gendered, feminised, and othered. Butlers account of
abjection is appropriate to the many feminist theoretical approaches in which
women undermine the psychoanalytic scheme whereby they are always the
Other of men, or the lack of the phallus, articulating unintelligibilities of the
feminine (Butler, 1999[1990] & 1993; Grosz, 1989 & 1994; Irigaray, 1985a &

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1985b). However, I read Kristevas account of abjection as a different means

of undermining the conventionally psychoanalytic scheme established by Freud
and Lacan. Kristevas account generates possibilities for reconsidering our
gendered, social, political, and sexual relations between the self and the Other,
as well as proposing a new way of undermining the boundaries between the
self and the Other. Her theory of abjection is, to me, a theory developed with
concern for the body of the Other that used to be a part of the self. I consider
that Kristevas approach can lead us to undo the discursive process of othering.
Exploring abjection may reveal much about our psychical and bodily processes
accompanying pregnancy, maternity, disease, disability, starvation, desire,
pleasure, pain, aging, and death.

Such processes allow us to continue to

confront the transformation of our embodied selves and to accept the

impossibility of rejecting abjection. Contrary to Butler, but following Kristeva,
I see the operation of psychic and bodily processes in the construction of
subjectivity that cannot be captured purely by our relationship to the symbolic
or to discourse.

In the context of Kristevas account, one is encouraged to consider the

body in terms of a psychic process, in which one perceives ones transformable
(lived) body. The unintelligible uneasiness felt by ones body suggests that this
ambivalent realm is the domain of abjection. As the boundary between the self
and the Other, the lived body embodies both psychic and bodily processes in
which the self and the Other become formed. These processes, as Kristeva
proposes, constitute an ambiguous route down which one seeks to forcefully
segregate oneself from the part that threatens identity. Such processes are
therefore at work in our abjecting of particular kinds of bodies. The abject is a

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consequence of psychic processes in which we try to shore up the boundaries

of the self.

Unlike Kristeva, Butler has focused upon the denial of the abject by
viewing abjection as a discursive realm of otherness, socio-culturally excluded.
The matter of norm, for Butler, indicates the social exclusion of the Other.
For her, the undoing of abjection requires modifications at a level of discourse,
that is, destabilisation of norms by different performances.

For Kristeva, however, there has to be a different kind of process, the

process of recognising the abject as part of ourselves, and living with the
uncertainties of our own boundaries and subjectivity.

Such recognition

requires personal encounters. Throughout the process of becoming a subject,

we explore our own psyches. We are searching for both our own identities, and
those of others, through the ways that connect us to others and that separate us
from others. It is a process of seeking to understand ourselves within others,
and others within ourselves. This process is love. We seek to keep ourselves
connected to our bodies while at the same time seeking continuously to reject
our bodies that have been, and will be, transformed. I regard the task of this
love as essential for us to exist in our bodies and our world. Kristeva considers
(1982: 2) that the abject is radically excluded and draws me toward the place
where meaning collapses. It is neither object nor subject, but the abject is
rather an in-between-ness that is positioned in a space before one enters into
the symbolic order.

Theorising the abject from an embodied perspective, Kristeva

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recognises our vulnerability. Learning to love our own body, which was once
separated from another body, is learning to love the Other within ourselves.
Kristeva regards the abject as that which threatens the fixed boundary
separating the self from the Other. Thus, for her, abjection appears in a
process in which a pre-subject seeks to separate itself from what is to become
the Other. Kristeva (1982: 9) states: We may call it a border; abjection is
above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut
off the subject from what threatens it on the contrary, abjection acknowledges
it to be in perpetual danger.

Thus, the instability of the boundary

demonstrates that the subject is in psychic and bodily processes of integration

and elimination.

Abjection, therefore, illustrates the psychic and bodily

processes of subject formation. The abject cannot be externalised from the self.
The abject always remains in the self, disturbing the fixed sense of self,
questioning its intelligibility.

Following Kristevas theory of abjection, I shall consider which

representations of the disabled as the abject are related to his/her body and its
unintelligibility. For me, the abject exists in the ambivalent space between
revulsion and fascination that is posed by the disabled body.

Here, the

complexity of changeable boundaries flows expanded. It twists and collapses

the division between the self and the Other that resists both its restriction and
its incorporation. For Kristeva, abjection is not simply about establishing the
bodily boundaries of the subject. It is a psychic and corporeal process of
becoming the subject.

Perhaps it is an inter-corporeal subject involving

particular encounters between individual bodies.

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The Disabled Body as the Abject Body

Kristevas notion of abjection and the abject body is significant in my

understanding of the specificity of the disabled body.46 I utilise her concept of
the abject to draw attention to a site of undoing disability. Like the abject, the
disabled is a chaotic fluid system of bodily developments, a system which
extends beyond the determination of the fixed subject. Like the abject, the
disabled is also what one neglects and forcefully eliminates from the ablebodied. Anne McClintock (1995), in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender And
Sexuality in The Colonial Contest, explains Kristevas notion of abjection:

The abject is everything that the subject seeks to expunge

in order to become social; it is also a symptom of the
failure of this ambition.

As s compromise between

condemnation and yearning, abjection marks the border

of the self; at the same time, it threatens the self with
perpetual danger. Defying sacrosanct borders, abjection
testifies to societys precarious hold over the fluid and
unkempt aspects of psyche and body. (McClintock, 1995:
71)

In Formal Justice, Anita Silvers (1998: 44) points out that Jenny Morris and Iris Young
consider that the presence of disabled people threatens able-bodied people by indicating the
possibility of becoming disabled. In particular, in Justice and the Politics of Difference, Young
(1990: 144) states: The abject provokes fear and loathing because it exposes the border
between self and other as constituted and fragile, and to threatens to dissolve the subject by
dissolving the border . Young (1990: 145) considers that racism, sexism, homophobia,
ageism, and ableism are, to some extent, formed by abjection, and exist at the level of
discursive consciousness, the despised groups are objectified. Thus, Silvers, Morris, and
Young have a similar theoretical position to Butlers account of abjection. In this section, I
introduce a different way of seeing the disabled body as the abject.
46

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In order to become a social subject, we attempt to eliminate the abject, the

domain between the subject and the object, and to reduce the domain of the
abject to the boundary.

Most of us assume that this boundary is fixed.

However, in reality, this boundary is fluid or blurred, simultaneously opening

up and closing down like an ocean wave that is essentially a line of water. It
increases and decreases in size with the ebb and flow of the tide. The disabled,
like the wave, creates ambiguity within the able-bodied boundaries.

In my view, the construction of able-bodied subjectivity involves the

establishment of a domain of the disabled abject, and this domain is fluid. The
formation of the able-bodied subject requires non-able-bodied subjects who
both establish and remain outside of the domain of the able-bodied subject in
order to define the boundaries of that very domain. Subject formation, for both
the able-bodied and the disabled, depends upon a denial that establishes the
domain of abjection. The able-bodied attempt to cast out what is actually part
of themselves.

When I took a walk in the street, my body operated as a visual sign of a

non-able-bodied and non-English subject, but of a not-yet disabled object and
not-yet Japanese object to strangers who encounter me for the first time, me,
the abject.

To strangers on the street, this vision is not recognised as a

particular subject who is Japanese and has a particular type of cerebral palsy. I
shall cite an instance. A man, who was walking along came up to me, thinking
I was Chinese, and tried to greet me in Chinese. He said Ni hao ma? That is
Hello and how are you? in Chinese. I was silent for a moment, but decided
to respond to him. I told him I am not Chinese but Japanese, but, because I

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have many Chinese friends, I can understand some words in Chinese. Then,
he was shocked at my bodily movement and vocal difference. He did not
recognise my physical disability, but he interpreted my bodily movement and
vocal difference as being that of an alcoholic. He said No alcohol! and ran
away. In this case, my body threatened him. Why did he run away from me?
His interpretation of my body, and voice, destabilises my subjectivity, my
national identity, and my own understandings of my disabled body.

Firstly, he was curious about my difference and he imagined it as a

Chinese body. Then he realised that what he imagined from my difference was
not correct. Secondly, he heard my voice and saw my body at close quarters.
He then recognised that I was not Chinese and perceived me as an alcoholic.
Finally, he fled from me. His reaction was mixed. My abject body was
excluded from enabling the fixed construction of his assumptions. In other
words, it disrupted his site of articulating the Other. This radical expansion
of the abject domain pushed him into a situation where he could not articulate
my difference. In this context, he not just fled from me, but he also fled from
his own unsolved condition.

For the man in the street, my body and my voice represented a risk to
which his boundary was permanently exposed.

This body also refuses

demotion to the absolute Other. Kristeva (1982: 2) claims that the abject
becomes the jettisoned object [and] is radically excluded. The man ran away
from me and radically excluded my presence. His ego, according to Kristeva
(1982: 2), requires the abject in order to reinforce its own existence: To each
ego its object, to each superego its abject.

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My body represented the disruption of boundaries and was not

recognised as it was. The boundary of able-bodied/not-able-bodied is uncertain.
My body could not pass as being able-bodied. My body was denied ablebodied privilege by the man, and while not disabled, my corporeal status as an
imagined alcoholic renders my identity as volatile. His reaction to my body
and difference illustrates the characteristics of the common reaction to bordercrossing, unintelligibility, and abjection. The disabled exists in the domain of
abjection making visible the unstable nature of able-bodiedness itself.

In Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit, freaks, as Elizabeth

Grosz (1996: 55-6) considers: Siamese twins, dwarfs, giants, hunchbacks,
humans with parasitic or autositic attachments, so called legless or armless
wonders, half-creature, hermaphrodites, rubber men, and so on , are not just
unusual or atypical; more than this is necessary to characterize their unique
social conditions.

Here, Grosz does not utilise the notion of abjection;

however, I can recognise certain similarities between Groszs freak, Kristevas

abject, and my own notion of the disabled. I recognise this in particular when
Grosz states:

The freak is thus neither unusually gifted nor unusually

disadvantaged.

He or she is not an object of simple

admiration or pity, but is a being who is considered

simultaneously and compulsively fascinating and repulsive,
enticing and sickening the freak is an ambiguous being
whose existence imperils categories and oppositions
dominant in social life. Freaks are those human beings who
exist outside and in defiance of the structure of binary
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oppositions that govern our basic concepts and modes of

self-definition Freaks cross the borders that divide the
subject

from

all

ambiguities,

interconnections,

and

reciprocal classifications, outside of or beyond the human.

They imperil the very definitions we rely on to classify
humans, identities, and sexes our most fundamental
categories of self-definition and boundaries dividing self
from otherness. (Grosz, 1996: 56-7)

Grosz recognises that freaks are ambiguous and crossing boundaries, the abject
that threatens the coherent identity. In her emphasis on the freak, she explores
the psychical, physical, and conceptual limits of human subjectivity, that is,
what the nature and forms of subjectivities consist of and the degree to which
social, political, and historical factors shape the forms of subjectivity with
which we are familiar; and the degree to which these factors are able to tolerate
anomalies, ambiguities, and borderline cases, marking the threshold, not of
humanity in itself, but of acceptable, tolerable, knowable humanity(Grosz,
1996: 55). I consider that Groszs notion of the freak involves the abject in the
formation of subjectivities.

In this light, I regard the disabled as the abject, that which disturbs the
subject boundaries of the able-bodied. The disabled takes countless shapes, but
is particularly associated with the lived body, its vulnerability and
changeability. The disabled is that which must be excluded so that an ablebodied self can be established. However, the disabled is not simply a contrast,
not simply what is not the able-bodied self. It is what almost becomes part of
the able-bodied self, that which has been, and could be, part of the able-bodied

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self. It is in relation to the construction of able-bodied subjectivity that contact

with the disabled is experienced so as to once again exclude that aspect.

In her poetry, Bitter and Twisted, Aspen (1995 [1994]) expresses her
disabled body as the abject:

bitter?
yes, i am bitter
like acid, and
like poison fruit.
twisted?
yes, i am twisted
like an old tree trunk
racked and gnarled
like old roots
twisting deep in the soil
i am here and i
will not be moved:
i am far too strong
and deadly.
(Aspen, 1995 [1994]: 57
in Mustnt Grumble: Writing by Disabled Women)

It is Aspens use of poetic language that allows her to articulate the meaning of
the disabled body. In identifying and embodying both a poison fruit and an old
tree with her body, the poetic language of Aspen illustrates the rhythms of the
lived body itself, that is, Kristevas semiotic. Whereas the able-bodied
discourse is constructed by the symbolic, Aspens expression disrupts the
symbolic order. She seeks to dissolve the boundaries between the able-bodied
and the disabled body, as well as between the subject and the object. Rather

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than reinforcing a distance from the disabled body of her own, Aspen
reconsiders physical disability as a body that opens up the possibility for
blurring boundaries.

The Abject in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial

1. The Alien as the Othered Abject

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (2002 [1982]) starts with a night sky and
develops into a deeper darkness of a forest near a suburban area in California,
in the United States. A small malformed alien collecting many kinds of plants
reaches his two fingers out toward a green plant. Suddenly, the small alien
moans in fright when a threatening motor vehicle with headlights throws its
beams through the dark sky. U.S. government radar has detected the landing of
a spacecraft. Suddenly, some government vehicles gather around the alien who
has become separated from the mother ship. The small alien becomes the
abject by questioning where is it?, and seeking to find his place. In the dark
forests, government and science officials look for the alien. When the crew of
aliens realises that there are human trespassers around them, one of the aliens
at the spacecrafts hatchway sends out a signal from its chest, alerting other
aliens to immediately return to it.

In one of the nearby suburban homes, ten-year-old Elliott (Henry

Thomas) makes his first appearance on the screen. He is failing to take part in

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a game that his older brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton) and Michaels
friends are playing. Elliott is separated from the group of older boys around a
kitchen table, as he sits behind a counter separate from them. At this moment,
both Elliott and the small alien are separated from where they want to belong.
Elliott is forced to leave the house for the time being. He has to stand outside
of his suburban home and wait for a pizza that one of the boys has ordered by
phone. Elliott leaves the dining room with his baseball and glove and walks
down the driveway into the night mist.

As Elliott walks slowly back up the

driveway to the house with the pizza, he hears a noise from the backyard shed.
When he hears more noise, he walks to the shed to look in. Leaving the pizza
on the ground, Elliott throws his ball into the shed, and it is thrown back to him.
Elliott is scared and runs away, losing his footing on the pizza box on the grass,
and coming into the kitchen. Elliott reports to his mother Mary (Dee WallaceStone): Mom, mom, theres something out there... Its in the tool shed. He
threw out the ball at me... No one believes him. However, Elliott is curious
about the unseen creature.

After midnight, in his bedroom, Elliott lies awake. With the familys
dog, he decides to return to the backyard armed with a torch.

In the cornfield

adjacent to the house, Elliott finds mysterious footprints and walks slowly.
Suddenly, he shines his torch light onto the alien. They both scream at the first
sight of each other, and both are equally scared. The alien runs off through the
field as Elliott also runs back into the backyard. Both are shocked. Elliotts
reaction is due to the recognition of the impossible and the unintelligible. The
image of the alien challenges the fixity of a same identity and forces Elliott
and the film viewers to face up to the abject through the image of the excluded

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and rejected.

The small alien is physically grotesque. It is depicted as

inhuman, animal-like and voiceless. It is de-gendered; it lacks either feminine

or masculine characteristics; it is neither boy nor girl, neither man nor
woman, it is desexualised. By demonstrating the alien body, the film
destabilises the binary categorization of human/inhuman bodies. Spielberg
explains about his alien creature in Evolution and Creation of E.T. (E.T.: The
Extra-Terrestrial, 2002 [1982] DVD the second disc):

It was tough finding a good look for E.T. because I wanted

him to be special I didnt want him to look like aliens
from other movies I wanted him to look so anatomically
different that the audience would say Theres no way
theres a person in a suit with a zipper up the back.
Thats why I wanted to make the neck very slender and
long I wanted people to say Theres nobody in that.

My fear was the audience would never love E.T., because

he was so off-putting, how he looked. And my hope was
they would love him within 15 minutes of meeting him. I
expected, because I designed the film this way for him to
be scary when we first meet him. But as Elliott slowly
starts to understand that theres no threat here and that
E.T. is the most magnificent curiosity of his young life I
would hope the audience would also breathe that kind of life
into E.T. from their own points of view. And they did.
Thats why it was important that E.T. wasnt cute.
Then we had a young boy who didnt have legs. He walked
on his hands. He gave E.T. the most amazing life. We used
to him primarily when E.T. had had a few too many and
stumbled in the kitchen

Sheerly, by working on his

hands, he gave E.T. an amazingly out-of-this-world walk

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rhythm. And Tammy and Pat Bilon [little people], you

knowdid some amazing work in the E.T. suits. They
were troopers because they were sweating in there. They
had to carry a lot Especially, when we were using the
electronic head that was 12, 15 poundson Tammy and
Pats own heads. That was very hard to do. We gave them
frequent rests, but they stuck with it to the very end and
they made it happen. (Spielberg, 2002)

Thus, Spielberg designs the aliens body to look very different from a human
body and frightening at first sight. I was surprised at the fact that Spielberg
used many people with physical differences to make E.T.s body move in
different ways from that of a normal human being. To me, this alien body was
a site of abjection, of physical disability. The alien is not a subject that Elliott
can recognise, but, nonetheless, an abject about which he seeks to find out
more. I view this film in a way that opens up a space in which to discuss ones
possibility of shifting position through processes of expanding the domain of
the abject.

2. Expanding the Domain of the Abject

Elliott cannot help thinking of the alien creature. Riding his bicycle
into the forest, Elliott distributes small, round, colourful chocolate balls on the
ground, probably to feed the alien creature, or to guide it to his home with the
path of chocolates as a lure. Elliott is in a double bind: a longing for more
contact with this creature, and a need to reject it. The abject body, to Elliott,
threatens engulfment.

At this stage, most people, like the man who

encountered me in the street, try to repudiate it. However, Elliott is different.

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Seeking to find out what exactly this creature is, he feels both fear of and
fascination with the creature. In this section, I shall open up a new concept of
abjection, that is, abjection that seeks to find a means of incorporating the
Other into the self.

Under a crescent moon, Elliott lies down in a sleeping bag on a terrace

chair with his torch set so that he can catch a look at the alien. He suddenly
hears some noises in the shed. He is fully awake and sees the small creature
coming out of the shed. Motionless and initially speechless with fear, Elliott
eventually exclaims in a very soft voice: Mom, Mom, Mom, Michael, Michael,
Mom!!

It is a frightening moment for Elliott as the alien moves closer and

closer to touch him with two long fingers. Elliotts body reacts to the touch.
Rather than touching him, the alien has simply come to return the chocolate
balls to Elliott and places them on Elliotts sleeping bag. In order to invite the
alien into the house, Elliott leaves more chocolate balls as a path to his
bedroom. In complete view for the first time, the alien has a rough, brown skin
surface, a big globular head, huge blue eyes, an elastic neck, long fingers, a
gourd-shaped body, short legs, and large webbed feet.47 As a spectator, I was
on the verge of both denying and accepting the alien with which my classmates
identified me.

Probably from fear and uneasiness, Elliott wipes his nose, and the alien
imitates him. Recognising that the alien is mimicking him, Elliott gesticulates
with other body movements in order to communicate with it.

The alien

Someone may find that the facial figure of E.T. is Kindchenschema (in German word for
Child-like figure which has a big head, big round eyes, a small mouth, and a small nose).
However, as Spielberg (2002) states, he designed E.T. as a different creature from the space
which looks very different from a human figure.
47

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imitates Elliott: the two make images of each other. The alien impersonates
Elliotts yawn and fatigue when he tumbles down in a chair in his room. This
scene appeals to me. Lacan describes the mirror stage as a moment of human
development in which an infant sees itself in a mirror and becomes fascinated
with the image.

He suggests that it becomes obvious that the infants

identification with a reflection of itself is acquired by its associations with

others. For Lacan, identification is recognition of the self as an imaginary
object.

However, for both Elliott and the alien, this stage is the moment of

relational development in which they see each other and become fascinated
with each other.

The following morning, Elliott acts as if he is ill in order to stay at

home. He makes the excuse that he has caught a cold while sitting outside
waiting for the alien. Elliott wishes to communicate with his new found friend.
He introduces himself. In this scene, Elliott also uses many items in his room
to introduce his culture to the alien:

Do you talk, you know, talk? Me human. Boy. Elliott. Ell-iott. Elliott. Coke. You see, we drink it. Its a, its a drink.
You know, food. These are toys, these are little men. This
is Greedo, and then this is Hammerhead, see this is Walrus
Man, and this is Snaggle Tooth and this is Lando Calrissian,
see, ...and look, they can even have wars. Look at this. Thth-th-th-th-th. Uuuuuuuuuuuugh. Look fish. The fish eat
the fish food, and the shark eats the fish, and nobody eats
the shark. See, this is PEZ, candy. See you eat it. You put
the candy in here and then when you lift up the head, the
candy comes out and you can eat it. You want some? This
is a peanut. You eat it, but you cant eat this one, cause this

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is fake. This is money. You see. You put the money in the
peanut. You see? Its a bank. See? And then, this is a car.
This is what we get around in. You see? Car. Hey, hey
wait a second. No. You dont eat em. Are you hungry?
Im hungry. Stay. Stay. Ill be right here. OK? Ill be right
here. (from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, 2002 [1982])

In this dialogue from the film, Elliott expresses his emotions through a
fragmentary flow of words or phrases that are more sensitive than sensible. He
speaks as if he was speaking to an infant. Elliotts expression partakes of what
Kristeva (1984) calls the semiotic.

Elliott is not sure if the alien can

understand what he is talking about, but he just wants to communicate with it.
To do so, he shifts his mode of expression from the symbolic to the semiotic.
In other words, he enters the imaginary realm in order to make the alien
understand him and his world. This shift often manifests itself to me when a
person who is not familiar with my difference attempts to communicate with
me. In that situation, his or her expression tends to be in the semiotic mode. I
once thought that it was not easy for me to deal with the semiotic mode since I
felt strongly that it was used because the user saw me as if there was something
wrong with me.

However, after I saw this film, I came to understand the

complex process of expanding the domain of the abject. Like Elliott in the film,
the person in front of me might have been curious about my physical difference
and sought to understand me.

Elliott assumes that the alien is hungry. Both Elliott and the alien have
identified and empathised with each other as though they were a mother and a
child. He tries to look after it. Elliott collects food from the refrigerator, such
as peanut butter, cheese, tomatoes, and a carton of milk. He treats the alien as
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a human boy. The alien has inspected other objects in the room, such as a
tennis racket and an umbrella. When the umbrella unexpectedly opens up and
the alien shrieks and rushes to hide, Elliott drops the milk carton on the floor in
the kitchen as they simultaneously experience shock and fear. While carrying a
plate of food to the alien, Elliott finds the alien in his closet that is full of toys
and stuffed animals. There the alien looks like another toy item. I began to
identify and emphasise with Elliott who seemed to understand the alien with
which my classmates identified me.

I suggest that my identification with Elliott is established in the

formation of my subjectivity within the processes of denial and identification.
These processes are not simply identifying with either the alien or Elliott, but
rather in-between the two.

This, Kristeva (1982: 1) terms as: beset by

abjection, twisted braid of affects and thought, just as when I am positioned

between a human boy and an alien. Identification, to me, always operates
changeably between the same and the Other. By unravelling the fixity of my
identity, I simultaneously identify with the alien and Elliott. I am driven to a
space in between.

I believe that this identification may be recognised as

multiplicity. The transitory, ever changing nature of identity in this context

undermines the process of othering.

3. The Alien is E.T.

When Elliotts brother Michael returns home after school, Elliott calls
his brother to his room. Elliott reveals his secret friend. Before the disclosure

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is made, Elliott wants to make sure that his secret must be safeguarded. Here,
Elliott starts to identify the alien as a boy:

Elliott: Michael, he came back...

Michael: He came back? He came back? Oh my god!
Elliott: One thing. I have absolute power. Say it. Say it!...
Michael: What have you got? Is it the coyote?
Elliott: No. Look. OK. Now. Swear it. The most excellent
promise you can make. Swear as my only brother on our
lives.
Michael: Dont get so heavy! I swear!
(from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, 2002 [1982])

When Elliott brings the alien out from the closet, Michael turns around and is
astonished at the first sight. Gertie, his younger sister, also rushes into the
room and is frightened from looking at the unknown creature. She screams
aloud, and the creature reacts by making an awful groan in imitation. Elliott
talks about his new friend to his sister:

Elliott: Im keeping him.

Gertie: What is it?
Elliott: He wont hurt you, Gertie..
Gertie: Is he a boy or a girl?
Elliott: Hes a boy.
Gertie: Was he wearing any clothes?
Elliott: No. But look. You cant tell, not even Mom.
Gertie: Why not?
Elliott: Because grownups cant see him. Only little kids can see
him.
Gertie: Give me a break.
(from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, 2002 [1982])
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In this dialogue, Elliott asserts that the alien is a boy. This scene takes the
spectator back to the threshold of how subjectivity is produced. This scene
demonstrates how the alien (the abject) comes to see itself as an incorporated
being within the fluid realm between self (a boy) and other (an alien). Elliott
closes down the aliens identity as other by assigning boyhood or boy-ness to it.

Elliott wants to teach the alien about where they are so the alien can
understand where it is located.

Firstly he uses a US map from an atlas.

Michael suggests a globe. Elliott teaches the alien where they are: OK. Were
here. We are here. Where are you from? Hes trying to tell us something.
Earth. Home. Home. Home. The alien whispers home, pointing toward
the window. To display where the home planet is located, the alien puts three
pieces of fruit and two eggs on the map of the solar system and levitates them
to float and spin in the air, as if it were a three-dimensional model of the solar
system. The children are amazed by the aliens ability. When Elliott screams
in fright, these objects instantaneously fall.

4. Multiple Identifications

The next day while at school, Elliott has to leave the alien at home. In
cross-takes of Elliotts (at school) and the aliens (at home) experiences, an
extrasensory relationship is established between them. Elliott is in a biology
classroom. As the teacher walks down the aisle, he picks up Elliotts drawing
of the aliens face with the classification extra-terrestrial, the initials E.T..
E.T. is at home exploring the places outside Elliotts bedroom. He stumbles

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into the kitchen. In his class, Elliott is advised about the dangers of a sharp
scalpel; Elliott is experiencing the results of whatever E.T. experiences at home.
When E.T. opens the refrigerator door, opens a plastic container of Potato
Salad, Elliott tastes it, E.T. starts to drink a can of Coors beer, and Elliott
suddenly burps in the classroom. When E.T., now quickly intoxicated, bumps
into a kitchen counter, Elliott reacts to the bump, rubs his nose, and exhibits the
effects of being drunk. When E.T. hits his head again and then falls face first
onto the floor, Elliott sinks in his chair and also falls onto the floor under his
desk. Opening another can of beer, E.T. gets very drunk; Elliott is also drunk
and he turns around and smiles at a girl.

The teacher distributes etherised cotton balls to each students jar to put
frogs to sleep, and he states: They wont feel anything. They wont be hurt. It
will take a little while. If you dont want to watch them, you dont have to.
Elliott stares at his frog, which he is about to sedate with chloroform and which
tries to escape from the jar. He connects with it in a chat similar to his first
chat with E.T., connecting the two creatures together: Say hi. Can you talk?
Can you say hi?

E.T. looks at a newspaper comic strip that illustrates an

antenna sending out signals: HELP! HELP! with a spaceman speaking: It

works. Simultaneously, a commercial of a telecommunication company is
playing on the television and a woman in the commercial is talking on the
phone: Hello, Uncle Ralph! Uncle Ralph, long distance from California! E.T.
gradually pans his gaze over from the television to a phone on the coffee table,
and he recognises that the phone is a communicating device. This experience
offers him the idea of creating a communicator to his home world. Thinking of
E.T., and realising that the frogs want to go home, Elliott suddenly finds the

- 252 -

courage to save him to free his frog from its jar. Elliott calls out: Run for
your life. Back to the river. Back to the forest! Elliott also seeks to release all
the other frogs. This scene expands the web of complex identifications, and
makes the spectator think about his or her day-to-day life in which there are
many creatures like E.T. For Elliott, E.T. is everywhere.

E.T. is still watching television. The TV screen shows a love scene

between John Wayne and Maureen OHara in John Fords classic film The
Quiet Man (1952).

The scene starts with Wayne entering the lodge and

approaching OHara. The movements of the two in the film that E.T. watches
at home identically match the movements of Elliott and the girl in the
classroom. When the two lovers in the film kiss, Elliott accelerates his courage
and kisses her. E.T. smiles as if he knew Elliott did so. To me, this scene is
very interesting; it connects the world of what E.T. is watching with the world
of what the viewer of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (2002 [1982]) is watching.
Here, the viewer may identify him or herself with E.T. rather than with Elliott.
The multiple identifications between Elliott and E.T., Elliott and the spectator,
E.T. and the spectator and importantly between the spectators themselves
enables a destabilising of their positions, it makes them experience different
perspectives. It allowed me to move forward to the touches or the feelings that
can be perceived beyond the construction of otherness that is a construction
within the symbolic realm.

Multiple identifications do not purge the boundaries of the abject, but

rather undermine them. Butler renounces any embodied process of multiple
identifications, because for her there is a series of pre-framed identities from

- 253 -

which the subject is socially forced to choose.48 However, what I experienced

in viewing this film is not like Butlers concept of discursive border removal,
but more complex and embodied.

Here, I shall make connections across

differences: re-embracing difference into myself. This is not simply a case of

destabilising or removing boundaries and categories.

When I saw the scene where Elliott identified frogs with his alien friend
and set them free from the jars, I felt a strong connection with him. Elliott is
concerned about the lives of other creatures.

Moreover, to consider my

experience in school life, I hoped to see someone like Elliott who understood
(other or my) pain of being different, isolated, and excluded. I identified
myself as one of Elliotts classmates as well. Thus, my multiple identifications
are coterminous with my body and embodied practice. By becoming embodied
or incorporated with others experiences, one creates the space where it would
be transformed.

The images of the alien friend shift throughout the film, from the abject,
to a boy, and now a girl. This shift of body images demonstrates resistance to
the social model of the normal body. When Elliott has been brought home
from the frog disaster at school, he discovers that Gertie has been in her own
room playing dress-up with E.T. E.T. is dressed up in girl clothes with an
ugly blonde wig, black hat with flowers, and a rabbit-fur around his neck: a girl.
Importantly, the alien friend can now speak his name: Elliott. Elliott.

48

By talking of pre-framed identities, this can sound as if these identities are fixed and
determinate. What I wanted to say is that we can only become formed as subjects in terms of
categories which are on offer; while recognising that the content of these categories is open and
indeterminate.
- 254 -

Gertie: I taught him how to talk now. He can talk now.

Elliott: E.T. Can you say that? Can you say E.T.? E.T.
E.T.: E.T.
Elliott: Ha, ha.
E.T.: E.T., E.T., E.T. B! good.
Gertie: I taught him that too.
Elliott: You should give him his dignity. This is the most
ridiculous thing Ive ever seen.
(from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, 2002 [1982])

Whereas Gertie wants to identify E.T. as a girl, Elliott does not like it. In the
imaginary, there is no certain boundary between self and other in this scene
between a boy and a girl. This is not, as Butler argues, a performance of drag
that simply blurs the boundaries, but rather, it is multiple identifications that
make connection across differences possible.

In a Halloween scene, E.T.s identification becomes ambiguous. E.T.,

Elliott, Michael and Gertie cerebrate Halloween together with other
neighbourhood children Each of them wears a different Halloween costume:
Michael is a bearded destitute with a trick bloody knife-through-his-head
Elliott is a hunchback, and E.T. is draped with a white sheet and wears
oversized clown shoes over his three-toed feet, pretending to be Gertie dressed
as a goblin. Their multi-clothing in this event can be considered as a version of
drag, but not drag as it is for Butler.

While Butler argues that the drag

undermines distinctions between what is performed and what is real (Alsop,

Fitzsimons, and Lennon, 2002: 101), this goblin look-alike E.T. performed as
Gertie not to pass as a real instance of a category.

- 255 -

By bringing abjection and performativity together for the process of

multiple identification, we may imagine subsequent associations across a
number of differences that are both embodied and psychic processes of loving
both the self and the Other. Without imaginary abjection, the image of E.T.
would have left me with a negative image of physical otherness. When I
watched this film, I reconstituted images of both E.T. and myself as lovable
and acceptable, and I started loving my embodied self.

5. Towards Incorporation

Later in the film, when Michael brings E.T. home from the forest where
Elliott and E.T. had spent the night building the space communicator, both
Elliott and E.T. experience the same physical conditions. They are dying
together as a result of their incorporated, symbiotic relationship.

Elliotts

mother, Mary, sees the very-ill-whitish-skinned creature that is E.T. lying on

the bathroom floor next to Elliott. Elliott tells her: Were sick. I think were
dying. Elliott emphasises we to express his incorporation, or union with
E.T.. However, Mary separates Elliott from E.T., seeking to bring Elliott back
to the category of a human being. After Mary carries Elliott down the stairs,
she encounters men in space suits.

A row of men wearing helmets and

uniforms march through the neighbourhood; some of them are rolling a large,
greenhouse-like plastic tunnel toward the house. The government-employed
scientists question the family members about E.T. Michael explicitly describes
Elliotts and E.T.s incorporation: Hes smart. He communicates through
Elliott Elliott feels his feelings.

- 256 -

This expression indicates the unity

between the two, similar to the experience of unity between mother and child
in the early stage of a childs life. Elliott is becoming E.T.s imaginary mother.

Both Elliott and E.T. are placed on long beds alongside each other in a
quarantined room. They are connected to many complex life-support machines
that display similar graphing results for both. Elliott complains about their
treatment and calls out: You have no right to do this! Youre scaring him.
Youre scaring him! Leave him alone. Leave him alone, I can take care of him.
Elliott physically and mentally senses E.T.s pain. As E.T. begins to approach
death, his blood pressure sinks, whilst Elliotts condition stabilises. E.T.s life
fades away. Here, E.T. becomes mother. As in the psychoanalytic narrative,
the mother fades away before the infant recognises that this mother is a
separate being or an other. Elliott loses his telepathic connection to E.T. and
miraculously comes back to full life. Elliott stretches his arms out to his dead
friend, pleading for him to answer: E.T. Answer me, please. Please.

With the process of abjection in which the very first love is lost before
it can be excluded, one cannot distinguish between self and other. One cannot
identify what one has lost, thus, the feelings of melancholic wonder. However,
in the film, after all the treatments and the moment when E.T. appears to be
lifeless, he is suddenly reincarnated.

Elliott experiences himself seeking

jouissance a love for the alien within himself who was not really the Other
but a part of himself.

Elliott discovers that the boundary between self and

other blurs in his experience of incorporation.

- 257 -

In the final scene, the flap of the spaceship opens, and E.T. leaves his
human friends. After Michael and Gertie say goodbye to E.T., Elliott
approaches E.T. to spend the last moment with his best friend from space:

E.T.: Come.
Elliott: Stay.
E.T.: Ouch!
Elliott: Ouch!
E.T.: Ill be right here.
(from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, 2002 [1982])

Here, there is no sentence, but a semiotic expression that makes the spectator
feel their moment. E.T. and Elliott use hand movements as well as those
simple words. E.T. invites Elliott to come with him, and his big round eyes
stare at Elliott. Elliott calmly responds to him that he will stay here. Or, Elliott
invites E.T. to stay on earth with him. E.T. softly says Ouch! as if he
understood Elliotts mental pain of parting. Elliott also repeats Ouch! back
to him. Elliott sheds tears. E.T. tells Elliott: I will be right here. It means
that E.T. will always stay in Elliotts life. E.T. will remain in Elliotts life, and
possibly, they will be incorporated in different ways. E.T. enters his spaceship
to depart from the Earth. Despite the fact that this film undoes othering of the
abject, I found this final scene uneasy to watch, because it showed the
separation from the abject, the process of othering. However, I also consider
that this uneasiness is significant for undoing the abject.

- 258 -

Once the body of E.T. has been incorporated with Elliott, like an infant
and its mother, E.T. is no longer positioned as the maternal Other. Unlike an
infant in general, Elliott chooses to separate from E.T. without othering and
decides to be incorporated with him in the imaginary. In this case, Elliotts
incorporated image of E.T. not only oscillates between absence and presence
but, more importantly, Elliott discovers himself in a new way of becoming a
subject, that is, a process of loving the Other and of incorporating the Other
with himself. The alien body was once far from a human ideal body, that is,
the able body, and, to me, it is the refusal of able-bodiedness that allows me to
resist the normal positioning of disabled subjectivity. E.T., as the abject, is
reclaimed through an equation with the self and the Other. I add, moreover,
that the way of the incorporating of E.T. is Elliotts internalising mode of
identification. Such an idea is captured in Kaja Silvermans notion of the
active gift of love in The Threshold of the Visible World. Silverman (1996)
states:

It is vital to my own theorization of the active gift of love

that sublimation be understood not only as the conferral of
ideality upon an object, but also as idealization, and so
identification, at a distance from the self. When the subject
sublimates, he or she agrees to posit the other rather than
the self as the cause of desire to see perfection in the
features of another Sublimation or the gift of love also
delegates that representative function to signifiers capable
of directing the subject away from his or her self to the
other. It transfers ideality from the first to the second of
those terms, a displacement which is crucial to the

- 259 -

assumption of lack and by implication of desire.

(Silverman, 1996: 74-5, emphasis in the original text)

She considers identification as a vehicle for taking the spectator somewhere

he or she has never been before, and which discourages the return journey
(Silverman, 1996: 102). The viewer of E.T. identifies with the Other implied
by the alien as part of him/herself. This otherness of the alien facilitates a way
of active love in which the viewer engages with his/her own life.

By incorporating E.T.s otherness into my specificity, I became part of

a cinematic unity of the self and the Other. Silverman suggests a place where
we can specifically learn to love the abject. For me, the place was E.T.: The
Extra-Terrestrial (2002 [1982]).

I learnt to love my own difference through

this cinematic representation of the abject.

What the final scene of the film provides, I believe, is a mode of

fluidity within identity. The film also provides a case of the Other as the self
or the Other within the self, and the condition of separation within
incorporation. In other words, Elliott ought to separate himself from E.T., but
E.T. illustrates that he is within Elliott. This cinematic representation of E.T.
as a subject-in-process establishes a mode of self that allows for love. Kelly
Oliver (2000: 16) in Conflicted Love sums up: Changing the stereotypes
and images that populate our cultural imaginary is an important step in
changing our social situations. Thus, through my relationship to E.T., my
self-image of physical disability is transformed.
- 260 -

Conclusion: Ways of Undoing the Other

When I first imagined the aliens body in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial

(2002 [1982]) before actually viewing the film, I was drawn to the image of the
Other; it was a body that I imagined, a body without a series of contours of
the able-bodied, an expanded or compressed body of my own. In this chapter I
have discussed how this body opens up possibilities to blur these contours of
the able-bodied, and consequently, the imaginary contour of my own disabled
body. To understand the disabled body as an abject body is not to have a fixed
image of the Other, but to undo the fixing of the Other or to expand the
domain of the abject. I assume that the imaginary body of the disabled is
something beyond categorisation. This categorisation, that is, the able-bodied
matrix, seeks to fix boundaries of both the able-bodied self and the disabled
Other. But, the disabled is not intelligible in any of its given contours and
goes beyond the boundaries of the Other.

Cultural representations offer fluid images and narratives of the Other;

there are the narratives and forms that produce a crisis for fixed norms. In the
film, the crisis comes to an intersection of contradictory contours that
constitute identity, but it also creates ways in which we can love ourselves
without othering differences because we recognise difference as incorporated
within the self. In the concluding chapter of Julia Kristeva, John Lechte (1990)
states:

- 261 -

Difference thus becomes the basis of the subject as an

open

system

modifying

itself

in

light

of

new

identifications. To refuse difference here, to be closed off

to the dynamic aspect of identity, is also to begin to die
certainly in a symbolic sense, and probably in a physical
sense as well. (Lechte, 1990: 216)

Reading Kristeva in a creative way in Art, Love, and Melancholy in the Work
of Julia Kristeva, Lechte (1990) explains her notion of the subject as an
open system:

[Rather] than thinking of the outside world of the other as a

threat, we should see it as a stimulus to change and
adaptation.

Trauma, crisis, and perturbation similarly

should be seen as the sources of an event in the life of the

subject, something which broaden horizons, and not
something to be denied or resisted with a resultant
atrophying of psychic space. To the extent that crisis is
absorbed into psychical structure, the latter becomes
increasingly more complex and supple, increasingly more
capable of love. (Lechte, 1990: 33)

It is neither easy nor simple to shift from a way of seeing physical differences
as the Other in a more positive way. Abjection, to me, is a field in which a
variety of others, differences, identities, and relations intermingle. I could have
rejected watching E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (2002 [1982]) and pushed the
small alien out of my domain of subjectivity for good. I was pleased to watch
- 262 -

and explore this film, that was, to me, an open system of loving my own
difference.

In questioning the category of the Other, E.T. created the

condition that allowed me, in turn, to love myself.

I needed to learn to love

myself because I also identified with Elliott.

I now understand how love operates to connect others together. Love is,
to me, crucial in the experience of othering the self and in the process of
undoing that otherness.

Thus, the process of undoing this otherness is to

return the self-love; this functions to encourage us to accept the Other. I love
my body with a nostalgia for the pre-symbolic stage, when my body was not
distinguished as the disabled Other. I keep loving my body rather than
forcing myself to distinguish it as the Other the lack of able-bodiedness.

If we understand abjection as fluidity or changeability, then it is not

limited to the disabled body but it is also located in all bodies.

To me,

abjection is not limited to the feminine, the maternal, the disabled, or the
Other, but is applicable to all beings. Abjection is a progress of becoming,
and as such, is an active transformation. In conclusion, I trust that my reading
of Kristevas abjection has allowed my readers to reconsider an image of the
disabled that goes beyond the image of the Other. All bodies can be open to
the presence of the abject. In exploring abjection, the disabled threatens the
able-bodied image of the human body. The changeability of the body
undermines the fixed image of the able-bodied, and in so doing, destabilisation
occurs in the able-bodied imaginary. Abjection is a process of transformation

- 263 -

of ourselves through which everyone creatively expands their own boundaries.

Oliver (2000) sums up:

By challenging the opposition between nature and culture,

between the body and the social, we can challenge
stereotypes that associate the maternal with nature and the
paternal with culture. Conversely, by calling into question
the association maternal and nature and paternal and culture,
we can call into question the opposition between nature and
culture. By bringing nature and culture together in our
primary

relationships,

relationships

that

are

we

can

both

imagine

embodied

subsequent
and

social,

prerequisites for human love Changing the stereotypes

and images that populate our cultural imaginary is an
important step in changing our social situations.

(Oliver,

2000: 16)

Thus, the opposition between nature and culture, or between maternal and
paternal, may also be linked to the opposition between the disabled and the
able-bodied. Without an image of E.T., the images of otherness and physical
disability had left me with negative image of otherness and myself.

The undoing of the process of abjection is not simply a matter of

destabilising linguistic and discursive categories, as is the case for Butler, but
of coming to recognise ourselves in the particular others we have abjected. I
have undone the process of abjecting E.T., once I came to recognise myself in

- 264 -

his particular otherness that I have abjected.

Love becomes an expansive

feeling for the connection to others that is vital to all of us.

- 265 -

Appendix

Mary Duffy

Venus De Milo

Duffy, Mary (1997) So You Want to Look? in Ann

Pointon with Chris Davies (eds.), Framed:
Interrogating Disability in the Media, London: British
Film Institute, p.182-3.

Image of Venus de Milo

(Louvre Museum, Paris)

- 266 -

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Motion Pictures
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Web Resources
Image of Venus de Milo (Louvre Museum, Paris):
http://www.cis.nctu.edu.tw/~whtsai/France%20Tour/Daily_Webpages/Summar
y%20of%20Trip%20(browsing)/03-30-0707%20La%20Venus%20de%20Milo%20(from%20postcard).jpg

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