DISABILITY RHETORIC

“to fuck up that which is already

fucked up” (6)
 •  Spend a few minutes
reading/drawing/writing/
thinking/talking with a
classmate about the
definition of “rhetoricity.”
“RHETORICITY” What is it? What are its
borders and boundaries?

•  Feel free to add your

insights to the diagram.
 DEFINING RHETORICITY

•  “we, the autistic, are merely the residues of

rhetoricity” (7)
•  “queer bodies and autistic bodies betray
rhetoricity in gesture, relationality, emotion, and
intent” (27)
•  “disability reinforces rhetoricity as much as
rhetoricity reinforces disability” (66)
 BODYMIND

“I use the term bodymind to emphasize that although ‘body’ and

‘mind’ usually occupy separate conceptual and linguistic territories,
they are deeply intertwined. This theory is drawn in part from
Babette Rothschild’s The Body Remembers. Although Rothschild’s
usage refers to persons who have experienced trauma, I believe it
can be usefully applied to persons with mental disabilities of all
kinds, for—as I argue throughout this book—our problems are in
no sense ‘all in our minds.’ If it weren’t so unwieldy, I would be
tempted to use something like psychobiosocialpoliticalbodymind.”

Margaret Price
 METIS

“Metis is the rhetorical art of cunning, the use of embodied

strategies—what Certeau calls everyday arts—to transform
rhetorical situations. In a world of chance and change, metis is
what allows us to craft available means for persuasion. Building on
the work of Detienne and Vernant, and Certeau, I argue that metis
is a way to recognize that all rhetoric is embodied. I show that
embodiment is a feeling for difference, and always references
norms of gender, race, sexuality, class, citizenship. Developing the
concept of metis I show how embodiment forms and transforms
in reference to norms of ability, the constraints and enablements
of our bodied knowing.”
Jay Dolmage
“NOTHING ABOUT US
WITHOUT US”
 Medical Moral Charity Social
Disability = Deficit. Cure it/ Disability = Result of Sin; Disabled people need “our” Disability is caused by the
Treat it/Eradicate it God’s divine wrath help, sympathy, welfare way society is organized

THE MODELS
 “YOU’VE GOT TO GET AWAY FROM
VERBAL LANGUAGE”

•  “The World Needs All Kinds of Minds”

•  How do we teach writing to students who think in

pictures?
 “I DON’T NEED YOUR ROCKIN CHAIR”

•  How do we “read” this song through a disability rhetoric

lens?

•  How do emotions drive this resistance to aging and

deterioration of the body?
 DISABILITY INTERSECTIONS

•  How do bodily rhetorics and disability rhetorics

intersect?
•  “It’s not that autistics are not autistic—it’s more that
autistics have too much autism and not enough autism, all
at the same time, and this makes them inherently
unreliable, inherently and rhetorically halved” (51)
•  Double & Triple consciousness?
 DISABILITY INTERSECTIONS

• Disability rhetorics & display?

• & protest?

• & memory?
 DISRUPTING RHETORIC

“to be a rhetorician is to have no clue what rhetoric

is, for rhetoric is ever-shifting, historically
contingent, powerfully shaped, impelled by
predictions about nebulous futures, and seemingly
always related to (no, defined by), context and
situation” (88)
“I am bombarded with representations of autistic people as non-
rhetors—as non-rhetors who cannot emote (goodbye pathos), as
non-rhetors who cannot recognize the mental states nor visualize
the needs of the people around them (goodbye ethos), as non-
rhetors whose logics are so mechanistic and rigid that their only
comparable non-rhetor analogues are robots and chimpanzees
(goodbye, logos). As a rhetorician, I am supposed to understand
autism as a limit case, one that signifies everything that rhetoric is
not. I am supposed to understand that autism is the antithesis of
narrative. As a rhetorician, I am supposed to understand that
autism prevents me from being a rhetorician.”
Yergeau, “Clinically Significant Disturbance”
“it is not uncommon for rhetoricians to claim that rhetoric
is what makes one human. This is a belief that persists in
spite of rhetorical studies’ various turns toward things,
ecologies, affect, and complex vitalisms: if one is arhetorical,
then one is not fully human” (6)
 •  Instructions: Skim the definitions of
rhetoric on the handout. Focusing on
one or two, think/write/draw/talk
about how disability and/or new
materialism “disrupts” this definition.
ACTIVITY: Add to the diagram if you feel so
DISRUPTING moved.
RHETORIC

•  How do your research (possibly

midterm?) “disrupt” rhetoric? Does it?
Should it?