WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES THE BODY MAKE? 59comes whatever exclusions exclusively human embodiment might entail.
Yet while extended functionalism does not require a normative body, the
theory prefigures a functional fit within cognitive economies of brains/
bodies/worlds. That is, it obscures variances and inequalities between dif-
ferent “fittings.” Both types of embodied mind theory Clark identifies, then,
try to account for common epistemic outcomes. Whether similar bodies
create similar mental states (special contribution), or different bodies cre-
ate similar mental states (extended functionalism), there is no attention to
divergent mental states. There is no epistemic difference.^17 The question,
then, is how to theorize the ontological multiplicity as Clark does in a way
that allows for epistemic multiplicity or dissonance. Or, put another way,
it is how to account for the difference that embodiment makes, without
falling into a standpoint approach that essentializes difference as a property
of the body-^ subject.
Disability as Assemblage
While philosophers of the embodied mind generally use disability as a
negative case to explain “normal” and universal cognition — for example,
asking whether quadriplegia interferes with “normal” cognition — disability
studies puts bodily variance at the center of its analysis. From the perspec-
tive of many scholars in disability studies, neither ability nor disability is a
fixed condition or vantage point. Disability “signals that the body cannot
be universalized” (Garland- Thomson 2001, 2). Bodies regularly run afoul
of neat categorization, and disability demands “a reckoning with the mess-
iness of bodily variety, with literal individuation run amok” (2). While in-
sisting on the capacities of disabled bodies is an important task in disability
studies, equally urgent is “deconstructing the presumed, taken- for- granted
capacities- enabled status of abled- bodies” (Puar 2009, 166). The ideal body
has to be recognized as such; it is not a real, living, enacting, and perceiving
body, but a construct that depends on the repression of disability, aging,
and vulnerability (L. Davis 1995). All bodies are vulnerable (Turner 2006);
further, the “instability of the disability body is but an extreme instance of
the instability of all bodies” (Price and Shildrick 2002, 72).
Disability scholars commonly define disability as the effect of social
forces that privilege some types of bodies and disadvantage others. The