NotNormativelyHuman 269
experienced by individuals—"an alternative modality of being" (Caeton
n. pag.)—, for outsiders, the so-called "normies," the disability
experience cannot be present socially and culturally unless it is
recognized and acknowledged as such. This is done most often through
practices of profiling, of sizing up a person vis-à-vis the established
standards of physical or mental normativity. Most of the time, such
profiling depends, as I said, on what can be seen about the disabled
person. To the degree disability is in many cases (only) a visible
signature, "a nomination of the visible," (Foucault) the concept and the
state it designates opens itself up to a principally endless play of
visibility and non-visibility. Speaking of play here is notto suggest that
there is anything playful about these processes. Rather, for the people
concerned,thisoscillationbetweenthevisibleandtheinvisibleinvolves
what Goffman in the subtitle of his book on stigma called "the
managementofspoiledidentity."Disability,almostalwaysperceivedby
outsiders as a form of defective embodiment, tendsto override all other
concerns with his or her identity; in such moments disabilityisthat
person's identity (Garland-Thomson,ExtraordinaryBodies12). For this
reason,andalsoformorebroadlyethicalones,anyculturalistreadingof
disability should not forget that disability is not only an identificatory
modalitybutalivingandlivedcondition,groundedinbutnotexhausted
by, anomalies in human physicality or mental endowments. There is, in
other words, an eminentlydiagnosticdimension to encounters with
embodieddifference,andthisdiagnosticdimension,orwhatIjustcalled
profiling, goes some way toward explaining why disability is often
coded innarratives of appearance or disappearance, where external
features of non-normative embodiment are concealed, revealed, or
eclipsed. These narratives are resourced by concepts, images, and
stereotypes coming from and going back to the general culture.
Examplesofsuchnarrativeswillbediscussedinthepagesbelow.
In many cultures, including the U.S.-American one, disability,
regardless of its specific form or features—is not only an inscription of
an individual body into a seemingly objective schema but, like "age," it
is a site of manifest otherness. "Disability" names a state of exception
(notin the Agambian sense) from the usual shape and form of human