272 RüdigerKunow
play are moreover not only matters of practical concern, they also
implicate the field of literary and cultural criticism; here reading for
disabilityisanunavoidablepointofreferenceforthemuch-touted"turn
to ethics" in the Humanities and related attempts at grounding possible
"ethical relation[s] to objects whose cultural distance is irregular,
unmeasured,orchangeable..."(Walkowitz228).
While it may seem immediately plausible that the contingencies of
embodiment display the power of "nature" over human life, the
following pages will start from a different assumption: they argue
instead that the phenomenology of disability reveals the power of
cultureincasesofphysicalorpsychologicalnon-normativities—andnot
just its power to construct bodies at cultural will. Rather, what interests
me here is disability as occasionand"product of cultural rules about
what bodies should be or do" (Garland-Thomson,ExtraordinaryBodies
6), and thus as a factor in cultural practice.^101 And indeed, in many
socio-cultural formations, U.S.-America being no exception here, the
interpellation"disabled" attaches meaning to non-normativity, and in
doing so produces effects that simultaneously marginalize peopleand
subject them to special attention. People interpellated as "disabled" are
bothsequesteredfromtheir"normal"counterparts,andatthesametime
oftenhyper-visible,staredat,evenputonpublicdisplay.^102 Againstthis
background, it makes eminent sense to theorize "disability" as a subject
position that, like "age," is always already "overdetermined from
without" (Fanon,BlackSkin87), by a wide range of concepts, images,
andaffects.
Disability, often under a host of different names, is a category of
embodied difference that is transhistorical as well as transnational and
transcultural, not in terms of an invariant core but rather as a pervasive
(^101) I am not trying to suggest here that disability is not a harsh, constricting
condition, only that culture's jurisdiction over its presence in the public domain
serves other purposes beyond defining what non-normative embodiment might
be: "Deeply internalizable, normality became a way of talk about
heterosexuality, middle-classness, whiteness, able-bodiedness without ever
mentioningthem"(Creadick143).
(^102) This is by no means a result of modern concerns with normative bodies. In
ancient Rome, as the poet Martial (40 to ca. 102 CE) notes, there existed a
specialmarketforphysicallynon-normativepeople(IV).