NotNormativelyHuman 279
question involving also the critic's very own subject position. Writing
from the perspective of a person who is not disabled, perhaps only
temporarily so;^109 judgments of this kind would mean claiming a
position of knowledge and superiority that I cannot and do not wish to
inhabit.
Rather, as in the previous chapter on "age," I intend to use
"disability"asacriticallenstoreflectonthecrucialquestionofhowthe
imaginary grammar of norms regulating the biosphere—in this case
able-bodiedness—producesmaterialeffectswhichdeterminethelivesof
people thus interpellated. Among the material effects of interest here is
the iterative failure^110 of the disabled to conform to what passes as
normal.Thisfailureisclearlyoneofthereasonswhy,despiteofitslong
history and pervasive presence, disability—like age—is a lived
condition that is often disavowed, individually as well as collectively.
Another reason for this disavowal may be that this iterative failure
(Heyes 121) may at one and the same time be an equally iterative
contestationofnormssothatbodiesorpersonsdesignatedas"disabled"
stand in more or less obvious opposition to the wonted order of people
and things. Lennard Davis, making a related point, even argues that the
non-normative body plays an indispensable role in defining the normal
body("ConstructingNormalcy"9-11).
As I have repeatedly argued in these pages, norms produce
recognizability; inversely, non-normativity produces silence and
oversight. The currently fashionable move of theorizing disability as a
difference is not much help here; clearly and in many ways, it is a
difference, like gender, race, ethnicity, but other than these also a
(^109) Disability activists especially have brought the term "temporarily able-
bodied" (TAB) into the public discourse to fight the idea of disability as fateful
exception. From the TAB-perspective, every person will sooner or later in their
life course, and most probably in late life, experience changes in his or her
physicalmake-upwhichwillbedisabling(D.Marks18,78).Thissuggestionis
corroboratedbystatistics:morethan90percentofallimpairmentsareacquired,
onlyasmallfractionarecongenital.
(^110) This failure can be experiencedasa personalcondition,the excruciating and
self-deprecating sense of being "less than normal," or that of socialand cultural
marginalization (cf. Voigt, Ryan J. "Who Me? Self-Esteem for People with
Disabilities."Brainline.WETA,2016.Web.20Oct.2016).