282 RüdigerKunow
a central, recurrent fact of human sociality; the historical perspective
also,andmoreimportantly,remindsusofthepointmadeearlier,namely
that the norms involved in disability determine not only what
(potentially) conforms to them but also what remains on the other side
of the divide, embodiments for which "able" seems a curiously out-of-
the-way term. Disability, presenting a visible, even recalcitrant
opposition to the human desire for sameness, "society's conception of a
'normal'oracceptablebody"(Wendell44),bringsintoplay,dialectically
as it were, normative concepts of a worthwhile human life, a life worth
living and worth having. As Lennard Davis says, polemically:
"normalcy is constructed to create a 'problem' of the disabled person"
("Introduction" 1). The entanglements which bind together norms and
(their?) exceptions mark an important point of reference for a cultural
critique of disability. Furthermore, they illustrate yet another important
point:disabilityismorethananidentityoraconstruct;itisthenamefor
a diagnostic constellation composed of relations and recognizabilities,
identifications and counter-identifications, hyper-visibility and
invisibility.AsIsaidabove,disabilityrelates.
What Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls the "ability/disability
system" ("Integrating Disability" 5) is thus made up of problems and
issuesthatextendfarbeyondtheindividualpersonsculturallyidentified
as "disabled." For this reason, any analysis of disability is incomplete
without reflection on its resonances in the public sphere of a given
society (Stiker 40 et passim). As with other forms of non-normative
embodiment, disability is a civic condition—"civic" here understood
beyond its narrow, political sense as designating a constellation where
national and cultural identities materialize themselves for better or for
worsein thelivingbodiesofdisabledpeopleinwaysthatsafeguardthe
fullflourishingofdisabledindividualsandcommunities.^114
This civic dimension is also the reason why war veterans and their
disabilitiesareausefulplacetobeginaculturalcritiqueofdisabilityasa
politically marked form of non-normative embodiment. As an opening
gambit,itmaybesaid(withonlyaslightpolemicaledge)thatdisability
(^114) Ronald J. Berger presents an example of such a community when he talks
about the deaf-mute culture on Martha's Vineyard. For almost 200 years, that
culture had remained intact, flourishing because even the non-deaf-mute were
communicatinginsignlanguage(Berger30-31,155).