Informalidad en la industria de la indumentaria

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freshman composition students, playing an hour of basketball, spending another hour in a contentious faculty meeting, taking a trip to the grocery store, cooking supper, and, at last, talking for a few short but meaningful minutes with my spouse before I scurried downstairs to where I currently sit working in my office in our basement.

3. My body is a postmodern text. When I sit behind a desk, looking out to my class on that first day of the semester, my students think I am a “norm.” It is rare in those first moments for students to notice my disfigurement. I usually arrive at the classroom early. I prepare, go over notes for the opening class session. I sit down. Students slowly drift in, and then finally, after taking roll and beginning the arduous process of matching names with faces, I get up and distribute the syllabus. What happens? I see surprised expressions, eyes quickly shifting away from my body, often glancing anywhere but the location, the space where disability is unexpectedly and suddenly being written. I go on and begin my introduction to the particular course, while my students hurriedly attempt to account for difference, to manage the contrast of the literal with the prescribed stereotype and the previous impression. These are the crucial moments that constitute the process of my life; these are the absolutely significant points that define the narrative of my body.

4. My body is a postmodern text. I am aware that I am constantly located in a social space, a gray area where the category of disability is manufactured. My body is deceptive, though, so I can at times escape, slip out of the net of discourses that determine the lives of so many disabled people. I am aware that I am able to have these moments because my body is so pliable in its ability to be normal and then abnormal and then normal again. I live in a space that allows perception, comprehensive awareness. I can feel the colonizing discourses of biomedical culture wash over my body like waves sweeping up onto the seashore. They recede and I am normal; they crash again and I am drowning in stereotype and imposed identity. The unique privilege of my life has been the fact that I am, figuratively, a beach, an edge of something; I know the different spheres of water and sand; I am able to live in both worlds. And as I move through these worlds, as the narrative of my life is constructed around and through me, I am aware of how I change and am changed, written and re-written by the different clusters of discourse that mark all of our lives: at the doctor’s office last week, for example, I was “ill,” a “patient”; on the basketball court later that day I was “healthy,” a “player.”

5. The goal of this paper is manifold and ambitious. My intention here is to swirl together autobiography, narrative, and critical analysis in order to

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simultaneously create a reading of disability, of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, and of the construction of the postmodern body. I acknowledge the irritating impossibility, the bombastic complexity of such a goal for a piece of critical writing. I recognize the likely failure of this project, although I am not going to lie: I am terribly hopeful for it. That hope is tempered by fear, coupled with the risk of it all: it is important for me to record that I write this document knowing of such matters, as I am aware of my own tenuous situation as a tenure-track, first-year assistant professor of English. I am a young professional at the beginnings of difficult career, a career that demands excellence and grinding dedication to work in the classroom, on departmental and college-wide committees, and in the chaotic arenas of published research. At the same time, I am a disabled individual who has been, in one context or another, disabled his entire life and has, therefore, acquired a range of experiences and a distinct knowledge as to what it means to negotiate exclusion and discrimination. My own self, then, presented within the framework of these words and of the autobiographical examples that follow, is at issue here, is vulnerable and open. Indeed, the way that these pressures, histories, and goals pull at each other, contradict and countermine each other in this essay is, in part, the very reason for the paper’s existence. Like the creature in Mary Shelley’s novel, and like the novel itself for Mary Shelley, this work is understood by its author to be something sewn together, hideously grotesque, monstrous, something that is most likely a powerful failure. My hope, however, is that the very fracturing agents that conflict at the core of this essay will slowly fold into each other, connect, blend together, and produce a reading, and an understanding of my own experience, that ultimately helps to define what David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder have recently demanded: an authentic, developed “disabled perspective” of culture (242).

6. At the outset my question is, what happens when a disabled individual writes herself? What happens when the disabled person explains and articulates, through either writing or bodily practice, disability? There has been an increasing number of theorists and researchers working in the field of disability studies who have attempted to construct answers to these kinds of questions. In doing so, what critics often discover is a need to expand the emerging field itself. For example, in commenting on the importance of scholars in the humanities working in a field dominated by the social sciences, Lennard J. Davis asserts that narratives written by individuals who are disabled constitute important voices in the workings of culture at large and need, therefore, to be understood through a humanities-centered critical approach:

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Cultural productions are virtually the only permanent records of a society’s ideological structure. If we acknowledge that communal behaviors and thought processes have a material existence, then that existence coalesces in the intersection between the individual mind and the collective market. Nowhere can we understand this intersection better than in literary and cultural productions. (“Enabling” 248–49)

Davis continues: “We must examine the process by which normalcy, taken for granted by definition, is shaped into hegemonic force that requires micro-enforcement at each and every cultural, somatic, and political site in the culture.... People learn themselves through consumed cultural artifacts” (250). In the same journal publication, Mitchell and Snyder echo Davis in arguing that

disability study in the humanities has been critiqued for a tendency to surf amidst a sea of metaphors rather than stand on the firm ground of policy and legislative action. However, the identification of variable representational systems for approaching disability in history demonstrates in and of itself that disability operates as a socially constructed category. The more varied and variable the representation, the more fervent and exemplary disability studies scholars can make our points about the complexity of this social construction. (242)

7. In this theoretical context, writing disability is the (re)production of disability, a potent act of creation. Autobiography by a disabled person is an authentication of lived, performed experience; it is a process of making, of being able to “translate knowing into telling” (White 1). Using the last two decades of criticism and theory as a map, disabled autobiography can be traced as a postmodern, postcolonial endeavor, for when disability writing constructs the particular self-definition it is attempting to narrate, it automatically resists repressive stereotype at large and attempts to reclaim ownership of the body and the way the body is understood. In other words, writing, autobiography, the narration of an experience by a disabled person to a reader or an immediate listener, enables a marginalized voice to be heard, which in turn causes cultural practice and stereotyped roles to change. The experiences rendered in “illness narratives,” as Arthur Kleinmann has named them, work against any kind of essential universalism and instead attempt to demonstrate particularity and individuality in experience. The

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writing of illness and the writing of disability, and as David Morris has recently noted the two terms are often collapsed together in postmodern culture, involve new constructions of reality, new categories for the body’s performance in cultural practice. Disabled autobiography is a conscious act of becoming.

8. What disability writing constitutes, then, is an unfolding of culture so that, in addition to negative stereotype, liberatory constructs are present and available to the practice of the body, in the body’s movement through the different representational systems of general culture. Disability writing, in other words, often takes the instability inherent in the body and spins it into the articulation of a volitional mode of selfhood; writing disability becomes an empowering act of control, a deconstructive critical strategy that attempts to break down oppressive and imprisoning cultural construction. By writing disability, the performance and general representation of disability is re- centered, re-focused on the disabled subject itself, which deflects and displaces the powerful gaze of the “norm.” As one critic argues, “as self- representation, autobiography is perhaps uniquely suited to validate the experience of people with disabilities and to counter stereotypical (mis)representation” (Couser 292).

9. For example, one of the students I talked with today is orthopedically disabled. In our conference, I commented on how beautiful the weather has been, and how much I love the springtime. The student responded with a detailed explanation of just how much she hates the spring. She dreads the spring because it is a ritualistic moment in the story or text of her life: each spring she becomes newly disabled. The weather changes, and she is unable to wear clothes that help to conceal her disfigurement. Each spring, then, she confronts new stares, the feeling of awkward humiliation that is attached to being physically abnormal in a public zone where normalcy is in effect. She is undressed by those stares, by the cumulative and constant recognition of difference: she is stripped and re-written with the coming of warm weather; putting on a pair of shorts, a t-shirt, or a bathing suit equates putting on a “disability,” dressing down into abnormality.

10. What this particular student experiences every spring is a process of conflict, resistance, and liberation. Again, in the spring, with the eyes, faces, and general behavior of curious and almost always kind-hearted people, this disabled student feels her body, her self, being lifted from her, being re-shaped and re-made because of the recognition of difference and the discursive and perceptual location of abnormality. Her response, however, is to attempt to re-define herself, again to resist the imposition of “abnormality” that comes from the matrix of culture surrounding her. In

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articulating her anger to me and to others, in speaking of her lack of control and building up a narrative of her experiences for her audience, she gains a measure of control, takes her body back, realizes a liberation from the construct of abnormality. In this way, she can re-determine and re-write the acts of becoming through which her body must annually move; she can trigger a process of self-definition that works against the subject/object, normal/abnormal polarization of her experience. Her voice, and her body, can claim a degree of power in her ability to narrate her feelings of abnormality. She does not stop wearing the shorts, but instead embraces the perceptual process invoked when she puts them on because she knows that she can define herself, that she can become and re-become what she knows she is.

11. Thinking of this project, I asked her if she had read Frankenstein. She had not (again, though she is obviously very mature, the student is only a freshman). When I was her age I had read the book, though, and when I read Frankenstein for the first time, at eighteen, I read myself as the creature, as a body that has no place in the world, a body that, in its long twisting scars and attachable prosthetic limb, has the imprint of technology and modernist science written upon it, and seems, therefore, “unnatural.” When I read of the creature being built, made from selected parts of dead bodies, I easily read it as an enactment that mirrored my own development as a person: artificial, “fashioned” limbs and transplanted organs create the creature, the daemon; such things also construct myself. At eighteen, again my age at that first reading, I felt all of the resentment of the creature, the anger, the isolation, the loneliness. The creature was the ultimate victim of stereotyped oppression, of a disabling construction of “ugliness”; the creature’s response was to torment its author, to triumph in the end by driving its creator and the one who first names it “ugly” to a cruel death. In this way, I vaguely recognized that the creature resisted what it had become and used its disabled body, a body that was incredible and superior in strength, in its ability to experience extremes in cold and heat, to wreck the inscribing process of outside definition. Being constructed in postmodern discourse, being the person I was and am, I read the creature as “powerful” in its resistance: the creature gained power through its disempowered body; it took the imposition of “abnormality” and used it as an articulation of strength and purpose. When I read the narrative, I read these terms into my own body; I used them to explain my own life.

12. Before I move to a more critical discussion of Frankenstein, I have one more autobiographical example of this postmodern process of becoming. I love to swim. I love the sun, the exertion of a day of swimming. A few weeks

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ago, with a couple of days off for the Easter holiday, my spouse and I spent a long weekend in Florida. We went to a place south of Tampa, to a condo on Indian Rocks Beach. The facility has a heated pool, but I wanted to swim in the Gulf. In order to get to the beach, though, I had to leave my limb upstairs and use crutches (salt and sand sometimes damage the hydraulic knee of my leg, so I try to avoid leaving it for long stretches on a beach). As I passed by the pool on crutches and felt the stares of roughly forty sunbathing, vacationing people, and heard the questions of several small, inquisitive children, I felt deeply disabled. I called that passage, a route I would take probably eight to ten times during the trip, the running of the gauntlet. That was what it was: a painful, bruising journey that simply had to be made. In those moments, I felt vulnerable. I felt angry. I will be honest: I felt hatred. I remember telling myself, on several occasions, that “I didn’t care what they thought of me,” that “I was going to do this no matter what.” I remember trying hard not to look back at them, those innocent people, not to hear the questions, but instead to focus on the goal: the gateway to the beach and ultimately the sea. I knew that making eye contact meant imprisonment, displacement, perhaps even failure. I knew how the process worked: eye contact would equate deep inscription, the aggressive internalization of abnormality and disability, and I knew that too much of that would have meant a decision to just avoid the whole troublesome thing and not swim at all.

13. When I did get to the water, however, I was free again, my disability hidden beneath the waves. And at that point, typically, I felt a rush of emotions. I was thankful and pleased to be in the water swimming. I was embarrassed by my body’s power to cause discomfort. I was anxious about the return passage back to the condo. I was ashamed of my profound inability to resist becoming what those stares had made me into: disabled, a person who needs help—the gates opened for him, the pathways cleared—a person who needs kindness and smiles to offset the uncomfortable stares and questions.

14. Of course, as usual these feelings were almost immediately countered by another very different experience. On the first day back from that trip, I went to the dentist for a check-up. Having been out in the Florida sun, I had a tan, and as I sat down in the reclined dentist’s chair, ready to be examined, he mentioned that I looked great and had a “healthy glow.” I laughed, but what flashed across my mind was what I had actually experienced while I was getting this tan (which has now begun to peel): that is, disability, the constructions of illness. The dentist defined my body and, in turn, “me,” as being “healthy.” But just the day before at the pool I was certainly defined as “disabled.” Any nephrologist will tell you that for the last

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three years I have been seriously “ill.” My point here is simple: it is clear that the text of my body, which is my body, is profoundly unstable. Again and again I discover how I am both normal and abnormal, both able-bodied and healthy, and disabled and ill. As I will demonstrate, it is this profound discursive indeterminacy that defines the postmodern body and the direction that both body criticism and disability studies are taking as they develop.

15. I will end this introduction with the following description. We have a full-length mirror in our bedroom. I looked in it tonight; I looked in it with the issues of this essay in my mind, with the experiences of the past couple of weeks clicking off in my head. What I saw was a tanned, smiling face, a body clothed in casual khaki Dockers and a light blue buttoned down shirt by Structure, a body wearing comfortable brown leather shoes and tan dress socks. I then took off the shoes, the shirt. The body was different, just slightly, no longer wearing several markers of class, no longer appearing totally healthy—the left shoulder slightly deformed, again lower and smaller than the right; the body uneven, slightly misshapen. I then took off the pants, the undershirt, and then the underwear and the socks. And there I was, stripped, naked. The body had become disfigured, disabled. Scars danced across the abdomen. A prosthetic limb dominated the left side of the body, drawing the eyes to it. I turned and it was apparent that the hips turn outward, the spine curves inward. My body looked bent, odd, strange to me. I took off the limb and the transformation was complete: I had stripped into disability and disfigurement, into powerlessness and vulnerability.

16. I had changed. In the mirror I had morphed from an apparently normal, youngish, tanned person in reasonably fashionable clothing to a nakedly disfigured creature. If only my dentist could see me now, I thought.

TH E CR E AT U R E A S MO N S T E R

17. The first time I taught Mary Shelley’s most famous book I was in graduate school, a teaching fellow, and I was teaching my first upper-division course. The class was a junior-level survey of nineteenth- and twentieth-