An Ever-Expanding Inclusiveness: <i>Bending over Backwards</i>

Abstract

An Ever-Expanding InclusivenessBending over Backwards Tom O'Connor (bio) Bending Over Backwards By Lennard Davis; New York University Press, 2002 In his recent collection of essays, Bending over Backwards, Lennard Davis states the following: my solution to the problem of identity is not the inclusion of disability on the roster of favored identities. Rather, the point is that identity studies itself is limited by the necessarily taxonomic peculiarity of its endeavor. The list of identities will only grow larger, tied to an ever-expanding idea of inclusiveness. After all, when all identities are finally included, there will be no identity. When studies focus on alterity, and when alterity must be included, then, in the full plenum of inclusion, alterity ceases to be Other. (30) The above quote outlines the book's purpose in potentially controversial terms. Bending over Backwards is not just a re-evaluation of the disability theories Davis first presented in Enforcing Normalcy (Verso 1995); it is a more extensive look at how notions of disability challenge other political assumptions and privileges. In this sense, disability theories inherently possess a multimodal, cultural critique: not only can literary theory and identity-politics be retheorized through the lens of disability but also the assumptions that often operate unchecked in the legal system, scientific study, and ethics. Davis clearly demonstrates how disability is unique in cultural ideology because it productively deconstructs the most fundamental "binary" in Western culture—that is, the opposition between "the normal" and "the abnormal." For this fact alone, Davis's book is a significant contribution to cultural studies at large. Davis takes his title Bending over Backwards from a rather blatant [End Page 161] bias operating in the legal system today: courts have continually sided with employers who must make "exceptions" for disabled workers, coding such "exceptions"—in legal language—as wholly negative and un-American. For example, the courts in the case Vande Zande vs. State of Wisconsin Department of Administration describe an employer as one who must "bend over backwards to accommodate a disabled worker" (126). Such problematic social "judgments" are what Davis's book attacks head-on from multiple perspectives, especially in the chapters "The End of Identity Politics and the Beginning of Dismodernism" and "Crips Strike Back." Consequently, Davis claims that we need a new umbrella term for both literary as well as cultural studies, one that can overcome the problematic, humanistic/ableist strain that is one of postmodernism's key flaws; his new term is dismodernism, which establishes a nonidealized ethics that can affirm all that makes life nonideal, namely, our limitations and our mortality: politics have been directed toward making all identities equal under a model of the rights of the dominant, often white, male, "normal," subject. In a dismodernist mode, the ideal is not a hypostatization of the normal (that is, dominant) subject, but aims to create a new category based on the partial, incomplete subject whose realization is not in autonomy and independence but dependency and interdependence. This is a very different notion from subjectivity organized around wounded identities; rather, all humans are seen as wounded. (30) Hence, dependence and interdependence should no longer be viewed as pejorative terms, since the hypostatized desire for "perfection"/ "the ideal" is nothing but an alienating illusion. Davis further comments: "we are all disabled by injustice and oppression of various kinds. We are all nonstandard . . . " (31–32). Disability is a reality that everyone must face, since anyone can become physically disabled at any moment—especially later in life. Davis's theorization of dismodernism is a potential link for all identities, regardless of class, race, gender, or any other identity marker. However, it must be noted that "dismodern" disability theories do not attempt to demean the identity-politics based on those particular identity markers; instead, they offer a more inclusive logic that doesn't only privilege certain wounded identities: all "attempts to remake the identity inevitably end up relying on the categories first used to create the oppression" (19). Davis acknowledges that there will [End Page 162] always be some minority group that isn't considered a favored category, such as "Bosnian mothers, Albanian Serbs, or Ethiopian Jews," and so forth (89...