Foreword: Prosing the Possibilities

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. See St. Augustine's On Christian Teaching, trans. R.P.H. Green (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Various terms will be used to represent “disability” throughout this introduction. This variability is not intended to suggest that all of these terms are interchangeable, synonymous, or even necessarily compatible with each other (some certainly are not). Rather, we suggest these kaleidoscopic terms should represent the very variability that comprises “disability” and the difficulty in defining it. Although all the terms used here probably exist in the minds of most people as representative, for better or worse, of the ways in which disability is named and claimed in history as well as contemporary culture, the authors also want the shift in their usage employed here to evoke looking through a kaleidoscope: while all the elements inside the scope remain (in essence) the same, one need only slightly bump the lens and the entire view can change dramatically. Each variation on the term and each turn of the kaleidoscope will be highlighted. 2. Francis Bacon “Of Deformity,” in Francis Bacon, The Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 99. 3. Michel Eyquem Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981), 8–9. 4. William Hay, “Deformity: An Essay,” in The Works of William Hay, Esq. 2 vols. (London, 1794), I.5. 5. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), 29. 6. Zygmunt, Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (New York: Cornell University Press, 1981, repr. 2000). 7. See Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986, repr. 2000). 8. Today the building at Tiergartenstrasse 4 is gone – bombed, of course, in the final days of World War II. Yet a bronze memorial stone set in the sidewalk behind Berlin's beautiful new philharmonic hall (where the old Nazi building stood) still commemorates T-4. Standing at the small bit of sidewalk left to teach people about the full impact of “despisers of the body,” one might even imagine those 270,273 official victims of the T-4 program and their despised and silenced bodies somehow rising up and dancing to the beautiful music now coming from Berlin's center here in a new century. 9. Theodor Adorno, Minima Morali: Reflections From a Damaged Life. trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1997), 58. 10. Dr Seuss, The Sneetches and Other Stories (New York: Random House, 1989), 13. 11. She is here quoting Jean Starborinski, “The Body's Moment”, Yale French Studies 64 (1983), 276.