Shape Stops Story

Abstract

Shape Stops Story Elizabeth F. Emens A Comment "I would like to suggest," Rosemarie Garland-Thomson tells us, "that 'shape structures story' is an informing principle of disability identity" (113). In her essay in this volume, Garland-Thomson eloquently describes how our bodies tell stories, create stories. Her founding principle—shape structures story—draws upon an essay by Caroline Walker Bynum about metamorphosis and continuity, about change as identity. Garland-Thomson's twist on this idea is best captured in her exegesis of Simi Linton's memoir of identity formation after her car accident: "Although her new shape is instantaneous, the new sense of self develops as a process that is simultaneously growth and healing. The recently impaired body pulls along the new sense of self, which resists and struggles as it reforms itself within a new community based on a shared sense of being in and relating to the world" (Garland-Thomson 119). The changed body pulls along the inner self, shaping and recreating that self in ways before unimagined. The account Garland-Thomson gives us of shape structuring story may seem at first surprising. Initially her idea of bodies creating stories rather than stories creating bodies seems in tension with what is arguably a dominant narrative of disability studies—the idea that the social model of disability should triumph over the medical model. [End Page 124] The medical model views disabled bodies as bodies needing a cure, whereas the social model views disability as a social category created by the context in which we live. Under the social model, someone who cannot walk up stairs is disabled only because stairs assume one kind of body rather than another. As Simi Linton asks her students, "If I want to go to vote or use the library, and these places are inaccessible, do I need a doctor or a lawyer?" (120). Whereas the dominant nondisabled culture tends to medicalize disabled bodies—always seeking a cure—disability studies focuses on the social context that renders certain bodies disabled. Garland-Thomson's rendering of disability as a shape that makes stories, rather than of bodies as constructed by storytelling, might seem then to invert the prevailing narrative of disability studies: the rejection of the medical model in favor of the social model. On closer inspection, though, Garland-Thomson says nothing to embrace the medical model over the social. Her account offers nothing to suggest that disability is a state that needs curing. On the contrary, through the narratives supplied by the film Murderball and works by Cheryl Marie Wade and Simi Linton, as well as her own narrative of the tongue dance, Garland-Thomson celebrates the power of bodies beyond the "norm" to create beautiful and powerful stories, stories to be cherished, not erased through medical cures. As she tells us early on, the imagined narratives of disability and disabled bodies are typically not "pretty ones" (114). As collected and rendered by Garland-Thomson, they become not pretty but passionate, powerful, extraordinary. Her essay climaxes with her description of the tongue dance, an elaborate dance begun by a colleague who is able to move only his tongue, and who therefore moves his tongue better than anyone. The original tongue dancer leads a train of aspiring imitators at the annual Society for Disability Studies dance, in a ritual that Garland-Thomson inscribes as the ethnic folk dance of the disability community. The dance—"the eroticism of [which] is lost on none of us" (121)—perfectly portrays the two themes Garland-Thomson teases out of her freshly positive narratives structured by disability: sexuality and community. Garland-Thomson generously narrates the tongue dance for those outside the community of the dance. Drawing on the language of disability, she renders the dance "accessible" to outsiders (00[8]), implying that they too might participate vicariously. But ultimately the outsiders are not participants. Their function is instead to bear witness to this moment of sexuality and community, to the power of bodies beyond the norm to come together in new ways that far...