Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities Ananya Mukherjea (bio) Susannah B. Mintz’s Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007 Susannah B. Mintz’s Unruly Bodies provides a much needed discussion of disabled women’s understandings of their own lives, bodies, and identities and of the meanings that their disabilities have and produce in the world—for others who are disabled and for the “able bodied.” As Mintz explains, this book links disability theory with feminist autobiography studies in discussing the illness and disability narratives of eight American women. In his classic work Stigma, sociologist Erving Goffman managed to link the experiences of people with highly visible disabilities (extreme facial disfigurements, missing limbs) with those of people with much more subtle physical anomalies, without diminishing the lives or knowledge of either group. He did so by focusing away from relative physical ability or disability and examining, instead, the concept of social identity and how, in his words, social identity can sometimes be “spoiled” by the body’s failure (refusal?) to conform to the categories and roles that others may expect of it. The disabled body, then, is not so much a determinant of individual value as its presentation, performance, and interpretation are media through which to understand what a society values and how individuals navigate such knowledge. Similarly, Mintz adapts Arthur W. Frank’s ideas that bodies give disability stories their meaning (123) and that the life writing of disabled women are life stories told through the body (9). Mintz writes, “The autobiographers studied in Unruly Bodies are compelling precisely because they write their bodies—their gendered, disabled bodies—as textually produced but also phenomenologically alive” (4). Trinh T. Minh-ha, in Woman, Native, Other, exhorted women of color to resist the seemingly rational, masculinist impartiality of academic discourse by “writing their bodies,” speaking from their own subjectivities, experiences, and practical knowledge as influenced by their physical bodies and the categories and political positions through which those bodies pass. Mintz offers a discussion of the writing of disabled women who do the same. As with Trinh’s work and women of color, the pertinence of this subject and [End Page 315] book, while certainly significant for English language studies and for disability studies, reaches beyond to gender studies, to women’s history, to sociology, and to sexuality studies. While Mintz’s book has much to offer as it studies a spectrum of life writing by contemporary disabled women, it is particularly noteworthy for highlighting the sexual and emotional lives of these writers, aspects of their lives that have been left out of much work in disability studies. Queer disability studies has been one exception to this oversight, but Mintz makes a real contribution by refusing (as do the writers she discusses) to redeem the disabled by presenting them as particularly brave, creative, or wise. Rather, it is in narrating her everyday life that Mintz disavows any need for redemption or constant comparison to the lives of the “normal” or “able bodied.” It is in such mundane reportage that the author is able to “set right” mistakes or misunderstandings from the past; in the case of Denise Sherer Jacobson’s story of parenting her infant son, “The Question of David becomes the arena in which Jacobson can transform submissive . . . behavior into scenes of . . . resolute expression” (148). In discussing Nancy Mairs’s detailed, matter-of-fact writing about her life with multiple sclerosis (MS), her experiences as the mother of adolescents, or her erotic relationship with her husband, Mintz writes, Mairs’s own phenomenology demands reckoning with a degenerative condition whose specific effects . . . force a continual renegotiation of the nature of selfhood. . . . To counteract the essentializing maneuvers of patriarchal discourse, Mairs presents a self both indeterminate and adamantly embodied, capable of becoming unhinged from cultural categories but also defined by the realities of MS. Asking that her readers acknowledge both the ordinariness and radical difference of her “crippled” female self, Mairs exposes the boundaries apparently inherent in [oppositional categories].” (26) Mintz’s focus on life writing as phenomenology and her insistence that the careful reader work hard to strike...