Introduction
Michael Davidson
A number of vectors converge to make this special issue on dependency theory possible–and necessary. First and foremost is the increased discussion of dependency within disability studies inspired by recent books by Eva Kittay, Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Berubé, Lennard Davis, Anita Silvers and others. Most significant among these is Martha Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice, whose 2006 publication received extensive coverage in mainstream journals and created a lively debate on disability blogs, listservs and public forums. In its attempt to situate disability more prominently in liberal theories of social justice, the book touched a sensitive nerve among disability activists over the issue of whether foregrounding dependent relations violates hard won virtues of independent living. The second vector is the volatile debate around physician assisted suicide, neonatal testing, and genetic engineering–raised to prominence by the Theresa Schiavo case and the film, Million Dollar Baby–that asks the question of what constitutes a “life worth living” and, more importantly, who determines that worth? If medical professionals, HMO’s, and health insurance companies determine who shall live or die, decisions about the value of human life will be based less on personal than rational (economic) choice. The third vector is the growing concern over the impact of economic and social globalization on worldwide disability. Globalization’s promise of greater access to healthcare, medicine, and social services through economic and communicational integration is offset by fears that such integration is merely a kinder, gentler term for neoliberal privatization and centralization that create, rather than ameliorate, conditions of dependence and disability.[1]
What is dependency and why does it have such a bad reputation? Although every relationship involves dependency–from a word’s dependence on a meaning, a country’s dependence on its people, a people’s dependence on its political representatives–the term takes on an especially charged character for persons with disabilities. For many able bodied persons, disability is synonymous with dependency, the former framed as a condition of tragic limit and loss requiring regimes of care and rehabilitation. For disability activists who have fought long and hard to achieve a degree of autonomy dependency conjures up the specter of paternalism that has historically marked living with a physical or cognitive impairment. Of course not all disabled people require assistance. Persons with mobility impairments who move about with prostheses or wheelchairs or persons who are deaf and sight impaired may lead relatively independent lives while persons with severe neurological or cognitive disorders may require extensive care. Generalizing among the various conditions that qualify under legal protections such as the ADA makes assigning a single category of dependence difficult. What recent dependency theory acknowledges is that, whether or not one identifies as disabled, humans are vulnerable and require care, and this condition needs to be recognized. As Kittay says, we are all “some mother’s child” (23-24).
As Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon have observed, in the American context dependency is identified with the welfare state, synonymous with social programs and public assistance. Opposition to universal healthcare, disability legislation, and universal design is often framed as a weakening of self-reliance and individual choice to oppressive bureaucracies and federal interference. Within the disability community, the long struggle against patronizing and colonizing attitudes has led to a strong critique of medical and rehabilitation institutions. How can one assert the right to self-determination if one must also acknowledge a reliance on technological interfaces, interpreters, doctors, family members and paid assistants? One answer posed by a number of disability activists is to see dependence not as a relinquishing of agency to the care of others but as a constellation of interrelations whose ultimate trajectory is independence. In her critique of Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice, Cal Montgomery observes:
I am a dependent person. I eat food whose final preparation I handle myself, but which has come to me across roads laid and maintained by other people from stores staffed by other people–and even those people didn’t grow or raise or harvest or slaughter any of it. I wear clothes made by other people from cloth woven by still others. I depend on others. And this is called independence.
MacIntyre has observed that in order for us to become “independent rational agents,” we need to use the “virtues of dependent rational animals” in order to achieve autonomy (5). As such remarks suggest and all of the essays in this issue testify, dependency is never a one-way street from dependent individual to care-giving provider, but is, as our title implies, a dialectical one that implicates both parties in the dependency dyad. Moreover, there is a reciprocal dimension to this relationship in which the care-giver often becomes co-dependent on the recipient. The parent who experiences pleasure in taking care of her helpless child or the care-giver who bonds with her client are two examples that embody relations of care as both reciprocal and unequal. My use of a gendered pronoun for the care-giver suggests that whatever emotional satisfaction care-giving may produce, the distribution and validation of such roles across genders and classes remain asymmetrical. Hence some of the most significant thinking about dependency issues has arisen from a feminist perspective that looks at dependency as a form of gendered labor.
If we want to understand why dependency is disparaged we have only to look at how disability is portrayed in the media, whether through the celebrity telethon image of crippled children soliciting funds or the reality show scenario of a spouse tragically forced to care for a partner with Alzheimer’s disease. Here dependency becomes a fatal burden for which care-giving is seen as self-sacrifice. What underlies such “human tragedy” scenarios is a cost benefit analysis that measures the putative “worth” of a productive citizen based on the level of economic assistance one requires. Daniel Moynihan differentiates dependency from poverty based on presumed moral values associated with the latter: “To be poor is an objective condition; to be dependent, a subjective one as well....Being poor is often associated with considerable personal qualities; being dependent rarely so.
[Dependency] is an incomplete state in life: normal in the child, abnormal in the adult” (qtd. in Fraser and Gordon 14). The severely disabled person who needs home care and medication thus is seen as a drain on social services and a burden on the family. Such bottom line thinking asks why should my tax dollar go to help someone who cannot be as productive as I am? The grim repercussions of this ideology of beset dependence can be felt in the continuing resistence to universal healthcare and, in the worst case, eugenics, euthanasia, and genocide.
At the level of political philosophy, disability-as-dependence conflicts with ideas of liberal individualism and self-reliance that undergird democratic societies and underwrite our theories of social justice. The philosophical stakes in recognizing dependent relations are large because they challenge many of the foundations of Enlightenment thought around the presumed equality of the “free, equal, and independent” subject that Locke saw as the cornerstone of the social contract. As Martha Nussbaum points out in Frontiers of Justice, not every individual enters the social contract on the same footing. Theories of social justice from Hume and Locke to John Rawls that presume some sort of equality of access to public largesse do not take disability into account and thereby create a contracterian form that works for some but not all members of society. Because all individuals are potentially vulnerable to illness, sensory loss, mental illness, or injury, what is equal access today may be disability tomorrow. Any contract that brackets the needs of physically and cognitively disabled persons is ultimately not very stable. Among modern political philosophers, consideration of such constituencies in social justice is either deferred for some future utopian state (Rawls) or dismissed altogether as irrelevant to being human (David Gauthier, Peter Singer). As Kittay says, “By excluding this dependency from social and political concerns, we have been able to fashion the pretense that we are independent–that the cooperation between persons that some insist is interdependence is simply the mutual (often voluntary) cooperation between essentially independent persons” (xii).
I mentioned that one of the forces motivating our concern with dependency comes from changes in the global marketplace. Lennard Davis, in his review of Nussbaum’s book in this issue, notes that one of the problems that social contracterians have with establishing a common bill of rights is that they assume that the “basic unit in which the state of nature became the political state is the nation.” As he and Nussbaum point out, not all nations are equal and therefore cannot presume the same capabilities for each one. Seeing dependency work in a global context displays the unequal and asymmetrical nature of all dependency relations. And as Robert McRuer points out in his essay, institutions such as the World Bank, which are designed to level the economic playing field, have appropriated a disability rights rhetoric of inclusiveness and independent living under the banner of social development and privatization: “[Dependency] theory, paradoxically, materializes independence and inclusion, not in the sense of bringing them into being but rather of attending to how human beings have hitherto brought them into being, and with what consequences.”
To some extent, all of the essays in this issue contribute to this materializing and defamiliarizing of independence within literary discourse. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have developed the idea that the figure of a disabled person often operates as “narrative prosthesis” upon which literature–narrative specifically–relies for its projection of totality and closure. They suggest that narratives depend on disability as a metaphor to annex other conditions of abnormality, powerlessness and difference, conditions that must be effaced by the novel’s end in order for resolution or tragic fate to take its course. In this issue of Journal of Literary Disability we attempt to look at the multiple ways that the prosthetic relation between disability and literature can be extended to include the dependent relations among characters and across genres. In the process, we hope, in McRuer’s words, to “materialize” independence as the unspoken, untheorized norm that literary works must affirm and with which disability rights continues to struggle.
The issue begins with a revised version of Lennard Davis’s review of Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice, which appeared in The Common Review and sparked a lively debate about dependency in blogs and listservs. Davis summarizes Nussbaum’s critique of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice for its absence of reference to disability, global poverty, and non-human animals, and for its bottom line reliance on financial accountability instead of human capabilities. Davis notes the importance of a philosopher of Nussbaum’s stature engaging with issues of disability but worries that she comes to disability issues belatedly, without having engaged with the larger issues raised by other disability scholars. As Davis points out, Nussbaum seems focused more on critiquing Rawls than engaging with disability tout court and notes that by including animals and disabled people as agents who need to be brought under the broad umbrella of rights, Nussbaum comes close to equating the two, leaving the more problematic aspects of dependency for severely disabled persons under theorized.
Robert McRuer’s “Taking It to the Bank: Independence and Inclusion on the World Market” studies the appropriation by global economic institutions of the rhetoric of independence and inclusion as developed within the disability rights movement. He sees this appropriation as part of the cultural logic of neoliberalism that subsumes the social model of disability under the umbrella of development and economic independence. He focuses on the World Bank’s document, Social Analysis and Disability: A Guidance Note, which explains how a social model of disability might contribute to World Bank projects. Drawing on the work of Suzanne Bergeron, McRuer notes that the rhetoric of inclusion in the Bank’s publications depoliticizes the concerns of women and disabled persons worldwide by seeing them as “clients of development and objects of expert administration” rather than independent agents. He concludes by looking at the case of Brazil and the ways that “dependent development” through privatization has recreated the very conditions of dependency that neoliberal policies were supposedly designed to thwart.
Neel Ahuja’s “The Contradictions of Colonial Dependency” continues the theme of globalization by looking at the leper colony as a site in which disability, race, and dependency come together at a moment of U.S. imperial expansion in the Pacific. Drawing on Jack London’s writings about Hansen’s disease (as leprosy was then called) Ahuja notes two forms of dependency: horizontal and vertical. Horizontal dependency refers to intersubjective bonds that link individuals through disability, race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, or species. Vertical dependency refers to hierarchical relationships in which a provider who occupies a privileged position is sustained by a subaltern figure. Horizontal, interdependent relations may work “against and within the violence of vertical dependency” yet both forms involve what Albert Memmi calls “reciprocal dependencies” in a system of exchange. London’s writings on leprosy in the colony at Moloka’i display both forms of dependency while depicting the person with leprosy as a figure of the primitive, the oriental, the abject. As Ahuja points out, “the literary representation of the leper figure thus becomes a moment of imperial discourse preoccupied with the monstrosity and primitivity of bodily interdependence; it naturalizes the dependency of Asian and Pacific Islander bodies upon colonial medicine as a form of modern progress.”
Martha Stoddard Holmes studies “dyads of care” in Victorian fiction. She observes that disability pervades Victorian medical and social discourses and serves as the centerpiece of much Victorian literature. The works of Elizabeth Gaskell, Dinah Craik, and Charlotte Yonge provide a broad canvas for viewing “dyads of sequential care, in which characters alternate the roles of carer and cared-for over time.” These care-giving scenarios are not cameo elements of Victorian fiction but underwrite many family and domestic relations. Relationships based on care-giving and disability reinforce family narratives and help prepare Victorian men and women for “lasting intimacies” within and beyond marriage. Stoddard Holmes concludes by suggesting that twentieth-century dismissals of the didactic or sentimental nature of Victorian treatments of disability, based on female self-sacrifice and religious piety, overlook an especially valuable imaginative message concerning our dependent and interdependent relations. If we bring to our reading of Victorian novels only a liberal ethos of independence, we may miss the important homosocial (and political) relations established around interdependency of care-giving.
Tom Coogan’s “Me, thyself and I” looks at the complex issue of disability autobiography when its production is collaborative. Such texts have often been criticized by disability scholars for their reliance on an able-bodied individual who participates in their authorship, but they also raise the issues of interdependency. Using the examples of Christy Brown’s My Left Foot and Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer’s I Raise My Eyes to Say Yes,” both of which were written with the help of others, Coogan complicates theories of autobiography that see it as a medium that foregrounds the triumphalist overcoming of an impairment. By reading the personal narratives of authors with cerebral palsy, Coogan is able to study dependence as both a textual and social problem, complicating ideas of agency and autonomy around which much disability discourse is constructed.
In my own essay, “‘Every man his specialty,’” I draw upon Lennard Davis’s view that disability “dismodernizes” ideas of autonomy and normalcy, and that it does so within the frame of dependent relations. Building on the work of Nussbaum, Kittay, MacIntyre and others, I explore a certain prejudice among disability activists over considering dependency as a legitimate concern within rights discourse. I then look at the work of one modernist writer, Samuel Beckett, in whose work disability is pervasive, often a metaphor for mortality itself, but equally often a sign of necessary interdependencies. Hamm and Clove in Endgame are the classic instance of what I call “abject dependency,” in which characters alternately resent and rely on their need for each other.
All of these essays ask important questions about the self-evident status of certain humanist ideals of self-reliance and autonomy as they are represented in classical liberalism and disability rights discourse. A number of the essays connect political dependency with attitudes towards the subaltern or “native” body within colonialism. Other essays connect heteronormative attitudes towards gender and sexuality with ableist attitudes towards bodily integrity and autonomy. All of the essays reinforce Mitchell and Snyder’s view of the constitutive function of disability within cultural forms but do so by interrogating bodily contingency and its implications for community and care. However, as Ato Quayson has recently noted, considerations of disability necessitate an awareness of what he calls “aesthetic nervousness” raised by corporeal nonnormativity. This nervousness is necessarily dialectical, involving relationships between characters (Tiny Tim and Scrooge, Hamm and Clov, Ahab and Ishmael) but also between texts and readers. The reader is also implicated in the disability dyad, his or her perspective “affected by the short-circuiting of the dominant protocols governing the text” that is triggered by the disabled character (15). In working out the complex thematics of dependency in literature we must also see our hermeneutic task as readers and critics complicit in the contingent character of the texts we interpret and the bodies they presume.
Notes
[1] I have discussed these issues in “Universal Design: The Work of Disability in an Age of Globalization.”
Works Cited
Berubé, Michael. Life as We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child. New York: Random House, 1996.
Davidson, Michael. “Universal Design: The Work of Disability in an Age of Globalization.” The Disability Studies Reader, 2nd ed. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York: Routledge, 2006. 117-30.
Davis, Lennard. Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and Other Difficult Positions. New York: New York UP, 2002.
Fraser, Nancy and Linda Gordon. “A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State.” The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency. Ed. Eva Feder Kittay and Ellen K. Feder. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. 14-39.
Kittay, Eva Feder. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Kittay, Eva Feder and Ellen K. Feder. The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Chicago: Open Court, 1999.
Memmi, Albert. Dependence. Boston: Beacon P, 1984.
Montgomery, Cal. “Critic of the Dawn.” Ragged Edge Online 2 (2001). 2 Feb. 2006 <http://www.raggededgemagazine.com/0501/0501cov.htm>.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006.
Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia UP, 2007.
Silvers, Anita, David Wasserman, and Mary B. Mahowald. Disability, Difference, Discrimination. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. 1998.
Editor, Dr. David Bolt |
Book Reviews Editor, Dr. Clare Barker
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