Social Rights and Jilted Agency

Ellen L. Barton’s Textual Practices of Erasure: Representations of Disability and the Founding of the United Way extrapolates the similarities between the Disability Rights Movement and other such social justice movements. However she takes even greater care in explaining the ways they are dissimilar. The Women’s Rights Movement will be used in this instance as the example against which The Disability Rights Movement will be compared. To be labeled as “female” is to be placed in a subordinated minority group; to be labeled as disabled is to be placed in a stigmatized “othered” group. Femininity, though unarguably limiting, is a condition that can be identified with (as half of the population is female), sympathized with and ultimately connotes some level of agency.  Disability is not afforded those same considerations for two main reasons.

The first is purely numerical; the amount of individuals who are considered disabled is substantially low, compared with those who identify as female. There is less of a sense of identification with disability than there is with femininity. The second is perceptual; feminism has recently been reconstructed to connote pride and female empowerment through embracing femininity. Disability is associated with pride only when it can be overcome, allowing one to lead a “normal human life”. This is where the idea of the “supercrip” comes in. In the words of Jenny Morris, “a supercrip is a person with a disability who lives out the popular representation of disability as adversity to be overcome” (Morris, Barton 185). The “supercrip” is a way for the public to project their fear regarding disabled individuals into something “safe” and easy to conceptualize. This construction is an easy way out that allows the public to view disabled individuals in the realm of normality and consider those who are able to portray themselves as functional and often exceptional as “candidates for inclusion” (Barton 188). This concept is not unlike Campbell’s notions toward appropriate femininity, in which she states that,  “gender is constituted for women by their relationships to externals—to laws, institutions, norms, and the ways in which categories such as race and class are constructed and enforced” (Campbell 4). Both femininity and disability are structures that operate on a fictive level that creates a false narrative.  

Barton would argue that those who are disabled are at a greater rhetorical disadvantage because their history has been subject to erasure and their condition is one to be pitied from afar but largely ignored. Barton opines that the “agent” in the case of disabled individuals is the institution that represents them rather than the individual; she uses The United Way as a case study to demonstrate this point.

The United Way created a charitable rhetoric based on the idea that disability was something that could be “fixed” by donating to United Way, they used advertisements that featured disfigured looking children along side images of healthy looking children participant in “normal” American life. In the 1950’s United Way found a way to capitalize on the huge economic and reproductive boom in the United States, people were newly affluent with a reinvigorated care for children. It is important to consider this historical context in which this organization was operating. Campbell stresses the importance of historical situation in regards to rhetorical interpretation. Campbell notes that, “Rhetors are materially limited, linguistically constrained, historically situated subjects…they are “inventors” in the rhetorical sense, articulators who link past and present…the forms of feeling that encapsulate moments in time” (Campbell 5).

The feelings of disabled individuals were disregarded in United Ways advertising model, it created a structure of feeling designed to give people a “way out” in regards to disability. It created a fictive narrative of disability as a problem that could be fixed by charitable donations, allowing those who donated to be absolved from the obligation of understanding disability as a social issue. “United Way advertising capitalized on these feelings of personal success and affluence, too, by constructing prosperous donors not only as generous enough to support the less fortunate but also as savvy enough to support a businesslike charitable campaign” (Barton 194). Disabled individuals had no choice but to comply with the demeaning portrait of “perpetual child” that United Way created or attempt to rise to the status of “supercrip” and be considered for acceptance. Thus the only agency disabled individuals are afforded is a sort of secondary agency that can cast them in whichever light it chooses. Females have a similarly limited agency, yet its limits are imposed in a different manner. Women cannot possess true discursive power because of environmental limitations- perpetually speaking on the masculine stage.  Though women have limited agency they are still have greater control over it because they are their own agents. Disabled individuals have historically been at the mercy of those who speak for them, they are "othered" in a way that affords them no discursive power or direct agency. Barton’s conclusion about the United Way stripping the agency from disabled individuals is inline with Campbell's final proposition of agency. “Agency is the power to do evil, to demean and belittle. The fear and disparagement of rhetoric are lodged here because rhetoric has an equal capacity for transcendence, resistance, and destruction” (Campbell 7). The removal of discursive power and agency from one party gives the other entity destructive power.

~Mikaela McShane