Jay Timothy Dolmage's Disability Rhetoric explores the depth of mutual insight and inquiry that disability studies and rhetoric can provide one another, and it furthers conversations between the two fields that have been developing over the last ten years. The book's main argument is that a disability perspective, particularly a focus on embodiment, can and should produce a non-normative history of rhetoric and rhetorical analyses. More of the book is focused on bringing disability theory to bear on rhetoric than vice versa, but Dolmage is clear that the two fields mutually inform one another. He writes in the book's introduction that "rhetoric needs disability studies as a reminder to pay critical and careful attention to the body. Disability studies needs rhetoric to better understand and negotiate the ways that discourse represents and impacts the experience of disability" (3).

The text as a whole is a prime example of the two fields' mutual interest in the power of language to shape our experiences. From my perspective, the critical contribution of Disability Rhetoric is its demonstration that disability studies provides tools to radically rethink other disciplines; in its specific reimagining of the history of rhetoric, these tools from disability studies are primarily a non-normative perspective and a focus on the embodied nature of all communication practices.

A non-normative history of rhetoric is, for Dolmage, driven by the rhetorical concept of "cunning and adaptive intelligence…characterized by sideways and backwards movement," referred to as mêtis (5). This Ancient Greek concept of mêtis is particularly apt for creating a new language with which to rethink rhetoric because embedded in its meaning is a challenge to normativity, linear thinking, and forward progress. And while the Western rhetorical tradition has focused on thought, mêtis describes the role of bodies in communication practices.

Dolmage not only writes about mêtis as a theoretical concept, he writes with and as mêtis in the way he tries out a non-normative, re-reading of the history of rhetoric. He provides readers with a caveat that he will at times intentionally "compress, juxtapose, and juggle eras and locations…to put a narrative together in a strange or jarring way" (12). As a reader encountering such jarring narratives, I best understood the concept of mêtis in the way I felt it. For example, Dolmage digs through antiquity for stories about disabled and non-normative figures that might be—but are not yet—foundational in the history of rhetoric.

I suggest that readers who are new to either disability studies or rhetoric might adopt a mêtis reading practice themselves by first delving into the book's two interchapters. This non-linear approach to reading provides a broader overview of the two fields' interplay, which is potentially more accessible to readers outside of the disciplines of rhetoric and disability studies because the main points are presented in chart form prior to an extended discussion. Readers will find that the first interchapter provides a breakdown of common myths about disability that have gotten traction throughout history and across cultures. The myths discussed in this chapter will likely be familiar to those with backgrounds in disability studies because what Dolmage treats as myths are elsewhere in the field discussed as models of disability or common frames of representation, including disability as pathology, overcoming narratives, kill-or-cure narratives, and disability hierarchy (or "crip casting"). The second interchapter talks back to the first one by presenting ways of conceptualizing the knowledge that disability generates. Readers with backgrounds in rhetoric will get an overview of how the field intersects with disability studies by beginning with this interchapter. Examples of rhetorical genres and concepts as applied to disability abound in this chapter, including an overview of forensic, deliberative, and epideictic writings about disability, as well as a discussion of how dissoi logoi, or making the weaker argument the stronger, can be used to interpret disability experiences.

I read Disability Rhetoric from the beginning, and as such I followed Dolmage's argument linearly, which begins in the first chapter by demonstrating how normalcy underpins Western thought; in particular, this chapter is concerned with how readings of certain characters and texts are stealthily dependent on the concept of normalcy. Dolmage draws on Lennard Davis to argue that the concept of the norm is the rhetorical center of disability studies, which all other concepts talk back to in some way. I found Dolmage's argument compelling that the concept of the ideal—with its less rigid normal/not-normal dichotomy—would have dominated thought in antiquity. The extension, then, is that ancient rhetoric actually does not provide a linear, normative origin to our current understanding of communication practices. It is not imperative to read the history of rhetoric as if it has set us on some path to valuing only the best, most fit rhetors and their communication practices. As scholars and historians, we can get outside of our own expectations and perform a mêtis reading that claims "imperfect, extraordinary, non-normative bodies as the origin and epistemological homes of all meaning-making" (19). While the first chapter will likely be a review of content for scholars in disability studies, the positioning work of how the theories matter to the field of rhetoric are new and innovative. Dolmage uses this chapter to thoroughly argue that the field of rhetoric relies on a contemporary value system in which the norm signifies positively and the abnormal signifies negatively.

The second and third chapters begin a re-reading of antiquity and a re-telling of the history of rhetoric. Chapter two presents a new cast of characters that rhetoricians might understand as part of the classical roots of rhetoric. Readers versed in the history of rhetoric will find that Dolmage is going off-road in his mapping of the field's history, straying deliberately from the canon. His goal in doing so is to offer an alternative rhetorical history, one that expands our rhetorical predecessors and teachers to include mythical figures such as Tiresias and Hermaphrodite. Dolmage additionally offers re-readings of canonized figures, including Plato, Aristotle, Lysias, and Demosthenes (in chapter three) to show where our traditions stemming from these figures might have—but so far have not—focused on embodiment.

I understand Dolmage's work in these chapters as an expansion of Brenda Jo Brueggemann's claim that disability enables insight (795) and of Simi Linton's project of centering disability (13). When we become aware of the pervasive normativity that the history of rhetoric affirms, and that in fact, disabled rhetors could have been a part of the field's canon, it becomes possible to make the argument as Dolmage does that "normativity constrains our available means of persuasion" (92). In chapter three, having unhinged the history of rhetoric from normativity, Dolmage theorizes language through the concept of prosthesis. His argument is that all terms are defined through other terms, and this dependent web of discourse is prosthetic in the way each term and rhetor reaches outside of itself to make meaning with others. While I do not have reason to challenge the intellectual utility of Dolmage's expansion of the term prosthesis, I am admittedly uneasy about moving away from the literal, lived experience of those with prosthetics. When we examine the ways in which disabilities can be metaphorically and theoretically generative, which they undoubtedly are, we must also ask ourselves what identities we unwittingly marginalize. I am not proposing that disability studies only focuses on lived experiences of disabled people and never considers a theoretical program resulting from disability perspectives, but I am proposing that we do not lose either agenda and that we pursue multiple forms of inquiry.

Chapters four and five apply a mêtis reading to mythical figures from Greek antiquity, and in doing so they continue to build a new history of rhetoric. Chapter four re-reads the stories of the Greek god Hephaestus, whose disability was actually celebrated in antiquity, as a challenge to the normative history of rhetoric that imagines Ancient Greece to have only praised the most able bodies. Chapter five similarly troubles the inherited concepts that contemporary scholars have come to accept about Greek society, and it does so by reading the myths about the goddess Metis as complex messages about the valuable, cunning intelligence of women. That contemporary rhetorical scholarship has obscured the stories of Hephaestus and Metis which value female and disabled embodiment is, as Dolmage argues, "no coincidence," but the result of entrenched normative constructions of history (205).

Dolmage asks, "What would rhetoric look like (and how would we teach it) if Metis and Hephaestus were the heroes of antiquity, if every move to historicize rhetoric was also a move to embody it differently?" (206) I read such a campaign to repopulate the history of rhetoric with non-normative bodies as having a similar spirit to trickster rhetorics and Judith Halberstam's concept of the "queer art of failure," as well as Robert McRuer's critiques of compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality. Dolmage's mêtis, with its connections to other logics of "doubleness and divergence" (Dolmage 219) has the potential to become a strategic position that historians and scholars of rhetoric can occupy to rethink our epistemological traditions.

Chapter six tests out a mêtis reading of a contemporary text, The King's Speech, which demonstrates the potential for a broadly applicable mêtis methodology to analyze representations of disability. Dolmage reads the main character's (Bertie's) stutter as rhetorically generative and capable of amplifying the struggle to make meaning that is inherent in all utterances. In this way, Bertie's stutter does not signify the ultimate negative experience to be overcome, but it instead reminds the field of rhetoric of the embodied nature of all communication practices and the imperfect nature of all language to signify meaning.

I am convinced by Dolmage's analysis that stuttering does illuminate the reality of communication, with its imperfect signification and delivery. And I believe that the concept of the stutter as Dolmage uses it can be deployed productively and responsibly, but only if we are aware of its limitations, which I think are similar to the limitations of the concept of TABs (being temporarily able-bodied). That is, while disability is a fundamental part of what it means to be human, this universal view of disability should not be used as a rationale to move beyond sustained inquiry into disability as a lived experience.

Dolmage concludes with a chapter titled "Prosthesis," in which he begins an inquiry into the influence that mêtis might have on education. This concluding move zooms out from the field of rhetoric to broader questions of education's normative paradigm, and ultimately invites readers to imagine the generative possibilities for an educational system that thinks radically about how different individuals learn. As he does throughout the book, Dolmage brings disability studies to bear on existing disciplinary assumptions. In this case, he gesture toward the ways in which mêtis can become a position from which education can be rethought entirely. While this chapter primarily poses questions for future inquiry, I am interested in the potential overlaps or challenges that a mêtis approach to education may have with universal design for learning.

As I have outlined, the focus of Disability Rhetoric is the rhetorical and metaphorical construction of bodies, and much of this is established through an examination of mythical characters from antiquity. The nature of the project means that the analysis is not directly related to lived experiences of disabled people—but how can a historical recovery project the re-reads myths be closely yoked to the embodied experiences of disability? While I understand the constraints that history and myth impose on Dolmage's project, I still felt a tension resulting from an absence of bodies in a text so thoroughly interested in embodiment.

I stand by my conclusion that my critique of Disability Rhetoric simultaneously reveals its strength and transformative potential. Readers well versed in disability theory might find it useful to understand Disability Rhetoric by placing it in the tradition of David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's scholarship on narrative prosthesis, and less in the tradition of feminist standpoint theory or Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's sitpoint theory. This relational mapping of Disability Rhetoric elucidates for me the many productive forms that disability studies scholarship takes. And while I continue to grapple with the extent to which the field should stick closely to the embodied, lived experiences of disabled people, I also know that it is crucial for the field to converse with other disciplines. When we do this, we demonstrate how disability theory challenges disciplinary assumptions and we argue that disabled people, their needs, and their perspectives are already building all of our fields, and that their work needs to be recognized. Ultimately, the view of embodiment that Dolmage explores is part of what he calls a "futuristic disability studies," which proposes new social structures and new rhetorics (288). This one future direction for disability studies, while not the only way our field can expand, certainly explodes the generative possibilities that disability theory has for rethinking the norms that our disciplines have been built on.