Disability is often a weighty matter, and a matter of waiting. This issue features 10 pieces — two creative nonfiction essays and eight academic research articles— and on the whole of it most of these pieces demonstrate the weight, and wait, of disability in the fabric of our cultural, historical, and individual experiences. Stigma, sex, access, and family also figure in this weighty, and waiting, fabric.
Volume 39.3 (Summer 2019) opens with two creative nonfiction essays. Pasquale Toscano's "Stand and Wait" offers a witty, well-crafted narrative about one visit (among many) to a specialist doctor who ultimately refers the author to yet another specialist while family dynamics also spark and sparkle in the waiting at these medical offices. In a fragmentary narrative form, Sarah Grossman's "History of a Half-Arm" explores the author's personal history with a prosthetic arm (first fitted at three months old) and her adult decision not to make use of the prosthetic technologies offered anymore.
Michael E. Skyer's critical essay, "Bodies in Dependence: A Foucauldian Genealogy of the Americans with Disabilities Act" is the 2018 Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies (http://disstudies.org/index.php/awards/irving-k-zola-award/). Skyer employs Foucault's method of genealogy to read the weight of the ADA as a policy-tool that essentially controls disabled people en masse and that weighs them as a potential pool of laborers. In Skyer's analysis, he explains that the ADA is heavily framed as positive legislation whose balance then tips toward capitalistic economic production.
In a collaborative article by Alan Santinele Martino and Jordyn Perreault-Laird, Foucault also figures as an analytical frame. In "'I don't know if I can talk about that': An Exploratory Study on the Experiences of Direct Care Workers Regarding the Sexuality of People with Intellectual Disabilities," direct care workers in Canada do —and don't—have power, agency, comfort in how they respond to the intellectually disabled people they care for who express sexuality. For the most part, the direct care workers convey discomfort with the sexuality of those they "care" for and, in a counter-balance, this article tips toward an argument for how sexual expression might be respected as a human need and right.
Celeste Reeb also explores the limits of talking about "it" (sex), in an analysis of the restricted language choices captioners make in tagging and describing sounds during sexually related scenes on TV programs. Though Reeb's article, "[This Closed Captioning is brought to you by Compulsive Heterosexuality/Able-bodiedness," doesn't directly make use of Foucault, it still works to demonstrate the way that language itself categories and controls bodies even in the space of closed captioning.
Jessica Ann Chace also explores the categorization and control of bodies in her analysis of the history of complex embodiment, cultural perspectives, and stigma around leprosy. "Diagnostic Medievalism: The Case Leprosy's Stigma," deploys stigma analysis that derives from an outdated "medievalist" perspective still circulating in two current and specific cases/sites: the 20th-century hagiography of Father Damien and the site of the U.S. hospital for lepers in Carville, Louisiana. The weight of "medieval" diagnostic views of leprosy (now called Hansen's Disease) remains.
Whitney Dirks also engages historical and stigmatic views of embodied difference in "'Weighty Celebrity': Corpulency, Monstrosity, and Freakery in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England." Dirks historicizes the fascination with fat bodies in England at the turn of the 19th century and explores this fascination as a precursor to freak shows and other exhibitions of large people as "weighty celebrities."
Mikko Oskari Koivisto examines "weighty celebrity" at the site of rap music. "(Live!) The Post-traumatic Futurities of Black Debility" offers analysis of the interwoven fabric of psychiatric disability, medication(s), racial violence, and speculative fiction in the work of rapper Pharaohe Monch. Precarity and debility, together, serve as key theoretical concepts for examining this woven fabric.
Sona Kazemi (Zola Award 2018 Honorable Mention) examines the precarity and production of disability at the site of war in the Middle East in "Disabling Power of Class and Ideology: Analyzing War Injury through the Transnational Disability Theory and Praxis." In this article, Kazemi views the weight and production of disability in a non-Western context and proposes a transnational disability model through a materialist approach in representing the everyday lived reality of disabled peoples in developing (and war-riddled) countries.
Returning back to the United States, the ADA, and the waiting game of disability, Emily Krebs closes out this volume with "Baccalaureates or Burdens? Complicating 'Reasonable Accommodations' for American College Students with Disabilities." The weight, and waiting, of student (disabled) bodies in U.S. higher education comes through in Krebs' exploration of the complex process (and socioeconomic privilege) necessary for obtaining an official diagnosis and (reasonable) accommodation at a U.S. college. She rhetorically analyzes the controlling language of accommodation and its effects on student and faculty perceptions of access in higher education.
