Revealing Rather Than Concealing Disability: the Rhetoric of Parkinson’S Advocate Michael J

PETER WAYNE MOE University of Pittsburgh

Revealing Rather Than Concealing Disability: The Rhetoric of Parkinson’s Advocate Michael J. Fox

Given societal prescriptions to conceal disability, when Michael J. Fox, seeking increased funding for Parkinson’s research, addressed members of Congress in 1999 without having taken his own Parkinson’s medication beforehand, his display of disability was, in his own words, “startling.” Through revealing his disability, Fox constructs a complex ethos bound up in the intersection of the body, text, and social practices. As a result, through risking the reinscription of traditional and limiting responses to disability, Fox confounds such responses, demanding that both audiences and rhetoricians rethink the relationship between disability and rhetorical practice.

...the symptoms were severe––I looked as though an invisible bully were harassing me while I read my statement. My head jerked, skew-

Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 12:10 05 April 2013 ing my reading glasses as if the back of my skull were being slapped. Iwasﬁghtingtocontrolthepagesofmyspeech,myarmsbouncing as if someone were trying to knock the paper out of my hands. But through it all, I never wavered. I saw in my eyes an even, controlled sense of purpose I had never seen in myself before. There was, ironi- cally enough, a steadiness in me, even as I was shaking like a leaf.... The bully attacked from every angle, even from within my own body, but I wasn’t about to give in, or be distracted from what I had come there to do. ––Michael J. Fox, Lucky Man 247–48

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Seeking seventy-five million dollars for Parkinson’s disease research, on 28 September 1999, Michael J. Fox addressed the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Hearing on Parkinson’s Research and Treatment.1 There is no readily available footage of the address, though Fox’s firsthand account of his speech (offered above) reveals its uniqueness: Fox, a Parkinson’s patient himself, spoke to members of Congress without having taken his medications prior to the speech. The speech marks Fox’s first public appearance sans meds. With Fox’s head jerking, arms bounc- ing, body convulsing, voice faltering, and papers quivering, this display reveals rather than conceals Fox’s disabled body. Acknowledging the shock of unmedi- ated and unmedicated Parkinson’s, Fox writes of his testimony, “For people who had never observed me in this kind of shape, the transformation must have been startling” (Lucky Man 247). Fox’s revealing of his disability is indeed startling, not only for his immediate audience but also for rhetoricians. In considering Fox’s discourse, I echo Tracy Ann Morse’s claim that disability is “underrepresented” in “our discussions of rhetoric” (154), but I add that analyses of disability within public oratory are also noticeably absent in our discussions of rhetoric. Much of disability studies scholarship focuses on policing societal and rhetorical constructions of disability, conducting analyses concerning disability at a cultural level (Brueggemann et al.; Lindblom and Dunn; Shearer; Stremlau), or dissecting language for its able-bodied metaphors (Brueggemann et al.; Davis; Dolmage and Lewiecki-Wilson; Mike Rose; Wilson). Still other scholarship works to explore pedagogical issues surrounding disability, both in terms of teaching disabled students and in terms of making disability the subject matter of a course (Brueggemann and Kleege; Brueggemann et al.; Lewiecki-Wilson and Brueggemann; Price; White). While disability studies does importantly theorize how the disabled body is both ousted from and reintro- duced into the body politic, within this scholarship there are few discussions of disabled rhetors in specific rhetorical contexts. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander’s Bodies in Commotion: Disability & Performance does some of this

Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 12:10 05 April 2013 work, especially Brenda Brueggemann’s piece within that collection. So too does Brueggemann’s Lend Me Your Ear,whichnoteshowBobDole’smaimed arm was rhetorically cast during the 1996 presidential race, initially concealed but later revealed as an heroic “badge of honor” (4). Lester Olson, Elizabeth Scherman, and Amy Vidali each consider the rhetoricity of the disabilities of Audre Lorde, Christopher Reeves, and ﬁrst-year college students, respectively, and Nicole Quackenbush has recently added her own analysis of Michael J. Fox’s disabled “performativity” to this body of scholarship.2 The aforementioned rhetorical work with disabled rhetors, however, is rare, though this relative dearth of scholarship is not for lack of trying; nor is it a Revealing Rather Than Concealing Disability 445

product of willful negligence. Rather, history simply elides rhetors that are not able-bodied and male. Encouraging, though, is that disability studies is burgeon- ing, exhuming disabled rhetors from the historical record in the same spirit as feminist scholars recovering from the archives female rhetors previously ignored. To these conversations, I contribute my work on Fox. First, I will draw on the key terms of revealing and concealing from Lawrence Prelli and couch them within Roman rhetoricians Quintilian’s and Cicero’s praise for the able-bodied rhetor. Given the history of concealing disability for rhetorical purposes, I con- tend that Fox’s revealing of his Parkinson’s disease in his 1999 address to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee complements while complicating the text of his speech. In an analysis that looks at the body, language, and social practices, I claim that Fox, and other disabled rhetors for that matter, construct ethos at the intersection of visible disability and an audience’s reaction to it. In doing so, Fox’s display confounds traditional, limiting, and reductive responses to disability, establishing Fox as a rhetorical agent and asking, even demanding, that rhetoricians and audiences both within and beyond disability studies reevaluate whether the disabled body necessarily obstructs rhetorical efﬁcacy, rethink conventional framings of disability, and reconsider the rhetoricity of the disabled body in light of the ethos fostered by Fox’s revealed Parkinson’s.

Revealing and Concealing Disability

In the introduction to his 2006 collection Rhetorics of Display,editor Lawrence Prelli grounds rhetoric in the acts of revealing and concealing.Prelli traces rhetorics of display through history, beginning with Aristotle’s coining of epideictic––literally a “showing forth”––to Renaissance humanists to eighteenth- century rhetoric and poetics up through the twentieth century (Prelli 10). Working from the premise that “rhetorics of display are nearly ubiquitous in contemporary communication and culture and, thus, have become the dominant rhetoric of our

Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 12:10 05 April 2013 time,” Prelli links display and rhetoric by way of Kenneth Burke’s terministic screens (2). Burke contends that “any such screen necessarily directs the attention to one ﬁeld rather than another” (50). Prelli builds on Burke’s theory, and he rephrases it as such: “[L]anguage use is a selective process that conceals even as it reveals.” Because language provides words to name experiences, Prelli avers that language mediates what we see, thereby connecting the visual with the linguistic and the rhetorical (12). To Prelli’s understanding of how displays in general create meaning, I add that displays of the body do the same, for, as Jay Dolmage claims, “to care about the body is to care about how we make meaning” (“The Circulation of Discourse” 114).3 446 Rhetoric Review

This notion of rhetoric as the practice of revealing and concealing carries much weight when considering the disabled rhetor under pressure––a classi- cally rooted pressure, I suggest––to conceal rather than reveal disability in the name of rhetorical efﬁcacy. Though not writing concerning disability speciﬁcally, early in the Institutio Oratoria (The Orator’s Education), Quintilian outlines his prerequisites for an orator, which serves as an example of this pressure:

There is one point which I must emphasize at the start: without the help of nature, precepts and techniques are powerless. This work, therefore, must not be thought of as written for persons without talent, any more than treatises on agriculture are meant for barren soils. And there are other aids also, with which individuals have to be born: voice, strong lungs, good health, stamina, good looks. (“Prooemium” 26–27)

Being able-bodied, strong-voiced, and handsome is of paramount importance in Quintilian’s classical model of discourse. With these remarks prominently placed in the introduction to his twelve-volume work, Quintilian claims the able body is necessary to be an orator. In likening the absence of these physical traits to barren soils, Quintilian asserts that the Institutio Oratoria is a worthless text for aspiring rhetors without natural talents and physical abilities and concludes, “A modest supply of these can be further developed by methodical training; sometimes they are so completely lacking as to destroy any advantages of talent and study” (“Prooemium” 27). Though Quintilian does not explicitly state it, under such teaching a rhetor could be advised to conceal the disabled body so as to adhere to the physical ideals demanded of an orator. Writing roughly 150 years before Quintilian, Cicero, in De Oratore,puts forth a higher standard for the rhetor’s body, distinguishing it from that of the average citizen: Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 12:10 05 April 2013

It is enough, indeed, for acquiring all other crafts, just to be a man like other men... .Noreadinessoftongueisneeded,noﬂuency of language, in short none of those things––natural state of looks, expression, and voice––which we cannot mold for ourselves. But in an orator we must demand the subtlety of the logician, the thoughts of the philosopher, a diction almost poetic, a lawyer’s memory, a tragedian’s voice, and the bearing almost of the consummate actor. (1.28.127–28) Revealing Rather Than Concealing Disability 447

The average body may be fit for average pursuits, but according to Cicero, rhetoric requires a body with physical and mental traits––keen mind, poetic diction, sharp memory, powerful voice, an astute actor’s demeanor––that far surpass that of the average citizen. Later in De Oratore,CicerocomplimentsSulpicius,andindoing so describes rhetorical brilliance in bodily terms: “For never, I think, did I listen to a speaker better qualified in respect of gesture, and by his very bearing and presence, or to one with a voice more resonant and pleasing” (1.29.132). In both these passages, Cicero upholds the perfected body as one of the primary assets of the effective orator. Both Cicero and Quintilian admit they are striving to educate the “ideal” orator, and in their models of discourse, a speaker lacking the physical traits these classical rhetoricians prize––in other words, a disabled rhetor––is not simply able to be a public speaker. As such, classical rhetoric recommends that the orator conceal disability, as the tradition teaches that the able body is a necessary requirement for rhetorical efficacy. The prescription to conceal disability is still quite strong. Christopher Clausen and Sally Stein both analyze the concealing of President Roosevelt’s wheelchair; the recent film The King’s Speech details King George’s efforts to stifle his stutter with the aid of speech therapist Lionel Logue; and Jenell Johnson examines the backlash against 1972 vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton’s disclosure of mental illness––though not as visible a disability as either President Roosevelt’s or King George’s––and his subsequent ousting from public service. In addition to national leaders, the concealing of disability as a prerequi- site to be in the public sphere is also seen in The Stuttering Foundation’s “Famous People Who Stutter,” a list of 123 individuals including James Earl Jones and Marilyn Monroe.4 With the triumphant “Stuttering didn’t stop them! Don’t let it stop you” atop The Stuttering Foundation’s website, the notion that one must be able-bodied to be a public figure is, perhaps unintentionally, reinforced. These individuals each conceal disability as a means by which to enter the public sphere. They conceal disability to be rhetorically effective. Fox has these same goals––to enter the public sphere and to be rhetorically effective––yet he accomplishes them

Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 12:10 05 April 2013 through revealing, rather than concealing, disability. Fox’s decision to reveal his Parkinson’s certainly qualifies as a coming out, and it necessitates a discussion of the closet. Describing his speech as a “momen- tous personal step,” as it was his first public revealing of his disabled body, Fox aligns his display with Brenda Brueggemann’s conflation of disability studies with queer theory (Lucky Man 246). The testimony, then, becomes a “way out of containment, airing of the closeted self,” and, most importantly (as I argue here), “a self-transformation of identity reidentified” (Brueggemann, Lend Me Your Ear 154). Yet the closet, when considered through disability studies, does not just function metaphorically; Tobin Siebers reminds us of the “long history, 448 Rhetoric Review

of course, of locking away people with disabilities in attics, basements, and back- rooms” (98). Because “[s]ome people hide in the closet, but others are locked in the closet” (Siebers 98), Fox is in an unique position: He steps out of a metaphorical closet––one into which he can easily and voluntarily return via his medications––and stands in stark contrast to other individuals who––given their visible, nonconcealable disabilities––may be in a literal closet, “attic, basement [or] backroom” or may never have the option of stepping into the metaphorical closet Fox leaves.

Claiming a Rhetorical Body

Michael J. Fox’s public unveiling of his Parkinson’s was a long time coming. Diagnosed in 1991 and spending seven years in the closet, Fox concealed his debilitating disease quite well through planning public appearances to comple- ment his medication schedule. In 1998 Fox underwent a thalamotomy to better manage his symptoms. But after tabloids reported Fox had a mystery illness and published photos of him leaving various doctors’ ofﬁces, Fox came out to People magazine in November 1998. In the media frenzy that followed, Dan Rather wanted an interview, as did Barbara Walters. At the same time, though, many Parkinson’s advocacy groups also sought Fox, hoping to harness his celebrity to advance their cause. In his 2002 memoir Lucky Man (which chronicles his diagnosis of, treatment of, and life with Parkinson’s), Fox tells that as he began to connect with the Parkinson’s community, he learned that

[r]oughly ninety percent of [Parkinson’s disease] patients are older, in their late sixties or seventies and beyond; many are infirm and liv- ing on fixed incomes––and without a great deal of political influence. Young Onset patients make up the remaining ten percent. (232)

Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 12:10 05 April 2013 As a Young Onset patient himself, Fox places himself in a group of patients that “might constitute a real political force, if not for the fact that so many of them are still closeted” (232). Questioning why some patient groups get more fed- eral funding for research than others, Fox asserts, “The answer lies, in part, with the fervor and commitment of the lobbying effort, and that starts in the patient community” (234). Fox writes that even though he was disheartened at the “frac- tional nature” of Parkinson’s advocacy groups, he felt he “was at a casting call for the part of ‘poster boy’ in a production not at all ready for prime time” (235). Seeing his potential as an activist, Fox admits, “I knew myself well enough to know that I’d have to make more of a contribution than merely lending my name Revealing Rather Than Concealing Disability 449

to an organization,” and eight years after his diagnosis, Fox eased himself into the role of Parkinson’s advocate and disabled rhetor (236). In explaining his rationale for not taking his medications prior to his address, Fox clearly recognizes the rhetorical heft of his decision: “It seemed to me that this occasion demanded that my testimony about the effects of the disease, and the urgency we as a community were feeling, be seen as well as heard” (Lucky Man 247). It is precisely because Fox foregrounds a body that has been tradi- tionally closeted and removed from the body politic that his speech before the Subcommittee resonates, for from its text alone, Fox’s address is remarkably simple. It does not employ a masterful, astounding syllogistic argument; it does not use many rhetorical slights of hand to wow the audience; there are no rhetorical fireworks, no rhetorical feats. Rather, it is a generically conventional three-part argument. Fox first claims that the number of Parkinson’s patients is growing and that the disease is devastating. While admitting he initially hid his symptoms out of fear and denial, Fox notes that because of his celebrity, he can “raise the visibility of Parkinson’s disease and focus attention on the desperate need for more research dollars.” After asserting that “managing [Parkinson’s] is a full-time job” wherein taking the proper amounts of medication is not an exact science by any means, Fox transitions to his complaint: Parkinson’s “meager” research funding “lags far behind” monies allocated to other diseases. “In a country with a $15 bil- lion investment in medical research,” Fox asserts, “[w]e can and must do better.” Noting the dire state of “inadequate” funding for Parkinson’s research, Fox avers, “If, however, an adequate investment is made, there is much to be hopeful for.” He then moves to his concluding request, beginning with a kudos topos praising the efforts made already by the Subcommittee and then asking for a seventy-five million dollar increase in funding for Parkinson’s research with the goal of curing the disease, thereby rendering it “nothing more than a footnote in medical textbooks.” But while the text of his address is fairly conventional, Fox’s body adds layers of complexity to this seemingly simple argument through how it shapes his delivery. In Lucky Man,detailingtheeffectsofParkinson’sonhisability

Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 12:10 05 April 2013 to speak, Fox describes his relationship to medications as an “‘on-off’ phe- nomenon,” likening it to Jekyll and Hyde (213).5 When he is “off,” Fox faces “the full panoply of classic Parkinsonian symptoms: rigidity, shufﬂing, tremors, lack of balance, diminished motor control, and the insidious cluster of symptoms that makes communication––written as well as spoken––difﬁcult and sometimes impossible.” He does not have hypophonia (which “weakens the voice so badly that for some, like Muhammad Ali, simply making yourself audible demands a tremendous effort”), nor is his cognition impaired, but Fox is beset by “‘cluttered speech’ combined with hypomimia, the medical term for the ‘mask effect’ often observed in the faces of [Parkinson’s disease] patients” (214). Because his “lips, 450 Rhetoric Review

tongue, and jaw muscles simply won’t cooperate,” Fox’s paralyzed face cannot gesture when he is “off”: “And it’s not like I can liven up my halting monotone with a raised eyebrow; my face, utterly expressionless, simply won’t respond” (214). Fox also has micrographia, which renders his handwriting illegible due to the inability to control his rigid hands. Fox confesses,

These impediments to self-expression are not the most painful or debilitating ...yet they madden me more than even the most teeth- rattling full body tremor. When the meds are “off” and [Parkinson’s disease] has already rendered me a prisoner in my own body, the suspension of my telephone and letter-writing privileges seems excessive. (215)

These are the symptoms against which Fox fights before members of Congress, making him appear as if some “invisible bully were harassing me while I read my statement ...[attacking me] from every angle” (247–48). By way of his delivery, Fox’s revealed disability works to recast him into a new role, establishing a new ethos for the Hollywood star. Although Subcommittee chair Arlen Spector introduces Fox via Family Ties and Back to the Future,Foxchoosestoidentifyhimselfnotbyhiscelebritybutinsteadbyhis body. Lowering his microphone, Fox’s first sentence to members of Congress is aquipabouthisheight:“Thestoryofmylife!Themicisalwaystoohigh.”After this brief acknowledgement of his body, Fox then eschews his stardom altogether: “Some, or perhaps all of you, most of you, are familiar with me from my work in film and television. What I wish to speak to you about today has little or nothing to do with celebrity.” Drawing attention to his body, referencing his eight years of Parkinson’s, and distancing himself from “experts, in the fields of science, book- ing, [and] other areas,” Fox later declares himself “an expert in only one [area]: what it is like to be a young man, husband and father, with Parkinson’s disease.” By discounting his celebrity while highlighting his disabled body both through

Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 12:10 05 April 2013 his words and the rhetorical revealing of his body, Fox creates a public persona that is a staunch departure from that of the Teen Wolf, Marty McFly, or his then popular role, Mayor Mike Flaherty on ABC’s Spin City. This recasting from actor to advocate appears in Fox’s declaration that “[w]hat celebrity has given me is the opportunity to raise the visibility of Parkinson’s disease,” as Fox works again to push aside his fame and focus rather on his body. Fox notes the difﬁculty of managing medication, likening it to a “balancing act” where “too little medication causes tremors and stiffness, too much medicine produces uncontrollable movement and slurring, and far too often Parkinson’s patients wait and wait (as I am right now) for their medications to kick Revealing Rather Than Concealing Disability 451

in.” Calling attention to his own physical state again, Fox frankly asserts that “in the end we all face the same reality: the medicine stops working.” In concluding the address, his tremors worsening, Fox interrupts his testimony as he fumbles his papers: “Turning pages isn’t always easy.” Fox speaks of managing Parkinson’s “with the help of daily medication and selective exertion,” though he admits, “I can still perform my job, in my case in a very public arena. I can still help out with the daily tasks and rituals involved in home life, but I don’t kid myself; that will change.” Fox closes his speech again referencing his body, contrasting its current display with an optimistic view of the future: “I can expect in my forties to face challenges most won’t expect until their seventies or eighties, if ever. But with your help, if we all do everything we can to eradicate this disease, in my fifties I’ll be dancing at my children’s weddings.” But though Fox claims his Parkinson’s (notably he refers to himself as a “Parkinson’s patient” only twice in his testimony), much more frequently he casts himself as a soldier via a CURING PARKINSON’S IS A WAR metaphor. Declaring “the time for ‘quietly soldiering on’ is through,” Fox claims, “The war against Parkinson’s is a winnable war and I have resolved to play a role in that victory.” When Fox speaks of the desire “to beat this disease” (“to beat” possi- bly alluding to the boxing of Muhammad Ali), and refers to those “suffering with Parkinson’s,” Fox uses language of fighting. And although his statement that van- quishing Parkinson’s “won’t happen until Congress adequately funds Parkinson’s research” does not explicitly employ a fighting metaphor, it could be read through the lens of asking his audience to join the battle. These metaphors function to reframe how audiences think of fighting; whereas typically only the able-bodied are called to war, Fox’s characterization of himself as a soldier challenges the notion of who is able to fight, given his tremors, cluttered speech, hypomimia, micrographia, dyskinesia, and rigidity. Though not falling under the umbrella of war metaphor prevalent in the speech, Fox’s other able-bodied metaphors––his hope that “improved treatment strategies are close at hand,” his praise for the “steps we are taking,” his plea that the Subcommittee “take up Parkinson’s”––

Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 12:10 05 April 2013 function in a similar manner as the soldier metaphor. Together, they each recast Fox as able-bodied while calling attention to the ableist, and stale, metaphors so prevalent in language.6 Given the physical state in which Fox delivers his testimony, his remarks are especially poignant. Quintilian’s dicta that “[s]peech must not be jerky, with irregular intervals and sounds ...;normustitlimpalong,owingtotheuneven- ness of all these elements” and that speech must not have the “vice” of being monotone become the standard prescriptions to rhetors (11.3.43–44). Pronounce words with clarity, annunciate with precision, speak with a strong voice, gesture with purpose, and so forth. Fox upends these normative recommendations, 452 Rhetoric Review

stumbling over words, cluttering his speech, projecting a feeble voice, gesturing uncontrollably. Yet Quintilian also avers that “if gesture and facial expression were out of tune with speech, and we looked cheerful when what we were saying was sad, or shook our heads when asserting something, our words would lack not only authority but credibility” (11.3.67). As such, Fox’s quivering hands, mud- dled speech, and unruly body, while they impede his ability to deliver his address, establish him as an authority on Parkinson’s. Thus, building upon other scholars recovering the oft-neglected canon of delivery as a key element of persuasion (Buchanan; Fredal; Hawhee and Holding; Porter), I suggest that delivery, for Fox and other disabled rhetors, extends into the complex relationships among ethos, the body, text, and society.

Responding to Revealed Disability

Just as Fox is caught in a tension between Quintilian’s preference for controlled, measured speech and a desire for delivery attuned to its subject matter, he dwells in another tension between, on the one hand, a rhetorical body affronting an audience in a manner similar to Karolyn Kohrs Campbell’s characterization of feminist rhetoric as a discourse that does not adapt to audience expectations and needs and, on the other hand, a rhetoric depending upon traditional responses to disability for its rhetorical force. Fox alludes to the former in describing his “transformation” into an unmedicated Parkinson’s patient in full view of the public as “startling” for his audience (Lucky Man 247). Through his “transformation” Fox asserts an agency aligning with Joseph Shapiro’s claim that “many disabled people are rejecting the ‘stigma’ that there is something sad or to be ashamed of in their condition. They are ...parading it instead of closeting it.” Yet woven into this rhetoric that Shapiro might label “iconoclastic” is a reliance upon conventional attitudes toward disability (20). In addition to the four visual rhetorics that Garland-Thomson claims frame disability––the wondrous, sentimental, exotic,

Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 12:10 05 April 2013 and realistic (“The Politics of Staring”)––Fox’s revealing of disability can be seen as also depending upon two others: compassion and disgust. It would seem Fox expects some pity from his audience; he is, after all, seeking funding from Congress. At the same time, he is acting as an agent using his own body as an argument for the eradication of the disease that he suffers, which suggests Fox is expecting a response of revulsion at the sight of his disabled body. Thus, while Fox does practice what Garland-Thomas calls “visual activism” by “saying ‘look at me’ instead of ‘don’t stare,’” he simultaneously risks reinscribing the traditional, limiting, and reductive responses to disability upon which his testimony depends (Staring 193). Revealing Rather Than Concealing Disability 453

Of such knee-jerk responses to disability, Fox’s rhetoric depends most, perhaps, on the accusations of deceit that displays of disability inevitably prompt. Amy Vidali, in her analysis of college application essays in which students out their disabilities, claims “people with disabilities are regularly accused of ‘faking it’” (632). This same charge has been leveled at Fox. Though audience responses to his 1999 address to the Subcommittee are scarce, in 2006 Fox performed a similar rhetorical display of disability in a television advertisement for Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill’s senate campaign. In the commercial Fox again reveals his Parkinson’s while arguing that a vote for McCaskill is a vote in favor of ﬁnding a cure for the disease because McCaskill, but not her opponent, supports stem cell research. Shortly after the ad reached the airwaves, Rush Limbaugh bombastically responded, questioning Fox’s display of Parkinson’s and brazenly claiming Fox exaggerates his symptoms as a manipulative ploy:

Michael J. Fox is using his illness as a way to mislead voters into thinking that their vote for a single United States senator has a direct impact on stem cell research in Missouri. It doesn’t, and it won’t. So Mr. Fox is using his illness as another tactic to try to secure the election of a Democrat senator by implying that with her election, that we’ll be on the road to stem cell research her opponent opposes and people who suffer from Parkinson’s disease as he does will have acure.

After attempting to dismantle Fox’s argument, Limbaugh turns to Fox’s rhetorical decision of revealing his Parkinson’s: “I wonder if this would [sic] become atrendandallkindsofillnesswerebeingexploitedhowpeoplewouldendup reacting to it and feeling about it.” Questioning what he sees as the exploitation of Fox’s body, Limbaugh fears the effects of foregrounding disability in public forums. Perhaps realizing these accusatory remarks against Fox may be offensive,

Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 12:10 05 April 2013 Limbaugh brieﬂy hedges––“So if this was not an act, then I apologize”—before reemphasizing his objection: “But despite all that, I mean its pitiable and it’s very sad anybody has this disease, because it is debilitating in ways that people that don’t have it don’t even understand. But to exploit it like this in misrepre- senting the political agenda of a particular candidate, there’s nothing admirable about that.” Concerning Fox, Limbaugh concludes, “He is an actor after all.” Predictably, Limbaugh’s diatribe, while vocalizing objections many have to displays of disability, elicited a ﬁrestorm of controversy. Limbaugh uses the word pitiable to describe Fox’s Parkinson’s, and perhaps by “pitiable” Limbaugh implies “pathetic,” in that he argues Fox’s display is a manipulative bathos appeal. 454 Rhetoric Review

By this reasoning, “exploiting” disability (Limbaugh’s term) is a ploy, an attempt to make Fox a sympathy case along the lines of Tiny Tim Cratchit. Limbaugh’s indictment of Fox as conniving, deceptive, and manipulative— and charges in general that disabled individuals fake their handicaps––may stem from two sources. The first is that disability is often linked to some sort of moral turpitude––in Fox’s case, lying. This connection between disability and dishonesty, even villainy, runs deep; consider Captain Hook’s and Ahab’s prosthetic limbs, Batman’s foes—the Penguin’s and Joker’s—disfigurements, Shakespeare’s Richard III’s hunchback (which Shakespeare gave to the king “to make more ominous and obvious his ability to murder ruthlessly”), and It’s a Wonderful Life’s “coldhearted banker in a wheelchair” (Shapiro 31–32). And George Lucas, speaking of his most famous character, says, “Darth Vader was half machine, half man, and that’s where he lost a lot of his humanity. He has mechanical legs. He has mechanical arms. He’s hooked up to a breathing machine” (qtd. in Moyers). With Darth Vader on a respirator and unable to stand without prosthet- ics, his disability results in a loss of humanity according to Lucas, and it further entrenches a connection between disability and depravity. Asecondpossiblereasondisplaysofdisabilityareseenasmanipulative is the link between disability and femininity (Dolmage “Metis, Mêtis, Mestiza, Medusa”; Dolmage and Lewiecki-Wilson; Garland-Thomson, “Theorizing Disability”). Both in his address to the Subcommittee as well as in the advertisement for McCaskill, Fox speaks to a discourse community valuing rational argumentation, and while Fox does offer such rhetoric for his audience, his discourse hinges primarily upon the display of his body. As the mind and logic are often associated with the masculine and the body with the feminine, Fox’s declaration of himself as “an expert in only one [area]: what it is like to be a young man, husband and father, with Parkinson’s disease” constructs an ethos caught within a gendered tension. Fox claims masculine roles, yet he does so through an authority founded upon an unmasculine way of knowing and of arguing: embodied experience. It is not surprising, then, that Fox’s discourse is vilified. Dolmage

Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 12:10 05 April 2013 claims, “When one needs to malign rhetoric, it is aligned with the body” and the feminine, and accusations claiming a display of the disabled body to be manipulative and deceptive trickery ﬂow from a discourse community typically privileging the mind over the body, fact over experience, the masculine over the feminine (“Metis, Mêtis, Mestiza, Medusa”3). Accusations of deceit––whether fostered by an unfounded association between disability and villainy, a pejorative link between disability and femininity, or some other impetus––embody the same reductive thinking as other traditional responses to disability. But as Fox’s revealing of his Parkinson’s demands a response from an unsettled audience, he creates an ethos suspended Revealing Rather Than Concealing Disability 455

between many seemingly conﬂicted points: an authority on Parkinson’s, a manipulative trickster, a poster boy for a cause, a sympathy case, a soldier on the front lines, a father, a celebrity, a commoner, among others. Fox speaks to this tension in Lucky Man:“[D]uringevery‘on’time[meaningwhenhismedicationsareman- aging his symptoms], I delude myself into believing that that, and not the other, is my ‘normal’ condition” (216). Countering Limbaugh’s assertion that Fox manip- ulates audiences via his Parkinson’s, this statement suggests that the medicated Fox may, in reality, be the “actor” (Limbaugh’s term) because what Limbaugh claims is acting, Fox claims is his true body. And yet, in these lines Fox admits to fooling himself into believing that his medicated body is his “‘normal’ condition” and that the body exhibiting Parkinson’s symptoms is somehow abnormal. The difference, though, between Fox and Limbaugh is that Fox calls this belief a delusion and reclaims his unmedicated body. In terms of audience response, Fox’s construction of an ethos based primarily upon a display of his disabled body asks audiences to discern which body of the many personas he embodies is his “‘normal’ condition.” By posing this question to his audience, Fox, while risking the reinscription of limiting responses to disability, claims a complexity for himself not typically ascribed by audiences to individuals with disabilities.

Reconsidering the Disabled Body

Traditional responses to disability are unable to account for Fox’s rhetoric in at least three ways. First, Fox works to construct an ethos that Zosha Stuckey might describe as “mov[ing] beyond the notion of disability as deﬁcit and beyond the wonder and amazement and arriv[ing] at people’s social historicity as rhetorical agents”––an ethos that enacts “a dialogic process in which [Fox] assert[s] agency, construct[s] a self, and respond[s] to derision” (Stuckey). Fox accomplishes this maneuvering by inhabiting the intersection of the body, text, and social practices, wherein he constructs a fraught, tensioned ethos, one that afﬁrms individuals with disabilities as rhetorical agents. As such, Fox’s revealed body

Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 12:10 05 April 2013 challenges the notion that the disabled body is a hindrance to rhetorical efﬁcacy. Second, because Fox’s disability does not necessarily obstruct his rhetoric, his display compels rhetoricians to rethink conventional narratives of disability and rhetoric. Consider, for example, the oft-retold narrative of Demosthenes, who Quintilian reminds us “thought of [delivery] not just as the ﬁrst faculty needed, but as the only one,” and consequently put pebbles in his mouth, shouted above the roar of the ocean, practiced orations in front of a mirror, and ran up hillsides while reciting speeches in order to treat his impairments (11.3.6–7). Demosthenes’ attention to delivery likely stems from the physical demands of projecting a voice in an open-air venue to an audience, at times, several hundred yards removed 456 Rhetoric Review

from the speaker (see Johnstone). Yet Martha Rose contends that such triumphant accounts of Demosthenes’ disability skew the historical record as they superim- pose a modern sensibility of overcoming disability as a sign of dignity upon a classical world that viewed disability much differently than we do today. Just as Rose questions the traditional Demosthenes narrative and whether that narrative is even true, Fox’s display asks audiences to reconsider what could easily become the conventional framing of his own narrative: Actor besieged by Parkinson’s overcomes the disease through courage, sheer willpower, and the miracles of modern medicine. Fox, I claim, is doing much more in his advocacy than that limiting narrative affords, and he constructs an ethos that will not allow for such reductive renderings of the rhetorical practice of disabled rhetors. Lastly, visible disability asks that we look more attentively to the disabled body as a location of rhetoric. Dolmage writes that “the rhetorical body [is] a field of tension, a site of trial and trouble” and consequently “studying any culture’s attitudes and arguments about the body always connects us intimately with attitudes and arguments about rhetorical possibility” (“The Circulation of Discourse” 114). In terms of this rhetorical possibility, discourses of disabled and revealed rhetors bring our attention to the relationship between the body and language and rhetoric. The text of Fox’s address complements his delivery and vice-versa; the two interact hand-in-hand as Fox’s body reveals what his words also reveal. And yet, such language regarding body and text is inadequate to describe Fox’s display. Given how Fox’s delivery is so tightly wound up with his ethos and the words he speaks, as well as with how his audience responds to his display of disability, the theory of ethos I put forth here does not allow for a split to be made between these elements. Revealed disability thus unsettles conceptions of rhetoric that would recommend disability simply be set out of public view––as if one part of a person could so easily be set aside––and instead constructs an ethos based upon a whole person. Thus, revealed, rather than concealed, disability unsettles in fruit- ful ways traditional conceptions of rhetoric and the body, claiming the rhetorical body––disabled or otherwise––as a potent available means of persuasion. Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 12:10 05 April 2013 Notes 1IthankRR readers Jay Dolmage and Julie Jung for their generative feedback, as well as Jessica Enoch for her formative comments on early drafts of this essay. 2As I was sending this piece to Rhetoric Review,NicoleQuackenbushpublishedherveryfine article “Speaking of––and as––Stigma: Performativity and Parkinson’s in the Rhetoric of Michael J. Fox” in Disability Studies Quarterly. Quackenbush, to my knowledge, is the first and only other scholar to examine Fox’s rhetoric, and she “seek[s] to restore history, complexity, and agency to Fox’s work through a thorough exploration of his rhetoric as it moves through ...two key and inter- connected stages––first, a rhetoric of passing and second,arhetoric of masquerade.”Indoingso, Quackenbush claims that the “performative power of visible disability” in Fox’s discourse resonates Revealing Rather Than Concealing Disability 457

given that “in the collective imagination and in our own rhetorical histories, physical difference con- notes a lack of agency and disability serves as the ‘master trope of disqualification’ from speaking and being heard.” There are parallels between Quackenbush’s project and my own. There are also, however, significant differences. Quackenbush gleans her methodology largely from disability studies; I draw on Prelli and classical rhetoric. Quackenbush is primarily concerned with the 2006 exchange between Limbaugh and Fox and its media coverage; I address Fox’s first public appearance sans medication (though I do touch lightly on Limbaugh). Quackenbush concludes that Fox’s rhetoric “has carved out space” for the disabled rhetor; I put forth that Fox’s revealing necessitates a reconsidera- tion of basic principles about the rhetorical body. While we are both examining Fox’s rhetoric, we do so through different lenses grounded in different neighborhoods of rhetorical theory with markedly different aims and conclusions. Read together, Quackenbush and I can provide complementary analyses on Fox, and it is my hope that further scholarship on Fox and other disabled rhetors will soon add to this conversation. 3DeLuca, Nicholson, and Ray have each argued along these lines––that rhetorical display is facilitated through revealing and concealing the body––though they do not use these terms exactly. 4Of the 123 individuals on The Stuttering Foundation’s list of “Famous People Who Stutter,” only ten are female. I would like to address the absence of women with disability from the public’s eye, but it is beyond the scope of this article. 5I am concerned primarily with the rhetoricity of Fox’s unmedicated body, and space here does not permit me to address the important issue of the rhetoricity of the medicated body, as well as the rhetoricity of medication itself; John Schlib offers an insightful consideration of these topics. 6While Fox uses these ableist metaphors to great rhetorical affect, Amy Vidali offers an insightful critique from a disability studies perspective of the cognitive metaphor theory upon which Fox’s metaphors and my analysis of them rests (“Seeing What We Know”).

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Peter Wayne Moe is a doctoral student in composition and rhetoric at the University of Pittsburgh. He teaches composition courses, and his work has appeared in Teaching English in the Two-Year College and Composition Forum. Correspondence can be sent to [email protected]. Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 12:10 05 April 2013