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

Rhetoric Review,Vol.31,No.4,443–460,2012 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0735-0198 print / 1532-7981 online DOI: 10.1080/07350198.2012.711200 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 247–48 443 444 Rhetoric Review 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 con- ventional 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 atten- tion 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; some- times 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

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