Next to Normal?

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Body

Christian Martius Robinson

A Thesis Submitted to The Faculty of Graduate Studies In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements For the Degree of a Masters of Arts

Graduate Program in Communication & Culture York University Toronto, Ontario

May 2012

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Thesis Abstract

Next to Normal - What We Talk About When We Talk About the Body

Lennard Davis argues in Enforcing Normalcy (1995) that the idea of the normal body is not only understood as being typical or usual but also productive and useful. Conversely, the idea of the abnormal body is the acknowledged untypical, unusual and unproductive human form. In 2009 Cerrie Burnell, a children's television presenter with a partial limb was categorized as an inappropriate public figure and accused of frightening children. Using the Lennard Davis's perspectives on normal and abnormal subject categories and critical discourse analysis this thesis contends that the disabled body is discursively established in the media and common vernaculars as an abnormality, despite Burnell demonstrating the use of a productive disabled body and disability being a typical or usual condition, which most will inhabit, given a long enough life span. iii

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Dr. Steve Bailey for his valuable support and guidance. Thanks also to Dr. Edward Slopek, Dr. Shannon Bell and Dr. Stuart J. Murray for their encouragement and assistance throughout this academic journey.

Thanks to Chavisa Brett for putting me on this path in the first place. iv

Next to Normal?

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Body

Cerrie Bumell and the Discursive Establishment of the Disabled Body

Christian Martius Robinson

CONTENTS

1. Introduction 1 What We Talk About When We Talk About the Body

2. Literature Review 15 Lennard Davis's Enforcing Normalcy

3. Methodology 39 Critical Discourse and Semiotic Analysis

4. Qualitative Content Analysis 55 The Cerrie Bumell Phenomenon

5. Conclusion 101 The Social Benefit of Deconstructing Subject Categories

6. Bibliography 113

Introduction

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Body

The body is often described in and represented with categories, delivered in parts, the focus of attention, constituted as specific areas over a bodily terrain. Much like the psychoanalytic notion that the idea of a whole body is an illusion1 (when the human form is made up of separate parts often encapsulating a plurality of limbs, organs, surfaces and features) the function of language also discursively conveys a selection of categories that amount to the illusion of a whole description. Terms like rational or irrational, able or disabled, and specifically, normal or abnormal are regularly applied to what is understood as both a subject and an object, conscious and unconscious, physical and mental and alive and dead to deliver a plurality of meaning embedded in the illusory whole of the body.

The aim of this thesis is to interrogate the normal and abnormal body category and instances where these categories are established linguistically to represent the illusion of an all-encompassing description of the whole body form. The critical focus of this work, or the problem that needs to be addressed, is that what is considered to be normal or abnormal and is applied to the human body, is based on the modern idea (post-

Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution) that human bodies are useful and able instruments. This idea is further authenticated by the fact that the word "normal" arrived

1 Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience." Ecrits. New York: Norton (2002) p.76. 2

in the English language in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, a post Enlightenment period when the Industrial Revolution was reconfiguring the social and political landscape.2 Therefore, the attendant idea of normalcy became the desired human condition, which developed from a capitalist infrastructure that conceivably created new terms from which new social realities could be constructed in the interest of producing capital. The useful human was then the person who personified the average way of social life, and embodiment of average health and an average way of functioning under a system that required the average use of an able and working body.

Connections that exist between the formation of words, historical periods and the coming into being of certain concepts can also be similarly reproduced when looking at the words "rational" and "irrational" that are associated with The Enlightenment period and the then newfound ability of human subjects to think for themselves beyond the influence of church and state. Immanuel Kant outlined the basis for rational thought as the burgeoning and unrealized potential of humans to think beyond imposed social structures when formulating his essay What is Enlightenment?3 But if words like

"rational" and "irrational" are also used to designate the normal and abnormal then the standard that defines typical or usual averages also becomes commensurable with what is conceived as sensible or logical. Therefore, if the average measurement is the logical standard by which the whole human population is quantified it is important to question whether or not the rational individual self-determining human, who is capable of

2 Davis, Lennard. J. Enforcing Normalcy. Verso (1995) p.24. Kant, Immanuel. "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?" Berlinische Monatsschrift (1784). 3

independent thought, which intellectually stretches beyond the traditionally imposed societal systems of control, is also the normal or average person that is defined by the imposed regulating systems that keep the infrastructure in place. Therefore, if the rational/normal or irrational/abnormal subject categories have collapsed into one another for ideological reasons the agent or the agency needs to be located, which systematically arranges the bodies that are required to be concurrently logical and average.

In order to locate the sites of agency and the mechanisms of rhetoric apparent in discourse this thesis will utilize the Foucauldian notion that "power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations"4 or that agency is meaningless until it is deployed and is contingent upon historical and material factors, which condition individual agents (the general public) accordingly. This thesis will maintain that what we talk about when we talk about the body is either affiliated within the power relations initiated by social, commercial or medical systems and is, therefore, conceptualized as "normal" or is inversely understood as a body form that is of little use or purpose in a structural system of norms, and is consequently designated

"abnormal." As a result, this thesis will submit that the agency of a network of social, commercial and medical systems defined, and continue to define, what bodies are constituted to be normal or abnormal

When interrogating the modern construction of the human body, which is supplemented by consumer products, social practices and common discourses, it seems that the continuous maintenance required to deliver normalcy (conforming to a usual or

4 Foucault, Michel. T he History of Sexuality: An Introduction Vol. 1 (1978) Vintage (1990) p.94. 4

typical standard) is undermined by the very perpetuation that suggests that the act of presenting normalcy in the social world is abnormal, because it is performed and not realized as an autonomously determined state of being. In direct contrast to the maintenance required for the usual or typical body standard, common bodily differences that can sometimes be selected as abnormalities, in terms of the mortal, aging, damaged or disabled form, are in fact the usual or typical standards, or normal states, which await all human subjects, given a long enough life span. This thesis aims to talk about the body in order to conceive the normal body category as a social construction or more specifically, the opposite of a naturally occurring bodily state, a self-evident existential abnormality and not a condition that should necessarily be quantified as right or good.

To be able to adequately question the modern conception of embodied normalcy this work will examine how the impaired or the disabled body (and this taxonomy can apply to the gendered body, the sick body, the deformed body and the elderly body) is represented as embodying something other than the normative configuration of the human body, or even the abject Other, in psychoanalytic terms, which haunts the subject and formulates the necessary border from which an identity is formed. This sense of embodied otherness is an ontological shift whereby the material considerations of the body are replaced by the socially constructed cultural signification systems of instrumental reason or economy based ideological languages. Therefore, the human body is conceived as a useful and able economy and not acknowledged for its potential for contingency and the usual and familiar experience of living in a fragile mortal form. 5

Wolfgang Donsbach states in The Identity of Communication Research that:

"Communication research has the potential and duty to focus on research agendas that can help societies and people to communicate better."5 By focussing on the anomaly in communication that fails to present the abnormal body type as a usual and familiar physical organism this thesis will reveal the disturbances in communication that represent typical and usual naturally occurring (or normal) ontological states as abnormal and conversely the non-typical or usual bodily states supplemented by social performance and commercial production, which transform the body into the typical or usual constructed

(or abnormal) form. Within the locus of what is determined and constructed as the human body, both in terms of how it manifests itself as an organism in the physical world and an object composed in language, there exist disturbances in communication that convey contradictory considerations of how the bodies are understood as normal or abnormal.

The purpose of this thesis is to challenge these disturbances so that a better way of communicating can be achieved.

The Theoretical Framework

What Literature Will Be Used To Talk About The Body?

In order to effectively interrogate the conception of normal or abnormal bodies in language this thesis will be looking closely at the work of Lennard J. Davis and specifically his work Enforcing Normalcy (1995).6 However, to contextualize the

5 Donsbach, Wolfgang. "The Identity of Communication Research." Journal of Communications, 56 (2006) p.447. 6 Davis, Lennard. J. Enforcing Normalcy. Verso (1995). 6

theoretical perspectives (working within a Critical Disabilities Studies framework) provided by Davis that question the discursive construction of normal and abnormal subject categories this thesis will also encompass both a post-structuralist and a psychoanalytic theoretical framework, which significantly compliments the work rather than offering competing perspectives.

The poststructuralist perspective and, in particular, Michel Foucault's conception of biopower is especially pertinent to this study in that Foucault argues that the docile human body is constructed as a subject and determined as an object in a network of power relations situated between institutions and regulatory mechanisms that are reliant on discourses.7 Similarly, the psychoanalytic perspective is applicable because the symbolic and imaginary fantasies of the self, the other and the social plane that they are organized within are, according to psychoanalysis, only accessed through discourse.

Therefore, if "the object of psychoanalysis is simply the linguistic exchange"8 the theoretical framework of the psychoanalytic method is a particularly useful tool to access the accidental and deliberate meanings attributed to the body that are provided by the spoken and written word that reconfigure human subjects according to normal or abnormal subject categories.

There are many critical perspectives that draw on how the human body is created by and from language but within this project the postructuralist and psychoanalytic domains converge at the site of the discursively instituted human body to address the

7 Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) Vintage (1995). 8 Kristeva, Julia. In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. Columbia University Press (1987) p.l. 7

notion of linguistic and pre-linguistic onto logical states. Postructuralist thought situates the inadequacies of language as an integral deficiency whereas within psychoanalysis the inadequacies of language prove to be the positive sites where subjectivities can be revealed.9 Therefore, poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory offers the necessary means to interrogate the idea of a body that exists before and in language, as an organism that originated before language but had to exist in language (or after its creation) so that it could be known. In short, both poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory maintains that the body may exist before language, but not in knowledge, and the body, this object realized as a subject, includes both its normal and abnormal configurations.

Cultural Studies, and its broad theoretical framework, offers the successful intellectual means to interrogate the subject of norms, discourses and the body by using a combination of different theoretical approaches provided by diverse intellectual fields

(like the poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and critical disability studies theory used in this study). The benefit of using an interdisciplinary approach offers a, "means of understanding and thinking through - rather than merely repeating - many of the ambiguities and anxieties, confusions and contradictions, urgencies and uncertainties."10

This thesis will theoretically think through the modern concept of physical abnormality displayed and performed in the socio-cultural world and deliver a more appropriate understanding of what it means to be considered to be abnormal or maintain the ostensibly normal or familiar experience of living in a material body. The fact that the

9 Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Phronesis (1997) p. 197. 10 Hall, Gary and Sarah Bichall. "New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Some Comments, Clarifications, Explanations, Observations, Recommendations, Remarks, Statements and Suggestions)." New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory. Edinburgh University Press (2006) p. 15. 8

idea of the normal body is a constructed form that is supplemented and maintained by commercial production and social practises and the abnormal body, when realized as a gradually diminishing organism, is a usual and common human form, but socio-political and cultural systems work to subvert the usual and turn it into an unusual bodily state, and also at the same time, present the unusually constructed normal form as the usual state of contemporary ontological existence, means that essential theoretical work in this field still needs to be done.

The Methodology

What Method Will Be Used To Talk About the Body?

Language is persuasive because it is a system that delivers "forms of representation in which different social categories, practices and relations are constructed from and in the interests of a particular point of view, a particular conception of social reality."11 Language is the indispensable communication technology available to all humans but it also provides human subjects with the ability to influence others and construct diverse social realities. This understanding of language as being ideologically persuasive is especially commensurable to the poststructuralist perspective that "all communication is rhetoric"12 but the idea of inherent persuasiveness contained within language also conveys that the act of communicating is partially deficient because it has

11 Deacon, David. Michael Pickering, Peter Golding & Graham Murdock. Researching Communications: A Practical Guide to Methods in Media and Cultural Analysis. Hodder Education (2007) p. 151. 12 Craig, Robert T. "Communication Theory as a Field." Communication Theory, Nine: Two (1999) p.138. 9

to persuade or even overcompensate rather than determine. Thus, if all communication is rhetoric then language has very real limitations.

Friedrich Nietzsche submits in On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense that the limitations of language produce transcendental signifiers so that words can never adequately describe things as they appear in social reality.13 Therefore language is constructed not to necessarily denote things as they are but to provide the means to define the categories that may be of social use and deliver multiple connotations that may also be of contextual use. With this in mind, it is important to define how and why the words

"abnormal" or "normal" are deployed, as they will be the binary terms that are interrogated throughout this thesis.

Critical Discourse Analysis will be the primary method utilized to examine how the abnormal body has linguistically situated, from The Enlightenment onwards, as an unusual spectacle. As Ruth Wodak argues in Qualitative Research Practice Critical

Discourse Analysis is interdisciplinary because "Problems in our societies are too complex to be studied from a single perspective."14 Hence, Critical Discourse Analysis

(and the necessary Cultural Studies interdisciplinary approach) will deconstruct the societal problem of normalcy and ask how the word "normal" positions human subjects and reproduces larger ideological structures. Specifically, the thesis will scrutinize in detail the connection between mass media discourses and common language use and

13 Nietzsche, Friedrich. "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense." Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's. Ed. D. Breazeale, New Jersey: Humanities Press (1979) p.3. 14 Wodak, Ruth. "Critical Discourse Analysis." Qualitative Research Practice, ed. Clive Seal, et al, London: Sage Publications (2004) p. 199. 10

question how discourse constructs ideologically positioned subject categories that are constituted from shared normative assumptions.

An analysis of media discourses and associated cultural vernaculars can reveal domains where hegemonic social consensuses are constructed and where the mass media shapes language and is also shaped by language. For example, the allusions that people use to, "suggest negative associations without being held responsible for them"15 are reliant on the provision of implicitly suggested hegemonic "common sense" opinions, which may not be conceivably common or sensible. The discourses included in this study will analyze methods of using language (like the use of assumptive expressions) that shape opinion and are reproduced in the media and shared vernaculars, so that what sometimes seems to be implicit (most of the time) can be revealed to be explicitly manipulative.

Specifically, this work will look at linguistic examples that sustain the idea of a bodily norm. The social discourses that will be analyzed can sometimes be reproduced by statements like: "I'd kill myself if I was like that" (that are generally declared by a person that cannot understand the full embodied reality of being situated in a body that seems abnormal to them) or the "Is it just me or does anyone else think..." agency shift statement, (which is often used by the initiator of a discourse to say something unpleasant by incorporating an act of displacement). Similarly, the socio-cultural practises sustained by the media provide shared assumptions of what normal and abnormal bodies represent.

15 Wodak, Ruth. Critical Discourse Analysis, p.207. 11

This research project will demonstrate how mass media discourses and public vernaculars intersect to deliver these "commonsense" opinions. The material will include: an analysis of how public or publicized figures with disabilities (or body abnormalities) challenge normative perceptions and/or reveal otherwise concealed prejudices. However, by also studying the visual images that are included in mediated texts or the apparent spectacles that seem to generate public vernaculars this work will also look at social events with a semiotic methodology in order to pinpoint where texts seem to fix the meaning associated with an image.

This thesis will argue that discourses, which appear in the media and are reproduced socially, sustain the notion that certain types of bodies that manifest physical differences are linguistically constituted as abnormal social figures. Furthermore, mediated and social discourses constitute the configuration of certain type of commercially useful and ideologically familiar body as the normal opposite to the abnormal self. Critical Discourse Analysis, therefore, provides the necessary method to interrogate the intersection of media discourses and social vernaculars that establish the normal or abnormal body.

Conclusion

Can We Talk About The Body In A Better Way?

As a result of doing this research it will become apparent that certain types of

body categories are discursively maintained for ideological reasons. Due to the industrial 12

demands of the nineteenth-century it was important to conceive human bodies as useful organic machines that could operate the larger mechanical machines, but in the contemporary post-industrial Information Age, where most workers may find themselves at a computer terminal instead of on the factory floor, which demonstrates that physicality is not required for the workplace like it used to be (at least in the Global

North) human bodies are still conceived to be useful or instrumental organisms. This is because normal body categories are now established as ideological products that are sustained by commercial practices that also sustain the instrumental dynamics of a consumer culture.

In the Information Age the normal body is created by beauty and health products, in health and fitness institutions and through medical procedures that cost money, so the demands of industry have, by extension, included and been replaced by the demands of consumerism. Hence, the activity of commerce remains, which drives both the industrial and consumer culture and solidifies the idea of normal and abnormal subject categories in the collective consciousness. If commerce is the galvanizing principle that establishes what is normal and abnormal in relation to the body, then as long as the capitalist infrastructure continues to order society ideologically according to financial gain there

may be little hope in changing a regimented system that, so far, has not been successfully replaced by a better alternative.16

The idea of the normal body in the Information Age can now exist as a code,

which is collectively recognised as a construction that is created through the use and

16 The idea of the normal body as a construct that is created by and perpetuates a contemporary capitalist economy is elaborated on in detail in the final chapter of this thesis. 13

purchase of products and services. A specific physicality can be created within fitness institutions or with the use of beauty products. These specific muscular, lacquered and toned forms, for example, that are created through the act being a consumer can be recognized as codes that display bodily normalcy so that to be normal and display signs of bodily normalcy the body itself has to signify a citizen's engagement in a consumer culture. Furthermore, these bodily codes work as specific meaning making signifiers in the constant exchange of information that constructs the ideological basis of a modern technological society. A normal citizen becomes the wearer of a normal body that has been created, or purchased even, in a capitalist economy. Therefore, the normal body can exist as an informational substitute for the essentially human abnormal form. For codes function as symbols that essentially replace other systems of communication, much like the construction of the normal body that seemingly attempts to replace the naturally occurring so-called abnormal body.

The capitalist bio-political system, which requires the codified construction of normalcy to organize its subjects, may be a difficult mechanism to dismantle, as a whole, but by interrogating particular statements made in social and mediated spaces, which render certain discourses inadequate, the larger ideologies that these statements support, both implicitly and explicitly, can successfully be deconstructed. Despite the grand

Utopian dream of irreversibly transforming the social political landscape with Critical

Discourse Analysis the modest hope contained within this thesis is that this work will contribute to an existing body of knowledge and the theoretical tradition that addresses

(and may one day reverse) what is considered to be normal and next to normal in relation 14

to the human body. The Utopian hope articulated within this thesis is that those with abnormal bodies (i.e. all of us) will one day be understood in society as having normal bodies and the idea of the normal body provided by the commercial infrastructure can and will also eventually transform into the abnormality it always was. 15

Literature Review

This is more a question about the nature of the subject than the qualities of the object, more about the observer than the observed.

Lennard Davis - Enforcing Normalcy

Lennard J. Davis's Enforcing Normalcy (1996) submits that the idea of the normal body type is a socially constructed form that was established according to the demands of the Industrial Revolution and the post-Enlightenment age that required the concept of a physically rational standard. Furthermore, this idea is specifically linked to demands of a capitalist system that organizes a population according to its instrumental use and ability to aid commercial production. Consequently, the body types that fall outside of a normalizing system, which orders, categorizes and celebrates a particular kind of useful and able body, can be designated as abnormal. As Davis argues, the bodily norm has arisen at "a particular historical moment" and is "part of a notion of progress, of industrialization and of the ideological consolidation of the power of the bourgeoisie."17

Lennard Davis reinforces his argument that "The body for a purpose is certainly the rule in the early modern world"18 by articulating the important detail that the concept of the norm only arrived in the mid-to-late nineteenth century when the word "normal" first appeared in the European lexicon.19 Davis calls attention to the fact that this new word, which constitutes what is understood as being standard, regular, common or usual,

17 Davis, Lennard. J. Enforcing Normalcy. Verso (1995) p.49. 18 Ibid, p.73. 19 Ibid, p.24. 16

materialized for the first time during a period in modern history when the Industrial

Revolution economically, socially and culturally transformed the nineteenth century by mechanically producing standard, regular, common or usual products. However, it was the purpose, use and ability demonstrated by industrial practices, which produced standard, regular, common or usual products that inextricably linked the concept of the norm and the word "normal" to a body quantified as having ability and purpose and is useful. Thus, an important distinction of the "remarkable fact"20 of the word "normal" first appearing in the mid-nineteenth century is that the rampant industrialization of the period defined what was typical or usual or "normal" because industrial practices transformed the socio-cultural landscape and normalized both the economic infrastructure and the ideological superstructure of society.21 So, the purpose, use and ability of industry conceived the norm, normal society, the normal citizen and the word "normal" as a concept and made this conception the standard, regular, common or usual principle by which the norm was instrumentally understood.

The fact that the concept of the norm entered into public consciousness as the practice of material production was standardized by industry demonstrates Karl Marx's notion that the class which, "has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production" and "ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships."22 A system of norms was, therefore, mentally conceived along with what was now normally

20 Ibid, p.24. 21 Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)." Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans, Ben Brewster, New York: Monthly Review Press (1971). 22 Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. International Publishers Company (1970) p.64. 17

and materially produced, which ordered, categorized and celebrated the definition of normalcy, and according to Lennard Davis, this system of norms included the concept of the normal body as a useful and able economy and, moreover, the abnormal body as the less able or useful form.

Within a paradigm of a materially influenced and a mentally produced conception of body normalcy the opposite attendant form to the normal, useful and able body is the less able, useful and productive abnormal body, or specifically the body categorized as disabled. At this point it is crucial to mention the political dimension of the different social categories that have developed to nominate those deemed in society as having less than able or useful bodies. According to the theoretical perspectives of Critical Disability

Studies the contrast between what seems to be physically determined and socially constructed in terms of what might be classified as an abnormal body can be established by differentiating between the compromised condition of impairment and the compromised ability of the disabled.23 Impairment is the individualized condition and experience of living with an impaired body whereas the disabled body is only apparent when disabilities are illustrated in a social environment that is physically limiting.

Throughout Critical Disability Studies research the difference between what is measured as a bodily condition, and is internal, mental, existential and physical, or the body deficiencies that are only identifiable in a social environment, which subsequently generates the idea that it is society that is disabled and not the person because the environment restricts certain kinds of physicality and produces disabled bodies, has

23 Shakespeare, Tom. "The Social Model of Disability." The Disability Studies Reader, Ed. Lennard J. Davis, Routledge (2010) P.268. 18

proven to be controversial.24 This is because the idea of the socially constructed disabled body fails to recognize the mental and physical experience of living with impairment (a person can be impaired and be able to use their body productively in their surroundings at the same time) while the idea of a biologically determined impaired form also fails to recognize not just the physical realities of a social environment, which disable a person, but also the discourses, ideologies and norms that are perpetuated within these environments.

In Enforcing Normalcy Lennard Davis utilizes the idea of disability as a social construct because the idea of an abnormal body is also constructed. Davis marks the significance of the juxtaposition between impairment and disability as demonstrating the ontological shift of considering the lived experience of the impaired body as a disabled body so that, "the impaired body had become disabled - unable to be part of the productive economy, confined to institutions, shaped to contours defined by a society at large."25 Consequently, in an industrialized capitalist economy all bodies are socially constructed as instruments, which are either useful to the material demands of the infrastructure, as labour workers, or preserve the ideological framework of the superstructure, as consumers, or not, so that the idea of the embodied reality of

impairment as a natural biological and ontological state becomes irrelevant in a social

reality established as the perpetuation of a instrumentally realized system of norms.

Davis also argues that, if the idea of the abnormal body also delineated what

could be called disabled instead of impaired from the nineteenth century onwards, there

24 Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. University of Michigan Press. (2008) p.25. 25 Ibid, p.74. 19

were other ways of classifying the human body, and the impaired, before the emergence of the norm. As Davis reveals, before the concept of a bodily norm was established human bodies were ordered according to the concept of an ideal.26 However, when contrasting the concept of a bodily ideal against the concept of bodily normalcy Davis submits that, "The central point here is that in a culture with an ideal form of the body, all members of the population are below the ideal,"27 and significantly that, "By definition, one can never have an ideal body. There is in such societies no demand that populations have bodies that conform to the ideal."28 Hence, the central point that Davis submits is that within a system of ideals all bodies are to varying degrees impaired because the human condition functions below the ideal (essentially divine body) as a necessarily mortal, decaying and damaged form, and this conception of the corporeal human body is a more realistic realization of bodily existence than the one propagated by a system of norms. Furthermore, Davis highlights the use of the grotesque (the depiction of the monstrous in form and content) as a "signifier of the people, of common life"29 because if all bodies were below the ideal mortal human subjects were also essentially misshapen, hideous, repulsive and grotesque in comparison to their divine and immortal counterparts.

The grotesque signifier also corresponds with the notion that everyone is essentially less able or lives with some kind of impairment, because the human form is a fragile, imperfect and a potentially grotesque biological organism. As a result, before the

26 Ibid, p.24-25. 27 Ibid, p.25. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 20

nineteenth century, the impaired condition was universal because "the grotesque permeated culture and signified the norm."30

Post the mid-nineteenth century the bodily ideal was replaced by the bodily norm, which signalled a shift in public consciousness brought on by heavy industrialization.

Although, this hegemonic adjustment of the idea of the human body was also influenced by other ideological mechanisms that were modified in the early modern age. First, in relation to the decline of the idea of the ideal divine body, the power and influence of religious institutions was transformed by the post-Enlightenment idea31 that human subjects had the newfound ability to think for themselves beyond the influence of the church, which in turn led to the French Revolution, the most significant rejection of divine law, which manifested in the public execution of monarchs seemingly appointed by God. Moreover, Friedrich Nietzsche's later proclamation that, "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him,"32 was also an explicit statement tied to the rejection of divinity and the desire for new forms of public consciousness that had the potential to think beyond the guidance of the church. Here the Enlightenment, the French

Revolution and Nietzsche's famous statement do not necessarily suggest that the

Christian God has been absolutely rejected or even ceases to exist, in the collective minds of nineteenth century populations, but instead that the Christian church no longer had a supreme influence on European society and its subjects. Therefore, as religious mechanisms of power diminished in the early modern age and were eclipsed by capitalist

30 Ibid. 31 Kant, Immanuel. "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?" Berlinische Monatsschrift (1784). 32 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Vintage (1974) p.181. 21

mechanisms of power, the idea of the ideal body, which principally corresponded with the notion of a divine spiritual body, became less influential, and eventually irrelevant to the ideological demands of the time.

With the advent of the ontological shift from the divine ideal form to the commercially beneficial normal body it, therefore, seems that the institutions that wield power may have changed but the practices that support them have remained. Modern human subjects may no longer worship a bodily ideal through religious practice but now instead worship the bodily norm with the exchange of money in a consumer culture. In short, the worship of a particular body type remains in contemporary existence but the kind of body and the kind of infrastructure that creates this kind of body has transformed

to represent a whole different set of values.

Secondly, the arrival of medical instrumentation in the early modern age

established the normal body as existing within an average set of statistical values.

According to Michel Foucault the modern medical infrastructure began to take shape

when medicine did not merely constitute a form of knowledge, which could be utilized to

restore health and eliminate ailments but that the definition of an average model of

"normal" human health could be used by medical institutions as a barometer to measure

all human subjects now at the mercy of this new system. As Foucault submits the

systematic categorization of European populations by medical institutions was 22

implemented by utilizing a set of normative principles:

In the ordering of human existence it assumes a normative posture, which authorizes it not only to distribute advice as to healthy life, but also to dictate the standards for physical and moral relations of the individual and of the society in which he lives.33

These physical and moral relations were measured according a systematic categorization that developed in a system of norms to quantify an average standard. The average, the median measurement of a population, then, subsequently became the norm because, as

Lennard Davis argues, this average or middle standard validates the hegemony of the middle class, for, "The average man, the body in the middle, becomes the exemplar of a middle way of life."34

This middle way of life supports and preserves a middle class ideology because the average citizen in a bourgeois culture with increased access to better health care and a safer work environment could probably live and work in conditions that reduced the possibility of becoming less able or productive for the capitalist system. If the average human is also of an average age, somewhere in the middle of a human lifespan of a set group of people, the standardized population could also be statistically accounted for, for example, as subjects unaffected by the inevitable impairment of old age. The average human in a population is thus defined as the normal individual situated in the centre of all the factors that determine existence that include class, age, health and ability. Therefore, what is considered to be medically normal is an average measurement of human health

33 Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1973) Routledge (1989) p.40. 34 Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy, pp.26-27. 23

based on the median averages of a measured population that fails to account for the essential quantities and qualities of every human life that manifest above or below the average, so that "the average then becomes paradoxically a kind of ideal."35 However, the contradictory element at the heart of the calculation of the elements of human existence that are quantified as average (and consequently normal) is that impairment is a condition that the average human will probably experience, given a long enough lifespan, but is also a condition that a median range of statistical values suitably conceals.

This shift from the religious or classical ideal of the body to the economically beneficial and the average, statistically realized "normal" body did not necessarily eradicate a notion of the ideal, as Davis argues, but instead the norm (like the average)

"creates a new kind of ideal" and, "This statistical ideal is unlike the classical ideal, which contains no imperative to be the ideal."36 Therefore, like the impaired body, which seemingly transformed into the disabled body, and became a new definition of impairment in the nineteenth century, the ideal body also converted into the normal body and became the new all-encompassing ideal form.

The primary conclusion that can be gathered from all the interconnected historical and material influences that Lennard Davis uses to herald the arrival of the concept of normalcy, which did not merely determine that which was typical or usual but also that which had purpose, and was able and useful and also preserved an average middle-class way of life, is that a network of power relations deployed by the capitalist infrastructure that gained prominence in the nineteenth century, created a system of norms and

35 Ibid, p.27. 36 Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy, p.35. 24

established the use of the word "normal" with the mercenary application of a self-serving materialistic ideology. Therefore, the abnormal disabled body has subsequently been created by the very same capitalist system as "a model that will fit well with capitalist notions of the functionality of the human body."37 As a consequence, the abnormal body category, which equates with the idea of disability, is not necessarily maintained by individual agents in society, who, may for example, reveal ableist prejudices or fears, but is instead propagated by the agency of the power relations that require an ableist ideology to maintain a system of power and the continual preservation of commerce. The concept of normalcy is, therefore, enforced by a capitalist infrastructure and the agency of economically realized ideological apparatus, which is deployed in a societal network of power relations, in which individual agents are created and located. The important distinction demonstrated by observing the ideological action performed by the power

mechanisms in place is that these strategies or techniques don't seem to be controlled by

individual agents, working collectively or alone, but instead that the agency itself seems

to autonomously control and create the agents that serve societal power structures.

It is useful to return to the critical perspectives of Michel Foucault when

considering the agency of a capitalist infrastructure and the application of strategies and

techniques, which are formulated from historical and material factors to subsequently

create the individual agent. As Foucault formulates, the rationality and function of power

37 Ibid, p.xiii. 25

strategies are not created by the agents in a system but are supported by the system itself, to organize its agents, so that:

The logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them: an implicit characteristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken 38 strategies which coordinate the loquacious tactics.

Thus, the continual preservation of power, and the enforcement of norms, is maintained by working as a strategy and these mechanisms of power are "everywhere"39 constituted as embodied knowledge and are "inert and self-reproducing"40 and, crucially, techniques of power exist as immaterial situations because "power is tolerable only on the condition that it mask a substantial part of itself."41

This act of concealment is central to the deployment of power because hierarchical relations, which are accepted as a form of immaterial embodied knowledge that has very real material effects, also conceals its original agents (the institutions or people who originally developed and maintained this power) so that there seems to be no external force that can be challenged, blamed or subverted. As a consequence, only the agency remains, as an internal mechanism of control, so that the agents of a power structure become the subjects who are created by this agency, and not the original subjects who create the agency.

However, if power is conceived as a subjective strategy and a hidden immaterial mechanism exercised on human subjects the material instrument on which this power is

38 Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I (1978) Vintage (1990) p.95. 39 Ibid, p.93 wIbid. 41 Ibid, p.86. 26

enforced is the human body. Hence, Foucault's concept of biopower42 is particularly pertinent to the idea that normal and abnormal bodies were created by capitalist power strategies in the nineteenth century. As Foucault articulates, within a biopolitical system

(and obviously a capitalist system) the body as a biological form is subjected to the power relations in place and "techniques of power that were essentially centred on the body" included their "spatial distribution" and "their separation, their alignment, their serialization and their surveillance."43

This concept of biopower, which orders human bodies in accordance with a strategic system, is moreover, recapitulated by Lennard Davis, when the classification of normal and abnormal bodies and the active enforcement of normalcy, which Davis outlines, incorporates Foucault's idea of spatial distribution and applies it to the idea of the disabled body. Throughout Enforcing Normalcy Davis describes the disabled body as a form that is constituted by a set of normalizing principles maintained by the ruling power structure and delineates (like Foucault) the arrangement of bodies (specifically disabled bodies) in social space with the same designations. Therefore the disabled body is separated as "an icon that needs to be excluded,"44 aligned as someone who, "is not of this nation, is not a citizen, in the same sense as the able bodied,"45 serialized in that "the identity of people becomes defined by irrepressible identificatory physical qualities that can be measured,"46 and put under surveillance when the, "The power of the gaze to

42 Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I (1978) Vintage (1990). 43 Foucault, Michel. "17 March 1976." Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976, trans. David Macey New York: Picador (2003) p.242. 44 Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy, p.80. 45 Ibid, p.91. 46 Ibid, p.32. 27

control, limit and patrol the disabled person is brought to the fore."47 As passages like these recount (throughout the book) the social construction of disability is dependent on and continually enforced by the arrangement and maintenance of normalcy. For a regulatory system of norms, which divides and preserves normal or abnormal bodies also organizes the bodies that are to be categorized as able or disabled. Therefore, Foucault's description of the implementation of a system of norms, which regulated society corresponds to Davis's demonstration of the emergence of enforced normalcy that appeared in the nineteenth century. Moreover, the direct relationship between Foucault and Davis's critical perspectives is explicitly validated when Davis submits that,

"Normalcy, rather than being a degree zero of existence, is more accurately a location of biopower."48 Therefore, the specific connection that Davis makes to Foucault's conception of developing techniques of power, which established a galvanising system of norms and spatially organized all human subjects, including disabled subjects, is not just a capitalist power system that was birthed by the productivity of the machine and its industrial and economic capacity, but fundamentally a biopolitical power system that organized human society as a biological form. In addition, any political and social consideration of the modern constitution of abnormal and normal bodies must, by its very nature, include the biological. Thus, a conception of Foucault's biopower, the political organization and categorization of biological bodies, is also essential to any conception of the disabled body.

47 Ibid, p. 12. 48 Ibid, p. 128. 28

A further connection that can be made that connects biopower with the formulation of the idea of the disabled body is that, like the biopolitical systems, which organize and divide subjects with hidden immaterial mechanisms, the idea of disability is also not located in an original form but as a normalizing technique of locating particular

"abnormal" subject categories. As Lennard Davis argues, if a "socio-political process is always at work in relation to the body"49 the idea of the disabled body "is not a discrete object but rather a set of social relations"50 and these social relations function to constitute the disabled subject category so that the disabled body as a socially constructed identity is an immaterial concept, and not a definite biological approximation, which is applied to material bodies to identify subject categories according to a system of knowledge that benefits a political economy.

The idea of disability, as a strategy that is enforced by a complex set of systematized social relations, as opposed to a stable physical form, is further reinforced by Davis when arguing that "the category itself is an extraordinarily unstable one" and that it "begins to break down when one scrutinizes who makes up the disabled."51 This idea of disability as being an unstable category or a signifier that attempts to clearly demarcate the division between normal and abnormal bodies, but is revealed as a misconception that is appropriated to serve the ideological demands of a political economy (when examined in detail) is fortified by the recurrent ontological reality that all human bodies, average or otherwise, are in some respects, impaired, different and less

49 Ibid, p.xvi. 50 Ibid, p.11. 51 Ibid, p.xv. 29

able. As Davis contends, "Disability is not a static category but one which expands and contracts to include 'normal' people as well." Thus, normal and abnormal bodies are illusory, which isn't to contend that some kinds of bodies are not more typical or usual than others, or that the construction of the normal and the abnormal is artificial because concepts and words are conceived as having very real effects. Instead Lennard Davis argues throughout Enforcing Normalcy that the normal and abnormal body categories do not merely exist to differentiate one type of typical body from another, but to strategically order a society according into quantities that have a qualitative productive or useful influence in a capitalist society. So the normal or abnormal body is an immaterial illusion

(not a material artifice) because it exists as a political strategy and not a empirically given mental or physical state.

Davis's notion that disability is an unstable category is also compounded by the fact that if the concept of either the normal or the abnormal body is socially constructed to seem to be empirically substantiated (with inadequate statistical averages for example)

- the idea of the human body, whether impaired, disabled or able, is also beyond classification. The terms used to describe the human body are, therefore, fluid, ever- changing and dependent of the political and social influences, relations and power mechanisms that surround it. These signifiers, established as words that serve a political purpose, then become transcendental, especially when the abnormal body category can also include those that have traditionally been classified as normal (and vice versa) and

52 Ibid. 30

essentially mean nothing outside of whatever social or political context and environment they may be applied.

Furthermore, subject categories and the particular terminologies used to render bodies into a pre-given reality may be unstable because the human body itself is unstable, contingent and a far from static biological form. Much like the idea of the average human the idea of a stable human identity or form is also a limited existential perspective that fails to account for the possible and inevitable changes that occur on and within the body and the self. The body exists as a construction because: "The body appears as a passive medium on which cultural meanings are inscribed or as the instrument through which as appropriate and interpretive will determines a cultural meaning for itself." For there is no essential state that any human subject remains in while existing and living in a body, ravaged or refined by the affects of time, use and the formulations of identity. Even in death the body and the self change, as both the physical and the mental remains of a person are in a continual state of flux, before being completely extinguished from physical and cognitive existence. Therefore, if the body is not an absolute category or an

essential state the human physical form exists in the consciousness first as a subject and

secondarily as an object. Herein Lennard Davis reiterates the order of the subject and the

object of the self when stating that:

The point is that the body is not only - or even primarily - a physical object. It is in fact a way of organizing through the realm of the senses the variations and modalities of physical existence as they are embodied into being through a larger social/political matrix.54

53 Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversions of Identity. Routledge (1990) p.12. 54 Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy, p. 14. 31

So, like the words used to describe the physical form, the object of the body is also a transcendental signifier on which, political, social and cultural meanings are inscribed.

On account of the subject of the body being transcendental, "Normalcy and disability are part of the same system."55 This system can then be subjectively applied to shape the idea of the body. One binary term supports and opposes the other in a dialectical relationship, but the human body itself is never essentially disabled, normal or abnormal. Hence, Davis argues that normalcy, both the concept and term, functions as a strategic and immaterial application of knowledge, which sustains an illusory ontological state that serves political and economical purposes. Thus, disability also, the opposing and reinforcing category, concept and term can be applied in the same way.

So, if the enforcement of normalcy and its attached terms and concepts function as the deployment of a hegemonic socio-political process that organizes social relations and reifies categories that are not absolute, and are administered onto the transcendental signifier of the body, it is of primary use, when understanding the formulation of the normal and abnormal body to comprehend that, as Davis submits: "When we start conceiving of disability as a descriptive term and not as an absolute category, then we can begin to think in theoretical and political ways about this category."56 Therefore, how disability as an absolute category is reinforced, the attendant concept of norms is established and the word "normal" is utilized, is through the act of describing, the application of language and the use of discourse; but in order to interrogate the discursive application of social categories, the use of language has to be rigorously scrutinized.

55 Ibid, p.2. 56 Ibid, p. 8. 32

Language is the primary technology that is used rhetorically to deliver, determine and construct specific existential realities, whether they are empirically authenticated or not, and the construction and enforcement of normalcy that Lennard Davis interrogates in

Enforcing Normalcy hinges on the use of language. The analysis Davis gives of the noted ideologically based language shifts that have occurred in the nineteenth century, which transformed the concept of the ideal into the norm and created the idea of the disabled body from the impaired body are clearly generated, as Davis states, from the "complex interactions between the body, the text and the world."57 So, if language is the fixing agent that holds the idea of the body together to exist as a subject before an object, the body as an object is fragmentary and exists as an amalgamation of limbs, parts, surfaces, organs and features. The whole body is an illusion supported by the use of language.

The notion of a whole body being the necessary illusion constructed from the ruin of the fragile fragmented body is one that Davis uses specifically to distinguish the relationship between the designation of the normal and abnormal body and the construction of the disabled body. If the less able body is of little use in post- industrialized societies and no longer meets the medical and economical standards set by the early modern realization of a capitalist society the disabled body becomes the un- average body and the unwhole or unwholesome human form that challenges the newly formulated average considered as a whole conception of normalcy. So, the newly formed normal person who encounters the essential otherness of that which has been deemed abnormal and is far from or less than average and subsequently unwhole, "provides a

57 Ibid, p. 125. 33

vision of, a caution about, the body as a construct held together wilfully, always threatening to become individual parts - cells, organs, limbs, perceptions."58

This same cautionary vision, which Davis argues the disabled body suggests, is also the depiction of the same original body experienced by the infant in the psychoanalytic idea of The Mirror Stage.59 Lennard Davis uses this concept to enhance his argument that: "The divisions, whole/incomplete, able/disabled neatly cover up the firightening writing on the wall that reminds the hallucinated whole being that wholeness is in fact a hallucination, a developmental fiction,"60 when recounting the corresponding psychoanalytic notion of the infant comprehending its body for the first time, as a whole form, reflected in a mirror. This process of misrecognition, where the image of the body reflected back at the infant seems more whole, real and symbolically complete than the physically limited and developmentally challenged form the infant seemingly resides in, provides the initial hallucination of the whole body that is encountered and also the subsequent basis for the formulation of the idea of a complete self.61 Therefore, as Lacan argues and Lennard Davis recapitulates, the infant's misrecognition of its self as a whole form works to psychically shield the self from the troubling reality of living in a fragmented body.62 Here the connections between the cautionary image of the fragmented or unwhole body, the function of the mirror stage and the threat that the abnormal, and specifically disabled body, merge to produce the necessary opposite to the normal,

58 Ibid, p.132. 59 Lacan, Jacques. 'The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience." Ecrits. New York: Norton (2002). 60 Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy, p. 130. 61 Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience." Ecrits. New York: Norton (2002). 62 Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy, p. 139. 34

average, ideologically realized form from which a "normal" subject can measure and protect themselves against. This cognitive formulation of the necessary abnormal (or

Other) from which the normal human identity is established is at once constituted from the idea of the fragmented, unwholesome or even the abject body, which is "neither subject or object"63 that is repressed so the hallucination of the whole or normal body can be preserved. Therefore, the disabled body is categorized in language as the abnormal body form because the category of disability has no use or purpose in the capitalist biopolitical system, except to exist as the necessary other, or, as Lennard Davis submits, the body form that disturbs the ideological norms to work as a reminder of the essential fragmentary nature of the human body:

In this sense, the disabled body is a direct imago of the repressed fragmented body. The disabled body causes a kind of hallucination of the mirror phase gone wrong. The subject looks at the disabled body and has a moment of cognitive dissonance, or should we say a moment a moment of cognitive resonance with the earlier stage of fragmentation.64

As a result, the true original self, which emerges as a physical form or a psychically realized being in knowledge, is first and foremost, far from whole.

The psychoanalytic notion of the fragmented body is a concept that is a particularly useful for describing the apprehension of the disabled body and Davis uses this idea well to articulate how disability can operate to haunt the psyche of the able- bodied public. However, Davis's criticisms of Freud in Enforcing Normalcy and the use of psychoanalysis as a clinical normalizing process that "can bring patients back to their

63 Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. Columbia University Press (1982) p. 1. 64 Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy, p.139. 35

normal selves"65 generates a simplified conception of psychoanalysis when Davis states that Freud's method produces a "eugenics of the mind."66 A statement such as this draws attention to the greater hermeneutic value of using psychoanalysis as a method of interpreting the use of language (as Lennard Davis does by utilizing the idea of the idea of a body that exists before language) rather than its clinical therapeutic value, but by suggesting that Freud's method attempts to eugenicize the mind Davis makes a bold hyperbolic statement that can be applied to the use of the psychoanalytical method as a whole, both as a form of linguistic inquiry and medical consultation. Considering how useful the psychoanalytic method is to Davis to delineate the boundaries of the idea of the repressed, fragmented and abnormal disabled body, such a statement (although focussed on Freud's clinical practice rather than Lacan's empathises on language) seems to be an inappropriate generalization when situated in the context of the rest of Davis's work.

The idea that the whole body exists as an illusion, which is constructed by the self and maintained in the use of language, introduces the concept of a body existing before language. If the poststructuralist perspective accounts for the supremacy of the text in that there is "nothing outside of the text"67 or the use of text in that "there is an outside to

what is constructed by discourse, but this is not an absolute outside,"68 then the body

exists before language, but not in knowledge. This conceptual framework of how the

body is understood in relation to text and the world accounts for the notion that Davis

articulates that (before subjectivity) the body as a subject is not a absolute category and

65 Ibid, p.39 66 Ibid. 67 Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Ed. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Hopkins Fulfilment Service (1998) p.158. 68 Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge (1993) p.8. 36

the body as an object is fragmentary. Therefore, the practice of discourse (as a performance) reiterates and sustains both the subject and the object of the body, through the matrix of the norm, which perpetuates the "ruse of identity and wholeness"69 and constitutes the human form as a whole body or an absolute category. What Davis argues is that it is only through the use of language that the body, normalcy and disability become real, and real in the sense that the embodied realities, however they are socially or politically constituted, exist in the consciousness as real tangible forms controlled by the subjects and subjectivities encountered.

Throughout Enforcing Normalcy Lennard Davis fundamentally argues that when looking at the binary relationships that exist between normal and abnormal subject categories, the establishment of the idea of the less able body, in fact, exists as an essential human form. It is of paramount significance that Davis talks about the disabled body as "an entity from the earliest of childhood instincts, a body that is common to all humans"70 and "the normal body is actually a body we develop later."71 The significance of this statement underpins the whole contextual basis of the theoretical argument that

Davis maintains in Enforcing Normalcy. For Davis demonstrates by delineating the arrival of a system of norms - the exchange of meaning from typical or usual or productive and useful, the emergence of the influence of industrialization, the ensuing

ideological shifts in language, the subsequent systematic division of populations, the

modern acts of agency that are concealed to function as accepted forms of knowledge, the

69 Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy, p. 141. 70 Ibid, p. 140. 71 Ibid, p. 141. 37

transcendental nature of both the text and the body, and the recognition of the intrinsic fragmentary form of the human body and the self - that the concept of normalcy is something that was developed later, despite the meaning that is attached to the word

"normal," which seems to signify that which is typical and usual and a perpetual given state of natural ontological existence.

In Enforcing Normalcy Lennard Davis establishes that the word "normal" and the continual hegemonic enforcement of normalcy is not typical and usual, or even right and good, and that maybe if we are to realistically be able to ascertain what is typical and usual in human existence we should instead look to that which has been categorized as abnormal, or even disabled, if we are to fully understand the human body.

Here, Lennard Davis ends his analysis, which rigorously dismantles the concept of normalcy, on a Utopian note by suggesting that maybe future societies will be able to see the human body "apart from its existence as an object of production or consumption"72 (and this includes the production and consumption of concepts in language that categorize the body) then we will "begin to face and feel each other in all

TX the rich variety and difference of our bodies, minds, and our outlooks." That maybe when we all dismantle the system of norms, like Davis does, which create the construction that was developed later, by using language, the technology that sustained the construction of normalcy in the first place, terms like "normal" and "abnormal" will become obsolete and disability will be accepted as impairment, a condition that every human being will experience, to varying degrees, in their lifetime. For it is only through

72 Ibid, p. 157. 73 Ibid, p. 171. 38

the use of the very same technology that created the construct of normalcy, the utilization and performance of the spoken and written word, which replaced one concept with another, can the norm be effectively deconstructed to be replaced again with another more ontologically egalitarian concept that accepts human diversity. This need for the eventual act of substitution should also not just occur within an inclusive theoretical domain where it can be successfully delineated, by scholars like Lennard Davis, but in the larger social, political and cultural world, where it can be comprehended by all of us. 39

Methodology

Not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normalization, not by punishment but by control, methods that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its apparatus.

Michel Foucault - The History of Sexuality: A Introduction

Critical perspectives, like those established by Lennard Davis, which interrogate the concept of normalcy, draw attention to the fact that the idea of the normal and abnormal body is conflicted, contradictory and definitively unresolved. However, the performance of speech acts that are created under the influence of institutionalized capitalist power structures and are replicated in everyday social interactions, are sustained in discourse as consistent or "normal" cultural behaviours. Furthermore, continual acts of linguistic authentication function to the mask the essential inconsistencies that exist within the idea of the norm and the bodies subjected to it. Therefore, The methodology applied to this study, which is utilized to reinforce and then challenge the ideological dilemma of the norm, which the theoretical framework demonstrates, will primarily be critical discourse analysis.

It is clear that the study of an ideological system of knowledge has to account for the fact that what is known as the norm is a reflexive idea that is created in the human mind. Despite the influence of a foundational or scientific basis for understanding human experience, the norm has not been empirically quantified, for even the arrival of statistical averages delivers a limited average perspective, or a "rounding-off' of what is 40

understood as natural human bodily diversity. As James A. Anderson and Geoffrey Baym illustrate in Philosophies and Philosophic Issues in Communication:

Reflexivity is a recognition that our knowledge, especially of human things is a human knowledge. We create it, or constitute its terms, and participate within it at every level. In its strong program, reflexivity represents the rejection of a unity of knowledge, acknowledging the failure of the social sciences to both coalesce and to achieve a dominant epistemological position.74

Consequently, the critical perspectives articulated by Lennard Davis undermine the concept of normalcy, "to bear eloquent witness to the fact that there is no definitive determination of what is"75 and show the inherent failure of foundational systems of knowledge. As a result, the appropriate methodology that has to compliment the demonstration of a reflexive, unstable and indeterminate system of norms also has to have a reflexive approach and be a method that is constructed by the very idea that knowledge is reflexive.

Like knowledge, communication is reflexive due to the fact that meaning is in a constant state of negotiation and dependent on the relationship that exists between the terms being used and those communicating and receiving these terms. Therefore, critical discourse analysis is built on the idea that meanings generated in discourse are diverse, multiple, explicit and implicit and can be used as a methodical tool to locate what is being said when words are said.

Other methods interrogating the discursive construction of normalcy, like quantitative and qualitative analysis or a phenomenological approach may prove to be

74 Anderson, James. J and Geoffrey Baym. "Philosophies and Philosophic Issues in Communication, 1995- 2004." Journal of Communication. (December 2004) p.593. 75 Iser, Wolfgang. How to do Theory. Blackwell Publishing (2006) p. 163. 41

inadequate and inappropriate. This deficiency is especially evident when considering the linguistic arrival of the word "normal" and the subsequent discursive reification of body normalcy relies on the analysis of the written and spoken word as an interpersonal exchange system that creates ideas. Quantitative analysis would be an ineffectual method in a study of norms because a system of norms, as Davis shows, is not a concrete reality that can be measured accordingly, despite the attempts of language to reify normalcy.

Moreover, despite the qualitative content analysis provided in this paper a literal use of qualitative data analysis that uses frequencies gathered from interviews may rely on the interpretation of narrative accounts provided by human participants, who could be of benefit to a study of normalcy and its maintenance, but this research is not based on the opinions of selected individual social groups but the general use of language in society, as a whole, demonstrated publicly and widely disseminated to manufacture a socially accepted system of norms. Additionally, a phenomenological method of inquiry is specifically used to locate phenomena, which is associated with sensory perceptions and their subsequent ability to generate realities that are applicable to the particular physical faculty being investigated. However, despite this study critically examining the idea of the body and embodiment and the realities that seem to surround the physical form, a phenomenological approach is fundamentally an inquiry into the idea of an intrinsic body or the essences located in the body or consciousness76 and if, as Lennard Davis argues,

"the normal human body is actually a body we develop later"77 the "normal" human body

76 Ponty-Merleau. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge Classics (2002) p.vii. 77 Davis, Lennard. J. Enforcing Normalcy. Verso (1995) p.141. 42

is not an object or a subject that is within the essential scope of phenomenological research.

Semiotic analysis is closely related to discourse analysis in that a study of visual symbols, which includes textual symbols, is based on how subjective experiences are translated in forms of symbolic representation. Both forms of analysis scrutinize symbolic language systems, the text and the icon, so that the "incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier" can be recognized and the reflexivity of communication and meaning can be ascertained. Bodily norms may be constituted as symbols that work as a visual rhetoric79 and the normal and abnormal body type may conform to a representative visual standard, but this study fundamentally interrogates the discursive formation of normalcy (associated with the symbol of the body) that is a spoken or written formation maintained in conversation as a social activity. The close relationship semiotic analysis has with linguistic analysis will have a bearing on the discursive approach taken in this thesis, for how the "normal" body is established in a textual

language will innately overlap with its associated constitution as a symbol. For example,

the text supplied with a photograph may fix the symbolic meaning gleaned from an image

so that it is not reflexive and it conveys a specific message (like a caption included with a

newspaper photograph) and a specular image may disturb the visual field to produce

discourses that attempt to rationalize this disturbance. Both the text and image are

symbolic devices and this thesis will use both a semiotic and a discursive analysis, but

78 Lacan, Jacques. "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious." Ecrits. New York: Norton (2002) p. 419. 79 Barthes Roland. "Rhetoric of the Image. " Image, Music, Text. Hill and Wang: New York (1977) p.282. 43

this thesis primarily uses critical discourse analysis because first and foremost, this research is concerned with how the normal or abnormal body is discursively interpreted from and with an image.

It could be argued that the chosen discourses have been generated from the visual representation of a disabled body and that the subsequent analysis has been secondarily applied on top of the initial semiotic analysis. This is especially apparent when this thesis will be looking at how public or publicized figures with disabilities (i.e. people seen in public) challenge normative perceptions and/or reveal otherwise concealed prejudices,.

However, it is the discourses that surround the spectacle of disability that will be of primary use to this thesis because the visual rhetoric of the disabled body initiates, preserves and reproduces the use of language (spoken and written) that sustains the concept of the normal and abnormal body. It is the textual reality that constructs the social realities in which human subjects are embedded within and the spectacle of disability is examined in this thesis as the visual influence that instigates the discourses, which are far from secondary and create a given ideological reality.

The textual reality of constructing normal and abnormal subject categories in discourse, which include the idea of the disabled subject, are dependent upon a comprehension of the spoken and written word as a functional technology and not a structure that produces a referential code. The normal or the abnormal are not determined as naturally occurring stable categories, in text, the body and in society, and as Lennard

Davis submits the norm can not be adequately authenticated as empirical knowledge, 44

once the concept is scrutinized in any depth.80 Instead the normal and abnormal subject categories are sustained by the function of language as a social practice. Furthermore, the function of language relies on the idea that "language has functions that are external to the linguistic system" and "external functions influence the internal organization of the

n| linguistic system" so that what is said and what is meant by what is said varies depending on the function of contextual factors, which are embedded in the text and exist outside of it.

The critical point of any analysis of language use is that a sense of pluralism pervades that divides subject from meaning. Language does not merely describe social realities but it also performs actions (for example the word "normal" can be used and understood as meaning something more than typical or usual) that can reinforce a social reality that may not be intrinsically or even robustly real. The practice of discourse, therefore, "is socially constitutive as well as socially conditioned" so "that it helps to sustain and reproduce the status quo"82 and not an authentic embodied reality.

A socially constitutive and conditioned discursive practice can demonstrate intrinsic ideological inconsistencies like those of a capitalist political economy that typically or usually requires a "normal" body of purpose, to work and consume, when most human bodies do not normally remain consistently purposeful. As a consequence,

Davis's interrogation of the discursive enforcement of normalcy and its application to the modern human body, indicates that "normal" social realities are reified by the use of

80 Davis, Lennard. J. Enforcing Normalcy. Verso (1995) p.xv. 81 Schiffrin, Deborah. Approaches to Discourse. Blackwell (1994) p. 22. 82 Fairclough, Norman & Ruth Wodak. "Critical Discourse Analysis." Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. Vol. 2. London: Sage (1997) p.258 45

words acting on the behalf of a constructed idea, as a function and a performance, and not by structurally referencing a necessarily real determined reality.

What Lennard Davis's demonstrates in Enforcing Normalcy is that social inequalities are maintained in society through language use. The word "normal" and the idea of the normal and abnormal body type works to categorize distinct, contradictory and often unequal conditions of being. This sense of bodily inequality is especially apparent when comprehending that what is considered as being a normal body of purpose cannot be sustained as an essential state of being and is therefore essentially abnormal and what may be measured as an abnormal unable body is a normal body form that all humans inherit at some point in their lives. Therefore, the chosen methodology in this study is critical discourse analysis because this is a method that "aims to investigate critically social inequality as it is expressed, constituted, legitimized, and so on, by language use (or in discourse)."

For the purpose of this thesis the method used, to interrogate the idea of the normal and abnormal body, will incorporate a combined approach that includes interconnected techniques that work to critically analyse the discourses selected. The general method will follow an ethnographic communicative approach, "which focuses on language and communication as cultural behaviour"84 but the means of scrutinizing discourse will also include the speech act theory and interactional sociolinguistics85

83 Wodak, Ruth. "Critical Discourse Analysis." Qualitative Research Practice, ed. Clive Seal, et al, London: Sage Publications (2004) p. 199. 84 Schiffrin, Deborah. Approaches to Discourse, p. 12. 85 These three designations (of six) are listed in Deborah Schiffrin's Approaches to Discourse. Schiffrin, Deborah. Approaches to Discourse. Blackwell (1994). 46

«/• "within a larger frame of inquiry" which, "creates a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts" because "it views all phases and aspects of communication (from the cognitive to the political) as relative to cultural meanings."87 However, despite an ethnographic communicative strategy working as a combined methodology it is useful to highlight how speech act theory and interactional sociolinguistics function within and ethnographic communicative approach to discourse.

Speech act theory works to focus on the action of language as a performance in that words do not merely chronicle a given reality but that the act of producing words (the utterance) and the situation or setting (the context) that the words appear in can illustrate the multiple functions of discourse and variation of meanings produced. For example, when looking at the use of the word "ideal" before the concept of the norm was introduced in the nineteenth century it becomes apparent that the action of particular words is dependent on not just the social context but also a temporal one. Therefore, as

Lennard Davis demonstrates, the act of using the word "ideal" before the nineteenth century was associated with the idea of spiritual perfection and paradoxically, after the nineteenth century, the norm created "a new kind of ideal"88 and replaced the idea of the unobtainable and spiritually realized body of perfection with the statistically average middle-class working and consuming modern body of purpose. Moreover, despite the obvious distinction made between the historical contexts that influence the use of the word "ideal" the action of this word highlights the fact that linguistic competence also

* Ibid, p. 143. 87 Ibid, p. 144. 88 Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy, p.35. 47

displays a form of social competence, in that social facts are included in the act of producing words.89 As the social action of using the word "ideal" and the separation of two different social periods (pre and post Industrial Revolution) shows, the knowledge of a society and knowledge of the way a society uses its grammar and syntax are intertwined but the function of language can give multiple interpretations of desired states of embodiment that are dependent on the (social and historical) context of an institutionally formulated discursive conception of bodily desire. As Deborah Schiffren delineates in

Approaches to Discourse the contextual setting that influences the social act of producing words includes an understanding of shared knowledge and the rules embedded within that shared knowledge of how to construct language to deliver particular functions:

Communication relies upon shared knowledge of the name and type of a speech act: speaker and hearer share knowledge of how to identify and classify an utterance as a particular "type" of act, as a unit of language that is produced and interpreted according to constitutive• rules. 90

Therefore, speech act theory works to uncover the action of the words being produced and performed by comprehending the contextual framework of social and historical forms of shared knowledge (like the body is conceived within a system of norms) and the linguistic rules associated with this knowledge that determines what the words do (like the function of the word "normal" that preserves the norm).

The speech act may function to uncover forms of shared knowledge because language specifically works to "mean something or express something or represent or

89 Schiffrin, Deborah. Approaches to Discourse, p.60. 90 Ibid, p.59. 48

symbolize something beyond themselves, in a way that is publicly understandable."91 So the multiple meanings revealed in a speech act or the idea that language communicates something beyond itself is dependent on a social contract, the collective agreement between human participants in a given society where specific utterances and contexts can create a particular social reality. These social realities are what John Searle would call

• « . . . 0*7 • . institutional facts, social certainties, which are collectively agreed upon and this social reality cannot exist without language, because social certainties are only constituted as a form of human agreement represented in language so that "you cannot have institutional facts without language and once you have a shared language you can create institutional facts at will."93 So, a social reality, social certainty or an institutional fact is not a fact, a truth or a certainty but instead a constructed reality produced institutionally at will by the function of language conveying something beyond itself. Therefore, the normal and abnormal body categories are produced as social facts only because they are collectively understood to be so and the idea of the normal and abnormal body is institutionally reinforced by the speech act working to communicate a meaning beyond itself that is publicly agreed upon (i.e. how the normal/abnormal body is established).

Interactional sociolinguistics utilizes the concept that the use and meaning of language is embedded in culture and society, both linguistically and socially, and is revealed, not only by noticing the context of a single utterance, but also by looking at the construction of a conversation, which generates discursive and social realities. First the

91 Searle, John. The Construction of Social Reality. The Free Press. (1995) p.61. 92 Ibid, p.2 93 Ibid, p.61. 49

interactional sociolinguistic method uses an analytical framework, which demonstrates that language exists as a linguistic code, which includes cues for background assumptions, inferences and shared knowledge that supports conversation in a discursively realized cognitive framework.94 (As Davis has shown, the word "normal" exists as a linguistic code that includes assumptions, inferences and shared knowledge).

Secondly, the interactional sociolinguistic method utilizes a sociological framework, which shows that social identities are continuously constructed in the act of interactive communication. Both the analytical and the sociological framework of interactional sociolinguistics work to show that: "The way we use language not only reflects our group-based identity but also provides continual indices as to who we are, what we want to communicate, and how we know how to do so."95 Therefore, the act of maintaining a conversation in a Western contemporary capitalist society can sometimes reveal cues in the language that present multiple meanings that situates the identity of the speaker in a specific social setting that relies on the assumptions generated from shared knowledge.

For example, the use of the word "normal" in a conversation can mean typical or usual, purposeful or productive or even average, depending on how the word is used in a social interaction.

The ethnography of communication relies on the contextual cues and the linguistic competence revealed in the act of producing words as a single action (speech act theory) and the ability to maintain a social interaction that is embedded within and subjected to shared knowledge (interactional sociolinguistics). Therefore, in order to

94 Schiffrin, Deborah. Approaches to Discourse, p. 100-101 95 Ibid, p. 102. 50

realistically interrogate the concept of normalcy sustained in discourse, this work will have to critically scrutinize how language is produced and influenced by the situation (the setting), the event (how the situation affects the discursive activity), and the act

(performance) of producing language itself. So that if, as Lennard Davis submits, bodily existence is understood as contingent and affected by historical and material factors produced by culture and society and reproduced in language, an ethnography of communication is of particular use to this study because this method is conceived as a response to the idea that, "culture is continually created, negotiated and redefined in concrete acts between persons who are participating in some kind of interactive situation."96

To be able to rigorously analyze and interrogate the continual establishment of bodily norms in culture and society this thesis will use critical discourse analysis to examine the production of mass media discourses and their influence on the reproduction of cultural vernaculars that are propagated as normal ideological positions. Media discourses shape language and are also shaped by language to constitute a system of knowledge that has a hegemonic ideological function to support material production, commerce and construct "normal" useful social identities. Therefore, normative assumptions about the human body can be represented in media discourses, directly or indirectly, because they exist within a conceptual framework of a generally unchallenged and agreed upon consensus that the normal body is a useful instrument that is of social and institutional benefit.

96 Ibid, p. 139. 51

How the media discursively disseminates institutionalized knowledge can be

made apparent when the relationship between the word "normal" and the idea of the

"normal person" as being a useful and able instrument is shown as directly correlating to

how illness and health, and subsequently impairment and disability, are comprehended in

a capitalist political economy. The incapacity to work, whether due to illness or

impairment, qualifies some members in society as abnormal because they function

outside of a system that is built on the productivity of the employable body (as a worker)

and the deployable body (as a consumer). Thus, a worker whose body no longer has the

ability to be employed (and consequently be deployed to consume) productively is

expected to verbally delineate the exact nature of their illness or impairment or more

specifically the experience of their distinct body abnormality to their employers, doctors

and insurance companies and when, or if, their body will be normal enough again to work

so that it can be of use to the capitalist economy. What is constituted as health and

normalcy in a capitalist consumer economy is an assumption of the body as a healthy and

productive instrument that works as "a background condition, the default state of our

existence."97 This assumption of the healthy productive body being the default

ontological state, therefore, enables the media to discursively disseminate the opinion

held by many in contemporary society that people with disabilities are lazy, work-shy and

potentially cheat the average "normal" taxpayer in society by receiving monetary benefits

from a social welfare system that is financially supported by the taxpayer (instead of

being gainfully employed).

97 Billig, M. Condor, S. Edwards, D. Gane, M. Middleton, D. Radley, Alan. Ideological Dilemmas. Sage Publications (1988). p.89. 52

Recent research has shown (in the UK) that there has been a marked increase in the use of the "undeserving claimant" category to typify people with disabilities in the

• • OS • tabloid media, which can influence public opinion and common vernaculars, especially during periods of economic recession that instigate welfare reforms. Therefore, the less than purposeful body then becomes the abnormal body but the enveloping term of abnormality also includes other social abnormalities that are the implied product of a body that is not of instrumental use. As Lennard Davis suggests in Enforcing Normalcy.

The loose association between what we would now call disability and criminal activity, mental incompetence, sexual licence and so on established a legacy that people with disabilities are still having trouble living down."

So other social and cultural abnormalities that are detrimental to the capitalist system

(crime, mental instability, sexual licence) are associated with the body that cannot be put to instrumental use. Essentially, what Lennard Davis is submitting, and the consensual public opinion of people with disabilities as lazy and benefit cheats reinforces, is that if a person is not able to work or consume productively they are assumed to be socially dangerous and a potential criminal.

Considering that the production of media discourses and the reproduction of associated cultural vernaculars have such wide-reaching and profound social affects it is worth taking into account that words do have significant power. So much so that words can constitute realities that may not be intrinsically factual. People with disabilities are

98 Watson, Briant & G. Philo. Bad News for Disabled People: How the Newspapers are Reporting Disability. Project Report. Strathclyde Centre for Disability Research and Glasgow Media Unit, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK (2011) p.39. 99 Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy, p.37. 53

not essentially lazy but it may be of use to a media driven political economy to brand those who may be sick and impaired as indolent so that they can be encouraged to be put to work, in whatever capacity, and also deter the able-bodied worker from being unproductive, so they are also not classified by this pejorative term. As Michel Foucault articulates and this thesis will substantiate, "We must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon them."100 Therefore, the discursive preservation of the association between the less-than-able body and laziness demonstrates that words such as "normal" (used implicitly) or "undeserving claimant" (used explicitly) can violently create conceptual realities that may not

(generally) be factual.

To cross-examine the potentially violent discursively realized creation of normal consensual public opinion a basic method of utilizing critical discourse and semiotic analysis will be implemented. From using critical discourse and semiotic analysis and applying to the theoretical framework a research question is formulated. The research question that is generated from Lennard Davis's Enforcing Normalcy is that if the concept of the normal and abnormal body is constructed as a subject category, which is maintained in discourse to benefit ideological systems of power, where is this construction demonstrated and subsequently unveiled in public discourse?

The content that will be analysed in depth will be a discursive example of a

dominant idea and a widely disseminated text. Therefore, by examining the locus where

mass media discourses and cultural vernaculars intersect is an ideal place to begin this

100 Foucault, Michel. "L'Ordre du discours." Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. trans. A. M. Sheridan-Smith. New York: Pantheon Books (1972) p.229. 54

research, for as Lennard Davis has shown, the conception of disability as a social process preserved by social activity, "is part of a hegemonic way of thinking about the body and the insertion of the body into the body politic."101 The discursive content analysed will, thus, demonstrate the hegemonic way of thinking about the body in social and cultural interactions and the critical discourse analysis will effectively interrogate the continual preservation of the hegemonic system of norms, by critically dismantling the language used to sustain it, so that the dominant concepts that define what we talk about when we talk about the body can be comprehended as benefiting the ulterior motives of a system of power, and not a socially beneficial way of understanding our own human bodies and our relationships with the other bodies that surround us.

101 Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy, p.73. 55

Qualitative Content Analysis: The Cerrie Burnell Phenomenon

The term "subject" foregrounds the relationship between ethnology, psychoanalysis, and semiotics. It helps us conceive of human reality as a construction, as the product of signifying activities, which are both culturally specific and generally unconscious.

Kaja Silverman - The Subject of Semiotics

Is it just me, or does anyone else think the new woman presenter on CBeebies may scare the kids because of her disability?

Anonymous BBC Message Board User

A single statement, which appeared originally on a television channel's online message board and was subsequently reproduced nationally, in both tabloid and broadsheet newspapers, publicly demonstrated that the concept of disability is a constructed subject category and a socially problematic issue in contemporary Western society. This mediated phenomenon unravelled from the appearance of what was deemed to be an abnormal body and the public and published discourses that presented bodily difference epitomized the larger problems, contradictions and assumptions that are still generated by the sight of the disabled body. This thesis will examine the phenomenon in detail to argue that the sight and the concept of the abnormal and normal body is maintained in discourse as a commonsense bodily assumption, which order populations according to hegemonic systems of power that require that the idea of normalcy is inscribed on the body. 56

The content that is analysed is therefore qualitative in that the single statement originally produced on the BBC message board provides polysemic and often contradictory meanings both in its linguistic arrangement and the secondary media discourses that reproduced the text and the concurrent conflicted ideologies contained within them. Qualitative content analysis thus works to unveil "unique traits which are perhaps manifest in only one single configuration of statements" and "insight into wholes which these unique patterns provide gives rise to observations and hypotheses of unusually rich relevance."102 As a consequence, a study of one particular statement and the larger media event that generated from it establishes that the content being studied is qualitative. This is a study of the quality of what we talk about when we talk about the body in the linguistic domain where cultural vernaculars and media discourses intersect.

Furthermore, this work interrogates the quality of the a continual apprehension of the abnormal body (as abnormal) but also, crucially, the statement studied is itself one of unusually rich relevance and provides an appropriate instance that shows that the unique ideological traits of a society are uncovered in media discourses and common speech acts. So the unique ideological trait of the constitution of the normal and abnormal body category is a binary that is consistently reproduced in the social and cultural sphere through the use of language, as the study of the content in this thesis (generated from an unusually rich BBC message board statement) will demonstrate.

102 Kracauer, Siegfried. "The Challenge of Qualitative Content Analysis." Public Opinion Quarterly Vol.16, no.4 (Winter 1952-53) pp.637-638. 57

In 2009, Cerrie Buraell, a British children's television presenter with a partial limb (or what may be conceived as an abnormal body part) was publicly categorized as an inappropriate public figure, both discursively in the media and in the recapitulation of a common speech act. Before the advent of Facebook and other consummate contemporary social networking utilities, CBeebies, the BBC television channel aimed at pre-school children, had a "Grown-ups"103 internet message board where adults could discuss and comment on CBeebies programming. In January 2009, while the message

103 The BBC. "Grown-ups." CBeebies. http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/grownups/. 58

board was still active, Cerrie Burnell joined the TV channel as a presenter.104 By the following February, a small group of outraged viewers objected to Burnell's appointment and specifically the sight of her right arm, which ends at her elbow and is not covered with a prosthesis. On the CBeebies message board Cerrie Burnell was subsequently categorized as be an unsuitable public figure for public consumption because of her disability and was accused of having the potential to frighten children.

The BBC received only nine formal complaints in total.105 Subsequently, the

British press picked up the story and national newspapers like The Telegraph, The Daily

Mail and The Guardian published articles on the incident. The articles reproduced some of the comments supplied by the viewers on the message board, which were removed by the BBC, and provided corresponding images of Cerrie Burnell's body. The newspapers published a variety of complaints. First, that Burnell had the potential to scare children, secondly that her appearance forced parents to talk about disability with their children before the parents considered it to be appropriate and thirdly that her appointment was not based on her ability as a TV presenter and was instead a result of the BBC's employment drive to be politically correct and represent minorities (called "positive discrimination.")106

The complaints, the press coverage and the public debate all arose from the sight of Burnell's partial limb on national television or the obvious the sight of impairment,

104 The BBC Press Office. "CBeebies Names its Two New Presenters." Press Release. Jan 20, 2009. http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/01January/20/cbeebies.shtml 105 Thomas, Liz. "One-Armed Presenter is Scaring Children, Parents tell BBC. The Daily Mail. Feb 23, 2009 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-l 152466/One-armed-presenter-scaring-children- parents-tell-BBC.html. 106 Ibid. 59

registered as a disability and often recognised as an abnormal body. These complaints and the press coverage revealed that Cerrie Burnell was primarily categorized as a disabled subject and secondarily realized as a television presenter. So, if the idea of the individual subject is established through the act of speaking (both by and about the subject in person) or "the foundation of subjectivity... is determined by the linguistic status of 'person'"107 the linguistic status of Cerrie Burnell does not principally determine her as a TV presenter or a television presenter with a disability but as a disabled person.

However, despite this subject category being determined in discourse it is the visual presentation of bodily difference that originally generated the linguistic activity that realized Burnell as a disabled subject. The image of the disabled body came first.

It is clear from looking at this event that certain images of the body disturb the visually perceived equilibrium, act as forms of semiotic disobedience or irrational spectacles that require some form of rational response. The modern perception of the body as a marker for identity is problematized by images of impairment, especially when bodies are measured according to their instrumental use. In the post-industrial standardized and consumer driven Information Age the body is still comprehended as having correct or incorrect uses and in the disciplinary control of the body that Foucault eloquently describes "nothing must remain idle or useless: everything must be called upon to form the support of the act required"108 and this includes the physical and mental support populations must provide to a political economy in exchange for money. The image of an irrational "abnormal" body is then an object that represents the impossibility

107 Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. University of Miami (1973) p.224. 108 Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) Vintage (1995) p.152. 60

of an apparently rational infrastructure providing for the potentially idle or useless body or natural human frailty and diversity. Furthermore, the public exhibition of disabled bodies undermines the notion that the rational "normal" body is a naturally measured or determined state. If terms like rational and irrational become synonymous with normal and abnormal then the standard that defines the typical or the usual in a given society also becomes commensurable with what is conceived as sensible or logical. The rational is then not based on reasoned logic or the ability of an individual to think outside governing systems of power that Enlightenment doctrines presuppose109 but instead instrumentally measured concepts that service ideological frameworks. Therefore, when applied to the body, the rational body is one that is visually realized as being of potential instrumental benefit and also embodies the standards of economic production. That is why images of disabled bodies may appear to be irrational, not because they intrinsically are but that they challenge an inclusionary rational system of norms by representing bodies that irrationally exist outside of this inclusionary and allegedly rational domain.

Like the images of Cerrie Burnell and the subsequent responses to images of her body demonstrate the normal (as in usual and typical) condition of impairment is far from usually or typically apprehended in the visual order. Burnell is established as an anomaly

(according to the original complaints) that functioned as someone to be feared, forced people to engage in socially troubling issues and represented a rampant totalitarian drive towards a form of inappropriate equality. The visual presentation of Burnell fundamentally functioned as a representation of a deviation from the standard "normal"

109 Kant, Emmanuel. "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?" Berlinische Monatsschrift (1784). 61

depiction of systematized human bodies and an incongruous image in regulated "normal" society that necessitated the public debate and the media response. As Lennard Davis contends in Enforcing Normalcy the visual disabled body works to disrupt the visual order and this "disruption, the rebellion of the visual, must be regulated, rationalized and contained."110 Consequently, the discourses that stemmed from Burnell disrupting the visual order attempted to regulate, rationalize and contain that which can only be regulated, rationalized and contained in contemporary society as a difficult subject

(impairment) inflicted on an object (the body) that represents a sense of troubling otherness. The statements and conversations that were subsequently produced by the television images Cerrie Bumell's alleged abnormal body showed that language is functional and can function to fix singular or multiple meanings (that the disabled body is an irrational form that maybe should be feared) and cement the concept of the abnormal body in the public's consciousness. Therefore, Burnell as the singular image of the disabled subject existed as a visual abnormality that required the normalizing ideological discourses to realize her as a disabled person rather than a person with a disability. The text provided on the message boards and in the newspapers fix the meaning provided by the anomaly or an irrational or abnormal image so that, in this case, image plus text equals an agreed upon idea.

This public castigation appeared despite the fact that Burnell's alleged abnormal body functioned as a normal body should in a capitalist political economy, as a body put to use, at work, in employment and as an instrument of labour (for a television channel).

110 Davis, Lennard. J. Enforcing Normalcy. Verso (1995) p.129. 62

What Burnell publicly illustrated is that impairment does not have to equate with disability for her an apparent bodily lack did not limit her abilities and also indicated that the supposed function of a normal body can be adequately adopted by those categorized as having an abnormal body. Nevertheless, despite transcending these categories Cerrie

Burnell was still deemed to be an inappropriate public figure. The normal body may have to be conceived as a productive organism but the performance of bodies in social and public spaces includes the visual performance and so-called abnormal bodies do not merely have to demonstrate how a bodily difference can explicitly limit ability but also suggest it. Meaning is inscribed on the body and that includes visual meanings, signs and clues that have specific agreed upon societal connotations. Bumell's partial limb has meaning that overwhelms the fact (which Burnell publicly demonstrates) that disability and impairment are not necessarily mutually dependent categories and that the idea of the abnormal body does not have to be a form that is not of instrumental use to a capitalist economy, for Burnell is engaged in the system as a useful and productive worker and not an economic deviant like many impaired people are considered to be.111 Nevertheless,

Cerrie Burnell is still categorized as an anomaly despite transcending the normative constitution of the normal and abnormal subject. Therefore, the connotations of the visual content provided by the original television broadcasts overwhelms the denotation and figures such as Cerrie Burnell generate discourses in the media that attempt to fix but instead compound the conflicted, unresolved and anxiety-ridden societal apprehension of the construct of the abnormal body and the concept of disability. As Lennard Davis

"1 As mentioned previously people that are categorized as being disabled are often also understood as undeserving claimants of social benefits or too lazy to present themselves for employment. 63

argues, and this event illustrates, disability is not a stable category but "one which expands and contracts to include 'normal' people as well"112 because a person may be established as a normal functional working human being while at the same time visually representing what is ideologically quantified as an abnormal body.

Specifically, a small group of anonymous parents complained about the sight of

Cerrie Burnell partial limb on a children's television channel and said that Burnell's impairment had the potential to frighten young viewers. In doing so the complainers effectively stated that the sight of the ability of an impaired body or the demonstration of an abnormal body functioning like a normal body was frightening. In spite of the TV presenter embodying the function of a productive and useful "normal" body the presentation of visual disabilities or the sight of an apparent "abnormal" body can articulate a sense of disembodied otherness, and such ambivalences are a result of the inadequacies of the discourses, which identify the disabled body as an abnormality. As the irate parents, national newspapers and television channels collectively demonstrated in 2009 we may still, "have not yet figured out to think the relations we seek to mark,"113 and until those in public (or private) who are able to figure out how to talk about the intrinsically innate relationship each human individual has with the concept of the normal and abnormal body or impairment and disability, the appearance of bodily difference will continue to frighten those that don't want to or are ready to understand it.

However, it was one complaint in particular that seemed to encapsulate the social measure of the vernacular used and the subsequent mediated response, which disclosed a

112 Ibid, p.xv. 113 Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge (1993) p. 168. 64

contradictory and conflicted apprehension of the abnormal body. According to the Daily

Mail newspaper one "blogger" said: "Is it just me, or does anyone else think the new woman presenter on CBeebies may scare the kids because of her disability?"114

When looking at the statement in detail it is apparent that the initiator of this rhetorical question refers to and relies on shifting the agency in the text. The sentence does not convey an embodied personal stance but instead references an unsubstantiated belief that certain attitudes may be held by a vague and generalized group of external agents (or recipients). To begin, the agent who initiates this statement primarily conveys a double act of disembodiment in delivering the two clauses in the sentence. The first act of disembodiment is presented by the speaker/writer shifting the responsibility of individually holding an opinion ("just me") onto the presumption that other people

("anyone else") share this opinion, which is a process that seemingly absolves the original agent from categorically taking responsibility for holding a socially offensive opinion, because a vague external group instead maybe shares this viewpoint and collectively takes responsibility for it. The second supplementary act of disembodiment or the additional agency-shift in the sentence is contained within the second clause when the original agent asks whether or not the TV presenter may scare the children.115

Therefore, the initiator of this question displaces their own repulsion of the sight of the

TV presenter by expressing the belief that Cerrie Burnell has the potential to frighten

xu Ibid. 115 Athlete and model Aimee Mullins who is also an amputee tellingly stated that in her interactions with children that: "From my experience kids are naturally curious about what they don't know or understand or is foreign to them. They only learn to be frightened of those differences when an adult influences them to behave that way." Mullins, Aimee. "How My Legs Give Me Super Powers." TED Talks. Mar 11, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQOiMulicgg 65

children, rather than themselves, and shifts their disturbed feelings onto another generalized group, who this time become the people who the agent says they fear for, rather than legitimately expressing their own fear.

The group category of the children functions discursively as a generalized group but ideologically works as a very particular group of people that are used as the imagined targets for corruption and a justification for moral outrage. The demonstration of appearing to protect children, whether it is from a frightening subject matter or a distinct use of language, bestows onto the apparent adult protector a badge of moral purity, even when there are no children to protect or even the subject in question does not have a corrupting influence. As this message board statement illustrates there are no tangible children that can be specifically located outside the imagined idea of a television audience and Burnell may not in fact scare children with her disability at all in actuality because the statement is a question that asks the reader to think of the possibility that

Burnell may scare the children rather than delivering categorical proof that she does.

Therefore, the "kids" function to provide a moral justification for the speaker/writer to utter a socially offensive statement because the overriding desire for broaching this subject is justified by a declaration of the need to protect children (seemingly at all costs) rather than markedly protecting Cerrie Burnell from judgemental and derogatory opinions. In deciding who deserves protection the message board statement proposes that it is the idea of the children rather than the reality of Cerrie Burnell that seems to qualify.

How this agency shift statement functions to supplant the speaker's own perspective is done through a double act of displacement that effectively removes an 66

opinion and the fears of the discourse initiator onto other (seemingly vague) groups of people. The "anyone else" takes responsibility for the speaker's opinion and "the kids" are the potential group (of minors) awaiting to be frightened. Therefore, this rhetorical agency shift is understood as functioning within the speech act theory approach to critical discourse analysis, for as this statement demonstrates "language is not just used to describe the world but to perform a range of other actions that can be indicated in the performance of the utterance itself."116

John Searle particularly calls attention to the fact that the act of speaking is an act in itself that influences social reality, when making the distinction between brute facts (a physical fact independent of human opinion) and institutional facts (a cultural or societal fact that requires opinion and social interaction).117 For example, the brute fact that Cerrie

Burnell has a partial limb is wholly independent of human opinion, whereas the institutional fact that the sight of her partial limb has the potential to frighten is dependent on how this fact is constituted in language as an act. Therefore, the intention of the speech act used on the message board statement is to convey an idea that is based on a potential collective agreement so the act of speaking is an act that creates an institutional fact that "assigns a new status to some phenomenon where that status has an

accompanying function that cannot be performed solely in virtue of the intrinsic physical

features."118 Thus, institutional facts function as actions in speech that affect social and

116 Schiffrin, Deborah. Approaches to Discourse. Blackwell (1994) p. 6. 117 Searle, John. The Construction of Social Reality. The Free Press. (1995) p.2. 1,8 Ibid, p.46, 67

cultural reality and the institutional fact of what Burnell's partial limb seems to represent can only potentially become a fact in a linguistic exchange.

In the case of the statement that appeared on the BBC message board there are a range of other actions that show that language does not merely describe the world but also communicates beyond itself. Under the rubric of the agency-shift the other methods that have been deliberately utilized to disembody the discourse so that what is not communicated directly (that the agent thinks that disability is frightening) is concealed but is also communicated at the same time. These additional rhetorical and psychological devices included in the text work to maintain that the discourse initiator believes that there is some credibility in the facts referenced while also protecting themselves from being condemned for holding a dubious perspective by projecting personal socially unacceptable belief onto others. The basic function of the comprehension of language performing multiple functions (unveiled by speech act theory) reveals that the speaker, in this instance, manages to express an opinion and a fear while also saying that this perception may be acceptable because it may not be their own singular belief (because others must logically hold it).

The first additional rhetorical device included in the text is the utilization of an allusion. Allusions rely on the recipients of the discourse to make the connection between the subject talked about and an acknowledged social group that constitutes this subject as a form of shared knowledge. This in turn qualifies the subject as plausible and justifies it as an accepted fact, not because the subject is empirically factual but because it is 68

communally considered to be so. Ruth Wodak, who provides a detailed analysis of the linguistic terms used in critical discourse analysis, states that:

Allusions depend on shared knowledge. The person who alludes to something counts on preparedness for resonance, i.e. on the preparedness of the recipients consciously to call to mind the facts that are alluded to.

As Wodak submits allusions depend on the recipients making the connection between shared knowledge and subjects constituted as facts or more specifically that subjects can be considered to be factual on account of them being constituted as a form of shared knowledge. In the case of the message board statement used to indirectly communicate the idea that disability is frightening the allusions that the speaker/writer uses to qualify this idea reside in the in the generalized subject categories that embody the concept in shared knowledge ("anyone else") and are subject to its effects ("the kids"). In asking the question whether or not that there may be other people that share the viewpoint (that disability is frightening) the agent who relinquishes their agency effectively petitions the recipient of the discourse to make the connection between the request to consider that it must be reasonable to suggest that there are other people that share the agent's opinion and, therefore, this opinion must also be a fact. Consequently, the "anyone else" referred to is not an indefinite person but the recipient of the discourse that is asked to come to the conclusion that subjects can become facts if they are rhetorically established with the suggestive power of allusions that constitute a form of shared knowledge.

19 Wodak, Ruth. "Critical Discourse Analysis." Qualitative Research Practice. London Sage Publications (2004) p.207. 69

The second additional device included in this agency-shift statement utilizes the defence mechanism of Freudian Projection.120 Psychological projection is a process whereby the self denies its own intolerable internal perception by projecting it externally onto others,121 but crucially as the BBC message board indicated, this mechanism is "not simply an evacuation into the external world of some repressed material or other; on the

contrary what comes back from the 'outside' has its origins in what has been suppressed

'inside.'"122 Therefore, the double agency-shift utilized in the sentence that dissociates

the initiator of the discourse from the perceptions communicated also expresses that the

dissociated intolerable internal perception is a product of an unconscious mind that

cannot process the troubling realities of the external world (in this case the disabled body)

and that this troubling reality comes back to trigger the Freudian Projection defence

mechanism so that the intolerable perception can be reflexively projected onto external

groups, namely the comprehensive category of anyone but the person who wrote the

words that expressed the opinion.

This statement is not only a good example of the multiple functions of language

that stretch beyond the act of describing but also (along with speech act theory) the

message board question can also be understood within the ethnography of

communication as a social interaction that requires a response. Therefore, by taking the

interactional sociolinguistic approach, where "the focus of analysis is how interpretation

120 Freud, Sigmund. "Draft H Paranoia from Extracts From The Fliess Papers." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume I (1886-1899): Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts, pp.206-212. 121 Ibid. 122 Quinodoz, Jean-Michel. Reading Freud: A Chronological Exploration of Freud's Writings New Library of Psychoanalysis Teaching Series. Routledge (2005) p.105. 70

and interaction are based upon the interrelationship of social an linguistic meanings"123 it is clear that this message board statement is asking the listener/reader to consider an interpretation of what is being said that is based on the social relationship being conveyed

(that of the relationship between the disabled and the able-bodied) and the linguistic devices contained within the sentence that adequately shift the agency so that socially

problematic concepts can be communicated. Within the discursive framework of

interactional sociolinguistics that maintains that interpretation is based on the social and

linguistic influence of what, how, when and where a sentence is produced, it is apparent

that meaning is negotiated, and in terms of whether or not Cerrie Burnell has the potential

to scare children is dependent on the negotiation of this statement after it has been

uttered, both in social and mediated spaces.

The original utterance is not stated as a definite fact supplied from an internal

belief system, but is instead constructed as a question that requires social interaction. The

agency-shift, the use of allusions and psychological projection all serve to disembody the

initiator of the discourse and show, as speech act theory demonstrates, that language has

multiple functions while also sufficiently introducing an opinion as a question, which is

dependent on the interrelationship of social and linguistic interpretations. This question

linguistically demonstrates that there is an element of doubt in the subject ("is it just me")

rather than the presentation of a concrete idea, and therefore the speaker attempts to make

the otherwise socially unacceptable idea that disability is frightening a palatable subject

for public consumption. Instead of saying disability is frightening outright the person

123 Schiffrin, Deborah. Approaches to Discourse. Blackwell (1994) p. 8. 71

making this statement is asking if it is frightening, while also introducing the idea that disability may actually be frightening.

Since the question being asked requires a response or seems to instigate a conversation, the idea that disability may frighten children is revealed through discursive activity and not by interpreting the words that necessarily unveil internal cognition. As a consequence, this statement provides a working example that, "developmentally we learn how to think by participating in conversation and then setting up our own internal conversations"124 rather than conversely revealing the priori of internal thoughts by representing them in conversational practice. As the initiator of the statement discloses, an idea is provided as a disembodied inquiry that asks whether or not disability is frightening, which requires a direct response, rather than stating that disability is frightening, which maybe doesn't, and therefore the person introducing the question shows that in delivering an idea that conversationally necessitates social interaction, "we

1 71 think because we can talk, rather than we talk because we can think."

Despite the disembodied nature of the question asked, the idea that the presentation of a visible disability may disturb viewers, children, parents and the general public alike is never directly answered. However, the question is not completely left without a response when the social activity that the statement solicits comes from the

British national press who provide explicit and implicit contradictory responses. First, the newspapers condemn the unsympathetic and discriminatory opinions held by a handful of people who voiced their concern in a subsidiary public forum (The tabloid rhetoric of The

124 Billig, Michael. "Discursive Psychology, Rhetoric and the Issue of Agency." Semen, 27 (2009) p.29. 125 Billig, Michael, Discursive, p.29. 72

Daily Mail newspaper called the parent's outraged responses "a disturbing campaign"126 whereas The Guardian newspaper's moderate editorial approach categorized the messages as "unpleasant posts."127) while also reproducing and re-circulating the same unsympathetic opinions on a mass level in the press for the general public.

These conflicted messages are also compounded by the fact that choices of words used to describe Cerrie Burnell as a person reveal the newspaper's intention to either secure subject categories or sensationalise them. Both The Telegraph and The Guardian refer to Burnell as disabled, which tellingly demonstrates the common currency and prevalence of the term disabled over the term impaired in public discourse. The term disabled is also used in both the broadsheet's headlines, which shows that the impaired body, as it is immediately linguistically determined (to support the function of a newspaper headline to grab attention) is constituted as disabled before it can be conceived as being impaired so that the socially constructed subject category can be

understood as the preferred term to describe an agreed upon "abnormal" body type that is instantaneously recognised by the public. The choice of the word "disabled" illustrates that impairment is too vague a term to fully constitute the abnormal subject as an object

(like Cerrie Burnell) because impairment is generally understood as a state of being

126 Thomas, Liz. "One-Armed Presenter is Scaring Children, Parents tell BBC. The Daily Mail, Feb 23, 2009.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1152466/0ne-armed-presenter-scaring-children- parents-tell-BBC .html. 127 Dowell, Ben. "TV Presenter's Calm Take on Prejudice. The Guardian. Feb 28, 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/feb/28/disability-cerrie-brunell-bbc 128 Lambert, Victoria and Matthew Moore. "Disabled BBC presenter Cerrie Burnell 'would rather be blonde than have two hands"' The Telegraph. Feb 27,2009. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/4862527/Disabled-BBC-presenter-Cerrie-Burnell- would-rather-be-blonde-than-have-two-hands.html. 129 Mangan, Lucy. "It is Parents Who Can't Face Disability on TV." The Guardian. Feb 24, 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/tvandradioblog/2009/feb/24/cerrie-burnell-tv-disability-cbeebies 73

instead of an allegedly rigid and instantly recognizable subject category. Lennard Davis alludes to the dominance of one term over the other when stating that rather than existing

as a subject category impairment is understood as a lived experience, so that in order for those quantified in society as having abnormally impaired bodies to be organized

ideologically "the impaired body had become disabled."130 Therefore, due to the demands

of editorial space, attention grabbing immediacy and the desire to disseminate instantly

recognizable content widely, the newspaper's choice and use of using the word disabled

over impaired to describe Cerrie Burnell indicates that the impaired body has in fact

become the disabled body because the term disabled is used widely in public mediated

discourse.

The political dimension of using specific terms to describe particular social

subjects is exacerbated further when comparing the original broadsheet's reportage to

that of a British tabloid. Instead of singularly establishing the disabled body as a

representing a political and definite subject in society The Daily Mail newspaper, a

conservative British tabloid, significantly called Cerrie Burnell "one-armed" (both in the

editorial content and its associated headline) which is factually incorrect (Burnell has a

partial limb rather than a missing one) and subsequently sensationalized the concept of

disability as an exaggerated abnormality.131 This factual inaccuracy demonstrates, firstly

that the tabloid newspaper is exploiting the Burnell story by using a pejorative term to

grab the public's attention and establish Burnell as a physical aberration, and secondly

130 Davis, Lennard. J. Enforcing Normalcy. Verso (1995) pp.73-74. 131 Thomas, Liz. "One-Armed Presenter is Scaring Children, Parents tell BBC. The Daily Mail. Feb 23, 2009.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1152466/One-armed-presenter-scaring-children- parents-tell-BBC.html. 74

despite the editorial systems of popular newspapers warranting rigorous fact-checking procedures (otherwise these national organs are left open to legal action) a glaring factual inaccuracy is allowed (that a partial limb becomes a missing limb) to be disclosed in public discourse without fear of a legal dispute. This is because subjects who are socially understood as having partial limbs are (maybe) also comprehended as having missing limbs, for the bodily lack is the element that is focussed on and defines the person, so that what is in fact inaccurate is not interpreted as so by otherwise diligent editorial departments that are employed to meticulously check facts for their own legal protection.

Therefore, the partial limb becomes the missing limb by the same process that constitutes the disabled as impaired. This transformation is essentially understood as the normal and collectively agreed upon definition of a particular kind of abnormal body and the commonsense consensus shared by the newspapers and the public alike is that the impaired are disabled and that which may be a partial lack is a whole lack in a society that celebrates a particular kind of whole, healthy, able and productive body. As a consequence, the media demonstrates firstly that social inequality is legitimized in discourse and secondly that the apparently healthy body (realized as a whole body) is the desired default bodily condition that is collectively approved in the public domain.

It is clear that the Cerrie Bumell media event that surrounded the social event of consuming images of the disabled body that the idea of the abnormal body is still a troubling idea for public consumption. From the presentation of contradictory arguments presented in the newspapers that exclaimed it is not socially acceptable to disseminate derogatory depictions of disability (while also reproducing and disseminating the same 75

pejorative statements on a mass level) to the mere choice of words, which define and sensationalize political subject categories, it is clear, as Lennard Davis surmises, that

"We assume that our official mascots of disability are nothing else but their disability."132

Even in fictional narratives characters with physical impairments are seemingly trapped in an associated mental impairment that suggests that the disabled body configures the identity of the disabled person so they become nothing else but their disability. For example, in the novel Moby Dick (conceived of as one of the Great

American Novels,133 which denotes its influence and maybe also the collective influence of the idea of disability being an all-encompassing identity) the character of Captain

Ahab, one of the most celebrated depictions of a person with a partial limb, is portrayed as an individual that is tyrannically driven and consumed by the trauma of his disability so that his impairment informs his actions and his very constitution. So that even in fictional worlds like the allegedly factual world reflected by the media (and there is a strong correlation between the two) the disabled body creates disabled person.

The Cerrie Burnell phenomenon is, therefore, a public demonstration of how cultural vernaculars (delivered on the message board statement) and the media discourses

(the public published response to this event) intersect to sustain the concept of the abnormal body, both discursively and visually as an abnormality. For the words produced from the appearance of a partial limb on national television work to communicate a socially unacceptable idea while also condemning the propagation of this idea at the same

132 Davis, Lennard. J. Enforcing Normalcy. Verso (1995) p.7. 133 Buell, Lawrence. "The Unkillable Dream of the Great American Novel: Moby-Dick as Test Case." Oxford Journals, Vol. 20, Issue 1-2 (2008) pp. 132-155. 76

time. The original statement suggests that it may be socially unacceptable to conceive bodies that are quantified as abnormal as frightening but maintains that the abnormal body has the potential to be feared by a generalised social group, while the media discourses surrounding this statement produce the same dialectic, but in reverse, by maintaining that the idea of the abnormal body as a frightening form is socially unacceptable opinion (held by any group) while also suggesting that the abnormal body may be frightening by reproducing this statement. In short the vernacular in the message board statement suggests that it may be socially unacceptable to conceive the abnormal body as frightening while the media states it is socially unacceptable to conceive the abnormal body as frightening. Conversely, as the interactional sociolinguistic method shows, the secondary meaning, provided as a form of socio-cultural knowledge from where the cultural vernaculars and media discourse intersect, demonstrates that language delivers multiple and often contradictory actions. The vernacular and the media discourses intersect to present the opposite argument as the original statement produces the contradictory message that the abnormal body is an object of fear (for children) whereas the media discloses, by reproducing sensational discursive material, that the abnormal may be an object of fear.

The idea that the abnormal body is to be feared is a form of knowledge, based on sociocultural clues produced in speech that maintain that "language is situated in particular circumstances of social life."134 The circumstances surrounding the discursive establishment of Cerrie Bumell as embodying a form that may be feared, despite it being

134 Schiffrin, Deborah. Approaches to Discourse. Blackwell (1994) p. 97. 77

socially unacceptable to categorically and explicitly convey this fear, is particular to a society that orders its subjects according to their function and their appearance, but at the same time conceals the ideological arrangement of populations behind empty rhetorical gestures that say that it is not acceptable to say the disabled body is a body to be feared but reproduces those fears at the same time by reproducing the original statements that were socially unacceptable.

Secondly, the newspapers use these select phrases and terms that refer to subject categories that criticize the notion that Cerrie Burnell may be troubling social spectacle, while also presenting an ancillary photograph of the TV presenter with the article, which clearly displays the spectacle of her impaired limb (The Telegraph135 and The Daily

Mail136 supply images of Bumell that include her reduced limb whereas The Guardian

1 ^7 produced a similar image for an interview piece conducted two years later. ) As a consequence, a visually striking image is created to go with an article that condemns the small group of people that essentially articulate that Cerrie Burnell's disability is visually striking.

The media's double function of rhetorically condemning an idea while delivering it for public discourse and creating a visual spectacle while denouncing the idea that object in sight may be considered to be a spectacle proves that the plurality of meaning

135 Lambert, Victoria and Matthew Moore. "Disabled BBC presenter Cerrie Burnell 'would rather be blonde than have two hands"' The Telegraph. Feb 27, 2009. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/4862527/Disabled-BBC-presenter-Cerrie-Burnell- would-rather-be-blonde-than-have-two-hands.html. 136 Thomas, Liz. "One-Armed Presenter is Scaring Children, Parents tell BBC. The Daily Mail. Feb 23, 2009.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1152466/One-armed-presenter-scaring-children- parents-tell-BBC.html. 137 Saner, Emine. "TV presenter Cerrie Burnell: 'I Don't Care if you are Offended'" The Guardian. Feb 21, 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/feb/21/tv-presenter-cerrie-burnell. 78

produced in the media event may have particularly useful editorial functions. The tabloid rhetoric of the Daily Mail, for example, works as a vehicle for the demonstration of editorial self-flattery for moral outrage while also providing the subject and the object that caused the outrage for public consumption as a troubling spectacle. So the Daily

Mail newspaper that produces the double meanings in the interplay of text and image also delivers a double function of explicitly commending itself for it's moral stance and it's righteous editorial policy while at the same time producing the implicit suggestion that that the subject which causes the editorial moral outrage is in fact one that may be shared by the newspaper staff, despite their reflexive politically correct published responses.

If the disabled body as a frightening object is conveyed in language, both as an agreed upon idea and as subject that troubles the consciousness, it is then pertinent to use critical discourse analysis to formulate how agreed upon ideas are discursively realised and the psychoanalytic method to locate the troubling social disruption revealed in the use of words. For example, by looking at the Daily Mail headline "One-Armed Presenter is Scaring Children, Parents tell BBC"138 it can at once be understood as a statement that says the an abnormal body has the potential to be frightening while also singling out the

parents as the morally reprehensible group of people that publicly stated that it does. The

double function of this headline presents two agreed upon ideas. First that disability may

be frightening and secondly that it is socially unacceptable to hold this opinion. So how

language is used to deliver multiple but agreed upon ideas can be revealed by critically

138 Thomas, Liz. "One-Armed Presenter is Scaring Children, Parents tell BBC. The Daily Mail. Feb 23, 2009.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1152466/0ne-armed-presenter-scaring-children- parents-tell-BBC.html. 79

analyzing this headline. Also, the linguistic disruption in this newspaper headline can be scrutinized additionally as an instance where two ideas in agreement are contradictory

(that disability has the potential to be frightening but it is socially unacceptable to state

that it is unless a group of people, other than the newspaper's editorial department, take

responsibility for uttering this statement). Therefore, if psychoanalysis reveals telling

moments where the unconscious, which cannot be suppressed blurts out linguistic

contradictory disruptions this headline can be psychoanalytically analysed as an

rhetorical example of the suppressed fear of the disabled body, because it states that a

supposed abnormal body may be frightening while also communicating that it is not

socially acceptable to publicly state that it is unless a convenient group of undefined and

anonymous parents are available to do so on the newspaper's behalf.

It is apparent that how a conflicted and contradictory apprehension of the idea of

the abnormal body is disseminated is with the use of images and text working together to

supply an interrelated double meaning. The relationship between the visual presentations

of abnormal, impaired or disabled bodies and how they are constructed in language

shows that the images work in conjunction with the discourses provided to fix the

meanings being communicated. Both symbolic and textual language is manipulative and

potentially violent139 in the act of fixing meaning so that the original image of Cerrie

Burnell on television, which instigated the message board statement or the original

introduction of speech that functioned as an action that created an institutional fact, to the

139 "The violence that we do to things" with words that Foucault so eloquently submits includes the violent act of linguistically situating Cerrie Burnell as a disabled person rather than a person with a disability. See: Foucault, Michel. "L'Ordre du discours." Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan-Smith. New York: Pantheon Books (1972) p.229. 80

media discourses that subsequently provided attendant photographs of Burnell's partial limb, that images and text work together to fix the idea in the public's consciousness so that what is understood as the abnormal body should not be explicitly communicated as an object to fear but is one that is maybe feared anyway.

As the interrelated uses of images and text produced around this event demonstrate, the public representation of disability is a socially striking phenomenon but the ideologically marked presence of bodily difference can communicate meanings on their own before the associated text has necessarily provided the context. According to

Erving Goffman the presentation of the socially stigmatized (as Burnell clearly represents) is dependent on presenting a "spoiled identity"140 as a subject position that

"constitutes a special discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity"141 that requires social management and is demonstrated in acts of concealment, passing or revealing that are dependent on appropriate social situations.142 Similarly, a newspaper's choice to conceal, pass or reveal images of Burnell's reduced limb in the media is equally an act of social management. Therefore, the published photographs that accompany the articles mirror the original depiction of the same reduced limb by exhibiting the same article (the limb) that caused the minor offence. Furthermore, by mass circulating images of the controversial body part along with the contemptible discourses it produced an impression of sensationalism is garnered that suggest that images of different or "spoiled" bodies are not merely phlegmatic. In effect a newspaper is asking its readers to look at a

140 Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster (1963) p.3. 141 Ibid. 142 Goffman, Erving. Stigma, p. 127. 81

the appearance of a body part that was deemed to be controversial and by reproducing this appearance the newspaper is also reproducing the controversy or asking the reader/viewer to contemplate the rhetoric of an image, which asks if the image is controversial or even if the visually disabled have the potential to scare the public.

Roland Barthes' understanding of the rhetoric of a photographic image is a particularly useful way of comprehending the inherently ideological framing of the visual representation of disability. According to Barthes a visually striking image or a

"punctum" (the detail in a photograph that punctuates the consciousness143) is often a partial object "when paradoxically, while remaining 'a detail' it fills the whole picture."144 Cerrie Burnell's limb is the partial object that is included in the newspaper photograph and is also a marked symbol of bodily difference, and as the television images of Burnell's body initiated and the subsequent newspaper photograph (that were provocative by their very association with original appearance of the body part that caused offence) reproduced, visual depictions of disability do not merely appear as ideologically inert objects but as a deliberately framed details that overwhelm photographs to intentionally punctuate the consciousness.

The partial object represented in the newspaper photographs that punctuates the consciousness (the partial limb) also provides a visual connotation that is particular to the relationship between psychoanalysis and concept of disability. In Lacanian terms the human body or the real body is a fragmented body first that is visually transformed into the idea of the whole body in the mirror. The Mirror Stage describes a process in a child's

143 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Hill and Wang (1980) p.43. 144 Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, p.45. 82

development when visual interpretation formulates the construction of the human ego.145

The Mirror Stage commences when the underdeveloped child with limited motor functions recognizes itself in the mirror as symbolically more complete than the incomplete body it tries to control. The child visualizes its body in the reflection of the mirror as a normal ideal form and thus values the virtual depiction more than the actual body. If Lacan's mirror stage is an authentic phase in a child's development this early incident of misrecognition illustrates that the first conception of the self values the visual more than the real, defines the limited function of human bodies as an abnormal alienating experience and understands appearance as the indexical representation of reality. Therefore, in psychoanalytic theory there is a cognitive apprehension of the limited capacity of the human body, which reveals the dominance of the symbolic over the real, the visual over the textual, the able over the disabled and the whole over the fragmented body, which in turn reinforces the comprehension of the modern normal body as a constructed form. This dominance of the constructed over the determined, which the

Mirror Stage unveils, is why the original tele-visual images of Cerrie Burnell body disturbed the visual order to generate the message board statements and the subsequent media discourses and why the newspaper photographs provided with the articles do not solely exist as ideologically inert images. The arrangement of words may have meanings beyond themselves, but so do images, and the image of a partial limb understood as an impairment or the disabled body provides a cautionary vision of the original fragmented

145 Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," trans. Alan Sheridan, Ecrits: A Selection, W.W. Norton & Co, New York, (1977). 83

body that existed before The Mirror Stage had the opportunity to function.146 The fragment of Cerrie Burnell's arm reveals the fragmented body or the intrinsically fragile, mortal and incomplete body that all human beings are situated within and the partial limb is the symbolic signifier of the real that the imaginary or the signified world of constructed images (that includes the whole body) attempts to suppress. The body is

"always threatening to become its individual parts"147 because the normal body is a construct delicately stitched together and supported by normative concepts of wholeness applied by textual and symbolic language and not a intrinsically normal and biologically determined states of being. Therefore, Burnell confronts the idea of the whole "normal" body just by appearing on television. Burnell represents something other, the idea of a body that haunts all human subjectivity, that suggests that the bodies that we live with are not whole, and like Burnell's are physically delivered in fragments, which the image of her partial limb fundamentally represents.

What the intersection of cultural vernaculars (message board statements) and media discourses (newspaper articles) produced along with images of the body illustrate

is that in the case of Cerrie Burnell's public categorization as a disabled subject there is,

as Lennard Davis surmises, two modalities that function to order the concept of the

disabled subject. These are the modalities of function and appearance.148 The modalities

do not necessarily work together to deliver a combined process whereby the disabled

subject is ideologically categorized and comprehended, for as this social phenomenon has

146 Davis, Lennard. J. Enforcing Normalcy. Verso (1995) p.132. 147 Ibid, p. 132. 148 Ibid, p.l 1. 84

shown, Burnell has challenged any concept that disability is essentially tied up with a productive lack or instrumental function because despite her disability Burnell as a TV presenter performs, not within the standardized form introduced by industrial practices, but as a so-called "normal" citizen, the employed and employable and useful member of

society. For someone categorized as having an abnormal body and the abnormal body

also being categorized as a physical form that is unable to be of use to a political economy Burnell manages to operate in a body that is of use to her employers and a body put to use for commercial purposes (within the commercial structure of a television

channel). Therefore, the second modality, appearance, is the method by which Burnell is

constructed as a disabled subject, for it is what her appearance suggests that provokes the

public conversation and not an apparently limited physical performance that displays a

lack of functionality. Without the second modality of appearance, or if the disabled

subject was solely understood as a product of standardization, Burnell would not have

been realized as an anomaly or presenting a disturbing body that had the potential to

frighten children. Instead the disabled body is conceived not only as a body incompatible

to the demands of industrial standardization but as a "specular moment"149 a body

ideologically marked to deliver specific meaning, and this meaning suggests that the

disabled subject is a troubling social spectacle that undermines the concepts of normalcy

as naturally occurring because conversely Burnell's alleged abnormal body is a brute fact

and a naturally occurring bodily form.

149 Ibid, p.12. 85

However, the public presentation of disability that produces inappropriate responses may not only be confined to clearly demarcated symbols of bodily difference or even spoken discourses, mediated or otherwise. The function modality that registers disabled subjects can also operate without the appearance modality. For example, in

August 2011, Charlie McGillivary, a mentally disabled man who was unable to speak, was arrested in Toronto and subsequently died after physically interacting with the police officers that put him into custody. Details from the Special Investigations Unit's examination state that McGillivary was mistaken for someone the police were searching for150 but what can be gleaned from the case, according to the victim's mother who witnessed the incident, is that the police officer's alleged violent interaction with

McGillivary was provoked by the inability of the police to communicate with the victim despite the actions of his mother because "the police didn't listen to her pleas and explanations that he was unable to speak" and that "the fact that he was more than 6 feet tall and 250 lbs. and unable to interact verbally with police may have sparked the situation."151 In direct contrast to the Cerrie Burnell phenomenon the recent Charlie

McGillivary incident illustrates again that disability is still a socially problematic issue in

contemporary society even when the disability in question is no longer comprehensively

judged as an appearance, but an appearance that does not match with its apparent

function. Here, instead of the appearance modality the function modality, operates to

constitute the disabled subject so that the disjunction between the visual (a 6 foot man of

150 Huddon, Monica. "SIU Closes Investigation into Toronto Custody Death." Special Investigations Unit Ontario. Jan 18,2012. http://www.siu.on.ca/en/news_template.php?nrid=1060. 151 Mills, Carys. "Friends Baffled by the Death of Disabled Man in Police Action." The Globe and Mail. Aug 03, 2011. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/article2119109.ece. 86

250 lbs) and the linguistic (the inability to speak) allegedly produced the police actions that resulted in a citizen's death.

Between the appearance and the function modality, which realizes the disabled subject, there exists a fissure that also disrupts the connection between the visual and the linguistic that disturbs modern subjectivities. The appearance modality demonstrated by

Cerrie Burnell showed that the presentation of an "abnormal" body did not match up with the normal productive function she clearly displayed, while conversely the function modality that is applied to the Charlie McGillivary case illustrated that the appearance of a so-called normal or physically imposing body did not match with the lack of a function

(to speak) that was misunderstood by the police officers. If the common phrase "What's wrong with this picture" is used to typically represent a disjunction between the linguistic and visual fields but is often asked as a rhetorical question or a sarcastic way of saying that something isn't right or fair, instead of applying such a phrase to the linguistic and semiotic disruption that the disabled body causes in the normal equilibrium (that Burnell and McGillivary seem to represent) maybe the phrase should be applied to the public's response to disability, whether it is embodied in the actions of police officers or produced as statements on internet message boards and reproduced in newspaper articles.

In order to exist as the moderate depiction of a common human condition,

Burnell's limb, and impairment in general, would have to be understood in discourse and its appearance, not as communicating difference or representing a spoiled identity, but as portraying a real commonsense summation that an impaired condition or the image of a partial limb is not overwhelmingly exceptional, diminishing or frightening. If the Cerrie 87

Burnell phenomenon, both visually and linguistically, does deliver a highly-publicized social conversation, in which a nation tackles with the concept of frightening disabled bodies, it is clear that the image of Burnell's body, the original question provided by the message board and the subsequent visual and textual mediated response, exhibits the act of imparting multiple coexistent interpretations in order to communicate ambivalent and often contradictory meaning. The distinction here is that the plurality of meaning produced is polysemic and that, "Polysemy indicates a bounded multiplicity, a circumscribed opening of the text in which we acknowledge diverse but finite meanings"152 so that oppositional attitudes, values and beliefs can be communicated at the same time.

As if to complement the double act of disembodiment contained in the agency- shift statement, which enables the message board speaker to deliver a socially problematic concept, the British mass media responds by delivering an ambivalent double message that says it is wrong to think that disabled bodies are frightening while at the same time nationally proliferating the same problematic discourses with conspicuous attendant images of an impairment. This suggests that the constructed connotative content that is supplied with the denotative reportage intentionally implies that disability is a troubling subject, while also conveying that it shouldn't be, by stating that the parents have disturbing views, and therefore, like the message-board commentator, the media are able to disperse a socially problematic concept without taking responsibility for its effects.

152 Ceccarelli, Leah. "Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism." Quarterly Journal of Speech. Vol. 84, no.04 (1998) p.398. 88

In practice the mass media can enforce social norms by exposing the "tensions between the 'privately tolerable' and the 'publicly acknowledgeable'"153 and closing,

"the gap between 'private attitudes' and 'public morality.'"154 The social norm that is propagated in response to Burnell's impairment is therefore a message that states that the disabled body should not be publicly acknowledged as a frightening form while also encouraging (through suggested implications) a private reinforcement of the idea that it may be. Therefore, by delivering a commentary that collapses the oppositional conveyance of discourses and images that imply that disability is disturbing into an all- encompassing moral position that says it shouldn't be, "mass media clearly serve to reaffirm social norms by exposing deviations from these norms to public view."155

Nevertheless, by identifying the media's ambivalent double messages, which reaffirm social norms that circulate a private attitude the printed and electronic organs publicly condemn, is not to suggest that the comments (originally removed from the BBC public forum) or the pictures of Burnell's reduced limb should be withheld from the public.

The significant issue at stake when analysing the discourses that circumnavigate the presentation of a disabled subject is not whether there should be some kind of social control over how prejudices, beliefs and connotations are propagated with convenient contradictory polysemic meanings or that a marked choice between what is made visible and invisible is managed so that deeply-ingrained socially unacceptable preconceptions

153 Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and Robert K. Merton. "Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action." Media Studies: A Reader, Eds, Paul Marris and Sue Thornam. New York Univ Press (2006) p.236. 154 Lazarsfeld, Mass Communication, p.237. 155 Ibid, p.238. 89

are withheld, but that the mediated response should instead be a report of substantial depth and a balanced consideration of social reality.

This highly publicized phenomenon, in particular, does not communicate an even- handed reflection on the social reality of the disabled body because the scale of the furore that originally appeared (nine official complaints and a few anonymous comments in a public forum associated with a select brand of television programming)156 does not correspond with the subsequent production of reflexive over-empathised editorial moral outrage and the column inches the event garnered. If those in the editorial departments, who published the story, produced authentic criticisms of discrimination and sincerely believed that disability should not be a troubling and fascinating subject for the general public (both publicly and privately) then Cerrie Burnell would not have become the subject of a highly publicized story, because crucially, the story originated from a marginal conversation conducted by a small number people in a specialized forum that delivered a few discriminatory comments.

How the public and the media talk about the marked appearance of Cerrie

Burnell's partial limb indicates that disability is a socially constructed identity category that displays impairment as a concurrently troubling and fascinating condition.

Furthermore, the difference in scale between the amount of online complaints and the magnitude of the mediated responses, along with the polysemic meanings provided by what is said in discourse and how it is delivered, and the direct avoidance of a question

156 Thomas, Liz. "One-Armed Presenter is Scaring Children, Parents tell BBC. The Daily Mail. Feb 23, 2009. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1152466/One-armed-presenter-scaring-children- parents-tell-BBC.html. 90

that asks if disabled bodies are frightening, means in summation that in the gap between what is said, what is communicated and what is understood there exists the apprehension that disability is an abnormality and the abnormal body is constituted in social reality as an agreed upon institutional fact.

If incidents in social reality constituted in discourse and the visual field unveil a common or shared perception that the disabled body is a problematic physical manifestation then, as a result, an attendant question arises that asks why, in fact, the disabled body does have the potential to scare the able-bodied public, when impairment is a typical, predictable and common human condition. Therefore, in order to fulfil such a query, the comprehension that human subjects are also objects, are both physical and mental, material and immaterial and potentially sick and in good health submits that (like the double act of disembodiment in the agency-shift statement and the disseminated oppositional meanings communicated by the media referenced) essential pluralities exist in the discursive interpretation of identity categories. As Lennard Davis argues the binary of the normal and the abnormal that is applied to bodies represents an ideological desire to sustain the essential irreconcilable pluralities of existence (because one category cannot exist without the other or it's opposite in order to be recognised) so that dialectical meanings "split the body into two immutable categories: whole and incomplete, able and disabled, normal and abnormal, functional and dysfunctional."157 Furthermore, the idea that a human body is potentially abnormal suggests that physical forms can also represent the binary of being both docile, "that may be subjected, used, transformed and

157 Davis, Lennard. J. Enforcing Normalcy. Verso (1995) p. 129. 91

1 *s8 improved" in discourse and judged as abnormal in inner consciousness, and this is compounded by the idea, shared by some anthropologists, that people with disabilities are constructed as liminal people.159

To some, disability is the social construction of the very real condition of impairment,160 made apparent in the environments and discourses that furnish everyday life, so that people with physical disabilities reside in constructed boundaries that fail to accommodate the realities of living with impairment. Discourses interpret the subject of the person and the object of the body; the physical and the mental states and the material and immaterial conditions so that, "liminal people, as the word denotes, are at a threshold"161 - not just social but also physical threshold, where a person with a disability

"is neither sick nor well, neither fully alive nor quite dead."

As a result of existing as a person on the boundaries of any kind of consummate interpretation, as a human being with a common degenerative or damaged condition, which all humans will inherit, given a long enough life span, liminal beings exist as constructed forms who show that the problem of talking about the disabled body does not reside in the body itself but the words used to establish the disabled condition. Language may not be commensurable with common physical and social realities and people with disabilities may be considered to be "betwixt and between" and constituted as

158 Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) Vintage (1995) p.136. 159 Murphy, Robert. F. Jessica Scheer, Yolanda Murphy and Richard Mack. "Physical Disability and Social Liminality: A Study in the Rituals of Adversity." Social Science & Medicine Vol. 26 Issue 2 (1988). pp.235-242. 160 Shakespeare, Tom. "The Social Model of Disability." The Disability Studies Reader, Ed. Lennard J. Davis, Routledge (2010) P.268. 161 Murphy, Robert. Social Science & Medicine, p.237. 162 Ibid, 238. 92

unclassifiable entities or "nonpersons," who are, therefore, discursively established as unclassifiable while also being concurrently classified as "unpredictable and problematic" and "socially dangerous"163 human subjects.

The essential liminality of the disabled condition is therefore established as a threat, a dangerous and incomprehensible state, and as the presentation of Cerrie

Burnell's partial limb demonstrated (which can also be considered as a liminal organism, existing on the boundary of being a right arm and a fully formed physical object) liminal ontological states are established in language as a form of knowledge because

"knowledge is embedded in discursive structures."164 For example, liminal disabled subjects are established discursively on internet message boards and heavily reproduced mass media discourses, as a threat so that public figures like Cerrie Burnell can transform from a children's TV presenter into a physical monstrosity who embodies what is collectively understood as representing an abnormal body.

The tension that exists between the empirical evidence of the natural bodily condition of impairment and the discourses that interpret the impaired form as monstrous are created from the direct result of the existence of two coexisting existential realities.

Like the pluralities that reveal the tensions and contradictions between dialectical subject categories (and the various methods of interpreting them) the existential reality of establishing both a subject and an object as a person sustains the notion that there are two worlds that provide the basis for the experience of living. One world is the measurable and logically evident exteriority that exists outside the body and the other world is the

163 Ibid, 237. 164 Davis, Lennard. J. Enforcing Normalcy. Verso (1995) p.63. 93

interior region of ideas that is created through the act of using language. Neither worlds, although inextricably linked, are able to totally correspond with the other (as the Burnell case demonstrates) because the logically evident exteriority of the body may exist before the interior world of ideas constitutes it in language, but if language is the necessary technology that enables the human subject to think and cognition is a by-product of using language, the material body does not exist in the immaterial interior of knowledge before it is established in language.

The body may exist before language, but not in knowledge, only on the account of language functioning as an inclusionary system that contains its exclusion. The two worlds of materiality and immateriality, which include and exclude one another, may exist in apparent opposition so that "language is the sovereign who, in a permanent state of exception, declares that there is nothing outside of language and language is always beyond itself."165 So these apparently incommensurable worlds, within which there is a body that exists before language (like the cautionary vision of fragmented body provided by the disabled body) and in the other there exists a body that can only be realized by language (like the idea of the abnormal body introduced on an internet message board) and these worlds are in fact conjoined and mutually dependent on one another to maintain a constant state of sustained tension. Judith Butler particularly addresses the plurality of an oppositional but equally combinatory relationship that the body has with language to formulate the concept of the mutually dependent dialectic that exists between the linguistic and pre-linguistic self.

165 Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (1998) p.21. 94

As Butler formulates in Bodies That Matter.

Language and materiality are folly embedded in each other, chiasmic in their interdependency, but never fully collapsed into one another, i.e., reduced to one another, and yet neither fully exceeds the other. Always already implicated in each other, always already exceeding one another, language and materiality are never fully identical nor fully different.166

It is here that Butler submits that the two separate, but significantly conjoined worlds do exist, a world of interior ideas and a world of measurable exteriorities, but that the tension and antagonism, which essentially pushes them apart and keeps them together establishes a gap or an absence, which exists with and part of these two realities. The human subject lives in both of these worlds at the same time and as a consequence, in terms of the discursive categories that attempt to define ontological existence, liminal or otherwise, "the referent persists only as a kind of absence or loss, that which language does not capture, but instead, that which impels language repeatedly to attempt that capture, that circumscription - and to fail."167

Human subjects then, are inherently on the boundary of being adequately constituted in knowledge and are, like people with disabilities, liminal, in the sense that the attempt of discourses to define individual existence, although far from futile, can never close the gap between how things are and how they are interpreted. So like the impaired body, which awaits all human subjects (subjected to the effects of time and damage) that suggests that maybe disability is an essential human state, the exclusionary and inclusionary sovereign function of language establishes that all human subjects are

166 Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge (1993) p.69. 167 Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter, p.67. 95

also unable to be established completely in language and are therefore, liminal. As a consequence, every human subject is liminal and is also, essentially, disabled.

To summarize, if manifestations of disability initiate discourses, which disclose an inherent fear of the appearance of the impairment because people with disabilities are established as misunderstood liminal subjects and an unclassifiable threat, then the essential the structure of language, which exceeds, collapses and implicates or is neither different or identical,168 also establishes that all human beings are, impaired or otherwise, categorically unable to be completely classified and are, as a result also constituted as liminal subjects. Therefore, the impaired begets the disabled body and the disabled body begets the abnormal body in the consciousness of the able-bodied public because it reproduces an explicit exhibition of conspicuous liminality that exists in all human subjects. The antagonism produced by the sight of Cerrie Burnell's partial (or liminal) limb, presents a physical manifestation of a profound and categorical liminal state, which suggests that human subjects exist on a frightening existential boundary between life and death and continuously live with the possibility of being both complete and incomplete, in the flux of uncertainty caught between nature and culture and functioning as both a material and immaterial being.

In addition to the poststructuralist and disability studies critical perspectives that address the idea of a body established in language the psychoanalytic method also places crucial importance on social and linguistic functions of language. Far from being merely therapeutic psychoanalysis can work as a hermeneutic method of understanding social

168 Ibid, p. 69. 96

phenomenon and concepts that are applicable beyond the clinic because, as Lacan maintains, "the unconscious is structured like a language"169 so that within psychoanalytic framework language becomes fundamental to unveiling cognition or revealing contextual clues to existential existence itself.

According to Slavoj Zizek psychoanalysis is, "a theory and a practice that confronts individuals with the most radical dimension of human existence," and if this is so, this radical dimension must incorporate the familiar idea in human existence that physical bodies, as finite, decaying organisms that house the consciousness, must be personal objects that also frighten the consciousness and constitute what is understood as within the taxonomy of the normal and abnormal body. This is a point that Lennard Davis raises when using fictional characters to describe the real life disabled subject. For he states that when the body is seen as a "zone of repulsion"171 (within the allegorical framework of fictional narratives reflecting the real life subconscious) what is so repulsive about the body isn't its fundamental organic structure but what this structure suggests. 172

What the body seems to suggest can be adequately understood in psychoanalysis as the Thing, the traumatic element of an organism that resists the familiar, used and understood symbolic framework.173 Cerrie Burnell's partial limb seems to represent the

Thing as "some strange traumatic content" for the general public and the Thing as an

159 Lacan, Jacques. Seminar XX. Ed, by Jacques-Alain, Miller, W.W. Norton (1999) p.48. 170 2izek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan. Granta (2009) p.3. 171 Davis, Lennard. J. Enforcing Normalcy. Verso (1995) p.144. 172 Ibid. 173 2izek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso. (1989) p.147. 97

object that creates "the striving for a homeostatic balance"174 in the symbolic order, as demonstrated by the public and mediated response to the spectacle of Burnell's body.

Julia Kristeva, in particular, confronts the concept of frightening bodies775 and psychoanalytically charts the condition and situation of abjection. In terms of Cerrie

Burnell's disabled body representing something other than the customary depiction of impairment, which has the potential to frighten the able-bodied public, Kristeva's work addresses the idea that Burnell, in fact, exhibits the essential abject self that exists in all human beings:

The abject appears in order to uphold the "I" within the Other. The abject is the violence of mourning for an object that has already been lost. The abject shatters the walls of repression and its judgements. It takes the ego back to its source on the abominable limits from which, in order to be, the ego has broken away.176

This is because the abject body can also be the disabled body. The abject and disabled condition, which threatens individual consciousness, is the wretched, broken and impaired form that reminds human subjects of their own potential wretchedness. To compound this idea, Cerrie Burnell challenges the predetermined roles of surplus repression (social and cultural processes of individual conditioning177) and the parameters of human coexistence delineated by basic repression (individual internal processes of self control) because the abject, as Kristeva describes it, decimates the entire psychological framework of repression, which is "the corner-stone on which the whole structure of

174 Ibid. 175 Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. Columbia University Press (1982). 176 Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror, p. 15. 177 Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. London: Routledge (1987). 98

psychoanalysis rests."1 78 Furthermore, the relational self recognized in the Other of

Burnell's body presents the potential for the self to become impaired. The self is haunted by the elementary physical fragility of the human form that extends to the limbs, which all have the potential to become partial, and the essential fragile incompleteness of the partial limb also references the larger fragile incompleteness that encompasses the whole human body. Therefore, "the object that has always already been lost" 1 70 that Cerrie

Burnell displays so explicitly, is the essential human fragility that demarcates the boundary between life and death and the wretched degenerative body, which signals through time the stages of its eventual and definitive extinction. If, then, the corpse is the final human transformation that the fragile contingent body suggests and is also "the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything,"180 Cerrie Burnell also represents this encroaching border, the abject and liminal place where bodies are not but permits them to be, and as a consequence (and this reference is demonstrated by the agency shift statement) "Normality has to protect itself by looking into the maw of disability and then recover from that glance."181

The construction of the alleged normal body is the necessary opposite that at once defines and measures what both the normal and the abnormal should be, according to a capitalist economy. It is the bodily form that protects the subjects and the subjectivities and preserves the presumed social and financial benefits of the function and the

178 Freud, Sigmund. On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement. W. W. Norton & Company; The Standard Edition (1990) p. 14. mIbid. 180 Ibid, p.3. 181 Davis, Lennard. J. Enforcing Normalcy. Verso (1995) p.48 99

appearance of particular kinds of standardised bodies that service contemporary political economies. Furthermore, within this same system the abnormal body form is conversely the essential primal reality (of the abject self) that Cerrie Burnell seems to represent.

To conclude, it is the fundamental idea that the disabled body represents a

"socially dangerous" subject position that is "betwixt and between"182 and corresponds with the similar boundary position held by the abject self "which is neither subject nor object"183 that reinforces the idea that the disabled body could represent the physical manifestation of the abject body. From the display of an impaired limb that produced a single line of disembodied text, which in turn produced a conflicted media response, which reinforces concepts that the human body is liminal and frightening it seems that the discourses and concepts reproduced by the Cerrie Burnell media event establish the idea of the disabled body as an incommensurable plurality. The "Other who precedes and possesses me, and through such possession causes me to be"184 is Cerrie Burnell, the subject with a disability, but also the vague external group that takes responsibility for the message board statement, the children that have the potential to be frightened, the implications of the suggested media response, the tension between the actual and virtual presentation that constitute stigmatization, the human form unable to be completely comprehended in discourse, the cautionary vision of the abject self, that is set up in opposition with the self in order to realize the self and the discursive and symbolic establishment of the disabled subject embodying an abnormal human form.

182 Murphy, Robert. F. Jessica Scheer, Yolanda Murphy and Richard Mack. "Physical Disability and Social Liminality: A Study in the Rituals of Adversity." Social Science & Medicine Vol. 26 Issue 2 (1988). p.237. 183Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. Columbia University Press (1982) p.l. 184 Ibid, p. 10. 100

It is then apparent that there are people (the "anyone else") who think that the disabled body is abnormal. In the boundary between the I and the Other there exists the physical configuration in social space of a bodily form that can represent the condition and situation of abjection. This bodily form, despite its liminality and its disturbing qualities, is in fact a common and natural constitution, and its potential to be realized as a disturbing abnormality is therefore addressed by socially acceptable discourses, which attempt to conceal or neutralize the disturbance, but are not completely capable of doing.

As the Cerrie Burnell case demonstrates, "significance is indeed inherent in the human body"185 but it is up to us learn how to deal with this significance as not necessarily an effect that should be considered as frightening or abnormal but as a composition that is both common and natural. Until we do learn how to sufficiently figure out how we can think about "the relations we seek to mark"186 language will continue to reveal that we think because we can talk, and the talking will always disclose our inability, despite attempts at socially acceptable discourse, to realize the idea of the human disabled body as something other than an abnormal form. People may never learn how to accept the haunting influence of abjection, but if private, public and mediated discourses develop a more sophisticated, fair and comprehensive articulation of impairment, both symbolically and textually, instead of asking whom fears the disabled body and judges it as abnormal maybe the able-bodied public might eventually ask why fear the disabled body and fundamentally ask why the so-called normal body is judged to be normal and the abnormal body is judged to be abnormal? m Ibid, p. 10. 186 Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge (1993) p. 168. 101

Conclusion

The Social Benefit of Deconstructing Subject Categories

A frame of useless limbs, what can make good of all the bad that's been done?

Morrissey - November Spawned a Monster

The taxonomy of the normal and abnormal binary creates subject categories. As the media event surrounding Cerrie Burnell has shown bodies are not only materially but also discursively realised in modern society. However, despite the fact that (according to

Lennard Davis) the disabled body is apprehended by both the function and the appearance modality, Burnell challenges the modernist conception that the normal body is constituted as an identity tied to industrial practices and a functional standardized and productive form. Burnell's body is fully functional in a productive role (as a TV presenter) so that she exists as visual disruption only and as a spectacle of disability that challenges the norm. This is because "normal" bodies in society are constructed with signifiers that do not carry the mark of incompleteness, instability or potential degradation that the disabled body seems to signify. The normal body is then the unobtainable commodified body, the illusory healthy body and the spectacle of the complete body seemingly attainable through the use of products and services and the exchange of money. In short, Cerrie Burnell's body confronts the norm perpetuated by a consumer culture rather than an industrial system, but still fundamentally challenges the 102

larger ideology of the biopolitical capitalist system within which industrial and consumer practices remain.

Therefore, it is apparent that "the general can replace the particular"187 and the spectacle of the normal body (much like the ultimately unobtainable but suggested capacity for absolute satisfaction contained within commodities) delivers the unachievable but strived for normal body as the "representation of fulfilment as a broken

188 • • promise." Cerne Burnell then undermines the essential illusion provided by a social and cultural economy that insinuates that particular kinds of bodies are available and possible for everyone engaged in a capitalist system. Just by existing in a mediated social space that is accessible (i.e. television) and having the potential to appear in every home

Burnell challenges the mass deception that modern populaces "buy into" while also reinforcing the comprehension that the pleasure provided by the market place is insufficient and unsatisfactory at the same time. Particular kinds of bodies, especially disabled bodies, can then reveal the collective state of cognitive dissonance that all members of a society must maintain to remain productive and "happy" consumers and this state of conflict includes the reification of the normal body at the expense of the abnormal body (or the commonly apprehended but repressed fragile or abject human form) that all must inherit, unless they die first.

How Cerrie Burnell functions within the appearance modality of disability also illustrates the contemporary turn Western society has made away from an industrialized

187 Adorao, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. Verso (1997) p. 130. 188 Ibid, p. 140. 103

ideology to a consumer ideology (despite both being contained within the same biopolitical ideological system). For contemporary processes of globalization have transferred industrial practices outside of the Global North so that transnationalism replaces nationalism and the Information Age replaces the industrial age for "only in the second half of the twentieth century did multinational and transnational industrial and

1 fiQ financial corporations really begin to structure global territories biopolitically." Hence, the former supreme influence of industry is conveniently removed and concealed in territories outside of the European and America continents (among others) so that the ideology of material production still governs (even when conceived as the processes by which "normal" bodies are supposed to appear). Although, as Foucault surmises,190 power conceals itself and the agency has replaced the agent (only insomuch as the individual industrial agents are located elsewhere) so the workers in the West are generally deployed in the exchange of information and communicative practises rather than in the service of industry so the primary material being produced in the Global North is data, which reveals that "the great industrial and financial powers thus produce not only commodities but also subjectivities."191 These subjectivities, as the Cerrie Burnell media phenomenon demonstrates, include the establishment of normal and abnormal subject categories as indexical indications of those that are included inside and outside of society, even when the industrial practises that produced these categories have been sufficiently dispersed. The form of standardized power systems and industrial practises

189 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press (2001) p.31. 190 Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Vol 1 (1978) Vintage (1990). 191 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press (2001) p.32. 104

maybe have been removed and (in some respects) hidden but the ideological content remains, and significantly the content (that is pertinent to this work) that supports the idea that normal, typical and usual bodies in society are the constructed forms and the others, the abnormal bodies are the intrinsically faulty human forms.

In the post-industrial domain of the Global North, which is seemingly built on the ephemeral production of information instead of goods and where modern factory work has either been transplanted to oversees sites of production or been replaced by computer operated machines, the former physicality that the normal useful and able human body provided is no longer needed. If the average body of the average Western worker is now required to punch keys on a computer terminal instead of manoeuvring heavy machinery, it would be reasonable to assume that the idea of the useful and able "normal" human body would, therefore, modify to incorporate these changes, if indeed the normal body category is inextricably linked to the instrumental dynamics of commercial production.

However, the idea of the normal body has not readjusted to reflect the changes in the modern Western workplace and the normal human body is still conceived in the 21st century as a useful and able economy. This is because the demands of industrialization and the influence of the idea of rationality merely established what was to be quantified as typical and useful, and by extension, a measure of physicality conceived as being right or good. As Karl Marx conceptualized in The German Ideology the Industrial Revolution not only established a new form of material production but also conceived an attendant 105

form of mental production:

The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas192

Furthermore, dominant material relationships conceptualized as ruling ideas also includes a system of commodity exchange that comprises both the use value and the exchange

1 value, which are "totally independent" of one another, so that a commercial product or service is created as an object or labour that fundamentally has value in a social and cultural system that produces ideas along with its commodities.

For example, the qualitative aspect of a beauty product has the use value of meeting the needs of maintaining a normal body category while also being quantified by the exchange value equivalent of the labour time that a normal body is expected to and can produce. Thus, the idea of the normal useful body is an instrumentalized form that is mentally produced by the use and exchange value of products and services, so that the industrially created, commercially sustained and socio-culturally produced human body perpetuates as a typical or usual form that maintains a system of norms that call for perseverance of commercial and cultural production. As Lennard Davis contends,

"Industrialization re-created the category of work, and in so doing re-created the category of the worker. The very idea of citizenship came to be ideologically associated with this

192 Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. International Publishers Company (1970) p.64. 193 Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin Classics (1992) p.128. 106

kind of work."194 The normal body of the model citizen was, therefore, supported and produced by a system of material production (in the form of the exchange of goods and services) and concurrently the normal body of the model citizen was also required by a system of material production (transferred into labour time) to produce the goods and services that the normal body also required. Therefore, if the mental idea of the normal human body remains in modernity, long after the industry that produced its products has relocated elsewhere, it is the creation and exchange of the commodity (beauty, health and fitness products and services) and the subsequent exchange of money that industry was put in place to deliver, which subsequently continues to define the normal and abnormal body category. As a consequence, Cerrie Burnell challenges the mental idea of the normal body by representing rather than demonstrating an incomplete human form that generally is not understood as being able to be fully instrumental both in the workplace and the marketplace, despite being instrumentally employed in the workforce.

The idea of normalcy as a modern technique of standardization by which the human body is established may also be challenged by the neoliberal idea of diversity in a free market economy. Recent work by Lennard Davis has apprehended this shift in public consciousness that maybe suggests that the conception of the norm has played itself out.195 Instead the idea of diversity may be the central taxonomy by which bodies are conceived in the 21st century, but this configuration of diversity celebrates the idea of bodily varieties that are realised as lifestyle choices that are tied to a competitive market

194 Davis, Lennard. J. Enforcing Normalcy. Verso (1995) p.86. 195 Davis has presented this idea in recent conference presentations as a precursor for an upcoming book on what he calls "The End of Normal." Columbia University. Upcoming Events. (2011). http://www.columbia.edu/cu/amstudies/events.html 107

economy and the illusion of the diversity of choice that it provides. Crucially, as Davis maintains,196 disability is not a choice, lifestyle or otherwise, so that the concept of diversity as a neoliberal conception is constituted by excluding certain groups, mainly medically diverse variations in a given population or fundamentally a realistic conception of diversity that includes all members of humanity. For example, the physically or mentally disabled body, images of abject poverty, drug abuse and visual degradation are rarely used for the commercial purpose of celebrating the diversity that fortifies the neoliberal system.

Therefore, despite the apparent commercial inclusion of the contemporary idea of body diversity the enforced influence of the normal and the abnormal body category remains, concealed under the surface gloss of a neoliberal idea that does not essentially include that which it professes to celebrate. Power may conceal itself in order to function and this act of concealment must now include the suppression of the normal and abnormal binary that still operates to establish which members are included and excluded within society. Diversity then operates in place of normalcy in a free market economy, despite functioning in the same way to realize human subjects as normal or abnormal or

as diverse beings that are maybe not that diverse. Much like the definition of the word

"normal" signifying not just the typical and the usual but also the productive and the

standardized in the modernist age the term "diversity" can now signify not the markedly

broad spectrum of variety but a limited realm of difference that is constituted and dictated

by lifestyle choices available to consumers in the marketplace. It is clear, then, that the

196 ibid. 108

violence of language still enforces subjectivities and identities that are beneficial to disciplinary forms of power by co-opting terms or words to reduce and reshape their meanings to benefit an ideological systems. Like the norm that became a new kind of ideal that seemingly replaced the pre-nineteenth century ideal of biologically unobtainable divine bodies, diversity has maybe become a new norm in contemporary society that has reduced the capacity of the word "diversity" so that it does not signify a rich resource of (including the healthy and the sick or the able or the disabled) biological variety in a given human population.

The overall purpose of this thesis is to deconstruct the subject categories that still apply in the Information Age with the use of different and often oppositional terms that are linguistically constituted so that the normal becomes the ideal and also maybe the diverse becomes the less than diverse. The Cerrie Burnell event that presented itself as a demonstration of a cultural vernacular on an internet message board first, and a media discourse second, shows that the research question that is generated from Lennard

Davis's Enforcing Normalcy (that the concept of the normal and abnormal body is constructed as a subject category and maintained in discourse to benefit ideological systems of power) is unreservedly demonstrated and unveiled in public discourse. The discursive and material production of the human body is not just apparent within the theoretical domain with appropriate and available discourse and semiotic methodologies that are employed to deconstruct the Cerrie Burnell media event but also, essentially, in the consciousness of all human subjects. 109

This study is different from the more regular analysis of traditional media and cultural practises produced by major publications or broadcasters. This is because the single message board statement that proved to be so rich a discursive resource, which generated the mediated constitution of the abnormal body, is a comment from a seemingly inconsequential internet forum. In the new media ecology that provides ubiquitous online platforms for the dissemination of public information, which may not be intrinsically factual or even moderated, the mediated discourses that are open to criticism do not merely exist on the traditional organs anymore but now include online spaces that may seem not to have widespread public value (on face value). For an ephemeral online space or a now defunct internet message board associated with a select brand of television programming generated a national media event and not a publication or a broadcaster or even an institution. Therefore, legacy of the new Information Age is one that will develop a collective comprehension of norms on a wider media platform that includes comment pages, message boards and blogs as a form of public consciousness. As the Cerrie Burnell phenomenon demonstrates contemporary media discourses can include the common vernaculars and speech acts that are provided by anonymous internet users so that material that is not factual or moderated can now function as the social templates that create the news.

If the collective comprehension of normalcy (and the abnormal) was not apprehended as a commonsensical framework of cognition that ordered human society the original message board statement would not contain an agency shift and the media would not provide contradictory polysemic meanings that publicly convey one message 110

while at the same time suggesting another. For it is apparent that a plurality of dialectical meaning permeates within the individual human subjects (in this case an anonymous message board user) that makes them convey a socially unacceptable statement masked as a form of acceptable discourse and the subjectivities (produced by the media) that state it is not publicly acceptable to establish disability as an abnormality in discourse when it may be privately acceptable to internally conceive disability as an abnormality through the practise of sensationalizing that which may be understood as being unusual, and therefore abnormal.

The essential work that needs to be done, and not just theoretically, is to challenge the use of particular terms that seem to benefit an ideological system of norms so that the words like "normal" or "abnormal" are not taken for granted as being frames of reference that describe and realize human beings as being quite the opposite from what the words are traditionally supposed to mean. The fact that what constitutes the "normal" human subject is not the typical or usual experience of living in the human body over time and what is understood as the abnormal human subject is represented as a physical object that displays normal signs of mortality, fragility, damage and time, means that the normal and the abnormal have been reversed to signify the opposite to what and where the terms are traditionally applied. Furthermore, as the images of the disabled body in contemporary society have shown (the Cerrie Burnell event being one case in many that reveals the unresolved and troubled societal conception of the visually disabled body) that the body that is discursively and materially established as being disabled is also conceived of as being abnormal. Ill

In order to realistically deconstruct the normal and abnormal subject categories and their uses it is of social benefit to maintain that the normal and the abnormal signifies its opposite form in contemporary society. It is crucial articulate this oppositional communication as an egalitarian act to remind our social and mediated cultures of the essential contradiction at the heart of what we talk about when we talk about the body.

It is only because the abnormal body is in fact normal that the abnormally normal body has been created in its place to suppress the naturally occurring abnormal body that haunts human subjectivity. The "Other who precedes and possesses me, and through such

1 possession causes me to be" is the biologically determined mortal normal self comprehended by all human subjects but is appropriately conceived as an abnormality and thus disqualified from social and cultural life. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to contribute to a body of knowledge that maintains that the human body is discursively realised for ideological purposes and this thesis acts as another reminder (to add to the many) of the essential contradiction that is till upheld in the 21st century that establishes the normal and abnormal body as a subject and an object that delivers an oppositional meaning. Only by adding to the accumulative force of critically undermining what the normal and the next-to-normal mean in relation to the body (and how disability is conceived in society) can new forms of knowledge eventually replace the bodily norm, which subjugates the human population. Thus, by joining in with the chorus of critical disapproval this thesis contributes to a movement that may eventually deconstruct inadequate forms of communication for social benefit so that better ways of

197 Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. Columbia University Press (1982) p. 10. 112

communicating can one day be used in their place. When that time comes "the anyone else" that thinks (in the original agency shift statement) instead will become a public that collectively holds the real commonsense and logical belief that what is now conceived of as the abnormal body and the disabled body is in fact the real normal body or even the essential identity of all human subjects. 113

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