Blue wrote a post about Andrea Dworkin’s description of her disability, and commenters are taking her to task for it over at Alas.
Dworkin had nothing remotely “apocalyptic” to say about disability. If she’d lived another 20 years that may or may not have changed. Her last piece of writing is not at all political despite its mention of the ADA — because her mention of the ADA was completely uncritical. It’s just a personal piece, quintessentially Dworkin, really. And the sad truth is that any newly disabled person (or newly accepting of the identity) is not ever speaking politically about disability rights unless they say they are, celebrity or not.
I think that there are good reasons for the critique. If Andrea Dworkin had, say, written in such a way as to confuse impairment with disability, and fit both into ideas about misogyny and its tendency to immobilize women, Blue would be right to point out that the narrative might contribute to ableist ideas about the human body. I’m not sure that this is different.
Andrea Dworkin did not write personally, exactly–she was a political figure with a long history of activist writing. Throughout her life, she used her experiences as frames for her analyses. It is therefore not improper to read her work as political, or as being received in a political spirit. This work will be read as part of Andrea Dworkin’s radical-feminist oeuvre; if it fails to really look at disability through the lens of radical feminism, then it makes sense to point that out.
Some commenters make the point that Andrea Dworkin was at a particular point in her disability trajectory when she died. Had she survived a few more years, let alone a few more decades, she might well have interpreted her experience and position in radically different ways. I agree with this, and believe that Dworkin of all people would not have remained apolitical or simplistic about any issue for very long.
Unfortunately, she did not survive to write that update. She did not live to add another dimension to this experience. People with disabilities, feminist or not, will likely recognize Dworkin’s essays as capturing a specific response to a specific interval. People without disabilities will be less likely either to see the context or to understand some of the political problems Blue brings up.
Blue has a good reason to add the perspective of someone who has lived with a disability for a long time and in different circumstances. She is not saying that Dworkin wasn’t under a great deal of stress, or that she didn’t have good reasons for the reactions she recorded. She isn’t calling Dworkin a Bad Crip, or a bad feminist. She’s not blaming Dworkin for her response to pain and suffering, or to debilitating illness. Rather, she is looking at the words Dworkin wrote, which survived her. She’s saying that they were disappointing as an analysis of disability.
There are disability-specific reasons to complain about Dworkin’s narrative, or so Blue believes. Dworkin had every right to describe her experience as she perceives it, but Blue is not being irresponsible when she points out that parts of it fit neatly into frames that hurt disabled people. This, for example:
I agree that the operation seems “barbaric” and thinking about it gives me the willies, but I dislike how Dworkin makes these personal experiences of a common procedure out to be extraordinary. All serious surgeries cause pain, and heavy-duty painkillers do cause hallucinations. I violently beat up a sock puppet in one fentanyl-induced hallucination last November for reasons I can’t explain. After back surgery at age 16, I imagined my hospital bed was in a basement hallway and I’d been abandoned there. It took repeated reassurances from nurses and my hospital roommate to convince me I was safe and stop me from hollering for help. My grandmother saw spiders all over the walls once. These hallucinations are normal, though as individual as dreams, and are not proof of anyone’s suffering or victimization.
Dworkin’s suffering should never be minimized, least of all by Dworkin herself. However, presenting surgeries as barbaric and extreme–or mutilating, or bizarre, or monstrous–has ableist implications. Not only does it obscure the very real benefit that people obtain from them, it makes their post-surgery bodies less natural, less normal.
Brooklynite pointed out another problem with Dworkin’s essay: that she represents herself-the-disabled-women as without assistance or protection, but does not quite investigate the dimensions of that absence. Again, this is only natural; the pain is your starting point, not the subtext. A disabled person will probably color in the blank spaces with an understanding of ableism–and will probably have some ideas as to how those problems can be ameliorated. How might her friends have treated her? What would a support network look like? What options would I have in her situation, and how have I dealt with similar situations in the past? Someone ignorant of disability might not make that connection, and might ascribe Dworkin’s abject vulnerability to something inherent in impairment. The belief that impairment is inherently disabling is a misconception disability-rights activists have struggled against for years. Blue is right to be irritated that it isn’t aired out here.
The thread started discussing Dworkin’s mental health and its potential impact on her writing. I’ll just repost a comment from antiprincess’ blog, on the thread to her post about the propriety of doing so:
And, you know, her whole point is rememory and post-traumatic feminism. Her thesis is that misogyny and misogynist violence reverberates through a woman’s life–and that the threat of it sends shock waves through all women’s lives. By her logic, her perspective is specially valuable and valid because she is a survivor of misogynist violence and because she shares that vulnerability with other women. Objectivity is distance is insulation. So to turn that around and say that stress has cracked her reality open and twisted it in knots–which, again, not what you were doing–must seem especially insidious to someone familiar with Dworkin and her work. IOW, “her mental illness could be an important factor” is a very ambiguous statement not just because of traditional conflation of “mentally ill” and “untrustworthy” but because of a traditional disjunct between intimate knowledge and deep insight.
I think that this might have something to do with the disjunct. I’m sure other readers will have other responses, but for me, Dworkin’s point was about the indisputable concrete reality of pain. Pain was the place she started from, and her writing details the many ways in which the society that brought her up ignored it and taught her to ignore it. She’s fighting a dominant narrative that conflates objectivity with distance and , and dismisses her as overwrought, fatalistic, “apocalyptic,” hysterical. Even looking at my own comments, I can see how injudicious “post-traumatic feminism” was: it sounds pejorative even though my intent was only to describe her understanding of the scope of injury, not to call her irrational.
Blue seems to be coming from a slightly different angle, one that is perhaps more informed by traditional stereotypes of disability. While disabled people have not been listened to either, or allowed to speak honestly about their anger and frustration, pain in their lives has been conceived of in different ways. Suffering has traditionally been seen as a defining part of disabled lives–in fact, disabled people were not considered to have real lives because of their suffering. Dworkin was fighting the tendency to ignore pain, but Blue is fighting the tendency to assume it.