Disability Studies interests me for two related reasons: First off, there is a kind of large-scale pop culture awareness of a myriad of serious physical/mental disabilities, as displayed for wide audiences in fiction and nonfiction, television and film, and yet, secondly, there seems to be a disparity in the proliferation of representations of various disabilities and popular (mis)understanding of how disability is constructed and propagated. This seems crucial to understanding the Self, as D. Studies seeks to do away with the “normate” us versus the “damaged” or “different” them. The history of disabled representations in culture shows the disabled as abject, outside, villainous, monstrous, or at home only in freak show; the value of these representations being varied but generally amounting to something like “aren’t you glad you ain’t them?” But if we’re reading Garland-Thompson and her definition of the “normate”, which takes on a socio-economical context as well as relying on a model sound body/mind, it becomes clear that, like the nuclear family, the popular conception of the normate is an historically impossible standard that no one truly fits. Instead, various stigmas form hierarchies of abled or disabled bodies that rely on such qualifiers as race, age, sex, status, health, attractiveness, and more. And yet the disabled figure, in all his/her forms, comes to be expressed in one of two different characters – the character for whom disability is the defining characteristic, action, or quality, and who generally follows a kind of dis-normative arc similar to Matt’s conception of a homonarrative, or a token disabled character in a story otherwise populated with “normal” characters who is meant to teach the “normal” characters and, by extension, the “normal” audience, a lesson. These character archetypes play such a dominant role in our understanding of ourselves and difference that it’s hard to move away from, as opinions and expectations in class would seem to suggest. How do we talk about physical or mental disability when we do not understand it, or when or experiences are radically different? (parenthetical sidebar, would Damasio rely on the ever-important binary of “physical/mental” when referring to disability? Or would the placement of mental disabilities in the region of consciousness, and therefore the brain, make them akin to physical disabilities? Again, to what extent does social or emotional trauma impact Damasio’s sense of the brain and consciousness?)

So it’s fitting that Hornstein’s book researches the various organizations committed to building and assisting the Hearing Voices community. Obviously, community is an important quality to the spread of understanding a traditionally ostracizing, stigmatizing condition. Although she (and many other writers we’ve read so far, I’ve noted) strays from using the term “empathy”, the success of the Hearing Voices community hinges on the possibility of a shared experience – a deeper level of camaraderie and connection than the characteristically cold, detached, “normate” status-quo-enforcing medical-pharmaceutical industry (exaggeration for dramatic effect) achieves. And while I wonder about how potentially divisive the formation of differing camps of shared experiences that cannot have an easy cross-over can be, it is obviously helpful, as evidenced in Hornstein’s numerous examples and the TED talk with Eleanor Longden. We discussed how mainstreaming functional examples of people with various diseases (a term they wouldn’t approve of) lessens the significance of people who are really suffering (again, this is tricky), I think the spreading of their stories and the methods that help them achieve this level of functionality can possibly prevent the variegated forces that can result in the less-functional cases of greater extremes from happening in the first place. As these real-life examples become more relevant to a pop-consciousness – similar to the spread of TED talks – the stigmatized, generic, standard forms for disabled representation will have less a grip upon collective imaginations. I’ve made note of a problem with TED talks before, as their easily-digestible messages become widely misinterpreted and misapplied, and while this same thing happens with more palatable depictions of people with disabilities, I think the acceptable-ness of the various examples of people living with Heard Voices (for example) is derived from their ability to cope, and this ability instilled through a nonconventional, possible-fringe method that could benefit from a wider audience.

One way in which this happens is with a shift in vocabulary. Hornstein notes how doctors and nurses and other facilitators involved with these various groups spend a lot of effort in changing the terms typically used when discussing disability, including doing away with such labels as “victim” and “sufferer”  and other diagnoses altogether, and Hornstein maps the importance of this move. I think we had, at some point in this class, discussed the vagueness of language, especially in the sciences, but here we see that a high level of specificity is achievable and actually conducive to a better understanding of experience. The point of Disabilities Studies, in some kind of utopian future, is after all to actually undo itself, as greater connectivity and understanding actually spell the end of the concept of “disability”. Also, I think that’s pretty much the goal of the X-Men comics since their inception, and while I won’t wast anybody’s time going on and on about comic book mutants, I’d argue the X-men are a pretty reputable pop culture conduit for positive understandings of stigma and disability that doesn’t, necessarily, conform to my above-outlined disabled character types… But maybe not, ’tis just my admittedly biased opinion.