“Cannibals All!”

This chapter argues that pro- and antislavery advocates mobilized disability rhetoric behind political discourse to garner support and deride opponents. John C. Calhoun, George Fitzhugh, and others constructed proslavery arguments based on benevolent masters’ supposed care of dependent, disabled bondpeople. Others absorbed medical discourses of black defectiveness, cited suspect U.S. Census records as evidence that freedom would lead to insanity and physical degeneration for blacks, and made disability central to their rationalizations of racial slavery and inequality. Abolitionists and fugitive slaves also deployed sentimentalized and often gendered disability rhetoric to underscore the brutalities of slavery. Their persistent reliance on constructing and sentimentalizing disability in their efforts to denounce slavery, however, left them and their audiences with a stigmatized view of race.

Archival Artistry: Exploring Disability Aesthetics in Late Twentieth Century Higher Education

Jay Dolmage’s (2014) Disability Rhetoric encourages scholars to search beyond normative Aristolean bounds of rhetoric and embrace a critical lens of rhetorical activity as embodied, and disability as an inalienable aspect of said embodiment (p. 289). To that end, this project posits an innovative structure for rhetorically (re)analyzing disability history in higher education through a framework of disability aesthetics. In Academic Ableism, Jay Dolmage (2017) argues that an institution’s aesthetic ideologies and architecture denote a rhetorical agenda of ableism. In Disability Aesthetics, Tobin Siebers (2010) asserts disability is a vital aspect of aesthetic interpretation. Both works determine that disability has always held a crucial, critical role in the production and consumption of aestheticism, as it invites able-bodied individuals to consider the dynamic, nonnormative instantiations of the human body as a social, civic issue (p. 2). Disability, therefore, has the power to reinvigorate the sociorhetorical impact of both aesthetic representation and the human experience writ large. With this framework in mind, this project arranges an archival historiography of disability history in higher education in the late twentieth century at a mid-sized U.S. state institution. During this time, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act was finally signed into law, and universities confronted a legal demand to allow all students access. Ultimately, this project seeks to demonstrate how disability scholars and historiographers can widen the view of both disability history and disability rhetoric in higher education through a focus on student aesthetic performance and intervention.

Movements and Autopathographies

No abstract available.CorrigendumCorrection of: https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v40i1.7470The authors of the editorial introduction entitled "Rhetorical and Reviewing Acts of Transformation and Cunning (on a cloudy day)" [Disability Studies Quarterly Vol. 40, No. 1, 2020] incorrectly cited the publisher for Jay Dolmage's Disability Rhetoric. The correct publisher should read: Syracuse UP. The correction notice is published in Disability Studies Quarterly Vol. 40, No. 2, 2020, https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v40i2.7638.

Performing a Metis Pedagogy in the Rhetoric and Writing Studies Classroom

Scholars in the field of disability rhetoric (e.g. Dolmage; Price; Vidali) have long called for the denormalization of traditional approaches to the teaching of rhetoric and composition. Such approaches historically characterize rhetoric as disembodied and ask students to compose straight, linear, alphabetic texts which privilege meaning-making through written discourse and remain inaccessible to diverse users and audiences. As a response, this article recounts how I applied the concept of metis—double, divergent, crooked—as a theoretical framework for a special topics course "Disability, Rhetoric, and the Body," and as an alternative pedagogical approach to the teaching of rhetoric and composition. More specifically, this article explores the connection between my own metis-work as a teacher-scholar and my students' performance of metis through multimodal composing and analysis. As a result, the rhetoric and composition classroom becomes a non-normative space where difference is not only valued, but celebrated.

Demonstrable Disability

This essay is about how disability rhetoric functions in early modern plays beyond the visible difference of disabled characters. In a medium that makes meaning out of bodies, disability rhetoric registers how much the language of disqualification can only succeed without the human form of the actor. Disability epithets define other bodies on the stage as whole and unmarked by negation, or, by contrast, have the effect of unsettling the scrutiny of the bodies that are onstage. Attention to disability rhetoric thus offers an instructive study because it succinctly outlines the concepts that ossify into, and serve to naturalize, negative images of early modern disability.

“Hopefully I Won’t Be Misunderstood.” Disability Rhetoric in Jürg Acklin’s Vertrauen ist gut

This essay brings together the fields of German literature, disability studies, and rhetoric in an analysis of the rhetorical strategies and representational implications of disability in Jürg Acklin’s 2009 novel Vertrauen ist gut. Resting on the theory of complex embodiment, the analysis considers the rhetoric of anmut as a literary strategy that invites readers to share imperfect, yet profound, embodied rhetorical connections with the protagonist without rendering invisible the differences that shape embodied experience. Although the characters in Vertrauen ist gut are fictional, this novel provides important insights regarding experiences of precarious embodiment and affirms the value of interdependence while challenging ideals of autonomy and independence. Furthermore, the novel’s narrative within a narrative—and the consequences of the narrator’s interpretation of their significance—challenges readers to use caution when interpreting literary narratives, as their relationship to personal narratives may not always be straightforward.