Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture.

• Author: Vedder, Julie
• Position: Book Review

Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture. Edited by James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001; pp. xiii + 270. $50.00; paper $25.00.

While reading at a campus coffee shop recently, I overheard the following conversation. Two undergraduates were comparing notes about professors with whom they had studied, and one noted, in a disbelieving voice, that one of her French instructors was actually from French-speaking Africa. "Oh, no," said the other. "I took the first half of my American history survey from a blind Ethiopian. Beat that." He went on to detail a combined contempt for this professor's instruction--after all, he couldn't use the overhead projector--and for his fellow students, who would often read the newspaper during class because the professor couldn't see them.

This exchange exemplifies the attitudes and problems Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture seeks to challenge. These include the association of disability with inability, the problem of authority for disabled (as well as raced) subjects, and the assumption that disability is an individual problem (a personal inability to use the overhead projector) rather than a systemic one (our reliance on visual methods of teaching, for instance). This collection of essays, edited by James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, aims to "evoke both familiar topoi [of rhetoric] and to complicate commonplace assumptions about subjectivity, education and culture" (x), partially to inform college instructors about disability in preparation for increasing numbers of disabled students (ix). Although set within a framework of postmodern rhetoric, which the editors define as "extend[ing] rhetorical analyses beyond an immediate text to investigate the interconnections of language and material practices" (3), the col lection is more explicitly about disability than about language. That said, this collection is an excellent addition to the field of Disability Studies precisely because it takes seriously the lessons of rhetoric, postmodern linguistic theory, and theories of resistance.

One of the strengths of this collection is its complicated assessment of and engagement with questions of authority, self-presentation, social expectation, and strategies of resistance within disability. Disability theory and activism has frequently seen itself caught between what seem to be incompatible goals: the desire to address...