FDR's Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability.

• Author: Blair, Diane M.
• Position: Book Review

FDR's Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability. By Davis W. Houck and Amos Kiewe. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2003; pp. xi + 138. $32.95.

Not only did bodies tend to indicate a world beyond themselves, but this movement beyond their own boundaries, a movement of boundary itself, appeared to be quite central to what bodies "are." Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (ix)

Davis W. Houck and Amos Kiewe begin their book, FDR's Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability with the assumption that bodies play a "fundamental role" in "transactions of influence" (xi). They argue that their study reveals that "cultures invest bodily conditions with meaning and in so doing can valorize or admonish appropriately" (5). To understand disability as a construction is not to deny the material reality of a physical impairment, but it does affirm that bodily conditions are defined and negotiated as "disabling" by a culture. At the same time, the rhetorically constructed meanings at a given moment can have very real material consequences for those labeled "disabled." In addition, our understandings of disability are never fixed or stable, and bodies can be "terribly important rhetorical resources" when it comes to shaping our understandings of ability and disability (6). It is the discursive construction of a condition as disabling that comes front and center in their analysis of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's campaign for the White House.

Houck and Kiewe present a principal case study that illustrates just how much bodies matter. In fact, they argue that, "Presidential bodies matter most of all" (xi). According to Houck and Kiewe, "the material condition of Roosevelt's body was much less consequential to his political life than the public's understanding of what his disability meant" (10). The authors trace Roosevelt and his campaign team as they strategically respond to the issue of his disability in presidential electoral politics. Roosevelt's disability is treated as a rhetorical obstacle to his electability (given the narrow cultural definition of which bodies can be seen as presidential). The authors present a well-researched, compelling, chronological account of Roosevelt's strategic responses to keep him politically viable after the onset of infantile paralysis due to polio. Roosevelt's rhetorical strategies included careful concealments and silences as well as the use of both verbal and visual rhetoric to overcome the "whispering campaign"...