In Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, Rosemarie Garland Thomson works to “alter the terms and expand our understanding of the cultural construction of bodies and identity by reframing ‘disability’ as another culture-bound, physically justified difference to consider along with race, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality” (pg. 5). Her work therefore builds upon the ideas of Michel Foucault and demonstrates in practice the materiality about which Judith Butler hypothesized in Bodies That Matter. For a working definition of disability, Thomson writes, “Disability, then, is the attribution of corporeal deviance – not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do” (pg. 6). Thomson applies her analysis to three subjects: the freak show, romantic fiction of the nineteenth century, and the work of black women writers in the twentieth century.
Focusing on the freak show, Thomson writes, “The freak show is a spectacle, a cultural performance that gives primacy to visual apprehension in creating symbolic codes and institutionalizes the relationship between the spectacle and the spectators. In freak shows, the exhibited body became a text written in boldface to be deciphered according to the needs and desires of the onlookers” (pg. 60). The people on display reaffirmed “normal” by demonstrating its opposite. Thomson writes of Joice Heth, a performer in P.T. Barnum’s act, “She becomes a freak not by virtue of her body’s uniqueness, but rather by displaying the stigmata of social devaluation. Indeed, Joice Heth is the direct antithesis of the able-bodied, white, male figure upon which the developing notion of the American normate was predicated” (pg. 59). Similarly, romantic fiction demonstrated the intersectional nature of gender and disability. Thomson argues, “Benevolent maternalism not only restates the terms of liberal individualism, but also, by moving from sympathetic identification with the disabled figures to a distancing repudiation of them, ultimately dramatizes individualism’s most vexing internal contradictions” (pg. 82). Accordingly, “despite the desire to construct a rhetorical model of socially valued feminine selfhood, these novels could only modify the available, dominant script of the masculine liberal self, bending it toward the other-directedness and self-denial mandated by the female domestic role” (pg. 101). The novels confirmed the very beliefs they attempted to alter. Finally, Thomson writes, “If the cultural work of nineteenth-century benevolent maternalism is introducing the body into politicized literary discourse, that work is continued by several twentieth-century African-American women writers who also used disabled figures in strategies of empowerment that recast benevolent maternalism’s positive version of womanhood” (pg. 103). According to Thomson, the extraordinary bodies in the authors’ work “demand accommodation, resist assimilation, and challenge the dominant norms that would efface distinctions such as racial, gender, and sexual differences and the marks of experience” (pg. 130). These novels fully demonstrate the analytical model of Thomson’s work. Thomson concludes, “The rhetorical thrust of this book, then, is to critique the politics of appearance that governs our interpretation of physical difference, to suggest that disability requires accommodation rather than compensation, and to shift our conception of disability from pathology to identity” (pg. 137). In that respect, she more than succeeds. ( )