'Disability' - the unwelcome ghost at the Banquet... and the conspiracy of 'Normality'

Abstract

This article critiques the analysis of the comic and the tragic in disability discourse and the text by Ian Stronach and Julie Allan, using the work of Mikhail Bakhtin on the theory of the novel, of language and of speech genres. Taking Bakhtin's notion that to speak or to write is always essentially dialogic, the article introduces particular dimensions of audience, disability, feminism and poststructuralism in an attempt to explore the social organization of disability discourse and to move beyond the artifice of the text's stasis. It argues that unless critical theory is matched with critical response, institutionalized inequality demands that the authority of an individualized 'disability' text written by non-disabled authors remains intact - even when it is accompanied by an undermining discussion of itself. The text is commonly decontextualized and remote, and the role of the disable reader, especially their role as audience, is reduced to a 'simple' one - a vessel into which the authors' authority is poured. This represents a particular kind of audience experience that maximizes the distance between the reader and the text's performance and, in the case of Stronach and Allan's work, ultimately destabilizes their arguments. © 1999 SAGE Publications.