When and Where is My Body Normal? Thursday Seminar with Minae Inahara

The title for the seminar is "When and Where Is My Body Normal?: A Topographic Analysis of the Able-bodied World", and Minae Inahara aims at exploring the theoretical frameworks developed by Judith Butler and Elizabeth Grosz, with particular reference to the female body, and in relation to the disabled body. The seminar is held today in the Centre's lunch room between 14.00-15.45.

Minae Inahara is Ph.D. at the Centre for Research into Embodied Subjectivity, Department of Humanities at University of Hull, and currently guest researcher at the Centre for Gender Research. She will also be helding presentations at the Centre's two upcoming symposiums Bodies Knowing Bodies: Interrogating Embodied Knowledges on November 17-18, and Dist-Urbances: Embodying, Voicing, Challenging Comfort, Safety and Trust in Land- and Waterscapes of TechnoScience (Länk borttagen)  on November 22-24.

Abstract

This paper will explore two theoretical frameworks, which each posit the specific set of relationships between the body and the social space ? those developed by Judith Butler and Elizabeth Grosz, with particular reference to the female body.  Both Butler and Grosz see the body as at least partially structured via social norms and both see such structuring as less than determining, allowing possibilities for restructuring.  However, they do this in different ways.  For Butler, the openness is a consequence of the necessary indeterminateness and the openness of the workings of language.  For Grosz, the openness comes from a Deleuzian conception of materiality as such; a conception in which material entities are contingent comings together of underlying forces.  Such combinations are always unstable and are always open to recombination in different ways.

This paper will demonstrate that the disabled body is also socially constructed.  Its apparent origin in biology or medicine is not opposed to its location within socio-culture.  The medicalisation of the body, as an account of bodily reality, and a bodily-based identity, is inherently social and has no anchorage outside of socio-culture.  To be characterised as disabled is to be imperfect and abnormal, and thus subject to socio-cultural inscription.

In this paper, I shall argue that the body theorised by Butler and Grosz is the able body.  These thinkers are not providing an account of disabled bodies but of able female bodies.  I shall then turn to the embodied experiences unique to disabled people ? spasm, pain, limping, speech problems, paralysis.  My exploration of the disabled experience lays the groundwork for developing theories of embodiment, which have their origin in disabled bodies, rather than merely rectifying the defective models of such feminist theorists.

Read more about our Thursday Seminars (Länk borttagen)