Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (480 page)

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Copyright © 1989 by Lois McMaster Bujold

The term
disability
suggests that a person can be defined as either “normally abled” or “disabled,” a perfunctory definition that, while helping us categorize the complex world we live in, is nevertheless a fallacy. And what a strange logic to rely upon, especially given our creativity and adaptability, and especially considering our clear lack of understanding of what “normal” really means. Consider, for example, the athlete who runs in marathons on prosthetics: Should he rightly be classified as “disabled”? Or perhaps he is “enhanced”? “Disabled athletes” compete in different arenas to ensure fairness and equality. Similarly, “enhanced athletes”—those who use steroids, for example—would be disqualified from competition to ensure equality and fair play. Who, then, is more fully “human”—more “normal”? Are we looking to classify based on the idea of purity? If so, why? Won’t reliance on outmoded notions of human purity limit us, especially if we explore worlds beyond ours? Where should we draw the line? Indeed, should a line be drawn at all? Disability Studies explores this boundary in terms of science, ethics, sociology, psychology, and philosophy; science fiction affords us an opportunity to explore the consequences of what will become arbitrary definitions of “normal” and “human.” In Lois McMaster Bujold’s
Paladin of Souls
the inferior body is a trap or prison for the soul; in John Varley’s “The Persistence of Vision” we see an alternative to the faulty logic of purity and impurity; we bear witness to a more fluid idea of what it means to be human as we watch the metamorphoses of Jodahs in Octavia Butler’s Imago; we see difference, even though it can’t literally be seen, and the processes of enforcing normalcy, in the cyborgs of Maureen McHugh’s “Nekropolis” and Robert Heinlein’s Friday. These examples point toward the unreliability of vision and an increasing awareness of the dis-utility of the body—schemas that have heretofore occupied a privileged place in our toolkit for creating identity.

So how do humans enforce ideas about “normalcy” in their cultures? We rely predominantly on sight—on visual markers—to categorize ourselves in a set of relational differences from other entities out there. The purer we are as humans, the more we differentiate ourselves from those other entities. We
see
Frankenstein’s monster as different—measurably different from a pure vision of what a human should look like. Similarly, tourists went to
see
difference in the freak shows in the early decades of the 1900s. By making these people “spectacles” and locating them as the Other through the act of gazing upon them, we defined difference as something physical, failing to “see” the characteristics that made them human.

In a study of freak shows, literary theorist Rosemarie Garland Thomson argues that the “disabled body transgresses individualism’s codes of work and autonomy by enacting patterns that differ from the norm,” thereby “threaten[ing] to disrupt the ritualized behavior upon which social relations turn.” These bodies “seem dangerous because they are perceived as out of control” (Thomson 37). Freud suggested in his essay on “The Exceptions” that “‘deformities of character’ are the results of physical disability.” This idea, shocking though it may seem, stems from the feudal concern for efficiency and the work of the body to keep a community alive; in the seventeenth century we became so concerned about “normal” functioning of the body relative to labor that we “confined beggars, the poor, and the idle in hospitals. [According to Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization,] these hospitals were, however, not medical facilities but poorhouses, institutions established by the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie to segregate, assist, and punish a great ‘undifferentiated mass’ of economically unproductive people” (Thomson 39). Thus, the economically powerful were granted the privilege of defining who was “Other”—able or unable to be economically productive.

These Others could become economically productive by staging their bodies as commodities in freak shows, a form of entertainment that played on our fascination with the visually monstrous that flourished in the United States between 1840 and 1940. Our fascination with the monstrous is predicated on visual markers; indeed, the “Latin word
monstra
, ‘monster,’ also means ‘sign’ and forms the root of our word demonstrate, meaning ‘to show’ (Thomson 56). Displayed on “elevated platforms” or in “pits,” the “freaks” held “the observer’s gaze like a magnet, not only foregrounding the body on display, but exposing it in such a way that the physical traits presented as extraordinary dominated the entire person on exhibit” (Thomson 60-61). In other words, a body that displayed difference in any way was labeled as Other and dis-abled in a variety of ways, whether that body was literally disabled or not. The Hairy Woman, for example, would not be considered “disabled” in contemporary culture, yet she was presented as an Other in the freak show. At the same time, the act of gazing upon an Other and enforcing the Other’s difference also enforced the spectator’s “normalcy.” While this gives the onlooker a sense of power, it also enslaves the onlooker to his or her own body.

The normally-abled often misperceive the “disabled” body as a trap, a metaphor used in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Hugo and Nebula award winning fantasy novel
Paladin of Souls
. This novel directly addresses both the power and limits of the gaze, along with the power and limits of the body. The act of seeing in this novel is the purview of the gifted and socially powerful. On the one hand, those touched by Gods are granted a kind of second sight so as to ascertain the purity of souls. On the other hand, the socially powerful use their gaze more traditionally, as a method of control and enforcement of order. The protagonist, Ista, is both God-touched and ruler: while she travels on a pilgrimage her gaze as a ruler is reshaped by the Gods to the point that she is known first as saint and then as ruler. Her powerful gaze allows her to see not only the purity of souls but also the demons that seek to corrupt both soul and body. Furthermore, the Gods have gifted her with the ability to control the demons through her second sight. We learn in Chapter 3’s creation story that this dual vision engenders the idea that the body is a trap. The World-Soul had to “split in two, that it might so perceive itself” and beget life—thus the act of seeing creates but also controls (41). We also learn that spirits yearn for the paradox of the body which gives them life but imprisons them: demons, by definition soulless, seek out bodies so as to “gain a soul”; in so doing, they also gain a self-awareness that they are “trapped in the horror of [the] self” (42). Ista works to bring peace to these spirits, which can only be achieved through the transcendence of the trap of the body, uniting with the Mother god and gaining “agency over both spirit and matter” (43). In our culture, identity stems from agency; in this case, however, agency demands that one must free oneself of the limits of the body.

Those in the deaf community articulate a similar stance: when ability is understood outside of the limits that a body imposes, the label “disabled” becomes moot. In deaf culture, disability in fact engenders “abilities,” even “enhancements,” that many in the “hearing” community fail to even recognize. John Varley’s short science fiction story “The Persistence of Vision,” which won the Hugo award in 1979, describes the story of a normally-abled drop out who wanders into the society of Keller, organized around the abilities (rather than the disabilities) of the deaf and blind. A nuclear accident renders a whole generation of infants “disabled” by “normal” standards and denied the rights of “normal” people. In fact, these mutants are feared and ghettoized; thus the gaze of the observer enforces their isolation and violation of human rights. Yet the story focuses on the reorganization of a society around a schema not situated in perception. The “normally” functioning narrator learns the extent of the limitations that we create for ourselves when we rely so heavily on vision to organize our world. In his dystopian world, cities have become sites of violence and alienation, rendering communication useless and collaboration obsolete. In the process of learning how to be in this place that does not rely on sight, the narrator reconceptualizes himself and his assumptions, first by recognizing how “handicapped” he is—“illiterate” is so many ways (295). He understands the community of Keller very differently from old notions of cities and how to live: he describes Keller as “an organism” whose strength came from the inhabitants’ ever evolving form of “communication” (296)—a kind of communication that transcends the limits of speech and biases of the body, particularly the eyes, and relies instead on multiple dialects of touching, “handtalk” (sign language), and “bodytalk” (293). Instead of defining people by what they wore or how they looked, or even by defining people through names (294), this culture recognized the worth of each person’s abilities and, because their culture depended on collaboration, they recognized problems early and dealt with them collaboratively. Ultimately, they transcended the limitations of the body altogether; when the narrator returns years later he finds most of the community has simply disappeared. They had spent years engaging in a form of communication that the narrator could not translate and that the reader knows only as “***ing.” This “is the gift whereby one can expand oneself from the eternal quiet and dark into something else”—something beyond the human (295).

The alternate literacies described by Varley and Bujold transcend the body, echoing feminist theorist Donna Haraway’s insistence that the revisioning of the body’s limits—our reunderstanding of what makes us human—will demand new modes of communication. In the “Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway addresses the limits that our language places upon us and suggests that our contemporary world is a world of “transgressed boundaries”—a world of the “cyborg”—in which we need to reimagine our human story. Our stories should not look back to mourn the loss of purity; rather, they should seize tools to help us expand our notion of human identity (175). For Haraway, to be “cyborg” is to be “resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity”—to embrace “ambiguity” and reject the dichotomies that reliance on sight imprisons us within (154). Our focus in terms of identity construction should not be on keeping the integrity of the body but on creating rates of flow across body boundaries (163). In other words, to be cyborg is to be monstrous—those same identities that were seen as Other in the freak shows of a visually centered world.

The revisioning of the body and a reconsideration of what defines our humanness stemmed from the experience of veterans of World War I and victims of industrial accidents who encouraged the passing of the vocational rehabilitation acts of the 1920s; however the biggest leap in our perception of disability came with the civil rights movement when, as a culture, we reconsidered the utility of visual-only markers such as color. Despite these gains, it wasn’t until 1973 that the civil rights of people with disabilities were protected by law. Those with mental health disabilities were not accorded their due legal rights until 1986. T
he Americans with Disabilities Act was passed on July 26, 1990 and was last amended on September 25, 2008.
Essentially, we failed to recognize or see people with disabilities as worthy of “normal” rights, in some cases up until two years ago! In all of these stories, the creation of an identity depends on a sense of agency perceived by other agents—other creatures grant another creature the status of an identity, or can deny a person an identity based on visual markers. An identity does not emerge in isolation but the system privileges the granting agent who is understood to be “normal.” But what happens when the grantor is not human? Or what happens when the act of conferring an identity no longer really matters?

Science fiction gives us numerous examples of agents whose bodies are neither human nor fixed. For example, Octavia Butler’s
Xenogenesis
trilogy (now retitled as
Lilith’s Blood
) addresses the repercussions of nuclear holocaust and the genetic survival of the human race. The survival of humans depends on their genetic integration with the alien Oankali through the ooloi—a creature of Oankali origin that engages with both the humans and Oankali, manipulating the genes to create the diversity required to maintain both species. The ooloi can both create and destroy: their touch disrupts genetic patterns. Despite their revulsion, the Oankali, who view humans as monstrous, need the humans who have survived the holocaust to help diversify the Oankali gene pool. The hybrid children are plagued by fears that the violence encoded in human genes might break through at any moment, but the quest for purity of form is clearly defined as a dead-end—in this case the pure Oankali and pure humans are both sterile.

In contrast, the hybrid children might metamorphose at puberty to become ooloi. The third story in the trilogy,
Imago
, describes one of Lilith’s children, Jodahs, as he undergoes this transformation. Desperate to be recognized as an agent by something, Jodahs changes shape depending on the weather or his surroundings, seeking some kind of context and communion. Like Varley’s “Persistence of Vision,” this story emphasizes the necessity of collaboration in the creation of agency rather than relying on the act of observation. Imago, however, suggests that our reliance on the visual and physical-subject-centered understandings of community may not always be applicable.

Posthumanists such as Niklas Luhmann and Cary Wolfe argue that “the fundamental elements of social systems are not people” who observe, but rather “communications” (Wolfe 115). In this sense, their ideas are closely related to systems theory. Communications systems rely on diversity, in terms of physical attributes and capabilities, mental cognizance, and subject contexts. Indeed, posthumanists argue that how we understand communities and identity must stem not from agency—what some thing is able to do—but from “passivity” resulting from compassion—“the non-power at the heart of power” as Derrida puts it” (Wolfe 141). This is the “sense of…mortality and vulnerability that we share” with other humans and even with animals (Wolfe 74).

In other words, agency and observation are violent, resulting in dichotomous relationships. Systems that create identity through an emphasis on communication instead ask entities to be aware of characteristics that do not engage in power struggles, such as an awareness of our shared vulnerability. Wolfe quotes Derrida’s ending of
Memoirs of the Blind
: “The blindness that opens the eye is not one that darkens vision. The revelatory or apocalyptic blindness, the blindness that reveals the very truth of the eyes, would be the gaze veiled by tears (Derrida 126–127, Wolfe 142).”