I am a writer on disability issues and a polio quadriplegic, since 1952. I congratulate you on your Salon piece. SDSers seem to be ever more off their nut. A Not Dead Yet official said recently he would not rest until newspapers carried the truth in their headlines, "Society hates the disabled." This is a society that spends billions of dollars each year in the care, housing, education and job placement of disabled people. A society that in my lifetime has remade the environment to be accessible to people with disabilities. A society that has given overwhelming support to the most sweeping civil rights law in our history, the Americans with Disability Act.

The dirty truth is that far from society hating disabled people, it is these disabled people (or at least the more vocal) who hate society, hate the able-bodied. Their firmly held belief that doctors and politicians are out to destroy them is paranoid and speaks of low self-esteem.

As one of the founders of the disability rights movement, I am afraid today's leaders have shrilly distorted and obscured the core purpose of the movement -- to obtain the full and equal civil rights for people with disabilities. In so doing the are driving away the supporters of the movement and they are marginalizing themselves in the national political discourse.

The Rap Browns and "Burn baby burn" brought down the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s. I am afraid there are those in SDS who are doing much the same thing. Too bad.

-- Hugh Gallagher
Author, "FDR's Splendid Deception"

What's missed in Vincent's article on disability studies is that the discipline's goal is not to produce more disabled bodies or to hinder scientific research, but to examine the goals of those who are trying to stop disability.

What's needed is acceptance of the disabled, not a constant desire to "fix" those who aren't "normal." This manifests itself in many ways -- from Janet Reno refusing to resort to clutching a pen to make the rest of us feel "comfortable" as she battles Parkinson's disease to those who decide that they'd rather be in a wheelchair than spending hours each day learning how to walk. Disability studies can be empowering, allowing individuals (and not a doctor or a government agency) to decide what's normal for them. Vincent's assertion that SDS can not be "group therapy" shows that she does not realize the real goal of SDS.

-- Martin Johnson

I've looked with horror at the growing disability rights movement over the past several years, because I could see that it was heading in the foolish directions that you so ably described in your Salon article. I certainly never want to be part of a crowd that is running in the direction of self-delusion.

I was born with spina bifida, with a variety of problems (orthopedic and urological) and believe me, I would be exceptionally happy to have it all fixed. The idea that I'm somehow superior to those poor, benighted able-bodied people who can walk without pain, and who don't get to spend too much of their time in the company of doctors is simply ludicrous.

For a while, I was active on a spina bifida mailing list. I unsubscribed, though, because there were too many people who thought that when I stated that I'd like to be able-bodied, it was somehow an attack on them. And you should have seen the uproar when I suggested that parents who knew (through amniocentesis or other prenatal care) that their unborn children would have severe disabilities, and had the kids anyway, were committing an act I considered to be unwise and unethical.

-- Tom Negrino

Norah Vincent, in what I took to be the heart of her argument in "Enabling Disabled Scholarship," writes that "it's hard to deny that something called normalcy exists. The human body is a machine, after all ... How then can we make the case that blind eyes, or deaf ears, or mute tongues are serving the purpose for which they evolved?"

If this is science, it's science with an almost Kansan misunderstanding of evolution. Eyes, ears, and tongues did not evolve for seeing, hearing, and speaking; they just happened to work well for those purposes and stuck around. Preferring sight to blindness is not eugenics, but defending that preference on evolutionary grounds is.

I assume by "normalcy" that Vincent meant "normality," but the slip is illuminating. Normalcy is a conservative, culturally accepted, hegemonic assumption of the way the world should be. And yes, normalcy exists; it's exactly what disability scholars are trying to fight. The human body may be a machine, but humans are the ones who decide to what purpose to put that machine. Such normative questions should always be open for debate, and it is hard to understand why anyone would begrudge disabled scholars the right to theorize their own bodies. However peculiar disability studies is (for example, its intellectual success seems to me to depend, like much postmodern theory, on its continued political failure) it cannot be accused of being "anti-intellectual."

-- Jared Bjornholm

As a successful person with a disability, I found Norah Vincent's article to be ignorant and offensive on numerous levels. I am flabbergasted, however, by the audacity of this quote: "SDS theory is also self-contradictory ... How can we say that Western culture has demonized, oppressed or ignored the disabled, and then turn around and claim that many of the great works of Western culture were created by illustrious disabled people whose disabilities deeply influenced their work?"

Would anyone be taken seriously if they said the same thing about African-Americans, women or gays? The fact that James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde made illustrious contributions to literature (that were influenced by their identities) does not mean that racism, misogyny and homophobia never existed. To try to apply this fallacy to disabled studies and the disabled community proves just how much our society needs disabled studies.

The fact is that historically, disabled people have been abused and marginalized by society's need to create an Other. The liberation movements for other similarly marginalized groups used both street-level and academic activism to meet their goals. Disability studies is our academic activism; there are several street-level activism groups, as well. The author's notion that somehow disabled studies is sucking away funding from these groups to educate disabled people would be laughable if the lack of intellectual rigor it displayed weren't so sad.

The disabled studies scholars I have read demonstrate a key understanding of society's construction of normal. Yes, the body undoubtedly has its standards of "normal" and "abnormal" behavior, but what disabled studies is trying to teach -- a point the author misses -- is that because the body is abnormal does not mean that the person is abnormal. And that is not a distinction that is made in the world today.

Disabled studies is important because, at its best, it explains these phenomena to the academic elite and those without disability, and says that having a disability is no less normal than having brown hair instead of blonde.

-- Eric Brunick

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