Review Minorty Body by Elizabeth Barnes

In her book Minority Body Elizabeth Barnes in my opinion both makes a prescient observation, those with a physical handicap are onto themselves a minority population that is no better or no worse than any other minority, while also making her argument by means that are deeply disturbing and flawed.  For full disclosure, I consider myself mildly disabled white man.  I  have hemispherical Cerebral Palsy which is by and large limited to my right hand. Over my 40 years on this planet I have had 8 surgeries on my hand.  But my understanding and reading of this book is also seen through the lens of my personal faith— orthodox, evangelical, anglican Christian.  Dr. Barnes writes, as evidenced from her work from a secular, postmodern narrative.  Our differing points of view contrasts with one another in significant directions.
Barnes, rightly I believe, discusses the hermeneutical injustice that is a constant feature of those with a disability.  I have been addressed in ways that discount or discredit my experience.   “Well just act normal.”  “Don’t be defined by your disability.”  I have experienced  bullying from one particular religious leader who insisted that I shake hands with my disfunctioning hand.  He assumed that not greeting others with my broken hand was a sign of  internal self loathing on my part.  There is a reality, that one can not speak to a person’s experience of disability, and here we could extend it to any minority experience, unless one has lived it. My accomplishments and successes are somehow more stunning because I have a handicap. But in such a thought is assumed something about how little people expected of me in the first place. They assumed I was incapable of accomplishing “the normal things in life”  because of my disability. There are assumptions being made by the abled majority about what it is and is not meant to experience disability. Not all parts of the disability experience as Barnes points out are necessarily all bad.  There are ways in which disability positively shapes a persons life and outlook.  From my own experience, I have a greater intuitive understanding I believe of other minority experiences.  I can make the epistemological leap in a way many others are not.
I am grateful for her articulation disabled and abled are indeed shaped in much the same way by their bodies.  In other words a man who stands 5’4” will not likely have a career in the NBA simply because his body dictates other choices.  Our culture tends to over look and underestimate the importance our physical being plays in shaping life outcomes.  Barnes makes clear  that all of humanity is shaped by their physical, bodily existence.
 In relation to this point is her excellent job at the beginning of her narrative of demonstrating how difficult a precise definition of disability is to articulate. One cannot simply declare that it is the absence of something, limbs or sight.  For in doing so one eliminates those who like me have Cerebral Palsy whose limbs are intact but we can not control them. Even to include cases of CP and the like in our definition would still exclude those whose condition are temporary (epilepsy) or indeed invisible (lupus). Disability is far more complex than what it might first appear.
However the ease at which she conflates gayness and disable-hood seemed to me to undermine her argument. Not with standing an orthodox Christian view of human sexuality as condemning sexual relations and acts between two people of the same sex. Whatever the particular reality of gayness is, it has to be far more complex of a reality than mear physical disability. There seems to be both physical, emotional and environmental factors in a person’s sexual identity and behavior. That there are personal narratives that defy the majority gay story, see Wes Hill and Rosaria Butterfield,  should give one pause. To not see that physical handicaps are just that, primarily physical with social and and behavioral issues arising primarily out of the reality of one’s physical condition seems misrepresent both minority groups.
   Still further is the intellectual (and admittedly emotional) discomfort with her argument concerning her doubts with the idea of a ‘cure’ for disability.  On the very next to last page Barnes quotes Chicago Disability Pride founder Sarah Triano. “Disability is a natural and beautiful part of human diversity. . . . Stereotypes the parade  refutes by giving us a time and space to celebrate ourselves as we are.” And then in the final paragraph of her manuscript Barnes writes, “the point is not that there are no bad effects of disability.  We are, all of us, limited by our bodies. . . .But the disabled body is a pathologized body.  It’s a body that departs from the ‘normal’ in ways we assume are bad or suboptimal.”
I am tempted at this point  to respond with a theological argument, and maybe there is simply no way not to object except on theological grounds. But even without a view of a ‘fallen’ or broken world, is in not safe to say that the world as it is, is not the world that we would hope it would be or even be one day in the future? Even as one needs to treat the disabled as a minority, one can not also treat the disabled as one would treat an a person with black or brown pigmented skin. It is not the dark skin tone itself that is hindering a person in society, it is societies reactions and actions toward the person with a dark skin that creates difficulties. A disabled person on the other hand is different. As Barnes points out there are indeed bad effects from the disability itself. From my own subjective personal experience even as disability has opened doors for me it has overall been something that has closed more than it has opened. Why then would we consider that which causes bad things in very specific ways to be  ‘normal and beautiful?’  Please understand I am not calling the person with a handicap unnatural or ugly. I disagree that disability is value neutral as she here argues.  Admittedly this simply may be a case of faith over philosophical speculation, but I will take it over Barnes’s noble but ultimately disconcerting argumentation.