Disability Matters: Embodiment, Teaching and Standpoint

Abstract

Does it matter who teaches disability studies, whether that teacher has a disability or not? Maybe this might strike the reader as a peculiar question — to focus on the teacher’s body or knowledge standpoint. There are certain theoretical and ontological implications in asking such questions. This chapter is an attempt to theorise about the way the bodies of teachers with disabilities are transmuted within the arena of teaching critical disability studies at colleges and universities. My exploration occurs through a theoretical enquiry drawn from the insights of critical disability studies (CDS). It examines the contribution that CDS can further make to thinking through the processes, formation and consequences of the teacher’s(ing) body as well as the project of speaking otherwise about disability.¹ In particular, the presentation explores the ways teachers with disabled bodies can contribute to experiencing alterity outside of the frame of ‘other’ and the ways that the teacher with a disabled body, disabled teaching body, can displace the objectification of disability through pedagogical enactments of the lived experiences of disablement. In this way, this chapter refutes the assertion made by McWilliam and Taylor (1998) that the pedagogical inspiration of bodies should not be celebrated. Instead, the focus of this chapter is on working through points of difference between the way normative teacher’s bodies and the disabled teaching body is mediated in the processes of subjectification, identifying points of convergence that can benefit dialogue across varied sites of scholarship.