Selfhood: The Entanglements of Identity and The Body

Guest blogger, Susannah B. Mintz

Unruly Bodies began in a class I was teaching on women’s autobiography. Among the texts I selected for the class was an essay by Nancy Mairs called “Carnal Acts,” the title piece of a 1996 collection. It was the sort of random choice that becomes fateful. I liked the title, knew nothing of Mairs. But her essay changed the course of my scholarly work. More, it was paradigm-shifting, setting in motion the reading, writing, and teaching of the last fifteen years that would completely redefine the way I think.

I was in my first job out of graduate school, hired to cover Milton and seventeenth-century English poetry, which were my Ph.D. areas of specialty. I loved that literature, but I never felt entirely comfortable with its criticism or even its critics, who struck me as a somewhat territorial bunch (academics being never far from the proverbial sandbox). I would continue to teach and write in this field well into my career, but from the moment of discovering Mairs, I knew that I wanted to surround myself with writers and theorists for whom matters of selfhood, especially the entanglements of identity and the body, took precedence.

Mairs, who has multiple sclerosis, is known for writing about her more “unseemly” bodily experiences—including disability but also adultery, suicide attempts, depression, hygiene, and sex—with unapologetic frankness. The boldness of her persona is part of what I found so captivating in “Carnal Acts,” that willingness to say out loud what it feels like, as a disabled woman, to be embodied, even when (or especially when) that experience is freighted by shame and embarrassment. Though Mairs writes only as herself, never presuming to represent anyone’s life history but her own, her essays speak to a broad audience, and I felt, reading them, that I had chanced upon a conception of identity that went beyond the specific insights of feminism.

Because disability pertains to everyone.

I was to learn this as a basic tenet of the disability movement, that “disability” is a category into which we will all eventually enter, whatever our current bodily circumstances. Injury, illness, the normal processes of aging—these make disability a highly porous category and thus in some sense not really a category at all, just the human condition. As I branched out from Mairs to other autobiographers, I began to understand the idea that disability both is and isn’t “in” actual, individual bodies. That is, bodies may have particular conditions—they may be in pain, or require certain technologies, or have various forms of impairment—but what they mean, how we think about them or react to them, is largely a function of social attitudes and relationships. Writing the book then became a process of self-reckoning. Exploring the rhetorical and formal choices women used to narrate disability, I had to confront my own assumptions about what’s “normal” and to reconsider my physical self.

Feminism trained me to think about my femaleness in terms of the prejudices of a masculinist world, and offered a set of beliefs with which I could fortify my sense of self against those pressures. But disability studies challenged me further. Writing about women whose bodies were not just not male but also to some degree not “acceptably” female, I constantly reevaluated what I thought I knew about bodies and empowerment. Some of my authors described struggling not for independence from men, but for the freedom to marry and have children, which disabled women are not supposed to want or be capable of. Some just wanted active sex lives, which the disabled are also not supposed to have. Some complained not about pay equity with men, but about being overlooked for any sort of work at all. Some were embittered about indignities they’d suffered as children whose parents and doctors wanted to “fix” them, others frustrated by the cultural irrelevance of aging women.

These were not the stories I’d read as a student of feminism, and I was galvanized by what might seem like a paradox: that we are strengthened, rather than diminished, by acknowledging our bodies’ fragility, our vulnerability, our need for others. I had to question the obviousness of “health” as the state we should strive to maintain, and the prevalent notion that given a choice, anyone would rather not be disabled—because their difficulties in an ableist world notwithstanding, the subjects of Unruly Bodies told tales of plenitude and the joys of caregiving, of making art and effecting social change. Some of the revelations I’ve had are subtle (I try to say “I understand” rather than “I see,” to interrupt the symbolism of sight as a guarantor of knowledge and mastery); others more structural—the absence of wheelchair ramps on my campus, for instance, or the dearth of positive images of people with disabilities in popular culture.

Maybe more personally, I’ve reoriented myself to this body I am, tried to quit willing it into submission, or perfecting its shape and size, or forestalling its death. If something catastrophic happens to it, I have ideas and friends—some bodily, some textual—to help me adjust to that change. Unruly Bodies literally gave me a community. As one of the authors I discuss said of her own project, “writing this book saved my life.”

Susannah B. Mintz, associate professor and associate chair of the Department of English at Skidmore College, received an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and her Ph.D. from Rice University. She is the author of Threshold Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity (Delaware, 2003) and Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities (UNC Press, 2007), and has written extensively in the fields of autobiography and disability in literature. Her essay “Vanishings” was a finalist for the William Allen Nonfiction Prize and “The Dirty Little Secret of Sabbatical” named a Notable Essay in the 2010 Best American Essays. Other creative work has appeared in such journals as Michigan Quarterly Review and Ninth Letter. She has recently completed a memoir, Hopeful Lane, and is currently at work on a study of literary representations of pain.

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