A review of

“Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American

Culture and Literature Rosemarie by Garland Thomson”
By Justin Holliday

Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s book Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring

Disability in American Culture and Literature has made a significant contribution
by looking at disability from a humanities perspective. Thomson introduces the
concept of the “normate,” a figure “who, by way of the bodily configurations
and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority” (p. 8);
this term has become so important that other theorists such as Robert McRuer
have incorporated it in their work. The “normate” contrasts with the disabled
body, but for Thomson, this difference is the result of sociocultural influence
rather than a natural difference. In her analysis of the freak show and nineteenth-
and twentieth-century literature, Thomson incisively exposes the tenuous
social construction of the disabled body in American culture and notes how
these representations have shifted attitudes toward people with disabilities
from monstrous spectacles to medical specimens. Ultimately, she argues for a
politics of accommodation instead of the historic compensatory model because
accommodation indicates a need to change the environment rather than to
shame or pity the person.

Thomson grounds her arguments about the cultural power of freak shows
and literature in feminist and poststructuralist theory to illustrate how the
disabled body is viewed as inadequate. Notably, Thomson intersects disability
with feminism, especially “standpoint theory, which recognizes the immediacy
and complexity of physical existence” (p. 24). Rather than homogenize any
group, Thomson notes that we should consider individual differences; she also
acknowledges the wide range of disabilities, which can make this particular
marginalized group feel more separated but shows that the intersectionality of
social markers can bring people from different backgrounds together. Thomson
also addresses the cultural attitudes toward disability are based on various
factors, including its association with femininity, something that the dominant
group attempts to control, which becomes significant in her later discussions of
the extraordinary female body as out of control. Then, she connects her feminist
framework to analyses of Erving Goffman, Mary Douglas, and Michel Foucault
to show how societies exert control over bodies, asserting that anomalies are
repudiated (Douglas), or stigmatized (Goffman).

To illustrate this curtailing of the disabled body, Thomson then shifts

her focus to the freak show, which allows her to trace American perceptions of
people with disabilities. From the monster in Ancient Greece to the “freak” of the
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century freak shows, people with disabilities
have been stigmatized as ‘Other’, as figures of admonition. As she later does in
her analysis of literature, Thomson successfully illustrates the intersectional
power of racism, sexism, and ableism in figures such as “The Hottentot Venus,”
Sartje Baartman, and “The Ugliest Woman in the World,” Julia Pastrana (p. 70).
These women, along with so many others, were paraded before crowds not only
for entertainment; according to Thomson, freaks were sources of anxiety, and
in particular, Baartman exemplified feminine sexuality out of control and thus
was used as a justification for the affirmation of restrictive nineteenth-century
American womanhood and the curtailment of women’s sexuality.

But, as Thomson notes, the freak gave way to the sympathetic figure
once medicalization abrogated the supposed “monstrousness” of disability
though not its abjection; Thomson critiques the sentimental fiction of Harriet
Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who all
problematically invoke the sympathetic, disabled figure to link white, middle-
class women’s pursuit for social reform. Only Stowe ostensibly racializes
her disabled characters, but by doing so, she contrasts them with “maternal
benevolence” (p. 88) of white characters, showing how even a childlike
Eva has a higher social rank, which enables her to take care of the African
American characters. Although Davis and Phelps do not use race as a social
marker to differentiate between characters and their ability, they focus on
class distinctions, and in the case of Phelps, a rising consumerist response to
feminine beauty. Thus, even as the novels attempt evoke sympathy for the
disabled female characters, the idealized woman is white, middle-class, and
conventionally beautiful, rendering women who fall out these categories not only
unfortunate, but also outside femininity, even outside womanhood.

Thomson’s final chapter, however, demonstrates the shift of cultural

attitudes toward people with disabilities in twentieth-century African American
women’s literature, which revises disability as a marker of identity to celebrate.
Once again, race, gender, and ability come into play with one another as
Thomson analyzes the works of Ann Petry, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde.
These books acknowledge oppression, but the characters do not succumb (with
rare exceptions, such as Pauline Breedlove in The Bluest Eye); instead, they
proudly affirm their identities. Thomson seamlessly intersects the changing
attitudes toward disability from Petry’s depiction of disability as grotesque to
an insightfully woven examination of Morrison’s first five novels, in which bodies
that we may considered disabled are actually “physical witnesses to violation
and oppression” (p. 116). Acting as “witnesses” to history, these black female
bodies can reclaim power in a patriarchal, ableist society.

Further, Thomson notes the power of reclamation in her discussion

of Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, which appropriates blackness,
womanhood, and disability as sources of power. These books show that
rejecting assimilation is the only way to fight subjugation and live. By rendering
disability as a celebratory ontology, Thomson successfully exemplifies the need
for a politics of accommodation wherein people with disabilities do not need
to change their bodies, but rather, the environment should be modified to
accommodate their needs.

The only criticism I have against Thomson is her claim, “Morrison’s novels
revise Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (131). While she provides links between characters
in Stowe and Morrison’s fiction (e.g. Topsy/Sula), she risks being reductive by
arguing that Morrison is working directly from Stowe rather than inventing
characters that do not rely on Stowe’s stereotypes, even if only to revise and
reinvigorate them with power. Although Stowe has had only influence on literary
depictions of slavery, this interpretation may overshadow the African influence
on Morrison’s work.