On March 5-7, 2004, the Modern Language Association and Emory University jointly sponsored a conference, Disability Studies and the University, apparently the first such meeting solely devoted to disability studies. Having incorporated disability studies into my own projects some years ago, I attended the meeting as the SBL's representative. SBL Executive Director Kent Richards also attended and presided at a session entitled, "Historicizing Disability." It is my happy task to report on this meeting to the Council and the membership.

What is disability studies? Like women's studies, gender studies, and various ethnic studies, the field's ancestry includes both scholarship and activism. Around the middle of the twentieth century, sociologists and rehabilitation professionals began to study the lives of persons with disabilities and their subcultures. These sociological studies represented a break from the dominant notion that the only appropriate approaches to disability were to fix it or to hide it. In the wake of the civil rights movements of African-Americans, women, and gays and lesbians, disability activism came into its own in the 1980s. Activists modeled their goals and methods on these earlier movements. The watershed moment came in 1990, when the Americans with Disabilities Act became federal law. For many activists, this bipartisan piece of legislation represented the entrance of disability into the national conversation about justice. Humanities scholarship on disability, fostered now by literary critics and philosophers, blossomed in the 1990s. The Atlanta meeting this spring provided an occasion of retrospect and prospect of disability studies.

As context for the discussion at the meeting, let me first explain the field's core ideas. First, impairment is distinguished from disability. Roughly speaking, impairment is a biological fact: a sensory deficit, the loss of a limb. An impairment can exist on its own, with no reference to or necessary engagement with social structures or the built environment. Disability, by contrast, denotes a lack of fit between the body and the environment. Here, social structures come into play. The significance of bodily abilities or impairments emerges only among others, in environments. For example, a trained computer scientist who loses the loss of her legs in an accident might also find herself out of a job if she cannot enter her place of employment with a wheelchair. Her impaired legs require a different means of locomotion, but she is no less able to be a computer scientist. The building design is a matter of social choices, usually the unconscious assumption of one body type. In the life experiences of people with disabilities, it is common for individuals to experience many limitations that are assumed or imposed, beyond the simple physical impairment. The distinction between impairment and disability was introduced to articulate this feature of life experience and social construction.

A second major distinction lies in the difference between the medical model and the functional model. The medical model became dominant in the nineteenth century and is still going strong. It focuses on the physical impairment and the options for cure or amelioration. That may seem innocuous, but it has social consequences. First, it tends to treat impairment only as an individual medical situation and to ignore the role of social structures in all of the additional exclusions the person will face. Under this model, our computer scientist would be told to accept unemployment as an unfortunate fact of her disability. Thus, the medical model tends to blur distinctions between biological conditions that lie beyond anyone's control and social conditions that result from choices and could be changed. Disability scholarship thus introduced the social-functional model of disability. In contrast to the medical model, this model examines the social construction of tasks to be performed by certain functions. For instance, sighted people accomplish the function of understanding a text with their eyes. This function can be performed through audition or tactile reception for people who are vision-impaired. Functional analysis encourages, rather than conceals, awareness of the various means by which tasks can be performed. It tends to view disability in terms of different function, not as an impairment of the person or of his or her life. The ADA definition of disability adopted a three-point definition that included concepts of physical impairment and social-functional aspects of disability.

The retrospective aspect of the conference papers had two themes. First, it addressed the question: who is disabled? The definitional issues have become very complex. If disability is a misfit between the body and the environment, we all begin life disabled, and many of us finish it disabled, if we manage to avoid an abrupt, early death. People who acquire disabilities with age often do not think of themselves as disabled, whereas younger people with exactly the same physical impairment might consider themselves so. Furthermore, the range of human abilities is so broad and so finely graded that the line between "disabled" and "normal" can be murky. Thus, two plenary sessions, "Defining Disability" and "Defining Disability Studies" had a definitional focus. The second theme relating to access emerged prominently in the sessions titled "Disability and Life Writing" and "The Inclusive University." Several scholars expressed concern that, as disability studies came into its own as an academic field, it might lose touch with its activist roots and the practical project of access. Access means just that—a way or means of approach. It requires a distinction between the essential elements of a task and the way in which these are performed. For example, a deaf student does not have access to lectures delivered orally. An ASL interpreter provides access to the same information the hearing students have, but the means is visual rather than auditory. While the conference participants seemed positive about how far universities have come in providing access, many also aired stories of access delayed or denied. Although providing access lies outside the range of scholarship and curriculum, it remains a moral imperative under the larger pedagogical mission of universities.

Regarding the future of disability studies, several speakers expressed awareness that the field is at a point of transition between a second and third wave. Lennard Davis even worried that disability studies, having peaked in the 1990s, is already passe within the MLA. However, the conference itself showcased research in aesthetics, literary criticism, history, autobiography, the performing arts, and cultural studies. I share Davis' hope that a third wave will continue the exploration of basic questions while diversifying research into other fields. In particular, I believe that biblical scholarship could and should make a significant contribution to disability studies and would also benefit from such an alliance. The SBL membership and staff agrees, which is why we have formed the new Biblical Scholarship and Disabilities Studies Consultation.

As I mentioned above, disability studies tends to contrast the medical model with the social-functional model of disability. Both models are children of modernity. Rosemarie Garland Thomson has noted that in the pre-modern period, cultural understandings of disability were greatly influenced by religion. Images of disability in the Bible, its cognate literatures, and in the history of its interpretation, have had an incalculable impact on the meanings ascribed to impairments and disabilities. Work relating to disability in the Bible must be interdisciplinary, since it touches on the concerns and demands the methods of biblical studies, the history of medicine, cultural history, literary criticism, and theology. Only when this work is done will it be possible to discuss the religious influence on the two modern models of disability, as well as the persistence of the older religious model in modernity and post-modernity. In turn, disability studies has much to give that would deepen our understanding of human embodiment and the religious meanings of the body in the traditions for which the Bible is the authoritative text. I hope that the new program unit on Biblical Scholarship and Disability Studies can spearhead this development. Further, and here I touch on concerns that the SBL and the AAR should share, we now live in an age of genetic manipulation and bio-machines. These developments pose deep questions for human nature and its possible artificial alterations. We would lose much in intellectual understanding and perhaps in human lives, if we fail to critique assumed concepts of what is normal, healthy, and good.

In addition to research, curricular integration was discussed in several sessions. For the MLA, this means addressing and critiquing disability as represented in literary or cultural texts used in the classroom. Nineteenth century literature is strewn with disabled bodies whose meanings are only recently being examined. For biblical scholars, a similar curricular integration could be achieved. Most of our introductory texts now incorporate feminist hermeneutics, and many address the biblical passages that have played a role in the oppression of Africans, Jews, and gays and lesbians. I suggest that a similar goal now be set for inclusion of disability, by which I mean both the representation of disabled figures and the rhetorical tropes of disability. The interpretive and liturgical practices of disabled communities of worship are also ripe for study. Curricular integration within biblical studies should coincide with parallel developments in ministerial training, both in homiletics and pastoral practices for ministering to persons with disabilities, and also for the inclusion of ministers with disabilities. These curricular projects will of course depend on the research outlined above.

The matter of access remains. Here, the responsibilities of professional organizations and universities overlap. For students, access needs should be handled ideally through an institution's office of disability services. The appropriate role of faculty is self-education about what access is and development of teaching methods that provide many means of access. At my institution, one of the ASL interpreters told me that some faculty members see the interpreter as a threat to their authority or as something extra, a special privilege beyond what hearing students receive. Both of these misconceptions can seriously interfere with the education of deaf students. I could easily multiply examples with various disabilities. It is my impression that faculty in all fields are poorly informed about the concept of access and the law. I think that this is a problem for personnel departments, something that should be incorporated into the standard intake training in the institution's employment, diversity, and harassment policies. To my knowledge, however, such inclusion is not widespread. Professional organizations like the SBL could begin a discussion about what role to play in providing an accessible education for all students.

But access is not just for students. Indeed, an exclusive focus on educating students with disabilities would betray an assumption that the disabled person will only appear in the seats and not behind the lectern. At the Atlanta meeting, a resolution circulated that called for a greater presence of scholars with disabilities. Implementing such a proposal involves institutions of higher education and their search committees, as well as professional organizations. Practically, it means recruitment and support of graduate students with disabilities, accessible professional meetings, and hiring procedures that do not penalize scholars with disabilities. These changes will require some serious introspection about exclusionary practices that are usually invisible to the able-bodied. It is easy and self-justifying to say that there are few scholars with disabilities because there are few people with disabilities who have the abilities to become scholars. The truth is that people with disabilities are already at an economic disadvantage, and the brightest tend not to choose, or choose to leave, academia. Although systematic data are not available, much anecdotal evidence exists. We need to initiate data studies.

Disability studies may appear to be the latest in a long line of trendy MLA-isms, and perhaps the most marginal. I would argue, however, that it is actually the most significant. Embodiment is the human condition, and it occurs in enormous variety. Refusing to count variant bodies as fully human ignores reality and diminishes our understanding of human possibility. The project of academic disability studies is to explore human embodiment—both its givenness and its construction, its existential reality and its representation—in its manifold variety. With the formation of the Consultation, the SBL has now joined this conversation.

Rebecca Raphael is Assistant Professor of Religion at Texas State University—San Marcos and is co-chair of the SBL's Biblical Scholarship and Disability Studies Consultation.

Resources

Hector Avalos, Health Care and the Rise of Christianity (Hendrickson 1999).



Hector Avalos, Illness and Health Care in the Ancient Near East (Scholars Press 1995).



Lennard Davis, The Disability Studies Reader (Routledge 1997).



Nancy Eisland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberation Theology of Disability (Abingdon 1994).



Nancy Eisland and Don Saliers, eds. Human Disability and the Service of God: Reassessing Religious Practice (Abingdon 1998).



David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, eds., Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (UMP 2001).



Sharon Snyder, Brenda Jo Breuggemann, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, eds., Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (MLA 2002).



Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies (Columbia 1996).

Citation: Rebecca Raphael, " What Has Biblical Literature to Do with Disability Studies?," SBL Forum , n.p. [cited April 2004]. Online:http://sbl-site.org/Article.aspx?ArticleID=250