The Minority Body: Thoughts on Disability
I finished reading The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability by Elizabeth Barnes -- although, honestly, I don't know what I mean by “finished” because I keep going back to it. In the book, she makes the case that disabled bodies are not defective bodies, but minority bodies.
The book was really interesting, but it's not for the philosophically faint of heart. Barnes is a philosophy professor at the University of Virginia, and she's writing for others who understand how philosophers think and talk. And I'm sympathetic to her ideas. As my husband and a handful of my friends can attest, I've spent the past week or so trying to figure out if I can reconcile her views with a Catholic understanding of the body.
I struggled, largely because I have only a cursory understanding of Catholic anthropology, and Barnes's book is very thorough (but remarkably short, considering). I would love to do a deeper analysis of this, but that's a bigger project than I can take on this summer. But I can share some preliminary thoughts.
Barnes argues that disabilities are “mere differences,” not “bad differences,” and she spends a whole chapter explaining what exactly she means by these terms. Some thinkers believe disability is entirely socially constructed -- if our society was fully welcoming of disabled people, then there wouldn't be “disabilities.” In this view, disabilities are created by social stigma and refusal to accommodate.
Barnes thinks this isn't entirely wrong, but it also isn't entirely right. It's true that some effects of disabilities are society-dependent. Some societies value things that our society considers disabilities. And many difficulties experienced by disabled people are due to our society's unwillingness to make accommodations. But Barnes believes that there often are bad effects of disabilities that would remain bad effects even in an ideal society. “It’s hard to see why we should deny that, say, being unable to visually experience the faces of your loved ones or auditorily experience birdsong are bad effects of blindness and deafness…that would persist in the absence of ableism” (27). She also points to disabilities “that involve chronic pain, or require continued medical monitoring, or are progressive.” Even if society was welcoming of such conditions and the people who have them, they would still have bad effects.
To believe that a disability is a “mere difference” and not a “bad difference,” it may seem that we have to assume that, for example, hearing is like hair color -- neither good nor bad, but neutral with regard to value. Barnes disagrees. A person can hold the “mere difference” view of disabilities and also hold “that disability involves the loss of intrinsic goods or capabilities” (56). It is good to be able to hear! A person who is deaf cannot hear, and has lost something that is intrinsically good.
How does this work? Barnes explains: “But being Deaf is not simply the lack of the ability to hear. There are other goods, perhaps other intrinsic goods -- the unique experience of language had by those whose first language is a signed rather than spoken language, the experience of music via vibrations, etc. -- experienced by Deaf people and not by hearing people” (57).
Later in the book, she gives examples of disabled people who report these kinds of experiences. She quotes a blind woman who values her ability to not prejudge people by their looks and another woman who uses a wheelchair who, while she is limited in her "freedom" to go up stairs or on difficult natural terrain, values her freedom from pressure to have an idealized female body. Many disabled people, Barnes says, live happy and fulfilled lives. They're happy, she insists, not despite their disabilities; they're just happy. And some of them are happy because of their disabilities. Not everyone with disabilities feels this way, but many do, and Barnes spends a chapter explaining why we shouldn't just dismiss their testimony.
Relating this to some friends, one friend told me that these ideas make her “wonder a lot about the tangible effects of grace.”
“I think for much of my life, the idea of grace was so vague and 'spiritual' that I did not really imagine grace as having measurable effects on, say, bodies and emotions. But I wonder if this is the case, and perhaps some kind of explanation for how something intrinsically 'bad' can have such positive effects/reception?”
Barnes would say that disabilities are not “bad differences,” but Catholic anthropology, as far as I understand it (which is not a whole lot) would say that body parts (and systems, etc.) have proper functions, and if a thing can't do what it's made to do, that’s bad. The immune system is made for fighting infections and diseases; the intestines are made for absorbing nutrients and sending waste on its way out; there is something wrong if these systems and organs and parts are not doing what they're made to do. (More here.)
Barnes disagrees with this idea, and she addresses related ideas in an early part of her book, but this is exactly the piece that I would love to dive into and don’t have the bandwidth for. Unfortunately, I have to set this aside for now.
But I wanted to explore one idea, which is, admittedly, not fully formed.
Spiritual disabilities
I want to toy with the idea, at least for a minute, of exploding our understanding of “disability.” (Barnes spends the first 53 pages of her book defining “disability” and I'm sure that what I'm about to say here will not fit with her definition.) She mentions a woman who was blind and was grateful for her freedom to not prejudge people by their appearances. It seems to me that it is good to see and it is good to not prejudge people by their appearances -- and that, ideally, we would be able to do both.
Maybe blindness is a disability of not being able to see physically, and prejudging people based on their appearances is a disability of not being able to see spiritually. If you can see perfectly well (physically) and you prejudge a person by their appearance, then you are prevented from seeing something about them -- aspects of their personality, their ideas, their perspectives, their capacities and abilities, their value and dignity as a human being made in the image and likeness of God. And those things aren't any less real than their height and weight and hair color! It seems to me likely that, in this life, for almost everyone, it's not realistic to have both physical sight and freedom from prejudging people -- but post-purgatory, when our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls are perfected, when we are communing with God, the source of everything good, we may be able to have both there.
And I think something similar could be said for other good experiences of disabilities -- if we could have an ability to walk and freedom from pressure to have an idealized body, and so on. I see this as a reminder for the able-bodied to be humble. There’s plenty you can’t do, either.
Some extremely important caveats to this idea: Barnes reminds her readers on several occasions that not every disabled person experiences their disabilities in the same way, and that many disabled people don't actually want to be cured. I am only positing this as an interesting thing to think about (and a reminder for those who can see physically that there is a lot that we can't see). I would especially love to hear from readers who are disabled or who are close to people with disabilities - what are your thoughts on this? (If I have said something truly terrible, please let me know immediately!)