University of California, Davis
Graduate Student, Graduate Group in Cultural Studies
About
Through my research I attempt to critically re-see able-bodied culture from the vantage of disability. To this end I have developed a concept that I have termed somanormativity, which is meant to conjure the hegemonic features of able-bodied discursive practices in a manner akin to the way that heteronormativity functions in Queer theory. In this way somanormativity is, to borrow the phrasing of Tobin Siebers, “about testing the potential of the person, making it known, and then granting admission or acceptance on what is known.” In short, then, it is about how bodies are made intelligible within a system that sifts them into two piles: the “normal” able body and the “monstrous” disabled body.
The applications of my theoretical inclinations are split between the historical then and the imminent now of tomorrow. As such, I focus both on the 19C France and societies of the contemporary global North. Technology plays an important role in my work; I am fascinated by the ways that certain forms of technology cease to be considered technologies. They are recuperated into the life of the organism and they become so normalized that their presence is hardly detectable.
This, in turn, is crucial to somanormative dynamics: some technologies become illicit and are coded as technologies of disabled alterity, while the use of other technologies are seen as permissible by able-bodied culture because they do not appear to compromise the supposed integrity and authenticity of the able-bodied user. Examples include the pencil versus the electrolarynx and the modern running sneaker versus carbon fiber transtibial artificial limbs.
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