Perspectives on the Experience
Working with disability studies and feminist/gender studies in context
with my English major has enabled me to recognize and familiarize myself
with the unfamiliar. My recent engagement in the area of disability studies
has broadened my scope to be more inclusive. I am careful to always recognize
the importance of including disability when discussing how oppression
and social construction work in terms of gender, age, race, and class.
The exceptionalities of disability were recognized when I realized that
my perspective on disability had flipped from being more passive to aggressive.
I began seeing disability and disability theory played out everyday, is
such places as in classes, at work and in the media. As I had seen before
with daily manifestations of racism, sexism, ageism and classism, when
most people are faced with disability it makes them resistant and nervous.
This project and the English class "Disability in Drama and Performance
Art" has assisted me in collectively developing my areas of study, political
activism, and overall personal perspective. The fabulous performances
viewed throughout the course have given me the opportunity to see how
valuable art and activism are as one unit. This experience has furthered
my engagement in terms of activism, awareness and intellectual development.
Nicht were, cyberreader! I am Ben Pattonus x Nightcrawler. I enrolled
in Professor Brueggemann x Professor X's class as a senior English major
with minors in theatre and film studies, unclear of my own relationship
to disability studies. I began to mutate into Ben Pattonus x Nightcrawler
in cyberspace in response to a class member's web posting regarding what
she felt was the class's dispassionate stance regarding the study of disability:
"This is not just a class," she wrote, "this is personal!" The statement
provided me with a moment of pause wherein I reflected on just how personal
the class had become for me. I'd never been a part of a class where
the students had such a vested interest in the coursework - for some of
my classmates, the coursework WAS their life. And here I was, right in
the thick of things. Each theme we discussed, from issues of access to
constructions of disabled identities, intertwined with my own experiences
and sense of self. So when Professor X asked me to help design this CoverWeb,
I felt myself morphing into the persona of Nightcrawler. As Nightcrawler,
I spent countless evenings and early morning hours coding HTML and revising
text. As designer of this CoverWeb, I teleported myself (as Nightcrawler
does) from frame to frame, image to image, page to page, dematerializing
and reappearing, hedging, bobbing, and weaving in cyberspace as I do in
my personal life. As Nightcrawler would say, Nicht were! I was
not! I was. Five of us added together have made something approximating "whole" here. A grand sum. I, for one, am still figuring out what I learned from the Fall 2001 "Disability in Drama and Performance Art" course we shared. Doing this web-text together helped crystallize - although not necessarily clarify - some things about that experience for me. Most of all, I'm convinced now more than ever how very exceptional that everyday class experience was, even in my own 19 years of teaching. We all took a lot of risks; exceptionality was the "norm." Packaging together the range of perspectives represented here was, in itself, a sizeable sum: one tenured (hard-of-hearing) professor; two undergraduate English majors with impressive backgrounds studying folklore/performance, queer theory, feminist theory; one M.A. student with a degree in law and a passion for all things liberal and radical; one Ph.D. student with hard-core critical theory at her ever-evolving center. All the other students in the course factor significantly as well - like free radicals floating throughout our text, anchoring us in some places, pushing us off shores in others. Our powers are increased to the nth degree by their presence as well. Some multiplication, and yet some subtraction too, as we worked to divide the labor, add up the whole. The course itself is still being consumed. Ben and Angeline, the two undergraduates, will present on their projects at an upcoming "Multiple Perspectives on Disability" conference in mid-April along with about six others from the class. (See: http://ada.osu.edu/Conference%202002%20announcement.htm). Wendy and Marian, the two graduate students, will also present at that conference in another session (and will help facilitate the undergraduate student session). Wendy and Marian and I are working on a much longer essay about the course for an edited collection forthcoming from SUNY Press, and in that piece we explore the "radical" potential of teaching and learning about disability in language and literature classrooms. Our warrants for these claims in this essay comes largely (although not exclusively) from the experience of this course. We also hope to present on this essay in progress at the 2002 Modern Language Association convention in New York City. As for the web-text project itself: it became, as these things usually do, far more consuming and interesting then we had even originally imagined as we kept engaging it. Ben was a student who had, of his own admission, slightly resisted the course in the beginning - unable to imagine where and how he might "fit" in ideas about disability and performance. But then he began performing disability, his own exceptionalities becoming everyday too, when he suddenly saw disability constructed everywhere in his favorite comics, The X-Men. So it was that Ben's own project, built with his sophisticated web-design skills, became a kind of plus-sign center of our summative equation in putting together this piece; his is the operative function. Angeline and Marian provide the materials to sum together - theirs are exceptional examples of projects that allowed students to locate and expand their own interests and to factor in some creativity as well. Angeline combines queer and feminist analysis on top of disability perspectives to look at the "body" of Julian/Dolphin/Trahan's performance art and written work. Marian re-encounters Lacan and her long-standing critical engagement with medicine in her hypertext poem project. Wendy sums - dividing, multiplying, adding, even subtracting quite effectively the whole range of all the final projects in the class - and in doing so, gets to lean hard on her strong critical and theoretical bent and to play out multiple possibilities in the categories she composes, an act Wendy performs (and has performed before) in remarkably personal and professional ways. Me? I write the whole equation here on the board. Greetings, cyberreader! I am Marian E. Lupo x Mastermind, a variation
of Marian Lupous x specious and Mastermindus mutabilis. As Marian Lupous
x hybrida, I began my studies with the visionary Professor Brueggemannus
x Professor X in Spring 2001 as a graduate student in the English Department
at The Ohio State University (http://www.english.ohio-state.edu/site_index.html).
(When the student is ready, the teacher appears.) Foreseeing the space-shifting
potential inherent in Marian E. Lupous x hybrida, Professor X encouraged
me, in my hybrida form, to enroll in English 576, The Performance of Disability
(http://www.cohums.ohio-state.edu/english/people/Brueggemann.1/562cCourse_web_site/ My immersion in this material was deep. Through the course developed
by Professor X, I worked with, ate with, met with, and learned with a
virtual and somatic wealth of disabled/disability studies artists, scholars,
and students in the company of my classmates, all mutating as we learned,
and most of us in varying stages of temporary ablebodiedness and ablemindedness.
I began to surface and make some of this material my own at the end of
the quarter through my final project, a hypertext poem entitled "The Pronounce
the Time of Death." http://www.cohums.ohio-state.edu/english/people/ As a former space-shifter in this class (student/graduate student/teacher),
I was called upon by Professor X to exercise my developing mutant powers
by coordinating the production of this webtext. I then began, through
cyber and somatic dialogue with the X-people, to change shape from Marian
E. Lupous x hybrida to Mastermindus mutabilis. In this form, I shared
my work, offered my encouragement, and monitored deadlines. We were already
a densely connected community through the leadership of Professor X, and
we became more connected as we took risks with our ideas and placed trust
in each other in this collaborative effort. As I mutated into the Mastermindus
mutabilis form, I took advantage of Mastermind's psionic ability to cast
illusions as I projected confidence and mastery. But this, dear cyberreader,
was only one of many illusions that through repetition "seem" to become
certainties - that through repetition, allowed me to claim the cyberform
in which I now appear. |