by Sam Zattera

In his investigation into how disability narrative is portrayed, Couser divides the pieces he analyzes into five different forms of rhetoric. He ends by discussing Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer and Steven B. Kaplan’s I Raise My Eyes to Say Yes. Ruth, a woman with severe cerebral palsy, is misdiagnosed and implemented into a state hospital where her intelligence is ignored and neglected by the staff (Couser 43). In comparing her story to slave narrative and testimonios, Couser emphasizes how it challenges the institutionalization of the disabled through using Sienkiewicz-Mercer’s individual narrative to address the plight of the “disabled” group as a whole. The focus here is not on disability within the individual, but disability within society.

What Couser is employing here, without naming it as such, is something that sociologist C Wright Mills calls the sociological imagination. In The Sociological Imagination Mills highlights the need for sociologists, as well as scholars of other fields, to understand the relationship between personal troubles and public issues (Mills 1). Where Couser’s and Mills’ work intersect is in this relationship. A personal trouble, as Mills defines it, is a product of the individual and does not provide an accurate representation of or have an effect on society as a whole (Mills 1). A public issue, on the other hand, arises from society itself and manifests in the form of the private troubles for many individuals (Mills 1). Where a single man’s unemployment is a personal trouble on its own, if put into a larger context it may become clear that that man’s unemployment is the direct result of the larger economic system failing him, therefore making what could have been a personal trouble into a public issue.

Without stating it, Couser employs this mentality to the rhetoric of disability narrative. I Raise My Eyes to Say Yes differs from the other texts he investigates in that it focuses on disability as a public issue and not as a personal trouble. In explaining what exactly the rhetoric of emancipation is, Couser states this:

                 “The comic resolution [of Sienkiewicz-Mercer’s story] is not a function of removing or correcting her impairments, but of getting the world to accommodate them–of removing the physical, social, and cultural obstacles to her integration into the “mainstream”” (Couser 44).

The counterhegemonic potential of the rhetoric of emancipation lies in its use of the sociological imagination and in its redrawing of the line separating private trouble and public issue when it comes to disability. Couser argues that understanding the social construction around disability is what sets some recent disability narrative apart from what has come before it (Couser 44). If understanding disability as a social construct proves as helpful as Couser’s writing suggests in producing change than connecting that world of literature to that of the sociologist could quicken the pace of that change. Sociology may not be a commonplace topic in discussion among the public, but it certainly is more abundant than discussion of autobiography. If, as Couser argues, the primary reason for a lack of counterhegemonic disability autobiography is cultural constraints (Couser 47), then portraying his work through a more overtly sociological perspective may more effectively help to loosen those constraints.

Works Cited:

Couser, G. Thomas. Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2009. Print.

Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford UP, 1959. Print.