In this blog I will be relating two passages written for different fields of study on the topic of social responsibility for individual problems. Mills’s excerpt “The Promise [of Sociology]” from The Sociological Imagination was published in the field of sociology, while Couser’s passage on disability is a life narrative . Before we are able to understand how they connect, there must be an understanding of what happens in both Mill’s and Couser’s writings.

In “The Promise”, Mills focuses on “public issues versus private troubles”; “Public issues” would be a direct result of a problem within a society, and a “Private trouble” would be a problem that occurred as a result of a flaw in a person’s character (Mills, 3). He finds that most individuals attribute their problems to their own personal failure, when they are in fact a social issue. He calls this relationship between the ordinary everyday lives of people and their surrounding society the sociological imagination.

In Couser’s short epilogue, Rhetoric and Self Representation in Disability Memoir, he suggests and critiques five rhetorics that the disabled use to represent their disability in life narratives; these are the rhetoric of triumph, gothic/horror, spiritual compensation, nostalgia, and emancipation. For the purposes of comparison we will focus solely on the rhetorics of triumph and emancipation.

Couser describes the rhetoric of triumph as when the “narrator removes him- or herself from the category of disabled or.. Denies that his or her impairment need be restrictive”, which he critiques because “disability is a “problem” that individuals must overcome (Couser, 34). Couser and Mill both seem to agree that it is wrong to make disability appear to be something that must be overcome by the individual rather than accepted by the society. Mill would argue that the fact that even though disability might be viewed as a personal problem, it is in fact a social issue that should be confronted as such.

The next rhetoric is that of emancipation, which Couser states, “represents disability not as a flaw in her but as the prejudicial construct of a normative culture” (Couser, 37). Couser seems to applaud this rhetoric because it is very close to viewing disability as a “political issue” rather than an individual one. This connects to Mills’ point of view in that it makes disability a “public issue” (Mills, 3).

These two pieces, though written for different fields of study, life narratives and sociology, unite in a common message. Couser and Mill both challenge the idea that a “private trouble” is not that of the individual alone, but rather that of the society in which they live (Mills, 3).

Sources

Couser, G. Thomas. Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing. Illustrated ed. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2009. Print. 31-48.

Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford UP, 1959. Print. 1-3.