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Stuart Murray  (he/him), University of Leeds 

Stuart Murray is Professor of Contemporary Literatures and Film in the School of English at the University of Leeds. He has worked in Critical Disability Studies for over 20 years, written/edited multiple books and articles on disability representation, and was among the very first University academics to teach courses on disability, literature, film and cultural theory. He is a big friend of Disability Matters and offered superb advice when we were putting this programme proposal to Wellcome. 

For the video recording of this presentation, please see the online symposia page.

This is the question posed to those of us contributing to the December 11 session. When I first saw it, it intrigued and challenged me, because in many ways I feel that my research and scholarship is in Critical Disability Studies, and has been for 20 years. Thinking further however, I liked the idea of this in itself being provocative. ‘Critical Disability Studies’ is no single, unified field and therefore the idea that one element or aspect of it might provoke another actually makes sense. In fact, it’s probably something that’s really important to say

In fact, I think the main reason I was approached to participate in this conversation is because of my background in Literary/Film Studies and, more recently, Medical Humanities, and so I want to address these as I also keep the above challenge in mind. Plus, I want to be genuinely provocative.

Disability Studies has transformed English Studies in the same way that it has added an essential perspective to scholarship in so many disciplines. It has rewritten critical literary scholarship by demanding it consider the saturation of literature with images, metaphors and narratives of supposedly ‘deviant’ bodies and minds, and has showcased the talent of disabled writers. Consequently, there is no field of English Studies that doesn’t have a developing body of critical work that sees writing in terms of the latest disability theory. 

But: it’s important to remember that the source of this development of critical thinking had its origins in English Studies. The ‘critical’ in this manifestation of Critical Disability Studies emerged in the work of scholars such as Lennard J Davis, Rosemarie-Garland Thomson, David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder, Michael Davidson and Tobin Siebers, all of whom have backgrounds in English. Equally, the massively important development of crip theory in the first decade of the 20^th century owes much to the work of Robert McRuer, again based in an English department.

So, the move to make here is not only to recognise how transformational Disability Studies has been to English but (in the spirit of provocation) to ask whether Critical Disability Studies does enough to acknowledge its heritage, more precisely its debt to English. I would want to argue that English is at least as foundational to Critical Disability Studies as Sociology and that this is often forgotten when thinking of its contemporary forms.

My main provocation however, comes through thinking about Disability Studies’ relationship with Medical Humanities, the subject of my latest book Medical Humanities and Disability Studies: In/Disciplines, recently published by Bloomsbury. 

As a discipline, Medical Humanities is largely successful because it functions as a network of connected approaches across and through multiple subjects; it self-consciously aspires to greater sophistication and has moved from deterministic models of instruction and listening, to critical modes of entanglement and discipline crossing. Disability Studies builds sophistication into highly complex theoretical frames that host critical projects of advocacy and interrogations of social, economic and political symtems. It is wary of structures that discriminate and committed to the project of championing disabled presence and forms of knowing the world. It is interrogative of structures and the rethinking of space and time, committed to activity and organised change, and more fully names a recognisable and critical world than Medical Humanities. 

Because of worries about its history (which disability scholarship has rightly critiqued), Medical Humanities pushes to be more than a humanist critical friend to clinical/academic conceptions of health. It has successfully argued for this, especially at levels of theory, but arguably it does so through the addition of perspectives; even at its most critically complex, it worries that it lacks the coherence and ethical framework that it sees in scholarship on disability. 

At the same time, Medical Humanities’ aim for greater critical inclusivity pushes back against many of the uninterrogated assertions made by Disability Studies, particularly assumptions inherent in its affirmative modes of counter narratives. In part, this problem arises because Disability Studies, in its systemic disciplinary formations, isn’t always good at being inclusive. A commitment to provocative engagement can assume that counter narratives to ableism are de facto good simply by existing in opposition and I often feel that the tendency of critical disability scholars to claim the moral high ground through an assertion of wide-ranging inclusion to be something that needs investigation and revision, because it all too often simplifies complexities of disability lives. I find more tolerance in Medical Humanities approaches to critical methods, possibly because the subject acknowledges that it doesn’t have the same kind of foundational core subject (the disabled person, for example) as other disciplines. It knows that it needs to know more.

In much disability theory, assumptions are made about what disabled people are or what they want and even if these come within a language of inclusion that suggests variety, they can be remarkably inflexible. Personally, I find that Disability Studies often champions a certain kind of disabled life while ignoring others (I have never felt it as a useful frame to think about my own disability – epilepsy – for example). Critically, the subject is poor in talking about (for example) chronic pain and engaging with the loss felt by many disabled people, or the complex ways they might articulate a need for dependency. It also champions certain critical methods while assuming superiority over others. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve heard at conferences that ‘it has to be considered whether Medical Humanities might be ableist’ (paraphrasing a throwaway remark); or that Medical Humanities ‘needs cripping’. But isn’t an uninterrogated sense of entitlement and self-worth, and an assumed self-importance as a point of reference (evident in some of these viewpoints) itself a sign of ableism? Where might that leave us?

At the moment, I find that much Critical Disability Studies lacks self-reflexivity and doubt; consequently it doesn’t seem to me to be a humble discipline. I find the provisional positioning central to much Medical Humanities work, or the commitment to contradiction and messiness championed by English, to offer better critical tools precisely because they are more flexible. If we want better research on disability (and we all do) will scholars in Critical Disability Studies contemplate how much it needs to change to achieve this?

References

Michael Davidson, Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008)

Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body (London: Verso, 1995)

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How we Look (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2009)

Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York UP, 2006)

David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000)

Stuart Murray, Medical Humanities and Disability Studies: In/Disciplines (London: Bloomsbury, 2023)

Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008)