My Presentation to the Torture Class

Warning: High Emotional Content.

There were many subjects I considered discussing for my presentation. I considered showing media clips, or discussing the arc of my blog (thanks to those of you that followed by the way). Ultimately what I decided to discuss however is disability. If you’ll allow me, I’d like to begin with a personal story and then tie it in to the course and the creation of the other.

This may seem like a strange topic considering that I personally am not disabled. Disability, however, has shaped my life. When I was five, my father was in a wheel chair for a year when he had a cancerous back tumor removed. The chemotherapy he had following the removal caused a rare condition to occur wherein the nerves in his legs no longer correctly transmit motor information, severely limiting their use to this day. When I was nine my mother’s auto-immune condition, Sjögren’s Syndrome (which is akin to Lupus or Coeliac disease), drastically worsened. To this day she is constantly nauseous, suffers from daily migraines, is severely limited physically and is only active for 8 hours a day. Today, as they have been for most of my childhood, my parents are severely physically disabled. In other words, I grew up in a disabled household.

My parents’ disabilities affected me directly in many ways. More important in defining who I am today though is how their disabilities affected them. Unlike my younger brother, I still have strong memories of when my parents were able-bodied. My mother in particular was an incredibly dedicated worker, administrating family planning clinics for Contra Costa County, pulling long hours and still finding time to spend with my brother and me. Even when a drunk driver ran her down while she was on a bike, crushing one of her spinal disks, she persevered. When her Sjögren’s Syndrome flared up, everything changed. My mother’s seemingly unstoppable lifelong effort to succeed in the workplace and in the community was crushed within the course of a year. Her work was not all that changed. My mother to this day cannot do lengthy social engagements or even meet with friends outside our house without great physical cost. As a result of this, most of her long-term friendships buckled and collapsed, and many in her family alienated. My mother’s Sjögren’s Syndrome will be with her as long as she lives, and its many burdens along with it.

Despite the amount of suffering my mother endures and the loss of her career, there is an additional layer of unnecessary suffering that greatly compounds her hardships. American society has, to put it mildly, a disturbing view of physical disability. For those who we acknowledge as “legitimately” disabled we have developed limited accommodations but by and large have not committed ourselves to bringing about true equal opportunity. One look at Occidental’s campus will tell you that the school simply wasn’t designed and largely hasn’t been updated to accommodate the basic needs of the physically disabled. Sure there are methods whereby the wheelchair-bound and those with reduced mobility can get into Johnson and Fowler, but can you imagine trying to get into Weingart? Or trying to get food at the Marketplace? Or live for that matter in any of the dorms? Despite its debatable “bet intentions”, Oxy operates out a standard playbook for American social thought: human beings when “normal” are physically “well”, and that additional “accommodations” are desirable but not urgent. I’ll return to this standard of normalcy and wellness in a minute.

To go back to the subject of my mother, she is not one of those I described above. Though her disability is crippling and prevents her from engaging in most activities the “well” (myself included) enjoy, it is not immediately visible to the eye like a wheelchair or a limp would be. Without a physical reminder of her disability, the social construction of “wellness as normalcy” comes to the surface in an ugly fashion. Again and again I see my mother’s friends, peers, acquaintances and even her own family question whether she was “really sick”. Some say it outright, calling her a “hypochondriac”, and inventing/perpetuating her own maladies. Others are, or grow to be more subtle, asking over and over again why my mother wasn’t investing “enough” time in their relationship, or why she couldn’t pick up their kids from school, or why she couldn’t just “overcome” and “be stronger than her sickness” for just one event that they wanted her to do. No matter how many times my mother explains her condition, and indeed demonstrates how limiting it is in her daily life, few truly believe her. With no job and very few friends and family that acknowledge the nature of her life, my mother has no choice but just to live.

This denial of illness and elevation of ability-based normalcy is from my life experience rooted in fear. As my mother’s friends and family look her in the eye and tell her she can overcome her illness if she sets her mind to it they are afraid. Afraid that when they look at her, what looks back is their own mortality. Afraid that the strength they see within her would not be in them were they as ill as she. Western culture is profoundly afraid of death and even more so, I’d argue, loss of our faculties. A post-enlightenment worldview has given the West an obsession with rational observation and our supposed ability to control our own lives. What is more American than the idea that anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps? If someone is not satisfied with their life, shouldn’t they just try harder? If you’ve gotten to where you are in life through hard work, isn’t it insulting when someone says that they are stuck by their circumstances?

This brings me back to our coursework and the discourse of torture. In the very beginning of the course, Elaine Scarry made the claim that the pain of others is fundamentally inaccessible. As we progressed through the course, we saw this view reflected again and again in Western metaphysics. Only in some of our most recently examined theorists, like Levinas and Derrida have we seen an attempt to break this tradition and de-alienate the suffering of the other. These more recent challenges to the traditional framework are just that however: challenges to an accepted reality. This standard conception of identity and the human experience as internal and isolated still governs our society today.

For the tortured and the disabled alike, there is a narrative of conflict between rational self-control and pain. The tortured, when the act is committed, are as we discussed “reduced to animals” and “rendered sub-human” by their loss of self (as Scarry puts it) and inability to overcome their pain through rational thought. When I read this at the beginning of the semester, I wondered how this fundamentally differs from the pain of the unwell or disabled.

While for one the pain is externally inflicted and the other the pain is internal, there is a parallel inherent in the two groups of people in the Western tradition. Neither group has control over their pain, nor can exert the rational faculty that defines humanity in Western metaphysics to stop it. For these two groups that should elicit the most sympathy from us, sympathy is impossible (Scarry). Ingrained in our thinking is the fundamental internalization of the pain of the “other” and their own obligation as humans to overcome their adversity through rationality and re-establishment of a “well” self. As Du Bois put it, the torturee is just “a body”. Asad says that torture in the ascetic tradition releases the soul from the body. Like the tortured, the disabled are reduced to the limitations of their body and hence have a damaged “self” from their inability to exert rational control.

In perhaps an even more frightening manner, this Western metaphysical tradition compounds with American exceptionalism, the American dream, and the neo-liberal tradition. Ingrained in this tradition, as I mentioned earlier is the expectation that everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and be a productive member of society. External barriers in this tradition are non-existent: the expectation is that whether you succeed or not depends on whether you have the willpower and personal drive to achieve what is offered to everyone equally. The tortured and the disabled are similarly demoted in the eyes of society by their inability to fulfill their Hobbesian social contract. The torture have allegedly already exited said contract for their alleged crimes, and the disabled face an inherent barrier that prevents them from contributing as “productive” members of human society. By “refusing” to use their rational control to fulfill their contract with society, both groups have failed to live up to the supposedly barrier-less American dream.

I know that significantly more biopolitical analysis is needed here, and that this is only an initial exploration, but it was important to me to share with you how this class has made me reflect on my own life and the lives around me. Thank you.