Disability as invisibility and hypervisibility: the question of modalities

Abstract

The article argues that narrative patterns prevailing in many countries and cultures are not convenient for articulation of contingent bodily experience. This may be a reason why the articulating of disability experience remains a difficult task. There are two seemingly contradictory processes: when disability does not appear in any social or historical narrative (the invisibility of it), and when only one physical feature is noticed and described (the hypervisibility). Accordingly, the two fields are chosen for this analysis: the discourse of the social memory, revealing historical invisibility of persons with disabilities; and the popular public discourse that demonstrates a hypervisibility of disabled bodies in sense of fetishizing only one feature of a person’s life. Both are the kinds of de-subjectification of a person. However, the cultural situation is changing. Today’s literature, philosophy, and practices of arts show many signs of focusing on contingent situations of every individual life and vulnerability of human bodies and souls.