Ann Mariya Sabu

Abstract

This paper aims towards a Foucaltian reading of what constitutes ‘home’ for a person with a disability, wherein the hardness, repetitiveness and mundanity of ‘everydayness’ - the pre-supposed banality of it is perhaps what is home to a disabled person is realized, what then is disabled are the spaces one inhabits, which doesn’t accommodate that disability bringing the context of geographical disabilities at play where the provision of what is ‘home’ to one is not been made accessible and thereby a denial of their being. This paper highlights the play between Home as metaphor and Home as a physical space. 

Bringing the context closer home, a person with eyewear may feel it’s a part of their identity, their belonging, they may never think of it as a ‘disability’ when they constantly make the act of wearing it  unless the space they occupy doesn’t give them access to an eyewear easily, geographical disability of access wherein Home as a spatio-temporality then is the focus of the paper. An identity is foregone which may constitute a part of oneself – their home, this spatialized subjectivity will be studied. Barriers are then built by places which are landscapes of hegemonic power one cohabits in whose aesthetic vocabulary the definition of what’s home for Other is banality and mundanity for the abled.

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 Keywords:

Home, Disability, Spaces, bodies, Foucalt, mundanity, repetitiveness

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INTRODUCTION

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This paper contains the play between Home as metaphor and Home as a physical space. My argument in this paper is that a person who is considered disabled by society isn’t the one disabled, what’s actually disabled are the spaces one occupies that doesn’t accommodate the differences, hence disabled are the spaces that these bodies which I would like to call their home, occupy. The real disability is of access and of geographical spaces which doesn’t cohabit their body, their home, their identity. 

An aspect that I would like to emphasize upon when correlating home and disability is the repetitiveness of a disabled person's life and thereby the banal mundanity of ‘everydayness’. For example, a person with eyewear may feel it’s a part of their identity, their belonging, they may never think of it as a ‘disability’ when they constantly make the act of wearing it  unless the space they occupy doesn’t give them access to eyewear easily. Certain disabilities are perhaps so normalized that they don’t look like disabilities or impairment or perhaps can be called ‘(normal) abnormality’. Visible skin conditions like even acne, something as quotidian as that, is a disability, at least that's what one is socialized to believe it is, eradicating that pimple is the sole mission some endeavour somedays. For instance, Hawkesworth’s (2002, 259) study of facial acne in young people shows the active ways in which teenagers relieve their ‘spatial anxiety or the threat of feeling less valid at certain moments’ by avoiding some places, or by covering or making up the face.

 In all of the above scenarios, we see that spaces that one accommodate have a pivotal role in enabling or disabling the (dis)abled bodies, however, there is an optionality with these sorts of disabilities, which isn’t the scenario for a person in a wheelchair or someone whose leg is amputated. There is a daily tryst with hostile spaces, spaces that don't accommodate what perhaps comprises ‘home’ for them, their bodies. How supposed spaces of belonging don't make one feel ‘home’ is realized, highlighting the underlying ‘ableism’ of a non-disabled society that creates a world in its own able-bodied image. Cara Kiernan Fallon, in her essay “Walking Cane Style and Medicalized Mobility,” explores how the common use of canes and walking sticks as fashion statements in the late nineteenth century created a blurry boundary between the able-bodied and the disabled. When everyone carried a walking stick, it was easier to age gracefully, gradually putting more weight on the stick for support.An abode, a stick could be to some, became a fashion, hence, cohabiting that disability and making the users feel more at home in their corporeal institution of bodyness. External spatial configurations that serve as dimensions of exercising hegemonic power which represses disability in aesthetic representations is the one to be blamed, making  one rethink  disability as a socially constructed entity, rather than as a biological certainty. 

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Referencing Extreme Makeover: Home edition, this American reality show served as the architectural salvation for families which contained disabled members by building them homes within a stipulated period of seven days, which met with their required needs. At a rhetorical level EMHE equates the condition of the family home with the condition of the bodies inside the home. Bodies are then ostensibly linked to their habitats, their homes. Thus EMHE constructs a  symbiosis between place and person; to heal the person, one must heal the space that the person inhabits. 

Home 

  Home is a very subjective idea, it is a place, in Spivakian terms, we cannot not want,  it is a sense of  belonging for some, marginalization and estrangement for others, home, as an entity consists of multitudes, Home can be a site where relations are examined, or experience of being in the world. It can be an umbrella construct or a very liminal space, or it can be an expression of one’s (possibly fluid) identity and sense of self or one’s own body might be home to the self, which is the core idea this paper deals with. My stance here is that the corporeality of an extraordinary body is the spatial configuration that constitutes Home for a person with disability as it is the expression of the symbol of the self. 

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To embrace the difference that one embodies which one comes back to every time at the end of the day, and the spaces that don’t motivate one to do so is the core theme, wherein finding a home in one’s body, that makes one one, their being, their identity, their home, is what I would like to pose as being made difficult due to the pre-inscribed narratives of the spaces that these aberrant bodies cohabit and thereby annotating the anomaly and asserting that ‘home’ is more than merely a physical address where they live.

The ‘repetitiveness’ of ‘everydayness’ was highlighted in the example of eyewear, but for people whose disability isn't an option to them, repetition becomes the tool of a space in time where “home and identity” can be found. Everytime a human who finds it difficult to walk performs the daily act of wearing a brace, or a disabled person who uses a ‘normalization device’ to perform quotidian tasks, what an ableist perspective would believe there is, is a mundanity to it, a hardness. But, perhaps that defines them, their sense of self and every time because of landscapes of hegemonic power which these bodies themselves are subjected to, the restrictive aesthetic vocabulary of the abled and what mundanity in this repetitiveness is perhaps the definition of what’s home for Other.

The Secret Garden
 

 The Secret Garden, a 2020 film, is a fantasy drama film based on a 1911 novel. My take on this film would emphasize an intersection between disability and home. Mary is an orphaned girl who has come to live in her uncle’s home in Yorkshire, she along with her friend Dickon discovers that there is more to the place, that it involves a secret garden and also she discovers her aunt’s isolated son. Colin and the portrayal of his disability are what I found extremely appalling, crippled, and having a hunchback, he is locked away. On being hysterical, he is locked down in bed. In the last scene, after Colin is brought to the secret garden which his mother invented by his cousin Mary and Dickon and he is able to walk, it tells the viewers the dichotomy between the mundanity of modernity and the power of pastorality, but beyond than that I would rather see it as an ending which reiterates the fact that any disability means that you won’t be loved, and what’s hilarious is that seeing him walk, his father Lord Craven who previously hated him and didn't want to see him as he reminded of his deceased wife, suddenly, begins to love him. It comes across as love being a feeling only to be felt for the abled- bodies and then ‘cure’ being the only possible resort for the ‘other’ bodies. 

Residing in what is supposedly his home, he is ostracized for his crippled corporeality, and the microgeographies of disability at play here are important to notice, what exactly is disabled is his home, a spatial geography of exclusion in this case and a physical space that didn’t respect his body - the metaphorical home. Colin's condition is what I like to call, ‘ triple liminalization’, he is a liminal object subjected to oppression by his body, his family and his space ( his room). 

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Men in the Sun 

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In Ghassan Kanafani’s 1962 novel, Men in the Sun, we briefly encounter the story of the female character Shafiqa whose leg was amputated “from the top of the thigh,” leaving her a “deformed woman” and a “burden” on society which is an 'other' to the 'good and proper' social and physical body (Campbell 1999). The text throws light on Palestinian body politics, where we see Shafiqa’s body being a Kristevan ‘abject’, the work highlights corporeal ‘Otherness’, bringing into context Freud who insists that disabilities in the form of amputations, blindness and other conditions can and should be understood as ‘well-known’ symbolic substitutes for castration. What Shafiqa faces is then a sort of double castration, one for her disability and two, for being a woman. 

A minimal marginalized space assigned to Shafiqa in the larger narrative is an intentional decision by Kanafani, her descriptions are very brief, her story is focalized through the reminiscences of a male character. Her house is said to be located on the edges of town, this ostracization and pushing to the periphery solely due to her body is seen in the text which is indicative in the title as it ultimately concerns the male body. Anatomy is destiny, argues Freud, and in this sense, women are already ‘disabled’. The ‘lack’ consigns them automatically to a subordinate social role. Home as a socio-political contested territory can be viewed here as Shafiqa’s body is a terrain for the body politic. Shafiqa along with her individuality and own social being is sidelined because of constraining spaces. 

Tara

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 Mahesh Dattani’s Tara revolves around the lives of conjoined twins, Tara and Chandan, born with three legs and the third leg was given to Chandan even when the circulation of that leg would have fitted better with Tara’s body. The spaces occupied by them then made the embodied body a contested terrain that saw Tara and Chandan’s identities merely relegated to their disability. Throughout the novel, all they were in search of was a metaphorical home, a home that gave them a space, that accommodated them with their bodies, disabled bodies, and the treatment they are meted out, comes into the foreplay in the novel and there’s a constant sedimenting of  their "otherness" to our "sameness."

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Glass Menagerie

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Many of the elements of Tara are similar to Tennessee Williams’ Glass Menagerie, wherein a character called Laura quits college because she isn’t feeling at ‘home’ with her crippled body, because the spaces she inhabits don’t accommodate her disability. She tries to find a ‘home’, an idealized space where she feels a sense of belonging, and she finds it in the glass figurines- in which she finds her shelter, her space that gives her stability amidst the destabilizing able- bodied aesthetic that suppresses her being and batters her body. Here, home is seen as a desire, escape, and reality. A sense of belonging to these spaces in this case, the glass figurines does not come without a sense of exclusivity.

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Foucalt’s ‘heterotopia’ 

Michel Foucault’s idea of ‘heterotopia’ as suggested by Harvey (1989: 273), offers multiple possibilities within which a spatialized “otherness” can flourish thereby opening a door to pluriformity heterogeneity. The authoritarianism of what Derrida calls ’Majoritarianism’ which produces conventional spaces sees ‘counter-spaces’ in Foucault’s heterotopia which are particular places in the cities where processes of change and hybridization are facilitated, what then we need to build are heterotopias around us, that accommodate somatic differences which would definitely be a ray of light to many in the world. 

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 CONCLUSION 

The constitution of ‘home’ in discourses of disability is a play between a metaphorical home and home as a physical space, Home which is a metaphor and Home as a space that is beyond or within the body. Disabled are the spaces that these bodies which are their homes occupy, Home is not a ubiquitous concept, it is a space we live with and a place we live by. What then is important to state is that there should be Space for every Body. The politics of representation is visible in all examples taken above. As disability scholar Rosemarie Garland Thompson puts it: “Representation informs the identity—and often the fate— of real people with extraordinary bodies.” If disabled people’s ‘everyday geographies’ are considered, the metaphorical geography can include the bodies and spaces that are ‘landscapes of power’ (Lefebvre 1991; Sibley 1995). Foucault’s ‘heterotopia’ that accommodates all kinds of bodies is necessary for the flourishing of society at large. The constituent makeup of "home" is that of one’s own body and the constant making and unmaking of it due to the spaces within and outside leads to the construction of identities. 

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Acknowledgements 

To Prof. Jobin Thomas and Prof. Dr. Sandhya Nambiar for their valuable guidance and inputs, and to my friends, Ananya and Maria.  

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Works Cited

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Internet Sources 

1. The Secret Garden (2020), https://youtu.be/sWfgTiJ3sCs.