#fleckenstein

Key (or New) Terms

Body schema— non-visual sensing of the body, including haptics, proprioception, or spatial awareness of the body and interoception, or awareness of the body’s internal state (Featherstone qtd. Manivannan 66)

Cartesian perspectivalism—the eye creates a two dimensional, artificial image of a 3D scene that is decontextualized, held up in a vacuum, and assumed to be a real, authentic reflection of reality (Hum 110-111).

Scopic regimes—culturally specific ways of interpreting what we see that seek to organize reality into one essential socio-historical construct (Hum 108).

Polymorphic literacy—a constantly evolving, multifaceted literacy made up of verbal, graphic, and mental (visual-kinesthetic space, reality in the absence of reality) (Fleckenstein 623).

I knew that my choice to host this blog on Tumblr, my first social media platform and online “home”, would eventually resonate with the contents of this course. I just didn’t expect it to come so soon! As I read Michelle Grue and Vyshali Manivannan’s pieces on role that clothing plays in navigating academia as a person of color or a visibly disabled person, I thought of my “main” blog. Just a tab away from where I’m composing this post waits a collection of historical and cultural fashions and aesthetics cultivated over the course of years, interspersed with quotations from literature, scholarship, and the work of historical interpreters, reflecting my own evolving relationship with history, fashion, academia, disability, and authenticity over the years. I find myself wondering what I would uncover if I examined that collection for markers of class and “authenticity”. How have I negotiated with what Sue Hum calls the “dynamic of universality”—have I looked for or considered the historical, social, and economic tides that brought content to my dash, or have I allowed what I saw to be reduced to a flattened, commodified “reality” of other cultures focused on what we in the West would like to believe we all, as humans, share?

Manivannan’s “But You Look So Well” brought this home for me in a very real way. Since I am visibly disabled, “dressing sick” or “dressing well” aren’t a concern for me in the same way as for her. I carry obvious, universally (Western) symbols of “sickness” with me everywhere. But I do find myself having to dress in ways that reinforce a sense of belonging in academia. At my undergraduate institution, I was once stopped on my way to class (in sweatpants and a t-shirt) and kindly asked if I needed help getting back to a program for special education high school students that sometimes ran on campus. In a dress and a blazer (especially the blazer, which seems to impress undergraduates) I am much more reliably clocked as an academic. As Manivannan notes, these more formal or ostensibly intellectual ways of dressing reflect a sense of neoliberal independence and “ownership” of pain that people with intellectual disabilities, especially, are stereotyped as not possessing. This speaks to Sue Hum’s assertion that Western society calls for an ostensibly objectivist way of seeing—what looks, to our sensibilities, as “authentic Chinese culture” is authentic, and what looks, to us, like an unintelligent person must be so.

Moreover, I’m aware that these standards are in some ways highly specific to me as a white woman. As Grue notes, the standard, “serious” styles that work well for white women seeking to be taken seriously can get Black women stereotyped as angry or unnecessarily severe. Grue’s piece offers a powerful reminder that clothing, like other imagery, is never neutral. I was especially struck by Grue’s reflection that Dr. Tamora “needs to perform a certain way to protect her body and her intellect, so she can do the work she wants to do.” I’ve often regarded signifiers or stereotypes of intellectualism (books, overtly academic vocabulary) similarly, as armor I can wield against societal stereotypes and prejudices surrounding the “useless”, naïve disabled person—a category I fought not to be included in growing up.