Slavery and Abolition - 9-26

This week's readings continue the trend we have been tracing of finding agency within disability and using disability to counter dominant ideologies. Last week, we focused on one's agency to reclaim disability in a non-violent way. While there are some traces of that notion in this week's readings, there is a shift towards using disability as a way to interrupt other external systems of oppression, such as slavery.

I want to begin by discussing the Dea Boster article, because it speaks to the different ways in which disability was used to resist slavery. Slavery is a system of control and thus requires the ability to render behavior docile. Boster explains how "epilepsy's associations with madness spoke to larger cultural concerns about uncontrollable behavior; it is not surprising, therefore, that the most terrifying aspects of epilepsy...were its incurability and unpredictability" (277). Boster thus communicates how epilepsy represented a vulnerability of slavery because it presents the opportunity of unpredictability.

According to Boster, epilepsy was used in a variety of ways to undermine slavery.

First, slaves could fake epilepsy as "a negotiation or resistance strategy in the antebellum South" (290). Epilepsy was grounds for annulment of a slave-transaction, which gave slaves a way to disrupt the flow of the slave trade. Also, malingering represented a way for slaves to demonstrate the uncontrollability of their bodies, as explained above. Boster outlines how it is nearly impossible to distinguish a real attack of epilepsy from a feigned one, and that this ambiguity created fear and uncertainty among slave owners.

Second, epilepsy was used to expose the physical violence incurred by slaves at the hands of their masters. Many people believed that physical abuse could result in epilepsy, and that "epileptic fits in slaves were often linked directly to physical abuse" (286). Boster gives the example of Harriet Tubman, who was hit in the head accidentally by her slave master. Boster continues by outlining how epilepsy thus revealed the violence that took place against slaves by exposing the lasting effects of physical abuse.

Third, and arguably most important, epilepsy was used to generate support for the abolitionist movement in the north. Boster elucidates, "epilepsy...was used to shock and convert Northern audiences to the abolitionist cause" (286). This strategy utilizes the argument I explained above about exposing violence to reveal to Northerners the extent of the violence incurred by the slaves, which generated broader support for abolition.

Thus, Boster argues it is impossible to understand abolition without understanding epilepsy or attitudes regarding disability in the ante-bellum South. Mr. Kogan's paper also emphasizes the importance of disability with regards to abolition.

Mr. Kogan elucidates how Benjamin Lay used his abnormal body to generate awareness and empathy for the abolitionist cause. The anecdote regarding Lay in the snow serves to demonstrate how empathy regarding his disability was then redirected to create empathy for slaves who shared similar experiences.

Mr. Kogan also explains how the outcast position of Benjamin Lay allowed him to take up a public advocacy without any risk to his social standing, as he had "already lost official recognition in the Meeting" (5). Mr. Kogan's paper is particularly interesting because it traces the historical depictions of Benjamin Lay to emphasize how "Lay's disability played a critical role in the historical memory surrounding him and his advocacy" (11).

Here, one can see the portrayal of Benjamin Lay not as negative, but as empowered. Thus, it is possible to understand that Lay was not seen as overwhelmingly negative.

One should also note note how the medicalization of Lay's disability also created the perception that he was abnormal mentally as well, which "became an asset that gave him a tempestuous attitude and spurred him forward in his abolitionism" (7). The importance of disability in cultivating an abolitionist ethic is epitomized when Kogan writes, "This mind-body connection made Lay's unconventional and strident abolitionism intelligible to a nineteenth-century audience" (2). Here, Mr. Kogan explains how the idea of abolitionism at the time was not the norm; however, Lay's disability allowed him to take up this advocacy in a way that people would understand, and the nineteenth-century audience was able to create a narrative that explained why Lay was advocating for abolitionism (a result of his mental and physical disability, they believed).


Finally, the Nielsen article begins by outlining how white women and African Americans were disabled because of their "inability to labor" (56). This understanding shifts from a medical model of disability to a more social one, in which one is disabled by their social status. However, the article continues by focusing on the physical aspects of disability as well. I am not going to repeat much of the "disability cultivated an abolitionist ethic" because I explained most of that above, but on page 58, Nielsen writes how "abolitionists used disability to argue against slavery" by emphasizing the physical violence of slavery.

Before I pose a few questions, I want to draw attention to the question of intersectionality. The Nielsen article discusses how things like childbirth were different for women of color as opposed to white women, and how the situation was also influenced by the potential for birth defects. The Boster chapter's reference to Virginia explains how her "status as a slave likely had implications for the kind of treatment she would receive and who was responsible for her care" (279). Here, one can see how disability is also affected by question of race, gender, class, and so on.



Here are some questions to think about before our class discussion:
--To what extent was epilepsy as resistance effective? Were there instances in which using epilepsy to resist slavery was actually ineffective?
--While malingering may have been effective, could it also have been counter-productive in terms of pretending to be disabled? It seems almost like a commodification of disability.
--What happens if everyone gets to claim to be disabled? What are the dangers associated with equating disability with a lack of productivity (Nielsen) as opposed to a physical disability? Who isn't disabled through this understanding? Were all African Americans considered disabled?
--In what ways would our understanding of slavery and disability change if we focused on the more social aspect to disability?
--In what ways would an intersectional approach help or hinder our understanding of abolition?

Hello everybody, this is Max Milavetz writing as your blog leader this week. The main concept I wish to focus on in the discussion is autonomy/agency in the enlightenment.

The Turner chapter presents a couple of views on this subject. First, the context in which this chapter occurs is important to consider. In the enlightenment period, the notions of individual autonomy, democracy, the scientific method, and many more philosophical views presented a new way of viewing society. As the old political systems fell under heavy critique, new beliefs about government, oneself, and the universe arose.

When applying the enlightenment values to the readings this week, one may view the situation of disabled people in the enlightenment as one in which the individual has greater agency. This can be seen when Turner talks about the “merry cripple.” Turner writes “the ‘happy’ or ‘merry’ ‘cripple’, contented with his or her lot and meeting life’s vicissitudes with a cheerful smile, was a stock figure in early modern popular culture” (69). By turning their own disablement into a comedic opportunity, disabled people exercised greater agency due to the equal “sparring” between the two people.

By joking about their disability, many disabled people “level the playing field” and earn the respect and equality of their non-disabled companions. Turner concurs that “humor was thus seen as a key means for disabled people to overcome the supposed horrors of affliction, to (re)integrate themselves into non-disabled society” (70).

In addition to “the merry cripple,” using disability as a source of national pride also helps gain agency. As seen on page 74 of the Turner chapter, a man describes his dismemberment at the hands of the French. At the end of his story, the soldier had shifted the focus from his disability to his national service. Thus, the ex-soldier’s pride in his disability and national service demands respect from the passerby.

Likewise, the same idea applies to the William Hay essay. Hay views his disability as an opportunity to learn: “The more a man is unactive in his person, the more his mind will be at work… by these he may acquire wisdom, and by wisdom fame” (69).  In this case, William Hay exercises autonomy by choosing to disregard his physical disability. He does no physical work, yet his academic life benefits everyone (he is a member of the parliament). Hay also demonstrates the capability for disabled advancement in the Enlightenment. As an upperclass member of society, Hay’s story is an example of a disabled person commanding respect.

Some questions for the week:

-       Does the context of the Enlightenment benefit, do nothing for, or hurt the autonomy of disabled people?

-       How can a disabled person exercise agency in a society that publicly mocks them? How can they earn respect? Do they need to earn respect?

-       Are jest books a reliable insight into the social trends of the time?

-       How might the opinion of those mentioned in the Turner chapter differ from that of William Hay?

-       How does the identity development of a disabled person in the Enlightenment differ from a disabled person in modern times?

Pictured: A portrait of William Hay, and a prosthetic arm.

Making our comments more readable and compelling

Thanks for a great first week's discussion and exchange—both on the blog and in-class!

I particularly applaud everyone for really engaging with these complex texts and developing substantial questions and comments on the blog. I greatly enjoyed seeing your well-developed, thoroughly referenced, and responsive comments on the blog.

What I'd like to see more of in future weeks, however, are fewer epic blocks of text in the comments. Remember the national tragedy that ensued a few years ago that involved massive blocks of text?

No? Here's a cautionary snippet to give you a feel of the mass of such things:

So, I've got a few suggestions and resources to help both the main blog authors and the rest of the class commenters some ideas and resources to help pare things down and make them comments more manageable and effectively structured.

First, here's a great link to how to use simple HTML codes in your comments. This website has some very accessible and straight-forward explanations about how to make you text bold, italicized, or bulleted

• into
• a
• number
• of
• discrete
• points.

(I hope you all enjoyed how meta that became).

Second, I encourage you to also check out some other posts about how to write appropriate-length comments on blogs. Writing in this medium is different than writing traditional papers, even though we analyze texts, make arguments, evaluate sources, etc. in both media. Here are a few links I found that had some good advice:

• "How Long Are Your Paragraphs"
• "How to Write Addictively Readable Paragraphs"
• "The Ideal Length of Everything Online According to Science"

While this post has been primarily about paragraph length and breaking up your key ideas to make them more readable for your classmates and me, that last link included this infographic that I couldn't resist posting here:

Finally, remember that we're meeting on TUESDAY, SEPT. 22, for our class next week. This change in the schedule means that the lead blog post needs to be done by Sunday at midnight and all the comments (unless I've made alternate arrangements with you) need to be done by Monday at Midnight.

Mr. Kogan's Growth Mindset in Action: Revising the Blogging Rubric

Before the school year, Dr. Taylor pointed me in the direction of something called a "Single Point Rubric."

If you read up on them in any of the following posts (the original Dr. T point me to; a quick explanatory one that I stole the above image from; a definitional post about different kinds of rubrics) you'll see some of the advantages of a "Single Point Rubric," which I've begun experimenting with in my AP Euro classes and thought I bring here as well.

So, here's what our revised Blogging Rubric will now look like for your posts and comments:

I'm hopeful that this revision will have a number of benefits for us:

1. I think, as the posts above explain, that this format will be far less cluttered.
2. I believe it will allow me give you better, more detailed feedback.
3. I think having grade totals from 0-100 will allow me a much more nuanced response and evaluation that the 0-8 (commenters) or 0-12 (lead posters) scale I initially devised.
4. I think it will be easier to convey feedback to you paperlessly, which, given our blog-based course format, makes a lot of sense.

So, I'm going to create separate Google Docs for each of you with 12 different pages for feedback that I'll fill out over the course of the semester. Once you see a grade up online, that should indicate that I've finished reading your post and you can see my feedback for that week's work. I'll be sending those links to each of you shortly as shared, view-only Google Doc files.

Please let me know if you have any questions, but I hope my experimenting with this will be a benefit for all of us in the class. And with this pedagogical risk I'm also trying, as Tammy Faye Bakker sings, to embrace "running toward the roar"!

Student-led discussions: "What're you looking for?"

One additional thing I also wanted to pass along in advance of our first meeting on Wednesday was the rubric I'll use for evaluating contributions to our student-led discussions.

Here it is (along with the details of how to earn make-up points in the event you don't participate in a discussion):



As I've taught almost all of you before, this structure should hopefully seem familiar to what you did in either AP Euro or Western Civ. Along those lines, the same expectations and guidelines for decorum also hold true for how we interact in class (respectful listening; building on one another's comments; avoiding interruptions; working to integrate those who haven't spoke into the conversation, etc.) Finally, I'll continue to play a similar role as note-taker and conversation observer and will only jump in when we veer off-track or need to escape from the conversational doldrums.

Finally, below is the video that we'll be discussing in our class on Wednesday (along with the transcript of that talk, if you're interested.

Defining Disability Discussion

Both the readings and Stella Young TED talk reveal conflicting views surrounding defining disability and common trends around how society defines it. Both Simi Linton and Young  explicitly reject the medical model of disability (Medical Model of Disability) in favor of a social model (Social Model of Disability), and the Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin article seems to agree.

Both Linton and Adams et al refer to dictionary definitions of disability in order to show that even our most primary source for defining terms in society cannot truly capture the nature of discrimination against disabled people and mostly attribute it to a form of incapacity or deviancy from norms that produce a disadvantage. Even the prefix of the word disability, "dis," connotes separation and a sense of a split from normalcy (Linton 30). Linton explains the controversy over defining disability: "there are disagreements about what it is that unites disabled people and whether disabled people should have control over the naming of their experience" (10). Defining disability as something concrete seems to lend credibility to the medical model of disability by suggesting that disability denotes a "condition." However, Linton reveals the danger of letting everyone decide for themselves if they fall under the category of disabled. Linton says erasing the line between disabled and non disabled people feels wrong as disabled people experience discrimination and daily challenges from society.

Young and Linton both feel strongly about rejecting the "overcoming" narrative of disability. Linton criticizes it because it places individual responsibility on the disabled person for a problem that falls to society, suggesting that disabled people should just "work harder." Young criticizes the idea of disability as exceptional because it objectifies disabled people in a form of "inspiration porn."  Adams et al highlights the produced and contingent nature of disability through the example of David who says he has Down syndrome "sometimes" (5). Both authors point to the creation of disability historically in both treating it as a medical condition and as an unstable category that can sometimes be used for political activism. Both Linton and Adams et al point to varied nature of experiences of people with disability as a challenge for activism and unification. However, this point seems to present the central problem of defining disability: How do you define a category of experience where the point of the category is that disabled people experience oppression on an individual level and in unique ways? 

Adams et al makes a unique point by talking about how the battle for disability accessibility often comes at the cost of other groups, such as that of the oppressed workers who must build the ramps and technology used. Thus, Adams et al draws on the scholarly shift to theorize about "global" disability studies in order to counter its Western nature that idealizes Western attitudes and practices towards the concept of "development."

Who should get to decide what defines disability? Should anyone who says they are disabled fall into the category of disability?

Does Linton propose in this chapter a category or axis for disability? If she does, what is it? If she doesn't, what do you think it would mostly likely be?

Both readings mention the intersectionalities of disability definitions with other categories of identity such as gender and race, suggesting they all define their group as not part of the normal group. How can grouping disability with other identity categories prove helpful and how can it prove dangerous?

Young says that images of disabled people as "exceptional" produces well-intentioned compliments towards disabled people for managing to live like a "normal" person. How can we counter these images and feel inspired by disabled people in a way that doesn't suggest that superiority?

How to know when a new blog post appears!

One thing I realize that I forgot to mention yesterday during our first class meeting was how to subscribe to blog updates.

Because each of you will serve as the lead blog-poster this semester, and everyone else will then have to reply via comments to that post, I thought it would be useful for you to know how to get alerted when a new post arrives.

You have two main options for getting alerted about new posts: 1) RSS Feed updates, and 2) email notifications.

If you're not using or checking an RSS reader frequently, then I would suggest option #2 as the easiest and most convenient.

On the right-hand column of the blog underneath the Twitter stream of #DisHist posts, you'll find a number of links and resources to earlier blog posts and to the blog authors. At the bottom of those, you'll find a link where you can subscribe to new posts via email. Here's a screenshot of where to subscribe:

(Pretty blog-inception-y, huh?)

As a final reminder, the lead blog poster (this week it's Emily) needs to post the initial reactions to the reading by MIDNIGHT on the MONDAY before class (so this week, that'll be on September 14. Chag Sameach!) The rest of the commenters need to have their responses done and posted by MIDNIGHT on the TUESDAY before class (again, this week that'll be on September 15.) 

Similarly, those of you adding the dates to the timeline on a given week should also complete those by MIDNIGHT on the TUESDAY before class.

Of course, having your email notifications about new posts will make life easier, so that you'll all know once that initial post goes up and can rush to your laptops to write a response.

I'll look forward to our first discussion this next Wednesday!