The Enfreakment of Language: Disability, eugenics, and rhetoric

1. The Enfreakment of Language: Disability, eugenics, and rhetoric Stephanie Wheeler skwheele@neo.tamu.edu

2. Overview • What does the presence of eugenics look like in our dominant approaches to meaning-making, and why should we care? • Enfreakment: The identification of elements that are desirable or wanted (linked to the logic of the freak show) • Eugenicist logics: the removal of what is not wanted or deemed necessary for the desired outcome, or alternatively, the replication of the elements that are considered useful. • To observe the interaction between the logic of eugenics and enfreakment within ableist systems, I propose the enfreakment of language, a term that encompasses both the process of enfreakment and the heuristic that allows us to see that process in action.

3. The enfreakment of language • The enfreakment of language uncovers how particular modes of Western and Euro-American meaning-making depend on the logic of eugenics. • This dependency is detrimental to the bodies that become subjected to the power gained through this logic. • Recognizing the reliance on the illusion of “completeness” or “wholeness” acknowledges the spaces created out of the implications of eugenics disguised as something other than eugenics.

4. Ableism and Derrida • Center of ableist structure: the nondisabled body • Whatever happens within an ableiststructure is always understood in terms of its relationship to the center – the nondisabled, or “normalized” body. • Because it is a consistently present center, “able-bodiedness” becomes understood as something “natural,” thus rendering disability as “unnatural.”

5. differance • Derrida argues that ideas operate as signs in language, wherein there are no value-identities, only differences: The meaning of any sign is only understood as what it isn’t. • At any given moment, a sign can have multiple assigned meanings, and privileged meanings can change depending on context. • Because of this constant and infinite movement between what a thing is and what a thing is not, a sign cannot ever be “complete,” and meaning is arbitrary. • To avoid this arbitrariness, the context that surrounds the sign is altered to reach a desired meaning, and is thus subject to eugenicist logic.

6. Eugenicist Systems • V.J. Guihan, Stephen Jay Gould and Michelle Ballif in particular have all pointed to an understanding of eugenics as discourse that enforces power structures. • This project extends that work by demonstrating the operation of eugenics as a logic that motivates discourses around human variation: • How a system based on eugenicist logic operates • The collapse of a system based on eradication • The attempts to create an alternate, anti-eugenicist system

7. American Ugly Laws and Nazi Euthanasia • I examine the language of the first “ugly law” on record – a law designed to keep people with “unsightly” disabilities out of public view – alongside the process and practices of euthanasia programs implemented under Nazi legislation. • Both had similar goals: to disable bodies through restriction and limited participation, and to remove those bodies from view. • Both the ugly laws and Nazi euthanasia determined what was wanted by clearly identifying what was feared with regard to the future of the nation and its citizens.

8. Universalizing the holocaust: Anne Frank • The response to the “bad” eugenics of the Holocaust is to create a new system with no center (universalize the Holocaust). Yet Derrida argues that a system without a center renders signs as equal, wherein all signs have infinite play. • Thus in the attempt to universalize Anne Frank and decenter a eugenicist system, her image becomes representative of everything and nothing at the same time. • To demonstrate, I show how her image is bound by the same eugenicist logics, thus rehearsing the same eugenicist logic that removed her body in the first place.

9. Bricolage And Gaga • The method of bricolage encourages the use of what is available (including elements outside of the structure), utilized only when useful. The coherence of these terms and ideas is of little importance. • An integral part of Gaga’s work is the constant referencing back to the genealogy of ideas that influence herand her audience. This allows Gaga to reference systems as always in a state of becoming (“Born This Way”), without trying to create new systems. • “Alejandro” video: tells the story of three women attempting to bricolage systems of normalization based on Nazi eugenics.

10. Concluding Thoughts • Remembering what has been pushed to the margins in the quest to “define” rhetoric – whether to build upon it, reject it, or refigure it – will demonstrate the ways that the field of rhetoric and writing is very much dependent on freak show and eugenicist logic. • The fields of Cultural Rhetorics and Disability Studies have already begun to move towards recognizing what has been erased, but what needs to happen now is an active recognition and interrogation of why those elements have been erased, and what impact it has on the field and the way we understand it and move within the spaces eugencist logics have created.