Chelsea FulkABJECT POETICS: ADVOCATING DISABILITY RIGHTS IN PAFUNDA AND SIROWITZThe disability community has faced significant discrimination in society where they are often viewed as a stigmatized, "dependent caste," and subject to a predominantly normative construction of the world (Putnam 194). Denied equal access to public services and deeply marginalized by an ableist ideology, the Disability Rights Movement demanded legislation granting equal rights for the disabled. Disability identity politics has allowed for the political organization of individuals with disabilities to form a collective identity and become politically recognized as a legitimate minority group (Putnam 189-190). The Disability Rights Movement advocated that disability, like race and gender, is a socially constructed concept rather than grounded and defined in medical absolutes. Poets Danielle Pafunda and Hal Sirowitz write about disability and the negative attitudes they face from society and its institutions. In her no. poem "In this Plate My Illness is Visible," Pafunda likens her body to a mere slab of meat, processed and consumed by Western medicine and its objectifying "medical gaze." Sirowitz describes himself in a similar fashion, conceptualizing his Parkinson's as a sort of zombie virus and placing himself one tier higher than cattle in his poem, "A Step Above Cows." This intentional degradation and rather perverse drollery allows for both poets to reclaim lost dignities, and by extension, alter normative thinking using the power of poetic language. Pafunda writes from a perspective of physical pain. She is diagnosed with fibromyalgia, an invisible disability that is classified as a medically unexplained neurological phenomenon. In individuals with fibromyalgia, the neurons responsible for receiving and processing pain signals in the brain are overactive, causing frequent bodily pain in the skin and joints. In her poetry, her speaker "uses…abject material as a gateway out of the normative structure in which she has been imprisoned, broken or otherwise subjugated" (Bartlett, et al 314). The medical classification of fibromyalgia does not represent Pafunda's personal experience with the disability in any significant way. Fibromyalgia shrouds itself in medical mysteries, unexplained and often undetected by modern medical testing. Instead of using a medical conceptualization to understand her body, Pafunda creates a personalized discourse to discuss disability in her poetics. The abject imagery of processed meat is Pafunda's own description of her body and functions as a way in which she reclaims a disability identity in her own choice of language. In addition to re-conceptualizing the body, she also uses poetry to voice her grievances with the Western practice of medicine and to advocate for patient-centered care. Pafunda's conceptualization of her disability is important to understanding her poetry. In her introductory piece, "Meat Life," she describes the flesh of her body as animal meat, stating, "…I have always had to, and will always have to, live consciously within the meat of the body, and this meat life influences every fiber of my politics/poetics" (Bartlett, et al 314). Her poem incorporates the metaphorical meat of her body in order to describe the pain she endures with her disability. She writes, "I wear a bag of hammers. I alter / my gait through the knife house" (1-2). Hammers are heavy, constructed from dense metal and used for driving nails into permeable surfaces like wood and flesh, as in the case of Christ – who suffered an abject death. Hammers are also used to tenderize meat, a process that involves the continual beating of the flesh in order to break down its natural fibers. The way in which meat is tenderized is similar to the way Pafunda's neuron receptors hammer pain throughout her body. The pain is so intense that it forces her to "alter" her style of walking as she proceeds through "the knife house." Alter is an intriguing word choice. Here, it's used as a verb to denote "change," but it is also a homonym to the noun, altar. An altar is a religious structure built to worship a deity where animals are slaughtered and offered as sacrifices. In this context and along with the abject death of Christ, the spelling and the meaning of alter changes, much like the speaker's walk, and adds a sacrificial connotation to the imagery surrounding the body. Like the homonyms, Pafunda uses the word, plate, in the title of her poem, "In this Plate My Illness is Visible," to function as a double entendre. It first conjures the image of a dinner plate – the flat surface where meaty meals are served for the purpose of consumption. But it can also refer to the glass plates of microscopes that medical technicians use to prepare specimens onto slides in order to study and scrutinize them under the light of a powerful, magnifying lens. In "Meat Life," Pafunda considers how, "As a woman, I'm subject to the male gaze, but I was sick before I was a woman, and so I am profoundly, perhaps equally, subject to the medical gaze…And yet the male gaze also reminds me that my illness is largely invisible" (314). The notion of the male/medical gaze is intensified with the microscope: the speaker finds her disabiliy crushed between two plates and subjected to the scientific eye.The gaze objectifies the body, it humiliates, it consumes, it controls. There is a distinct imbalance of power between the gazer and the gazed, the consumer and the consumed. Simi Linton reiterates the unequal power dynamic of the doctor/patient relationship that Pafunda manifests in her poetics. Linton writes, "A patient is understood to belong to a doctor or other healthcare professional, or more generally, to an institution…the 'good' patient is one who does not challenge the authority of the practitioner" (29). Western medicine renders Pafunda's speaker into what Michel Foucault terms "a docile body," compliant and dependent upon medical authority. The speaker demonstrates her compromised position of power when she asks an anonymous medical practitioner, "What will you ask me to do…my neck herky-jerky / with an ethanol samba?" (315). Here, the speaker must ask the gazer what is required of her, indicating that the choice is not hers to make. However, the author conquers the passiveness of her speaker through the political voice of poetry&endash; an artistic account of patient-hood centered in the realm of medicine. As the medical gaze looks deeper, her body is also flamboyantly on display as the ethanol takes effect, inducing willingness and misjudgment, a kind of mounting vulnerability. Female samba dancers are known for their feathery headdresses and bikini-style costumes exposing the majority of their bodies. Only the dancers' breasts and genitalia are covered, but typically in sequined material that serves to accentuate the sexuality of the body parts. They perform in front of an audience who intently watches the dancing figure of the female form. They are the object of entertainment for the viewer. Compounding this effect, the speaker uses the word jerky, a form of dehydrated beef, to further evoke the body as a piece of meat. "Piece of meat" is also a derogatory term which is a phrase sometimes used to describe attractive women. The diction choice and the methodical, medical imagery in the poem, reveal an authoritative doctor consuming an objectified female body beneath the scope of a microscopic stage. Unlike Pafunda's hidden disability, Sirowitz's Parkinson's is a particularly conspicuous disease, characteristic of violent and uncontrollable shaking due to the extensive drugs used to treat acute muscle stiffness. He too describes himself in an abject manner, as a "Parkinson's zombie" where "there's no pressure to respond. Because you can't" (Bartlett, et al 238). The shaking overtakes his body the same way the zombie virus seizes the body of an infected human. Michelle Putnam states in her work on disability identity politics that individuals with disabilities are "typically treated differently, often negatively, in comparison to persons without disabilities" (195). Sirowitz is no stranger to the discriminatory ways of society towards his disability. In his introductory piece, "Zombies are Loose," he recalls multiple occasions in retail stores where his Parkinson's has caused him to become a suspect of shoplifting. He writes, "The security guard approached me and told me to open my coat…she had unzipped my jacket. When she walked away, at first I felt relief, then anger" (239). This type of violation and defilement Sirowitz experiences with the security guard echoes Pafunda's body objectification from the medical gaze. In his poem, "A Step Above Cows," Sirowitz purposely employs an undignified comparison of himself to cattle, which places him low on the evolutionary spectrum of human existence in order to criticize on the ableist attitudes of individuals like the security guard that label him an undesirable. Sirowitz mentions in the very first line of the poem that he "read somewhere" a cow only has the ability to walk in an upward direction and is unable to maneuver its body downwards. In his poem, he asserts that: "Even though I have He discusses a particular moment when he lost his balance on the stairs but "for a split second, / I had the choice of where to fall" (240). It is interesting how the speaker chooses his ability to walk down stairs as proof of his belonging to the human species. Sirowitz purposely ignores his literacy or his command of the English language in his published poetry to establish himself as "human." His choice in which direction to fall is valuable to Sirowitz &endash; it is one of the few instances of control over his body that he can still claim and execute despite his Parkinson's. Cows are not creatures that we consider to be very intelligent and are often used in derogatory terms to describe others. But cows have control over their bodies. The speaker feels he must prove to the reader that his ability to make the conscious directional choice in which to fall renders him "not a cow" even though he is conscious of the fact that cows have a higher degree of bodily control. However, "not a cow" is not equivalent to "human," and on some level the speaker feels subhuman because of the way he is often socially ostracized, and his general lack of mobility, a side effect of the disease. Both Pafunda and Sirowitz are critical of the society in which they must socially function, and they use their disability poetics to call attention to the medical and social discrimination they face. Linton eloquently argues that the very act of "the medicalization of disability casts human variation as deviance from the norm…as deficit" (11). Foucault would agree with Linton in his essay, "Discipline and Punish," where he discusses the ways in which the normalizing institutions of culture produce "docile" and compliant members of society (1497). Anyone falling outside the narrow constructs of the norm is labeled a "delinquent," and in this case disability becomes a "delinquent body." Foucault claims that "the judges of normality are present everywhere…it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based" (1499). For Pafunda and her invisible "delinquent" illness, these judges take the form of medical practitioners, whereas Sirowitz with his Parkinson's finds these judges in all avenues of society due to the disease's noticeable visibility. Through poetics, however, both question normative attitudes and attempt to redefine "normal," using sarcasm and the grotesque to "find strength, dignity and satisfaction in their own debasement" (Pafunda 314).
Works Cited Bartlett, Jennifer, Sheila Black and Michael Northen, eds. Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press, 2011.
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