Michael Northen

TOBIN SIEBERS: A TRIBUTE

When Tobin Siebers died in the closing days of January this year, a ripple of disbelief and sorrow spread across the disability studies community. Siebers' two landmark books, Disability Theory, and Disability Aesthetics have become indispensible reading for anyone interested in the growing field of disability studies. Christopher Krentz of the University of Virginia, who had assigned his class readings from Disability Theory to be discussed that following week notes:

Being a brilliant theorist in itself, however, is not enough to account for the sense of loss that the community felt at Siebers' death. It was the personal quality of his relationship with students and others in the field that made him truly exception. Travis Lau, now a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, remembers the impact that meeting Siebers had on him.

It saddens me deeply to hear of Tobin's passing. In 2008, I received a phone call from him while I was still at UCLA. As a prospective graduate student at the time, it meant so much to me to hear a scholar I have admired for so long take interest in my work and welcome me so warmly into the field. We later spoke for about an hour in his office during my visit to the University of Michigan. What I loved most about our meeting was just how laid back it was — we didn't talk shop, we didn't throw around any academese. We looked at black-and-white photographs and discussed Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi." We joked, we laughed, we reflected. As I revisit Disability Theory, I see how Tobin's personality comes through most powerfully in his work — in its accessibility, its precision, its sincerity. I cannot begin to thank him for all that he has done for our community and our field, we of the tender organs.

Carol Marfisi, a long time instructor of disability studies courses at Temple University expressed similar feelings.

It is taken me a while to compose myself enough to write about the passing of Tobin Siebers. Sometimes when you hear a renowned speaker give a presentation they are not the same person as when they were presenting. They become distant and seemingly a little indifferent. This could be because they need to wind down. Not so with Tobin. Even the first time I approached him he listened to me very attentively and interestedly. From then on every time I would email him with some reflections he would send me a very thoughtful response. Now Tobin knew I was only an adjunct but he always made me feel like a peer and I think it was because that's how he truly felt about me.

I remember reading his book on Aesthetics of Disabilities and feeling as though he visited part of my soul and psyche because he really "got it", more than most people I know. We all will miss him so much but he left a part of himself through his insights and vulnerabilities, that for me will be ever alive.

Remembering Tobin Siebers

Last week, the students in my Disability Ethics course were assigned excerpts from Tobin's Disability Theory. I sent him a birthday greeting. And our community learned that he had died.

Tobin was a good friend, though not one with whom I kept in constant touch. His demise was a shock. He had done me numerous kindnesses that I hope I reciprocated adequately. The most lasting was providing a blurb for Music, Disability, and Society, eloquent and generous. I hope my book is as good as he made it sound.

When the time came for my students' reports on Tobin's magnum opus, I choked a bit on the sad news I shared. The students in Disability Ethics are an empathetic lot. They're health care and policy majors, some with disabilities. They weren't used to the discourse of cultural studies and needed a bit more guidance from their instructor than usual. But Tobin's exposition of the concept of realism in Disability Theory, an essential balance and foil to the social model principles that have heretofore served as the template for most if not all of disability studies. I believe it to have been Tobin's single most important theoretical contribution, though not without competition from his other works.

I didn't only learn realism from Tobin by reading Disability Theory, though. I saw him live it. In 2008-09, I served as one of the first two Diversity Fellows of the University of Minnesota's Institute for Equity, Diversity, and Advocacy, and was charged with engaging the keynote speaker for our annual Diversity Across the Disciplines conference. I proposed Tobin and regarded his acceptance, as a person with a disability and a disability theorist, as a considerable victory, given the broad lack of familiarity with and even resistance to the idea of disability as a minority, civil rights, and human rights concern. Tobin's address was a rendition of his essay "In the Name of Pain," his thinking on pain yet another "big idea" in disability studies. But pain was more than a thought for Tobin. It was something he lived. Unable to attend much/most of the conference because of the effects of his disability, I witnessed what had to be one of the sources of Tobin's thinking on pain, a compelling case for why disability isn't only – or, for some of us, even mostly – socially constructed.

As an artist and teacher and theorist of the arts, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Tobin's Disability Aesthetics. It locates disability at the center of Modernist and Post-Modernist art praxis in a way likely eludes most of us until Tobin makes it as obvious as the noses that aren't necessarily in the middle of Picasso's Cubist faces.

I'm proud that I had a role in what may be Tobin's last published work, his essay "Disability Trouble," which concerns the ongoing necessity of identity politics in the struggle of disability rights. It will appear shortly in Nancy Hirschmann and Beth Linker's anthology, Civil Disabilities: Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism. I entered the project as a then-anonymous reviewer, and was later recruited to contribute an essay of my own. I am not a generous reviewer, but I found Tobin's essay to be flawlessly written and yet one more inspiring, huge idea. Like so much else in Tobin's canon, it will doubtless teach across generations and live on in all of us.

Kuppers, who took personal responsibility for announcing the loss of Siebers to her colleagues and the disability studies community, in writing the following, perhaps gave fullest expression to both the personal and professional legacies of her friend.

I am writing with great sadness to let you know our dear Tobin Siebers died today, long-standing Chair of our Initiative on Disability Studies, V. L. Parrington Collegiate Professor, and Professor of English Language and Literature and Art & Design at the University of Michigan.

We have lost a great champion for disability studies at our university, in the wider US academic ecology, and in the development of our discipline worldwide. Tobin has been a field-builder, a mover and shaker, and a tireless advocate for a discipline that developed under his and his peers' guidance.

Two of his recent books, Disability Aesthetics and Disability Theory, have become field-defining, and can be found on reading lists around the world. They present perspectives on disability's cultural labor: how disability appears in art, architecture, literature; how its presence and relational web compels new insights into cultures, writing, and experience; and how criticism can offer readers tools for thinking anew about bodies in public space. One of Tobin's first entries into the new canon of disability studies was his non-fiction book Among Men: a beautifully elegant essayistic book about what it meant to grow up into a disabled man, lover, and father.

I have learned so much from my generous colleague and friend. I had the great fortune to work with him as co-chair of our initiative, and as co-teacher in our graduate classroom. His influence is everywhere: countless scholars in our field have been mentored by him, and he has validated so many of us in our shared quest to focus on disability as a rich and exciting field of inquiry. His legacy lives on in his nourishing critical perspective, his passion and presence, and it will continue to thrive and grow in the thoughts his writings allow us to spin out.

Disability Studies lives both inside and outside the university, and Tobin was always aware of multiple audiences, and of the need to think capaciously about sources of knowledge and wisdom. Whatever your personal relation to academic writing, I encourage you to re-read or read some of Tobin's moving and powerful work, and to take a moment to remember him and his spirit through his lines. In these essays, you can trace the imagination, heart, and intellect of a man who has given so much to all of us.

My thoughts are with Tobin's wife and children, and with the wider circle of the many students who have made him part of their chosen family.

Kuppers adds, "We are reeling here today, in Ann Arbor, and there's such deep sadness. Fog wrapped itself around Angell Hall today, and we are mourning Toby."

Back in 1998, before he had written his major work and, indeed, before most of what is now the core of disability studies has ever been put to paper, Siebers wrote in a personal essay he called "My Withered Limb":

To be crippled in America is not the American way. In a country where image is everything, it is hard to find an example for growing up crippled and hardly worth it when you do. The icon of the cripple is the paralytic, a double edge sword, but we desire role models all the same.

As a professional and as a person, Siebers became the role model that he saw was so much needed.

One of the ways of remembering Siebers' work is by continuing to read his writing. As Kuppers, who provided the link to some of his work urges, "Whatever your personal relation to academic writing, I encourage you to re-read or read some of Tobin's moving and powerful work, and to take a moment to remember him and his spirit through his lines. In these essays, you can trace the imagination, heart, and intellect of a man who has given so much to all of us."

• My Withered Limb (Michigan Quarterly Review):
• Disability Aesthetics (Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory)
• Disability Theory (University of Michigan Press)
• The Art of Disability: An Interview with Tobin Siebers by Mike Levin (Disability Studies Quarterly)

The editors at Wordgathering second Kuppers' sentiments.