Should We ‘Dis’ Qualify Bodies? Creating Across Identity Categories in Disability and  Performance

            Prologue:  Joan and I talk on the phone pretty frequently; even though I’m not living in St. Louis any more, I’m still deeply involved with the work of The DisAbility Project; we’re writing together, and I’m in the middle of several trips out west to watch them perform.  During a recent conversation, she tells me about the two shows the group did at Kirkwood High School.  I’m stunned at the sheer size of the audiences—900 students each!  And I marvel yet again how the Project’s come a long way from those initial performances we did for funders, friends, and family members.  She tells me of an intriguing after effect of their visit.  The group was performing a piece called “Meet Me,” their last one, in which they tell audiences something about who they are—and something about their disability. The performers speak frankly about their individual disabilities, but these conditions are introduced in the context of other information we learn about the performer--who they are, their profession, their hobbies, their family life.  In this way, disability is made a part of the person's life and identity, but not the single defining characteristic; it is neither ignored nor made to stand for the entire individual.  Openly acknowledging the disability defuses the discomfort or curiosity audience members might be prone to focus on, and is an attempt to redirect that anxiety into a productive relationship of understanding.
 Rich Scharf, when it was his turn, stepped forward and said:  "No, I don't have a disability but I am a gay man and a recovering alcoholic who has been sober for 10 years, and I really can resonate with a lot of these issues."  I hear from Joan there was a lot of controversy about this statement after they left--people wrote letters to the school newspaper and were upset that he had done that.  I think to myself, this isn’t the first time the group’s mix of gay and disabled issues have sparked controversy inside or outside of the group.  I think about the time, for example, one group member worried out loud that the disability issues were going to be overshadowed by the homosexual identity of the group.  Are these extremes—where queerness represents either an unacceptable corollary or unwelcome competitor to disability—the only ways to understand the relationship of disability and queerness in performance?  What’s to be gained for this theatre company by, as Carrie Sandahl has put it, “queering the crip and cripping the queer?”   
The Disability Project, self-described as “an ensemble that engages in conversation, writing, sound movement and theatrical exercises to develop performance material around the culture of disability,” has been presenting its original performance work in multiple venues across the metropolitan St. Louis area since 1996, in unlikely locations ranging from ballrooms to boardrooms to classrooms. The pieces presented are by turns comic and poignant, realistic and non-naturalistic; they address work, sex, doctor visits, accessibility, and pain, among other issues, as they relate to the disability experience.  Founded in 1996, the Project is made up actors with and without disabilities, embodying a diverse (although by no means complete) representation of acting experience, age, race, class, sexuality, and disability.  Under the leadership of playwright and director Joan Lipkin, the members of this community-based grassroots theatre meet weekly in workshop sessions to share experiences and create work.  Originally, the Project was conceived to build toward a single performance event in the fall of 2000.  The Project has evolved, however, into an ongoing ensemble which both continues to create theatrical work and to take performances out into the community, for audiences ranging from economically-disadvantaged inner-city grade schoolers, to suburban high school students to Missouri government officials.  It has been profiled in American Theatre Magazine, and has won several awards in the St. Louis area for its community-based emphasis.
I noted above that the members of the Project represent a wide range of identities, although certainly, there is no claim to exhaustive representation.  The disabilities in the group include blindness, spina bifida, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, blindness, epilepsy, and cancer.  Likewise, there are a number of performers without disabilities as well.  What I want to discuss today, however, is how the group has complicated its identity across other lines than the able/disabled divide.  More specifically, I want to address the question of what it means to “queer” this kind of community-based disability theatre, and its importance to the development of a disability aesthetic.  Earlier this year at the Gender and Disability Conference at Rutgers University, my colleague Carrie Sandahl explored the implications of solo artists who perform queer disabled identities.
--common experience
--able to critique the ‘membership requirements/strictures’ of both communities
--
I’d like to explore what queering the crip can mean for a theatre co. Is there a “cripping the queer?”
As a feminist playwright and director, Lipkin has a long history of involvement in gay activism; indeed, some of her best known work, including the plays Small Domestic Acts and Some of My Best Friends Are…  centers around the affirmation of queer identities in a heterosexist world.  Perhaps then most obviously as a result of the influence of its director and her commitment to diversity, then, The DisAbility Project contains a strong emphasis on queer visibility in the makeup of the group.  The Project includes openly gay and lesbian performers who have disabilities as well, who have frankly discussed within the group their own experience of the intersection of gay and disabled identities.  For example, within the “sharing circle” that precedes each weekly workshop where work is created and rehearsed, one performer who is a lesbian recounted the story of how when she first went to the doctor with symptoms of the multiple sclerosis it was later determined she had, that physican first assumed it “must” be AIDS.  From her stories and others like it, the sense that ableism and homophobia are themselves intertwined pathologies has become apparent.  But the Project also benefits from movement beyond the personal involvement with gay issues of its founder and performers.  The DisAbility Project has “queered” many elements of its performance makeup, often playing with norms of gender and sexuality in the process of its storytelling.  Through the example of the Project, I will explore how a queer aesthetic of theatre—and its necessary play with heterosexist and ableist conventions—can work as a strategy for a disability theatre company trying to effect social change in a world preoccupied with bodily normalcy based in categories such as sexuality and ability.    How does this combination of queer and crip cultures work to enhance the understanding and acceptance of both in the kind of public forums in which the Project has presented?  What is to be gained, aesthetically and politically, from blurring the boundaries between these identities in disability-related theatre, from the intersection of disability and queerness, disability and sexuality?
Joan interrupts Ann unexpectedly, pops up out of the audience to begin phone call #1.
JOAN: "Hi, it's me.  Do you think I will lose my funding if I kill the reviewer?  Yes, I'm upset, Ann.  It was unbelievable.  This reviewer shows up (she is on the review panel for the Regional Arts Commission) and stays for what, maybe half an hour.  I mean, she didn't even come when we asked her to, and didn't stay through the whole session, so how could she get the context of what we are doing?  And we do our sharing circle and Rich talks about the man he's dating currently and Katie, like she always does, about sex!!  Also, Sally was talking in the sharing circle about being involved with men instead of women.  Then later this reviewer calls me to tell me she is shocked! and says, 'I can't believe you consider homosexuality a disability.  I wouldn't expect that from you of all people.' So I say why do you think I think homosexuality is a disability? Where could you possibly get that idea?  And she says, well, they were there, weren't they? And I said, we have all kinds of people in the group. It's the world, and it's also theatre." 
     The assumptions upon which the reviewer’s comments were based—that all members of the group were disabled, and that any presence of homosexuality should be immediately seen as disability—have ableist and heterosexist roots.  To make the choice that only disabled performers should constitute a disability theatre company can be argued from a political or aesthetic standpoint.  To insist that only disabled performers should perform in a disability theatre substantiates the divide between normal/abnormal, able/disabled upon which the ostracism of the disabled individual in society has been predicated.  Likewise, to assume that the only way disability and homosexuality could be read as connected is to see the latter as a disability belies a richer sense of the important links between disability and homosexuality.  The reviewer’s insistence on immediately assuming that the presence of homosexuality was seen as a disability bespeaks the social history of homosexuality as pathology, one which was not removed from classification as a mental disorder by American psychologists until the mid-1970’s.
            At its most basic level, the presence of openly gay and lesbian members of The DisAbility Project reflects the project’s commitment to complicating identity categories.  As Lipkin herself has noted, “ I feel very strongly…that I want a lot of diversity in the group. And I consider sexual preference to be a form of diversity" (Lipkin interview).  Complicating the categories of disability with sexuality is one way in which the Project resists pigeonholing members according to disability—or any other identity category.  Lipkin is always careful to emphasize that the makeup of the group is in no way an exhaustive representation of the full range of disability identities in society.  This further emphasizes disablity’s ability to be a universalizing discourse of theatre.  Disability, after all, is unique in that unlike other categories such as race, gender, or sexuality, it is a community which anyone can join at any time.  Rosemarie Garland Thomson calls this disability's "universalizing" potential--not to erase differences between individuals, but rather, to become a connection among them and across diverse identity categories:
[A] universalizing view sees issues surrounding a particular difference as having “continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of [identities].”  Disability studies should become a universalizing discourse….[it] then would be recognized as structuring a wide range of thought, language, and perception that might not be explicitly articulated as “disability.”  (22)
 We are all, after all, on our way to being disabled by virtue of the aging process; likewise, we could all become disabled at any instant.  In “Queering the Crip,” Sandahl notes that there are experiential connections between members of queer and crip communities:  “Both disabled and queer people often experience a profound sense of isolation while growing up.  It is rare for an individual from either group to be born into crip or queer families much less communities, unlike a black person who is likely to be born into an African American family and community” (5).
            For The DisAbility Project to connect disability and homosexuality in performance is for it to likewise foreground that both categories have been pathologized, and both, to greater or lesser extents, remain subject to the idea of cure (as we see, for example, in the ex-gay movement of contemporary times).   Poet and essayist Eli Clare has commented on the common patterns of experience across the communities (although she is also careful to note where the paths diverge):
The ways in which queer people and disabled people experience oppression follow, to a certain extent, parallel paths.  Queer identity has been pathologized and medicalized.  Until 1973, homosexuality was considered a psychiatric disorder.  Today transexuality and transgenderism…are considered psychiatric conditions.  Queerness is all too frequently intertwined with shame, silence, and isolation….Queer people deal with gawking all the time: when we hold hands in public, defy gender boundaries and norms, insist on recognition for our relationships and families….Queer people have been told for centuries by church, state, and science that our bodies are abnormal. (96)
But this connection becomes more meaningful than a shared victimhood. (Talk about Carrie’s work on queering the crip in solo performance?—where she notes links between communities)
            A piece entitled “Healing Ministry” takes this inheritance of the shared pathology and inverts it for comic ends.  In the piece, Sally and Richard Haywood are televangelists of an indeterminate denomination and dubious reputation.  The piece is a send-up of faith healers and the outdated moral model of disability.  Building on the experiences of those members of the group who have been told by strangers that their disability is the manifestation of some sin, several participants wrote a piece that skewers those who use spirituality for social and economic exploitation, and equate disability with immorality.  In it, a married pair of  “ministers” gradually lose control over their carefully-crafted scheme to coerce money out of the faithful.  Their efforts to prove their own power become more and more ludicrous as they are confronted by supplicants with disabilities who they accuse of consorting with evil:
                        SALLY. [as faith healer] I think you’re in that chair because you never believed!
                        JIM. [in wheelchair] I thought it was the drunk driver that hit me--!
SALLY.  You obviously don’t believe, and if you don’t, then I can’t help you.  I can feel the power of evil in you from here.  (To the audience) Folks, even I can’t heal someone who doesn’t want to be healed, who still harbors the power of evil. (Back to Jim)  There is only one way to show me that you truly believe, that you truly want to be healed.  Show us with your donation!
Sally’s inability to heal the afflicted self-destructs here. However, it’s not the first point in the piece where that so-called “gift”—and the beliefs underpinning it—is revealed for the sham it is.  When the piece opens, Sally presents as evidence of her “powers” the fact that she has cured her husband, an ex-gay.
RICH.   Before I met and married Sally, I used to be a homosexual.  I know, hard to believe, but TRUE.  But Sally laid hands on me, and in only three years she was able to heal me of my loathsome desires.
SALLY.  Yes, Richard was one of my tougher cases, but I knew that the Healing Power of Love would eventually prevail.
Sally’s “cure” is almost immediately given the lie, however, when Rich humorously and campily flirts with a man in the audience.  The piece establishes a connection between the gay and disabled communities, both of which have had imposed upon them the necessity of “cure,” often—although not exclusively—within religious contexts.  Audiences who might have accepted this notion as natural are invited to now laugh at its absurdity, and have rendered apparent for them the importance of questioning the notion of cure.  The presence of homosexuality and disability as categories mutually under assault at once aligns them as allies as well as enhances the critique of social constructionism as a broader, more far-reaching discourse. 
The social construction of categories such as “gay” and “disabled” likewise becomes apparent, for example, in a work like the piece entitled “Go Figure.”  In this piece, one of the performers is Katie Banister, a woman with quadreplegia; the other is Rich Scharf, an able-bodied openly gay man who is a recovering alcoholic.  Together, they share telling the story of Banister’s first sexual experience after her accident.  They become a split subject to pass the single story back and forth; while it is Rodriguez-Banister’s experience, Rich Scharf’s presence suggests its connection to others.  Scharf’s clear physical and gender difference from Rodriguez-Banister at once prevents us from universalizing Rodriguez-Banister’s experience and simultaneously compels us to consider how Scharf might have felt his own body similarly circumscribed by ideals of male beauty and masculinity. In "Go Figure,"  because Katie trades off the telling of her story with Rich Scharf, and openly gay member of the company, the piece likewise troubles the sense that it is only a heterosexist narrative.  Rich's presence as gender bender, as periodic voice to Katie, provides a connection to queer sexualities that have also been historically pathologized and marginalized. 
            Queering the crip? Cripping queer? Camp—aesthetic?
. 
            Of course, I should not forget the camp quality to Rich’s perfor—barbie girl—who is speaking here? Archness.   
“You may not be able to tell, but I used to be quite the Barbie girl.  Oh yeah, I was always a traditional little girl at heart.  I enjoyed dressing up and all that went with it.  From my first pair of panty-hose to my bouffant hair, shellacked in place with half a can of Aqua Net.  Remember how popular big hair was in the ‘80’s?  The bigger the hair, the closer to God—and with the make-up to match.  The trick was to go to that border-line Barbie look without being sickening; I’m not sure I always succeeded.  God, I can remember my college girlfriends and I dressing to go out for the night with the boom box blaring, “No Parking On The Dance Floor.” 
Audience isn’t sure—is Rich a drag queen? This is gay culture/dance culture, after all. Is this the world of Babylon in QAF?

Campness/archness to how some of the dance is done—Gotta move

Camp connected to Employment: "Accessorize," never wear white after labor day. Tommy brings a camp sensibility to Employment: "Do these pants make my butt look big?"

This sometimes causes controversy. But in a way, that controversy resists sentimentalizing the disabled person. 
Queering--can be seen as messing with categories of identity in the way that Go Figure does with gender identity.

Parking:  Do poses out of the Mod Squad--so everyone, male and female, appropriates these 70's icon of action figures--has a camp quality to it. .  For example, during the piece "Parking," a man who has thoughtlessly parked in a disabled parking space finds himself "busted" by the "Quad Squad"--an avenging quartet of paraplegics who wryly deflate the notion that the disabled are passive and disinterested. 

 In Employment, playing with a sense of queering things. 

Joan re-emerges from underneath the table, talking to Ann on the phone again.
"Ann: We have this cool new woman, she's a gospel singer.  She called me today and said she isn't coming rehearsal. She told me she's upset b/c she's upset about all the gay people in the group, and  she says it's a problem for her: it's against her religion.  So I talk w/her about God--not my favorite topic, Ann, as you know!--if God created the world, didn't he create individuals with their different desires and differences. I've tried to talk to her from her perspective, to ask her, well, if she believes God created the world, then didn't God create these people right now. She's considering that at present and still participating.  It's like a don't ask don't tell policy with her.  She'd be uncomfortable if the people in the group were not expressive. I feel that it's absolutely that people feel expressive about their sexuality and their social experiences--and that it is empowering for people with disabilities to speak sexually. You know Ann, she asked me if it would be ok if people woud not talk about stuff so much.  I want to honor how Indus is feeling, and she is important to the group; but I'll be damned if I am going to censor anybody. I want everybody to feel free to talk about sex--the more they talk about it, the better.  I want people to talk about whatever they want to--and there's a lot of talk about sex, and it's not just coming from the gay people in the group.  

Queering: reclaim the body and sexuality?
Relationship to the work does/specific pieces: Why is it important to play with gender and gender roles?
Only piece that is directly sexual: Go Figure

The group is highly sexual--lots of sexual jokes, sexuality in the group--lots of desire, and longing for intimacy. This allows us to reclaim sexuality, redefine it. Katie makes sexual jokes all the time.

Insert "Go Figure" argument here from WTP paper.
Lot of sexuality in the group

For example, “Go Figure,” the story of Katie Rodriguez-Banister’s reimagining of her sexual identity after becoming disabled, speaks importantly to the unquestioned assumption in our society that the disabled person is asexual, undesirable, and undesiring.  [PLAY CLIP FROM “Go Figure” HERE].  As Nancy Mairs explains in Waist–High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled, “Most people, in fact, deal with the discomfort and even distaste that a misshapen body arouses by disassociating that body from sexuality in reverie and practice.” “It was like I was a virgin again!” Rodriguez-Banister exclaims about her sexual identity after becoming disabled, and in a sense, she is “like a virgin.”  She, and the audience, have to reimagine her sexuality and desirability as manifested in ways beyond what society deems normal or acceptable.  In this way, Rodriguez-Banister becomes one of those paraplegics who, as feminist disability studies scholar Susan Wendell asserts, “have revolutionary things to teach about the possibilities of sexuality.”
What is also striking about this piece is even as Rodriguez-Banister revels in remembering her sexuality before her accident (“You may not be able to tell, but I used to be quite the Barbie girl”), that memory is tinged with the recollection of “worry about what people would think of me.”  The disability experience  thus becomes subtly aligned with social proscriptions concerning female promiscuity and appearance.  Rodriguez-Banister’s movement from ability to disability is not a movement from normalcy to abnormalcy so much as a movement from being the object of one kind of spectatorial look to another, for “If the male gaze makes the normative female a sexual spectacle, then the stare sculpts the disabled subject into a grotesque spectacle.”   In our society, both female bodies and disabled bodies find themselves literally and figuratively marginalized because of their supposed deviation from an idealized norm, whether that model is femininity or some illusory construction of wholeness.   This is comically, but pointedly, displayed when Rodriguez-Banister remembers, “I placed a personal ad in the paper: ‘Petite, professional, independent woman on wheels seeks male,’” and “one man,” unable to conceive of a disabled woman placing a personal ad, “thought I drove around a lot.” 
But Rodriguez-Banister’s experiences, while distinct, confirm the deep affinity between able-bodied and disabled women, since “female bodies, like bodies of color, homosexual bodies, and disabled bodies, are positioned culturally so as not to forget their embodiment.”    Rodriguez-Banister thus not only powerfully reclaims her own particular sexuality, she breaks down the illusion that the “temporarily able-bodied” watching her performance are somehow removed from these body issues.  Rodriguez-Banister’s assertion that she is having “the best sex of my life,” becomes not an overcoming narrative on how to learn to do without, but a challenge to the audience to learn to do with differently.  “Go figure!” she exclaims at the end of her performance, but that expression of surprise can simultaneously be read as a command to us, in the audience, disabled and able-bodied, to figure out how to move beyond the narrow confines of how society defines sexual roles.  For this reason, it is particularly fitting that Katie trades off telling her story with Rich Scharf, an openly gay member of the company. 
Club Med?—Beautiful woman?  Desire? We consider Stuart as someone who would have this?

Expressed not only through sexual jokes, but also, through open expression of the desire to be companioned with someone. 

Return to MEET ME—married to love of life; lives with partner?  LOOK AT MEET ME.

CONCLUSION—SO WHAT

No specific discussion of gay identity in group--something that needs to be worked up to--problematic for most audiences. Playing with boundaries—in/out? Straight/gay? Passive/impassive?

Exploring this question allows us to begin to re-examine the trajectory of gay theatre that has incorporated disability to this point.  Playwrights including Tennessee Williams, Martin Sherman, and Tony Kushner have all queered disability—and discussion of The Disability Project not only allows us to re-consider why these antecedents might have found such an alignment useful, but the particular power of community-based theatre in showing the importance and interrelationship of these two communities.