Just Looking ...

In thinking about identity formation, and social location of identities I note an article by disability studies scholar Tanya Titchkofsky who examines that media coverage of Hurrican Katrina. Titchkofsky describes watching televised images of "human degredation unfold...From...rural Nova Scotia in a small university town...I watched the CNN coverage from, I watched in all my middle class whiteness, I watched poor women and men suffering and dying in New Orleans"(Titchkofsky, 2007). In her analysis of media representation Titchkofsky explores the ways that narrative is constructed and conveyed through specific events, such as Hurrican Katrina, focusing on how meanings emerge via embodied depictions of those events. Although Titchkofsky focuses on how disability and disabled bodies were appropriated and discursively deployed and used as metaphors for the disaster in New Orleans, her examination delves much deeper and teases apart our active participation in the construction of identity and meaning. Notably, Titchokofsky reveals how when actively noting bodily difference we are actually clarifying them since they are always noted from a specific locale. Noting difference is utilized to then construct and position ourselves and in so doing, we construct and position others. According to disability scholars disablity is a prime location where the meaning and implication of difference in contemporary society can be examined because disability has been typically excluded from the politics and theory of gender, race, and class. Disability serves only as one point of entry but is an especially salient one because, as Titchkofsky argues, disability is not merely the Other to normalcy, but it is rather an irreducible, productive force...to any interest we have developed in identity and difference. From here identity politics might move on to address the powerfully political process of recognizing how identities have and have not been recognized, formed and narrated by everyday life" (Titchkofsky, 2007).
Titchkofsky and other Disability Studies scholars evoke provocative analysis of discursive and material power and trouble many traditional locales for anlaysis and trouble hegemonic discourses of normalcy and power. I believe that a great deal of material produced by Disability Studies scholars is relevent to the topics we presently engage with in Social Theory through Contemporary Culture but in a unique context. If anyone is interested, the quotes above are from "Reading and Writing Disability Differently: The Textured Life of Embodiment" by Tanya Titchkofsky.