A post by Martin Huth
As part of some work in progress, this article shall discuss a form of social imaginative resistance, which relates to the imagination of the experiences of individuals whose embodiment can be conceived as “non-normate” (Garland-Thomson 2017), i.e., people whose bodies are not in line with alleged standards of normalcy. This illustrates the phenomenon of a limited imaginability or even unimaginability not only of the various forms of existence of people with disability, but also more generally of human beings who belong to the domain of abject bodies.
Especially in the phenomenological tradition, accounts of empathy highlight the quasi-perceptual access we have to mental states and feelings in others. We do not encounter opaque but rather already expressive bodies so that we are neither in need to infer from behavior nor to simulate it in order to get a firm grasp of what is going on with another (Scheler even contends that there is a universal grammar of bodily expression; 1973). Imagination as a bodily practice – since mental activities are inevitably rooted in our body (Merleau-Ponty 2012) – forms a pivotal prerequisite for a more complex understanding of others because, for instance, motivations of mental states are beyond the direct accessibility of the other (Moran and Szanto 2020).
However, scholars in the field of (critical) dis/ability studies have highlighted a gradual or even radical impossibility of empathizing with people who are living with and through non-normate embodiment and a widespread inability to picture their lives as happy, meaningful and rich. Reynolds (2017), for instance, detects a frequent ableist conflation of disability and suffering or illness. This sort of misconceiving people with (variegated kinds of) disability has been explained by the differences between various forms of bodily existence. More specifically, the very orientation in the world through a particular kind of embodiment would not allow someone to properly empathize with and imagine significantly different kinds of existence, e.g., those with impaired vision, the necessity to use a wheelchair or cognitive disabilities (Scully and Mackenzie 2007).
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