A Rhetoric of Remnants

Zosha Stuckey

Description

In the nineteenth century, language, rather than biology, created what we think of as disability. Much of the rhetorical nature of "idiocy," and even intelligence itself, can be traced to the period when the New York State Asylum for Idiots in Syracuse first opened in 1854—memorialized today as the first public school for people considered "feeble-minded" or "idiotic." The asylum-school pupil is a monumental example of how education attempts to mold and rehabilitate one's being. Zosha Stuckey demonstrates how all education is in some way complicit in the urge to normalize.

The broad, unstable, and cross-cultural category of "people with disabilities" endures an interesting relationship with rhetoric, education, speaking, and writing. Stuckey demystifies some of that relationship which requires new modes of inquiry and new ways of thinking, and she calls into question many of the assumptions about embodied differences as they relate to pedagogy, history, and public participation.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Rhetoric, Historical Recovery, and the New York State Asylum-School

2. “Confusion into Order Changed”: The Rhetorics That Govern(ed) Institutionalization

3. In Pursuit of the Active Life: The Roots, Rhetoric, and Recursiveness of “Special” (All) Education

4. In Pursuit of the Underlife of an Archive

5. Conclusion: Idiocy—An Old, Worn-Out Story

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• USA
• United States of America
• 19th century
• Local history
• History of education
• Region
• History of the Americas
• Regional
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 07 octobre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438453033
• Langue: English

Extrait

A Rhetoric of Remnants
A Rhetoric of Remnants
Idiots, Half-Wits, and Other State-Sponsored Inventions

Z OSHA S TUCKEY
Cover: New York State Asylum for Idiots, circa 1890.
New York State Archives, Public Domain
Published by
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
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State University of New York Press
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Production, Laurie Searl
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stuckey, Zosha, 1971–
A rhetoric of remnants : idiots, half-wits, and other state-sponsored inventions / Zosha Stuckey.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5301-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
E-ISBN 978-1-4384-5303-3 (ebook)
1. Mental retardation facilities—United States—History. 2. Mental retardation facilities—New York (State)—History. 3. People with mental disabilities—Education—United States—History. 4. Mental retardation facilities patients—United States—History. 5. Mental retardation—United States—History. 6. Sociology of disability—United States. I. Title. HV3006.A4S786 2014 362.3 850974766—dc23 2013043165
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to the Self-Advocates of Central New York, some who were institutionalized in Syracuse but now maintain authority over their own lives, and to Ken who lost his life because no one knew how to listen to someone who did not speak.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Rhetoric, Historical Recovery, and the New York State Asylum-School
2. “Confusion into Order Changed”: The Rhetorics That Govern(ed) Institutionalization
3. In Pursuit of the Active Life: The Roots, Rhetoric, and Recursiveness of “Special” (All) Education
4. In Pursuit of the Underlife of an Archive
5. Conclusion: Idiocy—An Old, Worn-Out Story
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations Figure 1.1 A small group of asylum pupils, circa 1900. The New York State Archives, Public Domain Figure 1.2 Asylum Pupils, circa 1900. The New York State Archives, Public Domain Figure 2.1 The Asylum in its early years. The New York State Archives, Public Domain Figure 3.1 By the 1890s, pupils formed an asylum orchestra. The New York State Archives, Public Domain Figure 3.2 Pupils performing exercises in front of a stage, circa 1890s. The New York State Archives, Public Domain Figure 3.3 Poster displayed at the 1901 World’s Exhibition in Buffalo. The New York State Archives, Public Domain Figure 3.4 Women ironing, circa 1890. The New York State Archives, Public Domain
Acknowledgments
Thanks first to my mentor, Lois Agnew, for teaching me how to be a careful researcher, writer, and scholar. I am indebted to the Composition and Cultural Rhetoric program at Syracuse University, to Eileen Schell and Chris Palmer, to the Center on Human Policy and Disability Studies at Syracuse University, and to Jay Dolmage. I thank Steven J. Taylor, Cindy Colavita, Rachel Zubal-Ruggieri, the Beyond Compliance Coordinating Committee, Liat Ben Moshe, and Carolyn Ostrander for offering support and inspiration. I am forever grateful for my cohort at Syracuse, for my mentors in my master’s program at Towson University, and to Robert McCruer for introducing me to disability studies at a reading group in D.C. in 2003. To my mother, who swore she would read it, to my father who isn’t here to see it, and to my siblings for their loving quips and wisecracks. And of course, to my beloved Robin who keeps me laughing through the entire thing.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction

Rhetoric, Historical Recovery, and the New York State Asylum-School
Minding the Gap
Gaps in the historical record have always intrigued me. Initially, I was lured by the fact that the progressive activist and orator Helen Keller received no audience in anthologies of rhetoric. Perhaps her exclusion was due to the fact that her speeches were delivered via verbal translations of sign language—a form of delivery quite different from traditional oration. Nevertheless, aside from Lois J. Einhorn’s work on Keller’s rhetoric and Davis W. Houck and Amos Kiewe’s rhetorical study on Roosevelt and his disability, there is a dearth of books on rhetoric and disability. A cadre of both scholars and activists are, however, attempting to fill in these historical and also material gaps that have privileged biological and medical meanings of disability over social, cultural, political, and historical ones. This new trend understands rhetoric as more than orality and speech giving; rhetoric and disability in this sense is embodied and at times nonverbal.
An example that further epitomizes this need for inclusion is the way in which disability activists in New York City have pushed for the city’s subway system to fill in the ten- to fifteen-inch-wide platform gaps that exist between some station platforms and the train. 1 According to the Americans with Disabilities Act (1991), the subway platform gap should not exceed more than three inches. Multiple people have died as a result of the oversized gaps, and while the city has begrudgingly installed retractable walkways in a few stations, people who use wheelchairs still cannot access all trains because of inconsistent elevator service. In addition to these and other modifications needed to create a more universally accessible physical environment, the disability rights movement has also attended to gaps in historical accounts. It is these gaps that most interest me here.
This book, while not about oversized subway platform gaps, oratory, or Helen Keller specifically is an attempt to expand how we think about participation across a broader spectrum of difference. A far cry from homogenous, the ways we engage as humans, citizens, and as communicators are diverse, and my aim in this book is to advance social, relational, silent, and embodied action as crucial elements of civic and rhetorical engagement. I construct a rhetoric of remnants from the archive and from our past that recognizes mainstream, verbal, and textual political participation as only one aspect of a wide range of ways to be civically engaged in the world.
Allied with the disability rights movement, new theories on disability and rhetoric (Brueggemann, Dolmage, Duffy, Dunn, Lewieki-Wilson, Price, Vidali), and studies of rhetoric and education (Cobb, Enoch, Gold, Logan, Royster), I look at the rhetoric in and around the first thirty years of the New York State Asylum for Idiots 2 (1854–1884) or what I call the “asylum-school.” I piece together how language constructed the “idiot” in the nineteenth century into a seemingly real entity, how asylum educational practices (the art of becoming, bodily transformation, civic usefulness, control of the will, imitation, speaking, writing, listening) molded pupils in ways that inspire broader educational philosophy, and how study of the actual gaps and silences themselves in discourse can be fruitful. I retrieve remnants from the archives in order to construct a social history that brings presence to people with disabilities in New York State’s history.
Today, the “asylum-school” is memorialized as the first public school for people considered “feeble-minded” or “idiotic.” 3 The “idiot” had, for many centuries, been viewed in contrast to “rational man” as hopeless, degraded, even wicked, inhuman, and depraved. 2 Idiot, derived from the Greek idiotes, which referred to a private person who did not partake in the democratic process, had come to signify lack of intelligence and mental and physical abnormality. Though we now consider someone with intellectual differences intellectually disabled, the term idiot still carries much symbolic, rhetorical, and paradigmatic force.
Much of the rhetorical nature of “idiocy,” and even intelligence itself, can be traced to the period when the asylum-school first opened in Syracuse in 1854. Pupils arrived at the school after long journeys from across the state with the pseudo-scientific label of “idiot.” While Alfred Binet’s metric intelligence scale, 4 which developed into the IQ test, was not officially used until 1905, the ways people looked, talked, and moved were measures used to determine intelligence in the mid-nineteenth century (Fletcher-Janzen, 407). I create this mid-nineteenth-century microhistory as a pivot point in which to recalibrate ways we conceive of presence and participation; I revive the so-called civically dead idiot of the nineteenth century into a significant historical force that complicates the physical and intellectual norms we so highly prize. Participation in civic endeavors does not always have to be verbal, nor does it have to be political. In minding gaps in the historical record, we can conceptualize rhetoric and participation in more inclusive ways.
Rhetoric
While some think of rhetoric as political muckraking, this book ascribes a more complex meaning to the term. Rhetoric in this book signifies symbolic and persuasive actio