Rosemarie Garland-Thomson proposes the term misfit as a critical keyword that seeks to defamiliarize dominant understandings of disability through a materialist approach. This concept emphasizes the particularity of varying lived embodiments and avoids a theoretical generic disabled body that can dematerialize if social and architectural barriers no longer disable it. When we fit harmoniously and properly into the world, we forget the truth of contingency because the world sustains us. When we experience misfitting and recognize that disjuncture for its political potential, we expose the relational component and the fragility of fitting. Any of us can fit here today and misfit there tomorrow.
This article offers the critical concept misfit in an effort to further think through the lived identity and experience of disability as it is situated in place and time. Arguments from both feminist and non-feminist theorists have attempted to shift prevalent traditional understandings of disability as lack, excess, or flaw located in bodies to a relational conceptualization of disability as a social construction whose meaning is determined primarily through discourse. Disability oppression in this view emanates from prejudicial attitudes that are given form in the world through architectural barriers, exclusionary institutions and the unequal distribution and access to resources.1 Similar to the useful distinction between sex and gender proposed by early feminists such as Gayle Rubin,2 the terms impairment and disability distinguish between bodily states or conditions taken to be impaired, and the social process of disablement that gives meaning and consequences to those impairments in the world.3 Although such binaries have limits, shifting disability from an attributed problem in the body to a problem of social justice was theoretically groundbreaking. The term and concept misfit contributes to the work of more recent disability theorists, such as Jackie Leach Scully and Tobin Siebers, who develop accounts of embodied aspects of disability such as pain and functional limitation without giving up the claim to disability as a social phenomenon.4
The idea of a misfit and the situation of misfitting that I offer here elaborate a materialist feminist understanding of disability by extending a consideration of how the particularities of embodiment interact with their environment in its broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal aspects. This article, in other words, offers an account of a dynamic encounter between flesh and world. […]
FITTING AND MISFITTING
I propose the term misfit as a new critical keyword that seeks to defamiliarize and to reframe dominant understandings of disability.5 Fitting and misfitting denote an encounter in which two things come together in either harmony or disjunction. When the shape and substance of these two things correspond in their union, they fit. A misfit, conversely, describes an incongruent relationship between two things: a square peg in a round hole. The problem with a misfit, then, inheres not in either of the two things but rather in their juxtaposition, the awkward attempt to fit them together. When the spatial and temporal context shifts, so does the fit, and with it meanings and consequences. Misfit emphasizes context over essence, relation over isolation, mediation over origination. Misfits are inherently unstable rather than fixed, yet they are very real because they are material rather than linguistic constructions. The discrepancy between body and world, between that which is expected and that which is, produces fits and misfits. The utility of the concept of misfit is that it definitively lodges injustice and discrimination in the materiality of the world more than in social attitudes or representational practices, even while it recognizes their mutually constituting entanglement.6
The theoretical utility of fitting and misfitting comes from its semantic and grammatical flexibility. Similar to many critical terms, misfit offers layered richness of meaning. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb fit denotes a relationship of spatial juxtaposition, meaning “to be of such size and shape as to fill exactly a given space, or conform properly to the contour of its receptacle or counterpart; to be adjusted or adjustable to a certain position.” Moreover, the action of fitting involves a “proper” or “suitable” relationship with an environment so as to be “well adapted,” “in harmony with,” or “satisfy[ing] the requirements of” the specified situation. As an adjective, fitting means “agreeable to decorum, becoming, convenient, proper, right.” Fit as an adjective also moves beyond simple suitability into a more value-laden connotation when it means “possessing the necessary qualifications, properly qualified, competent, deserving” and “in good ‘form’ or condition.” In British slang, fit even means “sexually attractive or good‑looking.” Fit, then, suggests a generally positive way of being and positioning based on an absence of conflict and a state of correct synchronization with one’s circumstances.
Misfit, in contrast, indicates a jarring juxtaposition, an “inaccurate fit; (hence) unsuitability, disparity, inconsistency,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Misfit offers grammatical flexibility by describing both the person who does not fit and the act of not fitting. The verb misfit applies to both things and people, meaning “to fail to fit, fit badly; to be unfitting or inappropriate.” This condition of mis-fitting slides into the highly negative figure of a “person unsuited or ill-suited to his or her environment, work, etc.; spec. one set apart from or rejected by others for his or her conspicuously odd, unusual, or antisocial behaviour and attitudes.” Thus, to mis-fit renders one a misfit. Moreover, ambiguity between fit and misfit is intimated in a less prevalent meaning of fit as a seizure disorder or in a more traditional sense as what the Oxford English Dictionary explains as a “paroxysm, or one of the recurrent attacks, of a periodic or constitutional ailment. In later use also with wider sense: a sudden and somewhat severe but transitory attack (of illness, or of some specified ailment).”
Misfitting serves to theorize disability as a way of being in an environment, as a material arrangement. A sustaining environment is a material context of received and built things ranging from accessibly designed built public spaces, welcoming natural surroundings, communication devices, tools, and implements, as well as other people. A fit occurs when a harmonious, proper interaction occurs between a particularly shaped and functioning body and an environment that sustains that body. A misfit occurs when the environment does not sustain the shape and function of the body that enters it. The dynamism between body and world that produces fits or misfits comes at the spatial and temporal points of encounter between dynamic but relatively stable bodies and environments. The built and arranged space through which we navigate our lives tends to offer fits to majority bodies and functioning and create misfits with minority forms of embodiment, such as people with disabilities. The point of civil rights legislation, and the resulting material practices such as universally designed built spaces and implements, is to enlarge the range of fits by accommodating the widest possible range of human variation.
People with disabilities have historically occupied positions as outcasts or misfits as, for example, in the roles of lepers, the mad, or cripples. One thinks of the iconic Oedipus: lame and blind, cast out on the road for his hubris, patricide, and incest. People with disabilities become misfits not just in terms of social attitudes—as in unfit for service or parenthood—but also in material ways. Their outcast status is literal when the shape and function of their bodies comes in conflict with the shape and stuff of the built world. The primary negative effect of misfitting is exclusion from the public sphere—a literal casting out—and the resulting segregation into domestic spaces or sheltered institutions. The disadvantage of disability comes partly from social oppression encoded in attitudes and practices, but it also comes from the built and arranged environment. Law or custom can and has produced segregation of certain groups; misfitting demonstrates how encounters between bodies and unsustaining environments also have produced segregation.
Misfit, then, reflects the shift in feminist theory from an emphasis on the discursive toward the material by centering its analytical focus on the coconstituting relationship between flesh and environment. The materiality that matters in this perspective involves the encounter between bodies with particular shapes and capabilities and the particular shape and structure of the world.
Misfitting contributes to this critical turn toward the material by attending to mutually constituting relationships among things in the world. Misfitting is a performance in Karen Barad’s and Judith Butler’s sense, in that enacts agency and subjectivity.7 The performing agent in a misfit materializes not in herself but rather literally up against the thingness of the world. Misfitting focuses on the disjunctures that occur in the interactive dynamism of becoming. Performativity theory would rightly suggest, of course, that no smooth fit between body and world ever exists. Nonetheless, fitting and misfitting occur on a spectrum that creates consequences. To use the iconic disability access scene of misfitting as one illustration of those consequences: when a wheelchair user encounters a flight of stairs, she does not get into the building; when a wheelchair user encounters a working elevator, she enters the space. The built-ness or thing-ness of the space into which she either fits or misfits is the unyielding determinant of whether she enters, of whether she joins the community of those who fit into the space. Another iconic example of misfitting occurs when a deaf, sign-language user enters a hearing environment. Imagine, for instance, the extravagant full-body gesturing of the deaf signer misfitting into a boardroom full of executives seated in contained comportment with moving mouths and stilled bodies conferring on important decisions.
Fitting and misfitting are aspects of materialization, as Butler has used the term, that literally ground discursive constructivism in matter.8 Fitting occurs when a generic body enters a generic world, a world conceptualized, designed, and built in anticipation of bodies considered in the dominant perspective as uniform, standard, majority bodies. In contrast, misfitting emphasizes particularity by focusing on the specific singularities of shape, size, and function of the person in question. Those singularities emerge and gain definition only through their unstable disjunctive encounter with an environment. The relational reciprocity between body and world materializes both, demanding in the process an attentiveness to the distinctive, dynamic thingness of each as they come together in time and space. In one moment and place there is a fit; in another moment and place a misfit. One citizen walks into a voting booth; another rolls across a curb cut; yet another bumps her wheels against a stair; someone passes fingers across the brailled elevator button; somebody else waits with a white cane before a voiceless ATM machine; some other blind user retrieves messages with a screen reader. Each meeting between subject and environment will be a fit or misfit depending on the choreography that plays out.
Fitting and misfitting extend the concept that shape carries story, an elegant phrase that I borrow from medieval historian Caroline Walker Bynum.9 In considering the philosophical question of continuity in human identity over time, Bynum draws from her personal experience of observing her father’s long-term progressive dementia. Perhaps unknowingly, Bynum asks a disability theory question about how we can maintain a continuous sense of self as our bodies change over time. Her response expresses an inherent and mutually constitutive relationship between body and narrative, between nature and culture: “Shape carries story,” Bynum concludes.10 In this formulation, embodiment—our particular “shape” in the broadest sense—is always dynamic as it interacts with world. As such, embodied life has a narrative, storied quality; the shifting of our shapes knits one moment to the next and one place to another. Bynum’s concept of shape carrying story introduces temporality into encounters between body and world, in a narrative that by definition connects moments in space into a coherent form we call story. The idea that shape carries story suggests, then, that material bodies are not only in the spaces of the world but that they are entwined with temporality as well.
Excerpts from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s article, “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept,” first published in Hypatia, Vol. 26, No. 3 – Special Issue: Ethics of Embodiment, Summer 2011, 591–609. Republished by permission of the author and Cambridge University Press.
FOOTNOTES
1. See, for example, Lennard J.Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995); Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability (New York: Routledge, 1996); Carol Thomas, chapter “Defining Disability: The Social Model,” in Female Forms: Experiencing and Understanding Disability (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999). For an overview of these arguments, see Colin Barnes, Len Barton and Mike Oliver, Disability Studies Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).
2. Gayle Rubin, “TheTraffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Rayna R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210.
3. See, for example, SimiLinton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
4. See Jackie Leach Scully, Disability Bioethics: Moral Bodies, Moral Difference (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008); Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (Cambridge: South End Press, 1999); David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Susan Schweik, The Ugly Laws (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
5. My contribution to disability studies has been to provide four critical keywords: “extraordinary,” “normate,” “the stare,” and “freakery.” RosemarieGarland-Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, ed. 1996); Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Staring: How We Look (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). A keyword, a term I borrow from Raymond Williams, is a single word that invokes an entire, complex, critical conversation. Indeed, “normate” and “extraordinary” are no longer mine; they belong to disability studies in general. I see them used often uncited; sometimes I’ve heard them attributed to other scholars. Like good children, they have successfully separated from their parent and are making mature contributions to the larger world. I hope misfits will answer a critical need as well.
6. See Jackie Leach Scully, op. cit., especially ch.4: “Different by Choice?”
7. What has come recently to be called material feminism provides conceptual language that expands the idea of the social construction of reality toward a material-discursive understanding of phenomena and matter. This corrective move shifts, according to Karen Barad, concepts such as Butlerian performativity toward the material and away from the linguistic-semiotic-interpretive turn in critical theory that tends to understand every “thing” as “a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation.” Material feminism emphasizes interactive dynamism—what Barad calls “intra-active becoming.” See Karen Barad, “Post-humanist performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes toMatter,” in Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds.), Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
8. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).
9. Bynum acknowledges three aspects of identity: individual personality; ascribed or achieved group affiliation; and spatio-temporal integrity, which is the sense of identity upon which she focuses. Her fundamental question is, “How can I be the same person Iwas a moment ago?” See Caroline Walker Bynum’s Jefferson Lecture, “Shape and Story: Some Thoughts About Werewolves,” National Endowment for the Humanities (Washington, DC), on March 22, 1999; www.neh.gov/news/press-release/1999-03-22
10. Ibid.
BIOGRAPHY
ROSEMARIE GARLAND-THOMSON is a bioethicist, author, educator, humanities scholar, and thought leader in disability justice and culture. She is professor emerita of English and bioethics at Emory University (Atlanta) and now lives and works in San Francisco. In 2016, her op-ed “Becoming Disabled” opened the New York Times’ ongoing weekly series on disability, which she later co-edited into the volume About Us: Essays from the Disability Series. She also works as a consultant and speaker on health-care ethics, program and curriculum development, equity and inclusion, accessibility, and disability culture and arts.