Black Man, Blind Man: Disability Identity Politics and Performance

BLACK MAN, BLIND MAN / 579

Theatre Journal 56 (2004) 579–602 © 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Black Man, Blind Man:Disability Identity Politics and Performance

Carrie Sandahl

Even before Lynn Manning’s autobiographical performance piece, Weights, began, Iremember thinking that there’s really no such thing as solo performance. Disabilityperformance contexts make this even more apparent.1 While even the most bare-bonessolo performances rely on some collaboration with others, they tend to downplay orhide their support structures. Manning’s piece, though, made visible a whole networkof people needed to perform a “one-man” show, even before the performer set foot onstage. This network collaborated with Manning to communicate his message to auniquely diverse audience assembled at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage onJune 14, 2003. On that night, the audience of about four hundred people included atleast one hundred fifty from the disability community, with its variety of accessibilityneeds. Downstage right, an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter perched on astool, waiting. At the edge of downstage left was a long rectangular screen ready to

Carrie Sandahl is an Assistant Professor at Florida State University’s School of Theatre. Her anthology(coedited with Philip Auslander), Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, isforthcoming from the University of Michigan Press in spring 2005. She is currently writing a monographentitled Americans with Disabilities Act: Disability Identity and Performance Since the CivilRights Era. She has published on disability and performance in Theatre Topics, Disability StudiesQuarterly, American Theatre, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Journal of Dramatic Theory andCriticism, and Contemporary Theatre Review. In collaboration with performance artist TerryGalloway, she recently co-wrote and performed in a parody of charity telethons, The Scary Lewis Yell-A-Thon (2004). Other performance work appears in David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s videodocumentary Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back (1996).

Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 2004 Society for Disability Studies andAssociation for Theatre in Higher Education conference. I would like to thank the participants in thoseconferences for their valuable feedback. I would also like to thank Harry Elam, Alan Sikes, Alex Lubet,Gretchen Case, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

1 Weights was developed through the Firehouse Theatre Company and the Mark Taper Forum underthe direction of Robert Egan, dramaturgical input by Irene Oppenheim, music direction by GaryBergman, and the ongoing support of Victoria Ann Lewis and the Other Voices Project, a workshop fortheatre artists with disabilities. The show premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in 2001, garnering threeNational Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) theatre awards, including BestActor for Manning. Excerpts from the text were checked for accuracy against a copy of the script LynnManning provided me and are quoted by his permission. The Kennedy Center performance was anabridged version of Weights; the full performance is about twice as long and includes a significantlydifferent beginning, additional episodes, and adult content that was excised from the Kennedy Centerperformance text to make the piece appropriate for a general audience. Information about LynnManning can be found at http://www.lynnmanning.com, a site that includes a link to the KennedyCenter performance analyzed in this essay.

Bridget Beall

muse logo

580 / Carrie Sandahl

display real-time captioning of Manning’s words for the hard of hearing. In anelevated box seat situated house left was an audio describer, a person wearing aheadset and ready to describe the visual aspects of the performance for those withvisual impairments. Ushers roamed through the crowd hawking various versions ofthe program (standard-print, large-print, and braille) and assistive listening devicesfor the hard of hearing who preferred them to the real-time captioning screen. Ushersalso negotiated the seating arrangements with audience members, even as the showwas about to begin. Neat rows of chairs with clearly delineated empty spaces meantfor wheelchair users morphed into hodge-podge clusters as the audience rearrangedchairs to fit the bodily configurations of particular social groupings. Aisles wereadjusted to make room for crutches, canes, large power wheelchairs, and service dogs.The hard of hearing clustered in front of the real-time captioning screen, and the ASLusers in front of the interpreter. It was a fire marshal’s nightmare.

While this network was configuring itself, the stage waited. A rich blue curtainprovided a luminous backdrop to the stage, which was bare except for a slightlyelevated red mat center stage and an electronic keyboard downstage left. As the stagelights brightened and the house lights dimmed, somewhat ominous Afro-Latinsynthesizer music with a quickening drumbeat swelled and intensified, occasionallypunctuated by a hissing sound. Manning, a tall African American man with an athleticbuild, slowly entered stage right with his hand on the shoulder of his musician, KarlLundeberg. Manning stopped when he got to the mat and subtly oriented himself tothe space by feeling the mat’s edges with his feet. For audience members who were notin the know, this entrance was perhaps the first clue that Manning is blind. Themusician, who by now had crossed downstage to his keyboard, began drumming,adding intensity to the recorded soundscape. Manning then began a series of stylizedjudo moves, striking at invisible opponents around him. He did not seem to bestriking at anyone in particular; instead, the movements were almost mechanized, hisfocus inwardly meditative. He then paused, looked out at the audience, and deliveredthe following epigraph, while slowly resuming his judo routine:

Yesterday, she said,“I couldn’t be so strong, if it happened to me.”“You have to lift weights,” I quipped.She laughed and tapped me on the bicep.

On the final line of this poem, Manning, in profile, raised his arm in a bicep curl andtapped his muscle with a finger from the opposite hand. The music stopped.Meanwhile, Manning’s words lingered in bright red digital lettering on the real-timecaptioning screen, and the ASL interpreter’s bodily rendition of Manning’s wordsfinished a couple of beats into the pause. Very faintly, I could hear the audio describerexplaining what had just happened, though I couldn’t make out exactly what wassaid.

There’s no such thing as solo performance. And yet, despite this visible network ofcollaborators, the image of a man alone remained, highlighted by a stage picture thatclearly isolated Manning center stage, fighting invisible foes, his light-colored shirtthrowing his body into relief against the rich blue curtain. Manning’s cryptic epigraphseemed to come out of nowhere, too. To whom is Manning speaking? What happened?When? Who is he fighting; who is there? Who is not? What does he mean by lifting


“weights”? From the pre-show environment to this disorienting epigraph and through-out the evening—onstage and in the audience—Manning’s politically charged per-formance raised questions about independence and interdependence as well as theindividual’s place in a community. In Weights, Manning tells the story of his suddentransformation from what he calls his life as a “black man” to his new life as a “blindman” after surviving a gunshot wound to the head in a bar fight at the age of twenty-three. Throughout the performance, the audience discovers one potential meaning ofhis epigraph: his life as an impoverished black man—its endless encounters withunjust authorities, obstructive bureaucracies, and omnipresent surveillance—trainedhim to cope with life as a blind man. In the process, Manning explores the points ofintersection where race, class, gender, and disability collide within a single individual;as his identity shifts, so do the communities to which he belongs, and the ways inwhich the outside world views him.

This particular performance scenario might seem the perfect microcosm of a worldthat includes care and consideration of human bodies across the spectrum of abilitiesand disabilities. Lennard Davis has recently described such a utopia, which he calls“dismodernism.”2 According to Davis, a dismodern worldview “signals a new kind ofuniversalism and cosmopolitanism that is reacting to the localization of identity.”3

Davis’s dismodernism rejects identity politics, which he explains had been necessaryto “first wave” civil rights organizing, but no longer relevant to “second wave”generations who have grown up with liberatory models already in place. Second wavegenerations, he continues, focus on internal differences within identity groups, engen-dering a deleterious, balkanizing effect. As a corrective, disability becomes the ur-identity, displacing all others because everyone is likely to experience impairment atsome point in time, either personally or when caring for a loved one.

The underlying principles of dismodernism, which developed out of lessonslearned from the disability civil rights movement, seem to align considerably with theperformance scenario described above. Dismodernism acknowledges that “identity isnot fixed, but malleable,” just as Manning’s sudden transformation from black man toblind man suggests. Dismodernism also takes for granted that “difference is all wehave in common,” and that human “[f]orm follows [human] dysfunction.” In ourperformance scenario, differently abled audience members had only their need foraccommodation in common. The formation of chairs was reconfigured according thespecific functions of various audience members’ bodies. It could even be argued thatin this performance context, the “normal” way of being an audience member was justone form of participation among several other equally valid forms. The use of assistivetechnology—from the real-time captioning screen, to the audio description equipment,to Manning’s white cane that he pulled out later in the show—exhibits dismodernism’stenets that “technology is not a separate part of the body” and that “dependence, notindividual independence, is the rule.”4 And, as Davis proposes, a “dismodern ethic”takes “caring about the body”—all bodies—as its central concern: “dismodernismargues for a commonality of bodies within the notion of difference. It is too easy to say

2 Lennard Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (NewYork: New York University Press, 2002).

3 Ibid., 27.4 Ibid., 26.


‘We’re all disabled.’ But it is possible to say that we are all disabled by injustice andoppression of various kinds.”5

Despite the apparent match between Davis’s theory and Manning’s performance, Iwant to argue that they are different in vital ways. Instead of using this performanceevent as a dismodern utopia, I consider it as a potent example through which toexplore the continued relevance and efficacy of identity-based theory, politics, andperformance. I wish we lived in Davis’s dismodernist world, just as I wish that allperformance events could be as creatively inclusive as Manning’s Kennedy Centerperformance. But we don’t, and fully accessible performance events are few and farbetween. Davis’s call to generalize the experiences of the disabled body to the socialbody as a whole I find troubling and premature. I have come to consider Manning’sepigraph as a call to consider the “weights” we must lift to prepare us, to train us, forsuch a future. Without attention to specific forms of oppression, to the heavy strugglesof identity politics, we can’t even begin to live the utopia of dismodernism.

In the course of this essay, I am going to take the risk of making some retro claimsthat Davis and other identity politics detractors would likely reject: that a performer’spersonal identity matters (a lot), and that identity politics–based political organizing,which involves performance, remains an effective means for social change.6 Myinvolvement in disability activism and participation in disability performance eventshave prompted me to revisit such claims to explain the power of live performance, andthe solo performer in particular, to galvanize community activism. To this end, I wantto use a more apt lens through which to examine Manning’s performance, the work of“postpositivist realists” who have been developing a theoretical model that “showshow identities can be both real and constructed: how they can be politically andepistemically significant, on the one hand, and variable, nonessential, and radicallyhistorical, on the other.”7 I want to reconcile the seeming contradiction of a solo

5 Ibid., 32.6 For a useful summary of the history and criticism of identity politics, along with an extensive

bibliography see Cressida Heyes, “Identity Politics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2002Edition, Edward N. Zalta, ed., http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2002/entries/identity-politics/.

7 Paula M. L. Moya, “Introduction: Reclaiming Identity,” in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and thePredicament of Postmodernism, ed. Paula M. L. Moya and Michael Hames-García (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 2000), 12. This anthology is a collection of writings on postpositivist realism. Eachauthor takes as a starting point concepts introduced by Satya P. Mohanty in the essay “The EpistemicStatus of Cultural Identity: On Beloved and the Postcolonial Condition,” which is reprinted inReclaiming Identity. Moya explains in footnote four of her introduction to the anthology that “Thepostpositivist realist theory of identity, as it has been formulated, elaborated, and tested in thisanthology, emerged from a collective of scholars working together in and around Cornell Universityduring the 1990s. The scholars who initially came together did so partly in response to the excesses ofthe widespread skepticism and constructivism in literary theory and cultural studies and partlybecause they were interested in formulating a complex and rigorous theory of identity that could beput to work in the service of progressive politics.” Currently, a working group called the Future ofMinority Studies (FMS) holds frequent working conferences to continue to develop these ideas. Formore information about FMS, see http://www.stanford.edu/dept/english/fms/. For disabilitystudies scholars’ viewpoints on disability identity politics, see, for example, Sharon L. Snyder, BrendaJo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, eds., Disability Studies in the Humanities (NewYork: Modern Languages Association, 2002). Disability scholar Tobin Siebers, whose article “TenderOrgans, Narcissism, and Identity Politics” appears in this anthology, has shared his forthcoming workwith me that, like my own here, applies postpositivist realism to disability identity politics and hasinfluenced my thinking here.


performer’s ability to forge community, by concurring with postpositivist realist andcommunication theorist Brent Henze, who explains that

far from conflicting with the formation of a true collectivity, individual agency facilitatesthe process; and the resultant collective has greater potential for liberatory politicaltransformation. The reasons are not just practical but epistemological: agency is necessaryfor epistemological reasons because it provides a site for alternative interpretive frame-works to be exchanged and “tried on,” tested against the experiences and lives ofoppressed people. Agency [. . .] enables a dialectal process of development to take placeamong members of a politically formed collective that would not exist [. . .] were it not forthe agency of the individuals in the group. So, paradoxically, only with individual agencycan we have an effective political collective that truly works on behalf of its constituents.8

Manning’s agency, expressed through the telling of his unique stories, can be theorizedas an interpretive framework embodied through performance. Interpretive frame-works privilege the particularities of experience, not their generalization. Henze callsthis “epistemic privilege”—or the “special advantage with respect to possessing oracquiring knowledge about how fundamental aspects of our society (such as race,class, gender, and sexuality) operate to sustain matrices of power” (136). The solo artistgalvanizes collective identity, laying the groundwork for coalition building and socialchange. When claiming two seemingly competing identities, the artist provides anopportunity to build bridges between them.9 Manning’s performance embodies—or,to use Henzes’s terminology, “tries on”—two interpretive frameworks: his experienceas a black man is juxtaposed against his experience as a blind man. The dialecticbetween these frameworks reveals points of difference and of commonality betweenthe two identities, prodding audiences to reconsider their assumptions about bothidentities and their own relationships to each of them.

“You have to lift weights”: Interpretive Frameworks

The main danger I see in Davis’s dismodernism is that it proposes to turn disabilityinto a metaphor, this time for the postmodern condition in general. Disability scholarshave shown that throughout history and to the present day, disability serves represen-tation as a master trope for difference. Nondisabled artists in all media and genreshave appropriated the disability experience to serve as a metaphor expressing theirown outsider status, alienation, and alterity, not necessarily the social, economic, andpolitical concerns of actual disabled people.10 David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have

8 Brent R. Henze, “Who Says Who Says?: The Epistemological Grounds for Agency in LiberatoryPolitical Projects,” in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, ed. PaulaM. L. Moya and Michael Hames-García (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 237–38.

9 I make a similar case in my article “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer?: Intersections ofQueer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance,” Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 9 (2003):25–56.

10 See, for example: Kenny Fries, ed., Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out (NewYork: Plume, 1997); Alan Garther and Tom Joe, ed., Images of the Disabled, Disabling Images (New York:Praeger, 1987); Hanoch Livneh, “Disability and Monstrosity: Further Comments,” RehabilitationLiterature 41 (1980): 280–83; Paul Longmore, Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003); and Martin F. Norden, The Cinema of Isolation: A Historyof Physical Disability in the Movies (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994). For a study thatconsiders the positive aspect of African American women writers’ use of disability as a metaphor, seeRosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture andLiterature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).


argued that representation relies on disability as “narrative prosthesis”—or the use ofdisability as a signifying difference, as something out of place—to launch a storyline.11

They go on to argue that disabled characters are corporealized metaphors for aproblem to be resolved within the narrative, most often symbolically by the character’scure, death, revaluation, or “rescue from censure.”12 Given that representation solvesthe “problem of disability” by making it go away through one means or another, Iworry that dismodernism’s use of disability as metaphor might follow the same path:making disabled people themselves disappear.

Let me provide one brief example of narrative prosthesis that is especially relevantto Manning’s performance. A typical use of physical disability as metaphor is tolaunch and fuel what scholars have called the “overcoming” narrative, in which thedisability experience becomes a generalized metaphor for psychological adjustment.The overcoming narrative typically follows this pattern: A person in the prime of lifesuffers a traumatic accident or illness. The newly impaired person then travelsthrough what Elisabeth Kubler-Ross has defined as the five stages of grief: denial,anger, bargaining, depression, and the final stage of acceptance, in which the personaccepts his or her limitations and finds renewed joy and purpose in life. The process isusually hastened by a tough-love, able-bodied lover or assistant who shows thedisabled person that his or her problems boil down to a bad attitude. This narrative isa favorite version of the American “pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps” myth, empha-sizing individual achievement over adversity, rather than considering the political andsocial aspects of a situation.13 The very real issues disabled people face such asdiscrimination, lack of access, segregation, economic injustice, and so on, are rarelydealt with or subside once the disabled character adopts a more positive attitude. Forthe most part, the characters in these representations are white, middle-class, andheterosexual, performed by able-bodied actors in disability drag. Manning’s perform-ance—its narrative structure, content, and embodiment—deflects the overcomingmetaphor audiences have become conditioned to expect.

Manning’s performance does not follow the traditional overcoming narrative’s arcof a previously whole individual adjusting to the “brokenness” of disability by gettingover a bad attitude. Weights is episodic and nonchronological, jumping around in timebefore and after the accident and retelling incidents from his childhood and adult-hood. The fragmented nature of his narrative mirrors that of his life, and disallowsreading Manning as “whole” before the shooting. Bit by bit throughout the perform-ance, we learn about a childhood riddled with violence, instability, and poverty in1960s East Los Angeles. Manning grew up as one of nine children of an alcoholicmother, an absent father, and an abusive stepfather. His mother would disappear fordays, leaving the children, including an infant, with no food, money, or indication ofwhen she’d return. Social services removed the children from their mother’s home andplaced them in a series of separate foster homes. Manning was incarcerated more than

11 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies ofDiscourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).

12 Ibid., 54.13 For a discussion of the overcoming narrative, see Paul K. Longmore, “Images of Disabled People,”

Social Policy 16 (1985): 31–37.


once as an adolescent. We also learn that Manning somehow survived this traumaticchildhood to become a counselor at a residential home for juvenile delinquent boys.And on his own time, he was becoming a painter.

Manning portrays these episodes and others through a mixture of prose, poetry, andmusic—some recorded and some performed by the onstage musician. Throughout theperformance, Manning tells some of these stories in the first person; others he reenacts,playing younger versions of himself as well as portraying other characters. Manning’scharacter portrayal remains in the style of storytelling. His portrayals are not realistic,and he never transforms into another character. Instead, Manning indicates a generalsense or outline of the characters he portrays by altering his voice, body posture, andblocking. As a result, it is always clear that Manning is telling a story from his ownpoint of view. This means that at times we witness a blind male performer taking onthe personae of mostly sighted characters of various genders: a bikini-topped bar-maid, the thug who shot him, his mother, siblings, a mobility instructor, a physician,among many others. The overall effect is dislocating. As Manning “tries on” hischaracters’ interpretive frameworks, his own remains forcefully present. Each con-trasting framework highlights and adjusts features of the other. Postpositive realistand Chicana feminist Paula Moya considers the contrasting of interpretive frame-works as the process by which “objective knowledge can be built on an analysis of[. . .] different kinds of subjective or theoretical bias or interest.”14 Postpositivist realistsconsider “objective knowledge” not as infallible and unchanging, but as contingentand open to revision, each new interpretive framework adding more objectiveknowledge about real systems of social power. I want to focus on four sections fromManning’s performance that vividly illustrate how the process of revising objectiveknowledge through specific instances of subjective experience works in Weights.

The first section begins the performance and involves two back-to-back episodes,the first of which tells the story of the day Manning was shot. In a direct address to theaudience, Manning recounts this day in a verbal cadence that matches the upbeat jazzunderscore. Manning dances throughout the monologue, subtly shifting his weightfrom one leg to the other, and snapping his fingers to the beat of the music. He beginsthe monologue with a chuckle, “It was the last day of life as I’d known it, and I wasfeeling too good to notice.” He then breaks into a prescient song, clutching a make-believe microphone and swinging his body from side to side: “On a clear day, rise andlook around you, and you’ll see just who you are. On a clear day, how it will astoundyou . . .” The ironic truth embedded in this corny Lerner and Lane song becomesapparent as the monologue continues. Manning explains that on that “smog free,picture-postcard day in Los Angeles,” he had just been promoted to House Director atthe boys’ home, finished up a painting he had been struggling with, and was going tocelebrate all of this by paying a visit to the local bar. Decked out in his finest Panamahat (another character suggests he looks like a pimp), Manning reenacts his strutthrough the bar, does the “black power” salute with closed fist, then glad-hands andjokes with the regulars. He plays an invisible pinball machine in a suggestively sexualmanner by punctuating his scores with pelvic thrusts while describing the “hot andsweaty” reunion he has planned with his ex-girlfriend Bobbi later that evening.

14 Moya, “Introduction,” 13.


Eventually, he wows the crowd by shaking up the dance floor with a “plump littleblonde” and a barmaid with “grapefruit-sized” breasts. The Village People’s “MachoMan” booms out over the loud speakers. Manning revisits his goofy dance for theaudience, wiggling his hips, preening, and flexing his muscles in time to the music,and ending with a spinning jump. Throughout the “Macho Man” dance, the ASLinterpreter signs the song’s lyrics, which also appear on the real-time captioningscreen. The embodiment of these lyrics by the interpreter and their appearance inbright red on the screen accentuate the song’s silliness.

When the song is over, Manning explains that one of the African American regulars,Rick, warns him that he’d better tone down his performance, lest he “piss off” the“rednecks” who frequent the bar, which is owned by a notorious racist. At thatmoment, Manning catches sight of himself in the mirror: “lit cigarette dangling frommy lips, smoke obscuring my face. There’s something unnerving about the image.”His contemplation is interrupted by a stranger, a “brother” hyped up on PCP whopicks a fight because he does not like the way Manning danced; apparently, it is notonly the rednecks Manning needs to worry about. As the conflict escalates, all eyes inthe bar turn to Manning, who realizes that “[s]ome of these folks are dying to see acouple of brothers throw down in here.” His finger-snapping and dancing becomenervous movement as his monologue revs up. Manning reenacts shoving the strangerto the floor and then throwing him out of the bar, disappointing the crowd whose eyesseem to lust for blood: “Here I am, this big Panama hat wearing black dude, about togrind another brother into the pavement for the benefit of tourists, pimps, junkies, andjuicers alike.” He makes the decision to walk away. A short time later, the strangerreturns, this time with a .32-automatic. Manning spreads his legs and points aninvisible gun at the audience as he takes on the persona of the stranger, who shouts,“You embarrassed me,” and pulls the trigger.

The episode that abruptly follows begins with Manning crumpling to the ground,lying in a fetal position. The wail of a siren melds with the sounds of drums beating.Then the moment breaks as the music changes to a jazz tune. He rises from the floor.He no longer dances and snaps his fingers. He no longer plays the “Macho Man.” Withan urgent sense of seriousness, he recites the following poem, elongating the vowelsounds considerably and punctuating key words with stylized gestures:

I walk the streets of the Wilshire district at night,An oddity,Sporting an army fatigue jacket or gangster brim,Old ladies clutch purses andCross streetsTo avoid the path of this black cat.Frantic fingers fumblefor car door latches,In attempts to lock out this black plague.And I smile,To keep from smashing their windows.

Head held high and hands in pockets,The line for coffee is too long for my liking,So I turn awayWith the hot stares of the policeTo warm my back against the cold night.


They burn rubberAnd screech brakes,And flash their .38’s in my face,Because “A niggah can’t change his mindwithout having something in mind.”And I smile,To keep from dying.

My “Black brother”Of little stature and lesser mind,Crouches in a dark alley,Gleefully carving a notch in the butt of his .32Because he believes he“Bleeeeew that big niggah away!”And I laugh,To keep from crying.

Through the juxtaposition of storytelling and poetry, this section sets up Manning’sinterpretive framework of his life prior to the shooting. He rises from the floor, as if hissituation is suddenly apparent to him, just as the opening song portended: “On a clearday, rise and look around you, and you’ll see just who you are.” Taken together, theseepisodes reveal an objective knowledge about the nexus of oppressive forces withinwhich the impoverished African American man in the United States must operate, andwhich almost seemed designed to culminate in his demise. In both episodes, theseforces are represented as a series of gazes, gazes that paradoxically render him bothhypervisible and invisible. Manning is hypervisible to the whites around him: fromthe racist bar owner who never appears but is reflected in the “rednecks” and a“trophy wife” who frequent the bar, to old ladies clutching their purses, to policeofficers who suspect his every move. To these whites, he is hypervisible, branded aplague, a criminal for the mundane act of changing his mind about standing in line fora cup of coffee, not a young man with a respectable job and a future as a painter. Whatis visible to the whites around him is a pernicious stereotype of black masculinity thatmasks his humanity. Like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Manning’s personhood isinvisible to the whites who encounter him—invisible not because he is an apparition,but because his black skin makes him invisible to the whites’ “inner eye.”15 As HarryElam puts it, “attacked and trapped within [a] system of constant white surveillance,the power, access, and agency of black men becomes severely limited.”16 Within thissystem, Manning and the other black bar patrons learn to monitor themselves. Rickwarns Manning when his performance becomes excessive, and Manning even catcheshis own image in the mirror, capturing a moment in which he searches for his ownidentity, an identity that eludes him.

Manning’s attempt at agency backfires in the pressure-cooker environment of thebar. There, he tries to wrest control of his image through an excessive, to the point ofparodic, manifestation of black masculinity. Elam explains that the “idea of style andimprovisation becomes a way for black men to determine a place for themselves in anoppressive world.”17 Through outrageous dress, sexual bravado, and personal charisma,

15 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1947; New York: Random House, 1995).16 Harry Elam, The Past is Present: The Drama of August Wilson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press, 2004), 146.17 Ibid., 152.


Manning draws the attention of all onlookers, black and white, in a defiant celebrationof the markers of black masculinity that whites brand as deviant. His sexist behaviorseems an obvious, if misguided, attempt to boost his masculinity rather than anythingthreatening or demeaning to women. His hypervisibility, though, inadvertently makeshim the target of a black brother, who cannot bear Manning’s self-display, assailinghim with the homophobic taunt: “Big, macho sissy.” Outside the bar, Manningbecomes intensely aware of his onlookers’ expectations that he fight for their prurientpleasure. He consciously chooses to frustrate their desire to see two black men fight.Even as Manning attempts to behave against expectation by refusing to fight, hecannot escape the entrapment of others’ expectations. When Manning lies on the floorin a fetal position, he suspends the moment of the shooting in a physical manifestationof the overdetermined panoptic gaze that traps the black man, suggesting perhaps thatthe shooting is an inevitability, not only for the victim but for the assailant as well.Significantly, when Manning throws the stranger to the ground, the “dude’s eyes dartaround like a crazed animal.” The stranger refuses to meet Manning’s gaze.18

In the second section, which takes place in the second third of the show, Manningbegins to develop a new interpretive framework, life as a blind man. This frameworkis not completely new; it does not replace the first. Instead, his interpretive frameworkas a blind man takes its shape because of his experiences as a black man.

This episode begins with Manning sitting cross-legged center stage. His swagger isgone, and his vocal cadence is no longer musical. Manning recounts awakening in thehospital the morning after the shooting, his recovery from surgery, and hallucinationsfrom painkillers. When he emerges from his hallucinations, his surgeon informs himthat as a result of the shooting, he has lost one eye and the optic nerve of the other hasbeen severed. Manning tells the audience, “Something akin to joy surges through me.”He has survived. For a man whose life seems to have been destined for a prematuredeath, becoming blind is a positive outcome. He also explains that he is relieved thathis hallucinations are a result of the shooting, and that he has not gone mad. He evenjokes to the doctor, “Well, at least I’ll still have my good looks,” and asks to keep thebullet as a souvenir. His reaction to blindness defies the overcoming narrative’s usualturning point: the necessary scene in which the newly impaired character believes heor she would be better off dead than disabled. The doctor tells Manning’s sister thathis behavior is “abnormal” and that he must be closely watched. A psychiatric socialworker is sent to his room to assess the situation; she explains to his visitors, right infront of him, that because of his odd behavior he should not be left alone. During hisrecovery, his mother, friends, other family members watch and interpret his behaviorconstantly, waiting for, even demanding, an “appropriate” reaction to his blindness.

Here, Manning interrupts the story of the hospital; he rises from the floor andexplains that this loss, the loss of his sight, is just one “in a long litany of losses” in thelife of his family. His posture is no longer that of an overconfident show-off, but of a

18 My thinking here is influenced by a set of questions Elam asks of August Wilson’s plays: “Areblack men within the general society still systematized, watched, and controlled by a ‘panoptic’ unseenwhite observer, as they are within the prison walls? Are they truly free? To what degree do Wilson’smen specifically and African Americans more generally still bear the scars of the imprisonment ofslavery?” (147).


man deeply humbled, his shoulders slightly stooped. He flashes back in time,recounting some of his childhood difficulties. In striking contrast to his performance inthe bar scene, his voice is soft and his gaze is downcast when he performs himself asa child. Upon returning to his adult persona, he tells the audience that because of hischildhood difficulties, he has never had any illusions of being able to live a perfect life.Manning seems somewhat overcome with the emotion of the story at this point in thestory, and takes a short break to towel the sweat from his brow and drink a bottle ofwater. When he resumes performing, he explains that he had even imagined, andprepared for, the possibility of blindness by navigating his apartment in the dark andperforming other tasks with his eyes closed. He had decided that should he everbecome blind, he would channel his creative impulses into writing instead of painting.So, in a way, he was prepared for his new reality, but not completely. While he couldimagine navigating the world as a blind man, accommodating his routine and hisdreams to a life without sight, he was unprepared for the discrimination andoppression that people with disabilities experience.

Manning explains that after being released from the hospital, he is ready almostimmediately to get on with his life and reclaim his independence. He raises his arm ina black-power salute, reminiscent of the same pose in the bar at the beginning of theperformance. He seems to have regained some of his confidence; his shoulders areheld high and his voice is strong again. The barmaid, Mandy, has agreed to letManning and his mother stay with her while he recovers in exchange for theirbabysitting her two children while she works. With a place to stay and reconciled withhis mother, his adjustment period to blindness is brief; after all, he is now going to beliving a life he had been rehearsing for years. Three weeks after the shooting, he makeshis first effort at putting his life back together by paying a visit to the State Office of theDepartment of Rehabilitation, an effort that threatens to dismantle his newly-regainedconfidence. There, he meets with his counselor, Mrs. Hereford, who expresses hersurprise at his being there so soon. He explains that he wants to go to college, get adegree in English, and become a writer. She dashes his optimism with the patronizingreply that he’s just not ready to be “rehabilitated.” She must have evidence that he hasproperly grieved the loss of his sight; it would be a waste of time to rehabilitate him soearly in his recovery. Furthermore, she explains that the Department of Rehabilitationdiscourages degrees in the arts, and that when he is ready she could set him up withhis own snack franchise. Manning quips to the audience, “I may be new to this blindthing, but I was close to being offered my own shoe shine stand.” Mrs. Hereford addsinsult to injury when she discloses: “I’m legally blind myself, I know what’s involvedin the grief process, it could take months.”

This section of the performance both mirrors and revises Manning’s earlier interpre-tive framework. Like black men, people with disabilities experience the paradox ofbeing at once hypervisible and invisible, but with a difference. He is now caughtwithin a new network of gazes; he is now under constant medical surveillance, notonly by medical and social service professionals, but even by members of his ownfamily. Even though his mother has offered to help him, she continually badgers himabout his too-quick recovery. Furthermore, black-on-black violence mutates intodisability betrayal and complicity. Just as Manning’s “black brother” is the one to pullthe trigger and seal his fate, his blind sister, Mrs. Hereford, is the one to trap him, toput him in his place. Condescension toward the disabled begins to replace suspicion


toward poor black men. The traditional overcoming narrative falters throughout thesescenes: Manning fails to follow the prescribed path of dealing with the grief ofdisability that apparently resonates beyond Hollywood film and into social services,and he fails to succeed by positive attitude alone. Those around him only see Manningas a character in such a film; like Ellison’s Invisible Man, his humanity is invisible—not just to white folks, but to everyone’s inner eye. The psychiatric social worker eventalks about Manning’s condition to his family as if he were not there.

In the third section of the performance, near the end of the show, Manning’s newinterpretive framework becomes more than a new set of oppressions; it includes a newway of being in the world. His new body and identity gain him entry into a newexistence and a new community. As Paula Moya points out,

. . . all knowledge is the product of particular kinds of social practice . . . causal constraints[of] the social and natural world [condition] what humans can know. Moreover, [. . .]humans’ biologically and temporally limited bodies enable and constrain what we are ableto think, feel, and believe and [. . .] our bodies are themselves subject to the (more or lessregular) laws of the natural and social world . . . .19

Because of his new biological make-up and bodily limitations, Manning is at firstcompletely disoriented. Upon leaving the hospital, he is left alone on a bus-stop benchwaiting for his ride:

While I wait, the sounds of the intersections rise to assault me. Buses! Trucks! Air brakes!Horns! Each sound explodes in my head, causing the colors in my mental canvas to goberserk. “Holy shit. I hope the world isn’t this noisy all the time. Who the hell can handlethis?”

Manning’s description is accompanied by jarring, discordant music and recordedtraffic sounds. As he describes this sensory overload to the audience, he holds hishands up to his face in a protective gesture. With each exclamation—“Buses! Trucks!Air brakes! Horns!”—he falls off-balance as if he were being hit. This moment mirrorsthe previous section in which he lay on the floor in a fetal position center stage afterhaving been shot. He seems trapped by his new environment, just as he was trappedby the social forces that led to the shooting.

Clearly, it would not be Mrs. Hereford of the Department of Rehabilitation—thelone Uncle Tom of disability social services—who would teach him how to handle thisnew world. And unlike the traditional overcoming narrative, Manning is not whippedinto shape by a nondisabled caregiver or lover, but comes to his new identity throughcommunity at the Braille Institute (which includes both blind and sighted allies),where he takes classes in braille reading, writing, and activities of daily living.Significantly, at this point in the performance, Manning takes a break in his story torepeat the poem “Weights,” the same poem performed in the epigraph. While herepeats the same choreography with this second performance of the poem, his voice isdeeper, he seems tired, and the poem takes on greater gravity as its ambivalencebegins to clear up. He has a new set of weights, a new set of challenges, with this newlife.

19 Moya, “Introduction,” 14.


Along with a new sensory apparatus, Manning acquires a new limb, the white cane.He must literally learn to walk all over again. The disembodied voice of his sightedmobility instructor, Tony (Manning’s voice, an octave lower), booms from the speak-ers, while Manning awkwardly attempts to follow his instructions. He demonstrateshis new gait for the audience:

The trick is to extend the cane out in front of me, centered with my body. Grip the handle,not too tightly, elbow out—like this. Now, with just the movement of my hand and wrist,tap the cane from side to side—like this. The intent is to check or clear the space in front ofme as I walk. I should sweep an area as wide as my shoulders. . . . I’m supposed to tap left,when I step with my right foot; and tap right, when I step with my left. Like this: tap left,step right. Tap right, step left. Tap left, step right. It feels a little dorky at first, but I catch on.I’ve got natural rhythm. I’ll figure out a way to make it look cool later.

With a good dose of self-mocking humor, Manning tries to integrate his exaggerated“macho-man” strut with the choreography of his new walk. Evocative of the dancescene in the bar, he gains agency by attempting to control the gaze that would definehim not only by learning to walk again, but to do so with style. At one point during hismobility training lessons, he is so excited about his new walk that he leaps into the air,clicking his heels in delight. It takes a lot of practice to meld his two identities, to enactperformatively a “black blind man.”

Manning’s interpretive framework, or what he thought he knew, is adjusted in theprocess of learning to navigate this new world. He describes his new perceptions forthe audience, applying a painter’s sensibility to his new nonvisual world:

I made wondrous discoveries every time out. A whole new way of knowing the world wasopening up to me, and I couldn’t absorb it fast enough: through my ears, through my nose,through my feet, through my pores! Light and shadow took on physical dimensions,became solid bands of heat and coolness that swiped at me as I passed. As cars cruised by,I began to appreciate the Doppler effect of sound: the way it swells when near, anddiminishes to a vanishing point in the distance. Sound’s not so different from sight in thisway. Only, this new auditory horizon is much closer, much smaller. Only the occasionalsound of a jet plane, cruising high in the atmosphere, can expand the world to anywherenear its former infinity. In the absence of that vastness, that visual feast, I came to recognizethe overwhelming distraction that sight had been. I had never noticed that sound movesthe way it does, or feels the way it does. And what about this pulse, this radiation that flowsfrom all things? And the smells! Good God! The smells! Who knew such sensory lushnessexisted in this, more immediate realm. Blind people knew. Blind people had to have knownall along.

Though he makes sense of this new interpretive framework though a prior one—hisexperience as a painter—what Manning learns could only be known through thebiological configuration of his new body, or what Moya calls the “causal constraints”of the natural world. He discovers new dimensions, or new truths, about what hethought he had known. It would take a phenomenological experience with blindnessto make these discoveries. His prior conception of blindness—which he had rehearsedin his living room before the shooting—could not and did not prepare him for the“sensory lushness” and the new physical dimensions of his world. As he describes thisworld, he holds his white cane in his right hand. His gestures with the cane are thosea blind man would actually use to navigate the world, such as sweeping the space infront of him, but these pedestrian moves take on poetic meaning as they punctuate hisdescription. The cane and its natural movements become his new paintbrush; he


Figure 1. “Who knew such sensory lushness existed in this, more immediate realm.Blind people knew. Blind people had to have known all along.” Lynn Manning recording

a CD-ROM spoken-word version of Weights. By permission of Bridge Multimedia.


seems to “paint” a new landscape for himself. He savors his words as he speaks,providing the audience an oral rendition of his new auditory experiences, “theDoppler effect of sound”: “moves” becomes “mooooooves” and “feel” become“feeeels,” and so on. These rich descriptions are what audiences miss in the traditionalovercoming scenario, with the focus on eliminating disability instead of reveling in it.And it is just such detail of individual experience that might disappear in a dismodernworld, where everyone is “disabled.” As Manning points out, there are certain thingsthat blind people know, things that they’ve known all along.

The fourth and final section of the performance is the closing episode that explicitlyasks audiences to readjust their own interpretive frameworks, given what we havelearned about his. Manning makes it clear in the following poem that he does not fitneatly into any of the prescribed identity categories and metaphors that would brandhim as either black man or blind man. In introducing this poem, Manning explains,“Coming to terms with my blindness was a challenge, but coming to terms with otherpeople’s perceptions of it was something else.”

Quick-change artist extraordinaire,I whip out my folded caneand change from black man to blind manwith a flick of my wrist.It is a profound metamorphosis—From God-gifted wizard of roundballdominating backboards across America,To God-gifted idiot savantpounding out chart-busters on a cockeyed whim;From sociopathic gangbanger with death for eyesto all-seeing soul with saintly spirit;From rape-driven misogynistto poor motherless child;From welfare-rich pimpto disability-rich gimp;And from “white man’s burden”to every man’s burden

It is always a profound metamorphosis.Whether from cursed by man to cursed by God;or from scripture-condemned to God-ordained,My final form is never of my choosing;I only wield the wand;You are the magician.

Underneath this poem runs synthesized Afro-Latin music, and the musician beats adrum insistently. The effect is chilling. Manning adopts contrasting postures stereo-typical of each identity. For example, he dribbles an invisible ball as he dominates the“backboards across America” and raises his face, smiles, closes his eyes, and sways hisupper body to the music like Stevie Wonder after he describes the “idiot savant.”Throughout the monologue, Manning holds his cane in his right hand. So whileManning (the performer) retains the marks of both blackness and blindness, through-out the poem’s performance, he exposes how those who encounter him only see one orthe other.

This poem drives home the point that metaphors are superimposed on bodies, andthat these metaphors shift dramatically depending on what one thinks one sees: a


Figure 2. “My final form is never of my choosing; I only wield the wand; You are the magician.”Lynn Manning recording a CD-ROM spoken-word version of Weights.

By permission of Bridge Multimedia.


black man or a blind man. The placement of this poem is significant. After Manninghas revealed, complicated, and embodied his interpretive frameworks, he returns tothe theme of being caught in a network of gazes, but this time the network includesboth racist and ablist assumptions. And even though Manning is now blind, heremains aware of those who look and what they think they see. The ways in which heis both hypervisible and invisible as a black man and a blind man are contradictory: heclearly cannot be both black and blind at the same time in the eyes of society. While hehas been able to meld his interpretive frameworks in his own life, on the street, with a“flick of his wrist,” he is viewed through one framework or another. DespiteManning’s own reconciliation of his two identities, he remains trapped in interlockingnetworks of oppression. He implicates the audience in these networks; he leaves uswith the responsibility of revising our own interpretive frameworks as we can nolonger feign ignorance of our own roles in systems of racism and ablism. As he endshis performance with the line “You are the magician,” he uses his left hand to make asweeping gesture that implicates everyone in the room, while firmly and resolvedlyholding his white cane.

“You have to lift weights”: The Back Story

I began this essay by describing a “solo” performance with an unusually apparentcollaborative communication system designed to accommodate the needs of peoplewith varying abilities. Though a bit of chaos entered into the picture as I described it,I may have inadvertently left you with an impression of a utopian community ofdifference, a community that—despite my best efforts to convince you otherwise—perhaps persists in exemplifying Lennard Davis’s dismodern utopia in which disabil-ity becomes the generalized, organizing trope of human experience. But the devil is inthe detail, as the saying goes, and it is the detail that I failed to describe in my initialperformance scenario that ultimately unravels a generalized description of utopia. JillDolan offers an alternative to Davis’s conception of a dismodern utopia that not onlyprovides a more useful model for social change, but also for analyzing how perform-ance can be a part of it. Like Davis’s dismodernism, Dolan’s utopia takes the care ofand concern for all human bodies as its central tenet . But unlike Davis, who wants usto envision a future dismodern world, the utopia for which Dolan “yearn[s] takesplace now, in the interstices of present interactions, in glancing moments of possiblybetter ways to be together as human beings.”20 Dolan understands that we will neverrealize a utopian ideal, nor is this her goal; she explains that attempts to realizeutopian communities have sometimes resulted in fascism, where consensus is achieved“at the expense of liberty.”21 Dolan’s utopia, then, is not an end-product but a process,what she calls the “utopian performative,” by which we enact—or rehearse—utopia’spossibilities.

What Dolan describes as utopia is remarkably congruent with Paula Moya andother postpositivist realists’ reconceptualization of “objective knowledge,” which Iinvoked earlier. Both Dolan’s utopia and Moya’s objective knowledge describe animpossible ideal that is nevertheless worthy of striving towards, for it is in that very

20 Jill Dolan, “Performance, Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative,’” Theatre Journal 53 (2001): 457.21 Ibid., 457.


striving that the inequities of our current social structure are revealed and new waysof being are imagined. Both require that individual interpretive frameworks contrib-ute to the conceptualization of this ideal through an emotionally and politicallydifficult process of varied and specific human interactions. Dolan offers us, though, away to include the performance event as a socially sanctioned site where theseinteractions can occur in temporary communities of audiences and performers,communities that would not likely have assembled were it not for the event itself.Theatre and performance, argues Dolan, “create citizens and engage democracy [in] aparticipatory forum in which ideas and possibilities for social equality and justice areshared.”22 Democracy at its best requires the participation of all of its diverse citizens,and in performance contexts this includes both the performer and the audience.Providing access to this context, however, is not something to be taken for granted,especially for disabled audience members. Assembling an audience that includespeople with disabilities in a meaningful way requires acute attention and commitmentto detail. And so I return to that missing detail from my initial performance scenario,detail found in the scenario’s “back story,” which begins not where my essay began—twenty minutes before curtain—but roughly a year before that June evening at theKennedy Center.

Manning’s performance of Weights was the capstone event for the Society forDisability Studies (SDS) annual conference, which was held in Bethesda, Maryland, in2003. SDS is an international, interdisciplinary organization of disability studiesscholars, the majority of whom identify as people with disabilities. Though ourconferences are primarily academic, disability arts is a regular part of the program-ming, both in concurrent sessions and plenaries.23 In fact, the organization has a“disability culture committee,” whose charge it is to support and disseminate disabil-ity arts. As chair of the disability culture committee, I collaborated with Betty Seigel,who is the Accessibility Manager at the Kennedy Center, and Stephanie Moore of VSAArts to produce jointly Manning’s performance for our conference goers and thegeneral Kennedy Center audience.24 The Kennedy Center saw our collaboration as anopportunity to further its “Performing Arts for Everyone” initiative, whose mission isto produce daily performances that are free and open to the general public. Theinitiative’s chairman, James A. Johnson, explains that “The Kennedy Center belongs tothe nation, and the productions staged here must be shared with every American.”25

For the Center, “every American” includes people with disabilities, and it has beenaggressive and creative about making this inclusion a reality. While the multicultural

22 Ibid., 456.23 Disability activists also attend the conference regularly and are represented on the Board of

Directors. SDS considers academics, activism, and art as integral to advancing knowledge aboutdisability. For more information about SDS, visit its website at http://www.uic.edu/orgs/sds/.

24 VSA Arts, formerly known as “Very Special Arts,” was “[d]esignated by the United StatesCongress as the coordinating organization for arts programming for persons with disabilities . . . VSAarts [sic] is supported by its affiliate network in offering diverse programs and events and innovativelifelong learning opportunities at the international, national, and local levels ranging from traininginstitutes and artist-in-residence projects to arts camps and emerging artist award programs.” http://www.vsarts.org/x16.xml.

25 Information about the Kennedy Center’s “Performing Arts for Everyone” initiative can be found athttp://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/millennium/pafe.html.


agenda of many contemporary theatres in the United States purports to include peoplewith disabilities, this inclusion often remains a goal unexpressed in practice.

Under Betty Seigel’s guidance, the Kennedy Center has put into place a remarkablesystem of accommodations for its audience members with disabilities. Unfortunately,the Center rarely attracts enough audience members with disabilities to make full useof its potential. By making this performance part of our conference event, the KennedyCenter would make full use of its system, furthering its mission to reach “everyAmerican,” and it would provide an opportunity for SDS members to partake ofdisability culture in a fully accessible performance venue, rather than in a jerry-riggedtheatre space in a hotel ballroom segregated from the wider community. The perform-ance was to take place on the Millennium Stage, where the Center’s free daily eventsare staged. We staged Manning’s work in this space not only because we wanted tomake his work available to a general audience regardless of personal income, butbecause it was the only space with flexible enough seating for the many wheelchairusers expected from the Disability Studies conference. The Millennium Stage is, inreality, not a proper theatre space, but a large open area in the Grand Foyer. The foyerdoes have, however, a small proscenium stage at one end with chairs set up to meetthe needs of the audience expected for each evening’s event.

Securing the space was relatively easy; planning transportation for the one hundredfifty variously disabled conference attendees from the Hyatt in Bethesda to theKennedy Center in Washington DC, would prove much more difficult. This processtook about six months as we encountered many obstacles, both logistical and financial.It was impossible to charter enough wheelchair-accessible taxis, vans, and coaches totransport the thirty-plus wheelchair users from the conference who planned to attend.Even if we had been able to find them, the cost to charter these specialized vehicleswould have been prohibitively expensive. That left us with the DC Metro system. Theroute involved taking an elevator only large enough for two wheelchair users (or onepower chair) at a time down to the Metro stop near the Bethesda Hyatt, then changingtrains en route (which involved two more elevator rides), and once arriving at the finalstop, taking a shuttle bus that could ferry only a few wheelchairs at a time to thetheatre. To make matters more complicated, the elevators were notorious for breakingdown, and construction near the Kennedy Center obstructed sidewalk passage forthose with visual impairments and wheelchair users who would elect not to take theshuttle. To speed things along, we hatched a plan to purchase Metro tickets in advanceto eliminate lines at the machines, and posted volunteers along the way to callelevators, point people in the right direction, and help them maneuver aroundconstruction obstacles. SDS board members who use wheelchairs did a dry run of theroute four months in advance of the performance and prepared a detailed list ofinstructions for attendees’ conference packets. Siegel contacted the Metro authoritiesfar in advance to warn them that it was imperative that the elevators be working theday of the performance, and that they should have repair staff at the ready should theelevators break down.

Hours before curtain time, the elevators did break down. Seigel and I made franticphone calls to the Metro authorities, encountering labyrinthian voice-mail trees andleaving messages that were unlikely to be answered, given that we were calling on aweekend. We finally enlisted the help of a local disability rights activist, Russ Holt,who put us in touch with the right person to speed along the repairs, which were


made with barely a moment to spare. And then it rained. Hard. Few of us hadumbrellas or even jackets, so our rag-tag group navigated the Metro system, theconstruction, and the shuttle, arriving at the Kennedy Center in soaking wet confer-ence attire but in good spirits and, surprisingly, on time.

To bring our conference community to this particular event required collaborative,Herculean efforts by both people with disabilities and our nondisabled allies: theconference planners, Kennedy Center staff, local disability activists, the Metro system,and the attendees themselves. This process was daunting, even when involving thecooperation of people experienced in disability access and accommodation. It requiredthat everyone involved not only believe in the importance of disabled peoples’presence at a performance event in a hallmark American institution, but also bewilling to put in the time, work, and money to make it happen. In other words, thiscollaboration not only required a utopian leap of faith—that we could make thishappen—but a “utopian performative,” an acting on that faith, a doing. And evenwith our faith and action aligned, the result was far from perfect. Better, but notperfect.

This kind of commitment to inclusion only happens when both disabled andnondisabled people are convinced that the inclusion of “every American” refers topeople with disabilities. But most people in the United States, even the mostprogressive-minded, are not convinced. We need not look far for evidence of this lackof regard; we need only look at the devastating blows recently suffered by our key civilrights law, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). In the past five years, federaland state Supreme Court decisions have substantially narrowed the scope and powerof this hard-won piece of legislation, and there has been little public outcry in responseto these decisions outside the disability activist community. Paul Steven Miller, aformer long-time commissioner for the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commis-sion and disability rights activist, offered an explanation for the courts’ dismissiveattitude and actions toward disability civil rights legislation and the public’s lack ofconcern during a recent talk to a group of disability studies scholars.26 Miller explainedthat our country’s landmark civil rights legislation, Title VII, passed on the heels ofcenturies-long heated public debate and moral outcry about racism. Conversely, theADA quietly “developed under the mainstream’s radar.” As a result, the courts andthe general public rarely see disability access and accommodation as anything otherthan an unreasonable “economic expenditure” and inconvenience. Miller argues that,to make matters worse, the general public does not even “shame” those who blatantlydiscriminate against people with disabilities because they fail to see disability issues interms of civil rights. Miller believes that it is our responsibility as disability scholars inthe arts and humanities not only to educate the general populace about disabilitydiscrimination, but to work outside legal frameworks to engender a sense of disabledpeoples’ humanity.

26 Miller’s talk was entitled “Developing Diversity and Equal Opportunity: Why the DisabilityPerspective Matters,” and delivered at the closing plenary of the Modern Languages Associationconference “Disability Studies and the University” at Emory University in March 2004. The conferenceprogram can be found at http://www.mla.org/conference_on_disabi.


Most people, even the most liberal and progressive among us, do not regarddisability issues as civil rights issues. Instead, they view disability through whatscholars have described as the “medical model,” which considers people withdisabilities individual victims of medical pathologies rather than a minority groupdeserving of rights.27 That the prevailing view of disability is the medical model partlyexplains why disability activists and their allies were reluctant to involve the mediawhile working toward the ADA’s passage. Disability activist and journalist MaryJohnson explains:

It was true that the organized disability rights movement avoided the media. Its leadersfelt they had good reason. Most stories about disability were inspirational features aboutdisabled people who had overcome personal affliction with a smile and a bundle ofcourage, and disability rights advocates said this was not the story they wanted to convey.They seemed to believe, perhaps with justification, that they could not convince reportersor editors of any other approach.

While they were silent, others were not—particularly those who disliked the idea ofgranting rights to yet another group. The case against disability rights had the same “youcan’t make me!” free-market histrionics one always got from social conservatives when itcame to civil rights issues. The difference was that in this case, almost no liberal groupsspoke out in support of disability rights.

Why was that? Most liberals and progressives believed that the problems racialminorities, women and gays faced were the result of animus, the work of a discriminatorysociety. When it came to disabled people, though, liberals’ views were similar to those ofthe anti’s. They believed disabled people faced essentially private, medical problems ratherthan problems of discrimination. What a disabled person needed, they felt, was medicalintervention—a cure. Lacking that, they should be given help, through private charity orgovernment benefits programs.28

Clearly, the disability rights movement fast-forwarded through the consciousness-raising phase that other civil rights movements modeled. As Miller and Johnsonexplain, activists perhaps miscalculated the importance of making disability issuesvisible and convincing to the general public. Activists considered the traditionalovercoming narrative, which is ubiquitous in inspirational features, too daunting toconfront—wasted effort—and focused instead on back-room political maneuvering.This is not to say that there have not been significant and visible disability rightsdemonstrations and consciousness-raising efforts, but that their scope and success hasbeen nowhere near those of black activists or women’s rights activists. Until thisconsciousness-raising work is done and until people are convinced that it is wortheveryone’s time, effort, and money to change not only our belief systems, but ourarchitecture, disability rights’ gains will remain vulnerable to dismantlement.

Manning’s performance is an important contribution to the consciousness-raisingeffort. Not only does he confront the overcoming narrative head-on, which manydisability activists seem unwilling to do, he manages to replace that narrative with acivil rights agenda. Because Manning has epistemic knowledge of both race anddisability issues, he is able to link lesser-known disability discrimination issues to

27 For a discussion of the medical model versus the minority model and the implications of theminority model for legislation and disability studies, see Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledgeand Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

28 Mary Johnson, Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve and the Case Against DisabilityRights (Louisville, Kentucky: Advocado Press, 2003), xii–xiii.


more-established racial discrimination issues. Manning told me in an interview thathis experience as an activist prior to the shooting provided him a model throughwhich to interpret what he would experience as a disabled man:

I was forced to become a Black civil rights activist when confronted with discriminationand low expectations at predominantly White grade schools. I advocated for equal rightsby showing up where Blacks were not expected, and excelling in non-stereotypic fields—fields of my own choosing. Losing my sight did not change my modus operandi. Once itbecame clear to me that blind people are discriminated against, like Blacks, and victimizedby the “low expectations game,” like Blacks, I strapped on my hard hat and went to work.I speak out through my art, and advocate by example.

As a solo performer who belongs to both communities, Manning’s body itselfexemplifies and symbolizes a meeting point for both communities’ concerns. Membersof both communities—whether black or white, disabled or nondisabled—see theirown stories reflected and challenged in Manning’s own.

In the process of bringing communities together, opportunities arise for newalliances to form. Henze explains that

Outsiders wishing to support the liberatory work of the oppressed must form responsibleand imaginative alliances—alliances grounded in appropriate reconceptions of theirexperiences in relation to others. That is, we should not work toward imaginary identifica-tions of ourselves with others, in which we make claims about our “sameness” withoutregard for the real differences in our experiences and lives; rather, we should work towardimaginative identifications of ourselves with others, in which we interrogate our ownexperience, seeking points where common ground or empathy might be actively con-structed between us while remaining conscious of the real differences between ourexperiences and lives.29

While Henze is not writing specifically about performance, his call for “imaginaryidentifications” that remain conscious of “real differences” recalls Dolan’s explanationof how performance makes possible—“in the performer’s grace, in the audience’sgenerosity, in the lucid power of intersubjective understanding [. . .] moments we canbelieve in utopia.”30

At the Kennedy Center performance, Manning attracted a diverse audience, manyof whom were at once insiders to aspects of Manning’s experience and outsiders toothers. In addition to the conference attendees (the vast majority of whom were white)and the general public who happened upon that evening’s performance, the audienceincluded constituents of the local community we had specifically invited: DC’s AfricanAmerican community, disability rights activists, and policy makers. The audience’sdiversity became apparent throughout the performance as various constituenciesresponded distinctively to different stories and exhibited different styles of spectatorship.Manning told me that this is common when he performs. He is able to sense different“pockets” of audience members throughout a performance:

Generally speaking, African Americans respond most strongly to the stories and poemsabout my experiences growing up impoverished in South-Central Los Angeles; disabledaudience members are most raucous when I recount the tribulations of seeking services

29 Henze, “Who Says,” 248.30 Dolan, “Performance,” 479.


from the State Department of Rehabilitation; and visually impaired audience membersmake their presence known when I describe rediscovering the world as a blind man. Thedemographic population whose response to Weights has surprised me most is that ofemancipated foster children. Even though I summarize my foster home years in just acouple of sentences, former foster children are often effusive in their thanks for my sharingthat aspect of my life with the world and being a positive role model.31

During the Kennedy Center performance, I understood what he meant by audiencemembers “making themselves known”: some African American audience membersvocalized their reactions to the piece in a call-and-response fashion, and I suspect thattheir style of spectatorship encouraged the mostly white disabled audience membersto do the same. Deaf audience members made their appreciation known at certainpoints by “applauding” in ASL by waving their hands over their heads. ThoughManning could not see these signs of appreciation, they were notable to the sightedpeople in the audience. I suspect that this audience as a whole was more vocal thanusual partly because its members wanted to make otherwise visual cues of apprecia-tion—the nodding head, smiles, looks of concentration—accessible to Manning. Thetalk-back after the performance was unusually lively, with the majority staying toexpress their appreciation for Manning’s work, and some to share their own stories.Two blind African American men told stories from their own experience that closelyechoed Manning’s. The audience continued its conversations during a free post-showreception hosted by the Kennedy Center. I overheard and participated in difficultconversations about race and disability as well as shared laughter with new acquain-tances and old friends. I know of no other type of event that would have made thoseconversations between these particular constituencies possible.32

Furthermore, the accessibility features, which were integrated into the performanceitself, reinforced for all gathered there the presence of a disability community, not justthe lone wheelchair user in segregated seating or the person with the assistive

31 Lynn Manning, e-mail interview, 17 July 2004.32 The stakes of identity politics organizing for people with disabilities are very high in the legal

arena, where protections hinge on one’s status as a legally recognized disabled person. The USSupreme Court’s recent decisions on four different “definition cases” have substantially narrowed thepopulation legally considered “disabled,” and therefore protected, under the ADA in the last fiveyears. Congress had originally intended the ADA to cover a wide swath of the population, definingsomeone as disabled if he or she has “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one ormore major life activities,” has a “record of such impairment,” or is “regarded as having such animpairment.” According to the National Council on Disability (NCD), an independent federal agencythat makes recommendations to the President and Congress on disability issues, the lower courts haveused the Supreme Court’s narrower definitions of disability to dismiss hundreds of ADA cases based“on the question of whether the plaintiff is covered by the statute, rather than whether the plaintiff wasdiscriminated against because of his or her disability” (“NCD Report No. 7,” 3). For a full discussionof these cases and their implications, see the NCD report entitled “No. 7: The Impact of the SupremeCourt’s ADA Decisions on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities,” part of the “The Americans withDisabilities Act Policy Brief Series Righting the ADA” available at http://www.ncd.gov/newsroom/publications/decisionsimpact.html. Lennard Davis strengthens his argument for dismodernism byexplaining that while disability identity is the lynchpin of civil rights legislation, it is also the law’sgreatest weakness. He suggests that the logical extension of dismodernist thinking would express itselfin practice by broadening the ADA to cover everyone, regardless of disability status. He argues thatthis would secure the right for everyone to experience impairment, illness, and disability withoutdiscrimination. I agree with Davis in principle, but I disagree that his strategy would work, based onthe work necessary to convince the general population that such legal protection should be a right.


listening device trying to remain discreet. Even the ASL interpreter served as a visualbridge between communities. The interpreter was an African American man with abuild and a shaved head very much like Manning’s. Both Manning and the interpreterwore chino pants and polo shirts and had a similar movement style. Through the ASLinterpreter, Manning’s performance was embodied by a doppelganger, who served asa conduit of Manning’s message to both the deaf and black communities. The disabledconference-goers even felt as if they had been part of the performance: some of usremarked before the show started that our entourage may as well have been theperformance. People gawked at us the entire way to the theatre: on the street, in theMetro system, and in the theatre. Visibly disabled people like to joke that whenevermore than one of us is walking down the street, it’s a parade. Our journey to thetheatre and our presence in such large numbers certainly made us a spectacle, as muchas if we had joined the performer under the proscenium frame. Manning’s collabora-tors, including the audience, were embodiments of “imaginative identifications”—Dolan’s “performative utopia,” or utopia glimpsed through its performance in thepresent—not the realization of Davis’s futuristic dismodern world.

The solo artist galvanizes community, performing the vital role of interpretingindividual experience, gained through epistemic privilege, for the collective. In sodoing, he or she brings people together, adding to the collective’s framework forunderstanding systems of oppression, as well as providing access to phenomenologi-cal frameworks that only actual bodies of difference, with their unique corporealities,have access to. This vital role, the important specificity of experience, would be lostshould we accept Lennard Davis’s proposition that we reject identity politics andreplace it with a dismodern ethic that generalizes one group’s experience to the wholesocial body. My argument for this kind of visibility is not naive regarding visibility’sdangers that Peggy Phelan has so convincingly outlined. Phelan warns us thatincreased visibility does not necessarily lead to increased power and can even provedetrimental: “In conflating identity politics with visibility, cultural activists and sometheorists have also assumed that ‘selves’ can be adequately represented within thevisual or linguistic field.”33 Phelan argues that we must be leery of privileging mimeticlikeness, of assuming that representation must reflect one’s likeness in order to beaddressed.34 Manning evades these dangers partly because his story is so unique,avoiding traditional disability narratives that have the misguidedly “uplifting” effectof making the actualities of life with a disability disappear, and partly because his“self” cannot be adequately addressed in the visible representational field. He hasaccess to worlds that can only be described. Additionally, it is the detail of Manning’sstory that, paradoxically, allows for a multitude of imaginary identifications acrossidentities, not his ability to represent one identity group or another mimetically. Whilewe may lose patience with identity politics and tire of the internal dissension thaterupts as identities are explored in ever-greater detail, Manning’s performance makesclear that we need to spend more time exploring what disability is and can be, alongwith what blackness is and can be, in as many variations as possible.

33 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: the politics of performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 10.34 Ibid., 7.

Documents

Black Man, Blind Man: Disability Identity Politics and Performance