Celeste Langan

Sometimes English professors should stick to being that, and recognize that talking policy--as opposed to talking about policy, metaphorizing or deconstructing or rhetoricalizing or historicizing it--requires clarity and many numbers and a different kind of discourse. Langan's major point here appears to me (but not her: she says her main point is to draw an analogue between the contingent nature of disability to identity and that of class, which I don't really buy, because if disability is contingent then so is, like, gender and ethnicity and etc., and if we only mean acquired disability then we should say so) to be that disabilities come from different places--when it comes to mobility, say, the rider of shitty public transit is as qualitatively if not quantitatively disabled as the person in a wheelchair. This is interesting--I am disabled in a billion ways daily, but those ways shift constantly and come from different places--poverty, busyness, my cognitive limits, etc. And public transit users, of course, especially in the US, have a certain disadvantaged profile compared to car drivers. It's the occasion for some obvious but well-put talk about equality of mobility v. freedom of same; also for the cute analysis of Speed on these grounds, where the heroes are established quickly as the kind of people who do not have to take the bus, where freedom of speed--bus can't go below 50 kmph--becomes as restricting as normally, when it never goes 50 ("get it? the bus is slow! haw, haw"), where we get fucked by the limited pathways opened to us by capital investment and flows (Wordsworth, in the Prelude, talks about a disabled kid who was brought to London but was too dull to appreciate it--conflating mobility and cognitive disabilities). So think of Turkish highways from which horse carts have recently been banned; think of American highways on which pedestrians can be prosecuted; think of the impossible question of what our collective duty is regarding the provision of access/opening of mobility. "Mass-transit dependency." The wheelchair as restricting vehicle. The notion of "automobility", as represented by say free walking in a world where free walking almost constitutes a disability, and its resultant reification and commodification as automobile mobility. Capital investment in premium service (the Canada Line) over lower-income-directed service (more bus lines in Surrey). People falling off the transport grid. Especially if we subscribe to the demedicalized, outcome-based definition of disorder (which I as a prospective speech pathologist certainly do--it's not about how yer brain or body is, it's about how it restricts you), it gets ridiculous to draw distinctions. Disadvantage is disadvantage.


A bus rider's union in LA. Million-man marchers getting there by bus; then chanting "We will not be moved." Langan is great shooting the ol' linguistic palimpsest on this matter--the paper feels like a li'l mini-inventory of topical figurations, the way so maany good English papers do, and hence its name, perhaps--but when she tries to actually dig into access and urban space, you want someone to come along to apply an analysis and do a budget proposal. Public Culture.… (más)