2013/01/01 by Elizabeth A. Wheeler · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature #Climate Change Communication and Perception
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/isle/ist054
openalex publication_date 2013/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/25
Gravity is a harsh mistress. Mountains and disabled people have something in common: they both get stereotyped as inspirational. Climbing a mountain, reaching its peak, is a personal experience mediated by centuries of preexisting symbolism. The mountaintop stands for all kinds of excellence: the high point, the acme, the peak of perfection, and the sublime. The mountain has an imperative quality: if you can climb it, you must climb it, “because it was there.” Don't just climb one mountain; “Climb Ev'ry Mountain.” The mountaintop is the ultimate standpoint, and reaching the top has acquired its own verb: “to summit.” Across the lifespan of American literature, many writers have expressed their shock of contact and their spiritual transformation at the summit. Mountain climbing stands for accomplishment, communion with divinity, and more recently, the acquisition of ecological consciousness. Mountaineering awakens the climber's respect for nature and deepens his environmental ethic. But what if you can't climb a mountain? The love of nature does not require specific bodily abilities. Mountaineering is an impossible standard internalized by many people who cannot climb. My project here is to bring disability studies to bear on the environmental imagination. I challenge the unexamined ableism in ecocritical discourse. The value system of current environmentalism asserts that humans are part of nature and therefore obligated to care about it, not as rulers or stewards but as participants. This value system goes wrong when it defines some people as closer to nature than others. In this essay, I critique such exclusionary thinking and seek to widen the repertoire of human responses to nature. I focus on the genre of the first-person memoir, a literary form common in disability narratives as well as nature writing. In my literary criticism, I use the theoretical tools of phenomenology. Phenomenology is a useful discipline for this project, because it studies humans' perceptions of their surroundings from the first-person point of view. I borrow from the neighboring fields of ecophenomenology and queer phenomenology to construct a disability phenomenology of nature. There is a pitfall, however, in relying on first-person memoirs to elaborate environmental consciousness. Thinking through one's own able body can reproduce normate assumptions about other people's bodies. First-person nature encounter narratives generally focus on the interaction between one specific body and one specific landscape. A narrow focus can eclipse the possibility of other body types and other landscapes. You can't see the body that isn't there. You can't see the people shut out by the lack of disability access; those not there because racists drove their great-grandparents out of town; and those not there because they have left the area to search for work. A consciousness grounded in a certain type of body, and that body grounded in a certain type of landscape, provides a vivid example of situated knowledge. The more specific we get about situated knowledge, though, the more we encounter the problem: Whose body will be exemplary? Disability memoirists, nature writers, and phenomenologists all use their own bodies as examples to make their points. How can these writers avoid exclusionary thinking? What kind of presence can register absence? One solution is to turn to writing that is dialogic in and of itself: writing that contains a multiple consciousness. An important source for multiple consciousnesses lies in minority discourses. Minority discourses in the USA would include the writings of people of color and people from poor, queer, and disability communities. A member of a stigmatized minority group has to know the majority culture as well as his own. He never has the luxury of believing that his is the ideal or only body type that could occupy a particular space. If he so chooses, he can take this knowledge and use it to shape a more inclusive vision. Knowledge flows from the hard-earned experience of not feeling at home and then reflecting upon that experience. Even more complex knowledge results from negotiating multiple minority identities at the same time. Multiple consciousnesses can inspire multivoiced discourses within one narrative. Even when the story focuses on one body in one landscape, it can still retain an awareness of “Who's not here?” or “Who's not here yet?” Furthermore, minority consciousness reveals the social privilege inherent in phenomenology, with its focus on mindfulness in the moment. If I am hungry and broke, or if I am being bullied, I may find it counterproductive to dwell attentively in the present place and time. To demonstrate these principles, I do a close reading of Eli Clare's 1999 memoir Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. Exile and Pride combines disability narrative, nature writing, and reflections on identity politics and environmentalism. Clare has a sophisticated multiple consciousnesses derived in part from multiple forms of oppression. A transgender poet and memoirist with cerebral palsy, Clare crips and queers conventional mountain climbing narratives in order to open up the symbolic landscape. Disability studies scholar Carrie Sandahl offers good definitions of queering and cripping: “Queering describes the practices of putting a spin on mainstream representations to reveal latent queer subtexts; of appropriating a representation for one's own purposes, forcing it to signify differently … Cripping spins mainstream representations or practices to reveal able-bodied assumptions and exclusionary effects” (37). 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