ABSTRACT
The practices of Raschida, Laura and Barry involved transgressing out of disabled identities as visually impaired or physically disabled. Susan and Peter, in contrast, appeared to be transgressing into a disabled identity, as a dependent wheelchair user or, in Peter’s case, with a more visible disability than his emotional or behavioural difficulties suggested. Phillip, who was losing mobility through muscular dystrophy, practised a much more ambivalent kind of transgression in both directions. The pupils’ transgressive actions, regardless of direction, were highly precarious and were practised with the constant threat of coercive markers of disability. Although for Raschida, Laura, Barry and, in most cases, Phillip, these coercive markers restricted their scope for transgression by forcing them to be disabled, they helped Susan and Peter and occasionally Phillip, to transgress. These coercive markers were laid down either by formal medical and charity discourses of disability, for example, physical items such as a white cane or guide dog, or
informal discourses such as the mainstream pupils’ sympathetic attitudes. The teachers’ discourse of needs, which required the pupils to accept help and public acknowledgment of their disability, also acted as a coercive marker of disability. The mainstream pupils’ governmental regime (Chapter 3) was occasionally punitive and thus acted as a coercive threat. More usually, however, the mainstream pupils’ regime operated collusively to support the transgressive actions of Raschida, Laura and the others. The precarious nature of transgression required pupils to engage in a kind of policing of boundaries around their own selves. They also needed to work on their mainstream peers’ governmental regime to encourage them to catch the ordinariness of their transgressive actions. As a result, transgression was never accomplished entirely, but had to be constantly repeated, giving the pupils a kind of liminality (Turner, 1969). Their new identities had the quality of ‘undecidability’ (Derrida in Kamuf, 1991:112), encountered by their mainstream peers, in which they were neither disabled nor ‘normal’, but participated in the fusion of boundaries (Haraway, 1991). The chapter begins by addressing the question of what counts as transgression, before reporting the six pupils’ accounts of this process. The transgression of Fiona, a hearing-impaired pupil, is considered in a separate chapter (Chapter 7) because of the complexity of deaf identity and culture.
