ABSTRACT
The autobiographical actmodels the agency and self-determination that the disability rights movement has fought for, even or especially when the text is collaboratively produced. One notable example is Count Us In: Growing Up with Down Syndrome, a collaborative narrative by two young men with the syndrome in question. Not only is the title cast in the imperative mood-‘‘count us in’’—the subtitle puns on ‘‘up’’ and ‘‘down,’’ a bit of verbal play that challenges conventional ideas about mental retardation, such as that those with it never really mature. Autobiography, then, can be an especially powerful medium in which disabled people can demonstrate that they have lives, in defiance of others’ commonsenseperceptionsof them. Indeed,disability autobiography is often in effect a postcolonial, indeed an anti-colonial, phenomenon, a form of autoethnography, as Mary Louise Pratt has defined it: ‘‘instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with [read: contest] the colonizer’s own terms’’ (7). People with disabilities have become
increasingly visible in public spaces and open about their disabilities. But their physical presence in public life represents only a rather limited kind of access. Properly conceived and carried out (admittedly, a large qualifier), life narrative can provide the publicwith controlled access to
lives that might otherwise remain opaque or exotic to them. Further, much disability life writing can be approached as ‘‘qualifyof-life’’ writing because it addresses questions discussed under that rubric in philosophy, ethics, and especially biomedical ethics. It should be required reading, then, for citizens in a world with enormous technological capability to sustain life and repair bodies in the case of acute illness and injury but with very little commitment to accommodate and support chronic disability. Because disability life narratives can counter the too often moralizing, objectifying, pathologizing, and marginalizing representations of disability in contemporary culture, they offer an important, if not unique, entre´e for inquiry into one of the fundamental aspects of human diversity.
