ABSTRACT
In my empirical material several types of technology, such as wheelchairs, rehabilitative devices and sports equipment, are mentioned in different contexts. Ingunn Moser (2006), researcher in science and technology studies, points out that the role of technology is largely unexplored in disability studies. This can be explained by researchers’ attempts to replace previous medical models of explanation and their focus on the individual and normalizing measures, with social and cultural analyses of disability (Moser 2006: 375). Assistive technologies represent the medical professionals’ endeavour to compensate for individual impairments and have as such been of little interest (Blume 2012: 349). However, in disability sports research the difference between everyday technology and the technology that is used in disability sports contexts has been emphasized. Hargreaves argues that ‘the wheelchair, normally a symbol of weakness, of dependency, of neediness, when used for track races is transformed into a symbol of power, speed and muscularity’ (2000: 190). It should be added that these are two quite different types of wheelchairs differing in appearance and function. Wickman (2007a) claims that sports technology, for instance prostheses, can challenge the boundaries between bodies with or without impairments by reducing physical differences and contributing ‘to the production of “super sportsmen” and “super sportswomen.”’ But no matter how good the sports results are, the disabled body is still considered ‘different and … inferior to the non-impaired body’ (Wickman 2007a: 7). Phenomenology offers analytical tools to explore the functions of assistive
technology. Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) compares the blind person’s stick with the gaze. The former ‘has ceased to be an object for him, it is no longer perceived for itself; rather, the cane’s furthest point is transformed into a sensitive zone, it increases the scope and the radius of the act of touching and has become analogous to a gaze’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2012: 144). The stick becomes an extension of the body and a utensil with which the blind person perceives the surroundings. In this way the habit – that is, knowledge that only can be obtained through the body, and thus not objectively mediated – can incorporate new instruments or aids and by these extend our ‘being in the world’; the stick is one example of a perceptual as well as a motor habit (MerleauPonty 1945/2012: 145, 153). Merleau-Ponty’s example has certain similarities to
Haraway’s (1999) use of the metaphor of the cyborg, as described in A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. Haraway’s cyborg is, just like Merleau-Ponty’s blind man with a stick, a hybrid of an organism and a machine. But Haraway politicizes the cyborg, describing it as a female figure in the borderland that questions the whole, normal body with her mere existence. The cyborg is a conscious actor who actively disturbs order and crosses boundaries. According to Haraway we all are cyborgs who use information technology and modern medicine but, she adds, ‘Perhaps paraplegics and other severely handicapped people can (and sometimes do) have the most intense experiences of complex hybridization with other communication devices’ (1999: 178). Haraway only mentions disability once in A Cyborg Manifesto, and cyborg
theory has mostly engaged disability metaphorically (McRuer 2006: 224). But Moser (2000) applies Haraway’s notion of the cyborg as an alternative to prevailing rehabilitation discourse and as a possible figure in theorizing about a marginalized position – that of the disabled. Moser writes about Olav, a man who lost his faculty of speech after a stroke and became partially paralysed on his right side. By means of computerized technology, Olav maintains contact with the world around him and with his life before the stroke. The computer gives Olav a voice and makes self-representation possible. In this way he becomes an agent instead of a passive recipient, and restores his dignity. The computer has become ‘an ally and an opponent. It is both a friend and an intimate part of him’ (Moser 2000: 230). Moser argues that Olav’s subjectivity comes into being in the relation between body and machine – that is, through the heterogeneous cyborg. However, Moser does not discuss gendered aspects of Olav’s use of technology in his self-presentation. The sociologists Diana Mulinari and Kerstin Sandell (1999) problematize
the idea of crossing boundaries as they stress that the opportunities to cross look different depending on social position: ‘The transcendence beyond the body is the ancient patriarchal dream, and moving across boundaries out of pleasure speaks to experiences of privileged subjects and elites’ (1999: 293). Haraway also depicts the crossing as free from conflict, while several researchers insist that such action in fact implies a personal risk-taking that is often followed by punishment (Pratt 1991; Mulinari and Sandell 1999: 293; Bordo 2004: 298).1 That said, I will now use Merleau-Ponty’s description of the significance of bodily knowledge for using assistive technology, in combination with the metaphor of the cyborg to explore how the hybrid machine-human being can problematize the idea of the whole, homogeneous body. To begin with, however, the role of technology when the participants in the study are made the Other will be explored.
