Going Full Retard

There. I've finally written it. And though you wouldn't perhaps know it, by the time you read these words, they will be approximately ten days in the making.

As I look at those words, I wonder how they could have passed the editing process. I know how it came to be written; I understand that writing can reveal both the best and worst of one's brain. But I fail to see how someone could have let that pass in the rational editing phase. Editors vet every word -- more than once. It's hard to believe that people -- the writers, the actors, the producers, the crew, everyone -- everyone knew it was there, but that no one with the power to remove it, removed it.

There's so much to say about the ways language works, but I keep stumbling over those words: their power is such that the sheer hatred obscures the potential for rational linguistic thought. Others have written about the phrase and its ideas as hate speech, unacceptable usage, and so on; many have linked to the campaign to change public perceptions of the r-word (on which, see my post here). I find myself in agreement,

THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. IT IS WRONG. And we in the disability community will change people's minds, one by one. Join the pledge.

One of the remaining depredations of an English degree is that I often find my mind gets stuck in unusually awkward places. Even as I despair over the casual derision that belies the hatred of disabled people, I also find my brain focused on the word "full." (If I weren't too late, this would double as a blog carnival post). Why full? Why not full out? Full on? Way? Total? Hard? Hardcore? All? Why full?

One part of me wants to run to the dictionary and look things up; I hope that the repository of usage will help me understand the work of the word full. I also recognize -- since this was supposed to be hip conversation -- that the decision to go with full might best be approached through thinking about the practice of signifyin: saying more than the dictionary means, saying with a sense of resistance, saying to include meanings that are specific to a minoritized community. In their rush to be hip, the writers have mined dialects, idiom, and vocabulary that are clearly not their own. They have closed their ears and minds to the resonance of language in order to capitalize on the difference of an already exploited population. I expect more from professional writers (who are supposed to have a skill with words and whose job it is to work with language).

That full represents to me a severely skewed understanding of disability. In this world, you can go full, half, or maybe two thirds retard. I guess it's the idea that the various and differing manifestations of disability can be seen as performance items. Take this aspect, this manifestation, and not this. You can measure up disability and then perform it in ways that allow you to seem "really disabled," while simultaneously maintaining an awareness for both yourself and your audience that this is a performance of disability. Simple Jack ... the return of the stereotyped "village idiot" a la Forrest Gumpish cliche... you can pick and choose your manifestations, your signs, your disabledness.

And that's what gets me. In these performances of make-believe disability, it turns out the very principles of the disability rights movement are undermined. Movement people and scholars who, as a rule, separate impairment from disability argue that disabled people are not our impairments. But this, the idea that you can go full, half, semi ... is an idea founded on the principle that doing the impairment makes the human.

I want to clearly distinguish this point from the idea that disability can be performance. When a disabled person performs disability, the acts that might be seen as performances of impairment are a) usually actings of one's own impairment and b) they are performed as an act of resistance to the power systems that dominate and cripple more than any impairment. Here, however, the reclaimed power that disabled people experience is absent. The performed manifestations of impairment serve only to create the illusion of impairment; they thereby re-ensnare disabled people in the box of stereotypes and oppression, a box in which the only hope of freedom is one in which you don't go full retard: half will be sufficient.

There are many places to take action online to push back against the nastiness of Tropic Thunder (I like the Arc -- keep uptodate and get involved; Patricia Bauer has done awesome work getting the word out). And as you protest the language of the film, I'd ask that you bear in mind the whole phrase -- not just the r-word -- for the adjective is as nasty as the noun.