How much should you know about me?

I found Stephanie Kerschbaum’s article “On Rhetorical Agency and Disclosing Disability in Academic Writing” fascinating.  Like the Kerschbaum, I was offended how people (some close and some not so close to the author) suggest that she mentions her disability in her writing.  It challenges the notion that the writing is adequate on its own.  It also calls special attention to those writing about people with special needs.  For example, authors in African-American studies don’t have to reveal whether or not they are black, authors of violence of against women texts don’t have to reveal whether or not they were domestically or sexually assaulted, and authors writing about gender don’t have to reveal which gender they more associate with.  This resonates with her declaration that, “Why am I always asked to talk about my deafness?  Why not about my race or my gender or sexuality?  Nobody has ever said to me, ‘So how does your gender play into this theory?’” (67).  However, Kerschbaum relates how writers of disability studies face direct or indirect pressure to reveal either their specific disability or their relative with a disability.  This is definitely a form of discrimination in the academic world.

I found it fascinating that Kerschbaum comes to the realization amid her academic career that revealing or not revealing one’s disability in their writing is a strategic choice on the author’s part.  I also found the following claim and rationale intriguing, “Because disability is a contested site upon which identity claims are made…disability self-disclosures are a prime location where academic writers assert themselves and give texture to their identity claims” (61).  Kerschbaum makes the claim that disability is so intertwined with one’s identity that it would be difficult to separate the disability from the person.  I don’t know how much I agree with that claim.  However, she simultaneously mentions how the acknowledgement of one’s disability is a form of empowerment that can act as a sort of membership in a particular subset of the academic community.  In other words, claiming one’s identity could be empowering or demeaning depending on how the author perceives it.

Claiming one’s disability can also backfire.  Kerschbaum mentions how an audience could understand the writing as a self-empowering piece where the only praise the author receives is that he or she is “brave” for writing about their disability.  I love how Kerschbaum then makes the academic distinction between the body and the mind, and when should the body come in in topics of the mind?  Kerschbaum’s writing begs the question as to how much the audience should know about the person who wrote an article and why should it matter?  What is salient and not salient to disclose?  And, how can we make that distinction?  Her article forces us, as readers, to evaluate how much of ourselves we disclose in our writing as well as why we do or do not do it.  It also calls into questions how much of an author do you need to understand before you read their article.  The ideas, questions, and struggles in this article will stay with me for a long time.