Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept

Author(s): ROSEMARIE GARLAND-THOMSON

Source: Hypatia, SUMMER 2011, Vol. 26, No. 3, Ethics of Embodiment (SUMMER 2011), pp.
591-609
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Misfits: A Feminist Materialist
Disability Concept

ROSEMARIE GARLAND-THOMSON

This article offers the critical concept misfit in an effort to further think through the
lived identity and experience of disability as it is situated in place and time. The idea of
a misfit and the situation of misfitting that I offer here elaborate a materialist feminist
understanding of disability by extending a consideration of how the particularities of
embodiment interact with the environment in its broadest sense, to include both its
spatial and temporal aspects. The interrelated dynamics of fitting and misfitting con
stitute a particular aspect of world-making involved in material-discursive becoming.
The essay makes three arguments: the concept of misfit emphasizes the particularity of
varying lived embodiments and avoids a theoretical generic disabled body; the concept
of misfit clarifies the current feminist critical conversation about universal vulnerabil
ity and dependence; concept of misfitting as a shifting spatial and perpetually
the

temporal relationship confers agency and value on disabled subjects.

This article offers the critical concept misfit in an effort to further think through
the lived identity and experience of disability as it is situated in placeand time.

Arguments from both feminist and non-feminist theorists have attempted to

shift prevalent traditional understandings of disability as lack, excess, or flaw
located in bodies to a relational conceptualization of disability as a social con
struction whose meaning is determined primarily through discourse. Disability

oppression in this view emanates from prejudicial attitudes that are given form
in the world through architectural barriers, exclusionary institutions and the
unequal distribution and access to resources.1 Similar to the useful distinction

between sex and gender proposed by early feminists such as Gayle Rubin

(1975), the terms impairment and disability distinguish between bodily states or
conditions taken to be impaired, and the social process of disablement that
gives meaning and consequences to those impairments in the world.2 Although

Hypatia vol. 26, no. 3 (Summer, 2011) © by Hypatia, Inc.

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592 Hypatia

such binaries have limits, shifting disability from an attributed problem in the
body to a problem of social justice was theoretically groundbreaking. The term

and concept misfit contributes to the work of more recent disability theorists,
such as Jackie Leach Scully and Tobin Siebers, who develop accounts of
embodied aspects of disability such as pain and functional limitation without

giving up the claim to disability as a social phenomenon.3

The idea of a misfit and the situation of misfitting that I offer here elaborate

a materialist feminist understanding of disability by extending a consideration

of how the particularities of embodiment interact with their environment in its

broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal aspects. This article, in

other words, offers an account of a dynamic encounter between flesh and

world. I will make three arguments throughout this paper about misfitting as I
define the concept. First, the concept of misfit emphasizes the particularity of
varying lived embodiments and avoids a theoretical generic disabled body that
can dematerialize if social and architectural barriers no longer disable it. Sec
ond, the concept of misfit clarifies the current feminist critical conversation

about universal vulnerability and dependence. Third, the concept of misfitting

as a shifting spatial and perpetually temporal relationship confers agency and
value on disabled subjects at risk of social devaluation by highlighting adapt
ability, resourcefulness, and subjugated knowledge as potential effects of
misfitting.
What has come recently to be called material feminism provides conceptual
language that expands the idea of the social construction of reality toward a
material-discursive understanding of phenomena and matter. This corrective
move shifts, according to Karen Barad, concepts such as Butlerian perform
ativity toward the material and away from the linguistic-semiotic-interpretive
turn in critical theory that tends to understand every "thing" as "a matter of

language or some other form of cultural representation" (Barad 2008, 120).

Material feminism emphasizes interactive dynamism—what Barad calls "intra

active becoming" (146). Such becoming understands the fundamental units of

being not as words and things or subjects and objects, but as dynamic phenom
ena produced through shifting forms of agency inherent
entangled and in all
materiality. Misfitting as an explanatory concept lets us think through a par
ticular aspect of world-making involved in material-discursive becoming.4

Fitting and Misfitting

I propose the term misfit as a new critical keyword that seeks to defamiliarize
and to reframe dominant understandings of disability.^ Fitting and misfitting
denote an encounter in which two things come together in either harmony or
disjunction. When the shape and substance of these two things correspond in
their union, they fit. A misfit, conversely, describes an incongruent relationship

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 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson 593

between two things: a square peg in a round hole. The problem with a misfit,
then, inheres not in either of the two things but rather in their juxtaposition,
the awkward attempt to fit them together. When the spatial and temporal
context shifts, so does the fit, and with it meanings and consequences. Misfit
emphasizes context over essence, relation over isolation, mediation over orig
ination. Misfits are inherently unstable rather than fixed, yet they are very real
because they are material rather than linguistic constructions. The discrepancy
between body and world, between that which is expected and that which is,
produces fits and misfits. The utility of the concept of misfit is that it defini

tively lodges injustice and discrimination in the materiality of the world more
than in social attitudes or representational practices, even while it recognizes
their mutually constituting entanglement.6
The theoretical utility of fitting and misfitting comes from its semantic and

grammatical flexibility. Similar to many critical terms, misfit offers layered rich
ness of meaning. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb fit
denotes a relationship of spatial juxtaposition, meaning "to be of such size and

shape as to fill exactly a given space, or conform properly to the contour of its
receptacle or counterpart; to be adjusted or adjustable to a certain position."
Moreover, the action of fitting involves a "proper" or "suitable" relationship
with an environment so as to be "well adapted," "in harmony with," or "sat

isfying] the requirements of" the specified situation. As an adjective, fitting

means "agreeable to decorum, becoming, convenient, proper, right." Fit as an
adjective also moves beyond simple suitability into a more value-laden conno

tation when it means "possessing the necessary qualifications, properly

qualified, competent, deserving" and "in good "form" or condition." InBritish
slang, fit even means "sexually attractive or good-looking." Fit, then, suggests a
generally positive way of being and positioning based on an absence of conflict
and a state of correct synchronization with one's circumstances.

Misfit, in contrast, indicates a jarring juxtaposition, an "inaccurate fit;

(hence) unsuitability, disparity, inconsistency," according to the Oxford En

glish Dictionary. Misfit offers grammatical flexibility by describing both the

person who does not fit and the act of not fitting. The verb misfit applies to both
things and people, meaning "to fail to fit, fit badly; to be unfitting or inappro
priate." This condition of mis-fitting slides into the highly negative figure of a
"person unsuited or ill-suited to his or her environment, work, etc.; spec, one set
apart from or rejected by others for his or her conspicuously odd, unusual, or
antisocial behaviour and attitudes." Thus, to mis-fit renders one a misfit. More
over, ambiguity between fit and misfit is intimated in a less prevalent meaning of
fit as a seizure disorder or in a more traditional sense as what the Oxford English

Dictionary explains as a "paroxysm, or one of the recurrent attacks, of a periodic

or constitutional ailment. In later use also with wider sense: a sudden and some

what severe but transitory attack (of illness, or of some specified ailment)."

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594 Hypatia

Misfitting serves to theorize disability

as a way of being in an environment,

as a material arrangement. A sustaining environment is a material context of

received and built things ranging from accessibly designed built public spaces,

welcoming natural surroundings, communication devices, tools, and imple

ments, as well as other people. A fit occurs when a harmonious, proper
interaction occurs between a particularly shaped and functioning body and an

environment that sustains that body. A misfit occurs when the environment
does not sustain the shape and function of the body that enters it. The dyn
amism between body and world that produces fits or misfits comes at the spatial
and temporal points of encounter between dynamic but relatively stable bodies

and environments. The built and arranged space through which we navigate
our lives tends to offer fits to
and functioning and create misfits
majority bodies

with minority forms of embodiment, such as people with disabilities. The point

of civil rights legislation, and the resulting material practices such as universally

designed built spaces and implements, is to enlarge the range of fits by accom
modating the widest possible range of human variation.

People with disabilities historically occupied

have positions as outcasts or
misfits as, for example, in the roles of lepers, the mad, or cripples. One thinks of
the iconic Oedipus: lame and blind, cast out on the road for his hubris, patri

cide, and incest. People with disabilities become misfits not just in terms of
social attitudes—as in unfit for service or parenthood—but also in material

ways. Their outcast status is literal when the shape and function of their bodies

comes in conflict with the shape and stuff of the built world. The primary neg
ative effect of misfitting is exclusion from the public sphere—a literal casting
out—and the resulting segregation into domestic spaces or sheltered institu
tions. The disadvantage of disability comes partly from social oppression
encoded in attitudes and practices, but it also comes from the built and
arranged environment. Law or custom can and has produced segregation of
certain groups; misfitting demonstrates how encounters between bodies and

unsustaining environments also have produced segregation.

Misfit, then, reflects the shift in feminist theory from an emphasis on the
discursive toward the material by centering its analytical focus on the co

constituting relationship between flesh and environment. The materiality that

matters in this perspective involves the encounter between bodies with partic
ularshapes and
capabilities the particular shape and structure of the world.
and

Misfitting contributes to this critical turn toward the material by attending

to mutually constituting relationships among things in the world. Misfitting is a
performance in Barad's and Judith Butler's sense, in that enacts agency and

subjectivity. The
performing agent in a misfit materializes not in herself but
rather literally up against the thingness of the world. Misfitting focuses on the
disjunctures that occur in the interactive dynamism of becoming. Perform
ativity theory would rightly suggest, of course, that no smooth fit between body

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 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson 595

and world ever exists. Nonetheless, fitting and misfitting occur on a spectrum
that creates consequences. To use the iconic disability access scene of misfitting
as one illustration of those consequences: when a wheelchair user encounters a

flight of stairs, she does get into the building;

not when a wheelchair user en
counters a working elevator, she enters the space. The built-ness or thing-ness
of the space into which she either fits or misfits is the unyielding determinant of
whether she enters, of whether she joins the community of those who fit into
the space. Another iconic example of misfitting occurs when a deaf, sign
language user enters a hearing environment. Imagine, for instance, the extrav
agant full-body gesturing of the deaf signer misfitting into a boardroom full of
executives seated in contained comportment with moving mouths and stilled
bodies conferring important on decisions.

Fitting and misfitting are aspects of materialization, as Butler has used the
term, that literally ground discursive constructivism in matter (Butler 1993).

Fitting occurs when a generic body enters a generic world, a world conceptu
alized, designed, and built in anticipation of bodies considered in the dominant
perspective as uniform, standard, majority bodies. In contrast, misfitting

emphasizes particularity by focusing on the specific singularities of shape, size,

and function of the person in question. Those singularities emerge and gain
definition only through their unstable disjunctive encounter with an environ
ment. The relational reciprocity between body and world materializes both,
demanding in the process an attentiveness to the distinctive, dynamic thing
ness of each as they come together in time and space. In one moment and place
there is a fit; in another moment and place a misfit. One citizen walks into a
voting booth; another rolls across a curb cut; yet another bumps her wheels

against a stair; someone passes fingers across the brailled elevator button; some

body else waits with a white cane before a voiceless ATM machine; some other
blind user retrieves messages with a screen reader. Each meeting between sub
ject and environment will be a fit or misfit depending on the choreography that
plays out.
Fitting and misfitting extend the concept that shape carries story, an elegant

phrase that I borrow from medieval historian Caroline Walker Bynum (1999).
In considering the philosophical question of continuity in human identity over
time, Bynum draws from her personal experience of observing her father's long
term progressive dementia. Perhaps unknowingly, Bynum asks a disability the
ory question about how we can maintain a continuous sense of self as our
bodies change over time. Her response expresses an inherent and mutually
constitutive relationship between body and narrative, between nature and cul

ture: "Shape carries story," Bynum concludes (1999).7 In this formulation,

embodiment—our particular "shape" in the broadest sense—is always dynamic
as it interacts with world. As such, embodied life has a narrative, storied qual

ity; the shifting of our shapes knits one moment to the next and one place to

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596 Hypatia

another. Bynum's concept of carrying story introduces temporality into

shape
encounters between body andworld, in a narrative that by definition connects
moments in space into a coherent form we call story. The idea that shape car
ries story suggests, then, that material bodies are not only in the spaces of the
world but that they are entwined with temporality as well.

Misfitting, Visibility, and Identity

A good enough fit produces material anonymity, a version of the visual ano

nymity I have elsewhere argued that staring relationships interrupt.8 A

reasonable fit in a reasonably sustaining environment allows a person to nav
igate the world in relative anonymity, in the sense of being suited to the
circumstances and conditions of the environment, of satisfying its requirements
in a way so as not to stand out, make a scene, or disrupt through countering
expectations. Material
anonymity describes a predominantly unmarked and

unrecognized being in
way ofthe world, a way that Harvey Sacks calls "doing
being ordinary" (1984). Such a phenomenology yields the privilege or social
capital conferred by accessing spaces, performing tasks, and establishing rela
tions that enable one to exercise the rights of citizenship in democratic orders.
Linda Martin Alcoff s 2006 account of identity formation, Visible Identities,
corresponds with my concept of misfitting in that it is relational, experiential,
and contingent. How look at each
we look, other, Alcoff insists, deter
and
mines in large part howour way through the world and how we treat
we make
one another.9 Like misfitting, Alcoff's version of identity formation as "a per
ceptual habit" (Alcoff 2006, 188) fuses a materialist with a constructivist
theory of identity formation. As with fitting and misfitting, Alcoff's version of
identity is discursive-material. That is, identity is at once performative and
narrative, emerging as particular material bodies interact in particular social
locations and moments. Identity, for Alcoff, does not reside in visible features
but emerges from shared, dominant interpretations of "visual markers on the
body" (6). This perception of identity is a "learned ability" that is context
dependent, complex, and fluid (187). Alcoff suggests that we are called into
subjectivity through an exchange of mutual recognition, which may of course
often be misrecognition. Misfitting adds to this primarily perceptual field
stronger elements of materiality; our bodies move, meet, negotiate, and come
into direct contact with the built and natural worlds. The degree to which that
shared material world sustains the particularities of our embodied life at any
given moment or place determines our fit or misfit. Our particular embodi
ments are as unchosen as the narratives of our identities upon which
Alcoff focuses. Identities are narratives accessed through visual perceptions
for Alcoff; fitting and misfitting are largely tactical navigations through space
and time. Both these visual and tactile relations make up the process of

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 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson 597

identification both as it is imposed and felt. Both sets of relations turn on ma

terial particularity, the way we look and how function. Frequently, we do
we

not choose our particularities, but as Alcoff reminds us, the meaning and the

substance of our bodies to some degree. The concepts

can be reshaped of fitting
and misfitting speak directly to the issue of reshaping body and world.
One of the fundamental premises of disability politics is that social justice
and equal access should be achieved by changing the shape of the world, not

changing the shape of our bodies. People with quadriplegia, for example,
should be provided with sustaining environments that allow them to partici
pate fully as equal citizens rather than urging them toward normalization

through medical scientific cure. Deaf people, similarly, should not be made

into hearing people through technology such as cochlear implants and

high-tech hearing aids but rather should have access to communication with
both the hearing and the deaf through sign language and other forms of non
verbal communication that create a fit between them and their world. Alcoff
aims to mute identity or reshape our bodies in order to achieve
not social jus

tice, but rather to "make identities more visible" in order to transform their
meanings so that they provide their bearers with a coherent and positive nar

rative of human particularity from which to launch subjective and political

agency, a point to which I will return. Similarly, the formative experience of

slamming against an unsustaining environment can unsettle our and others'
occurrences of fitting. Like the dominant subject positions such as male, white,
or heterosexual, fitting is a comfortable and unremarkable majority experience
of material anonymity, an unmarked subject position that most of us occupy at
some points in life and that often goes unnoticed. When we fit harmoniously

and properly into the world, we forget the truth of contingency because the
world sustains us. When we experience misfitting and recognize that dis
juncture for its political potential, we expose the relational component and the
fragility of fitting. Any of us can fit here today and misfit there tomorrow.
In this sense, the experience of misfitting can produce subjugated know

ledges from which an oppositional consciousness and politicized identity might

arise. So misfitting can lead to segregation, exclusion
although from the rights
of citizenship, and alienation from a majority community, it can also foster in
tense awareness of social injustice and the formation of a community of misfits
that can collaborate to achieve a more liberatory politics and praxis. Indeed,

much of the disability rights movement grew from solidarity born of misfitting.
Even the canonical protest practices of disability rights, such as groups of
wheelchair users throwing themselves out of chairs and crawling up the stairs
of public buildings, act out a misfitting.10 So whereas the benefit of fitting is
material and visual anonymity, the cost of fitting is perhaps complacency about

social justice and a desensitizing to material experience. Misfitting, I would

argue, ignites a vivid recognition of our fleshliness and the contingencies of

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598 Hypatia

human embodiment. Misfitting, then, informs disability experience and is cru

cial to disability identity formation. The dominant cultural story of proper

human development is to fit into the world and depends upon a claim that our
shapes are stable, predictable, and manageable. One of the hallmarks of
modernity is the effort to control and standardize human bodies and to bestow

status and value accordingly.11 Our bodies and our stories about them reach
toward tractable states called normal in medical-scientific discourses, average in
consumer capitalism, ordinary in colloquial idiom, and progressive in develop
mental accounts.12

Misfitting, Dependence, and Vulnerability

The concept of misfitting allows identity theory to consider the particularities

of embodiment because it does not rely on generic figures delineated by identity
categories. The encounters between body and environment that make up mis
fitting are dynamic. Every body is in perpetual transformation not only in itself
but also in its location within a constantly shifting environment. So who one is
and what that means is fluid as well. The material particularity of encounter

determines both meaning and outcome.

Although misfit is associated with disability and arises from disability theory,
its critical application extends beyond disability as a cultural category and
social identity toward a universalizing of misfitting as a contingent and funda

mental fact of human embodiment. In this way, the concept of misfitting can
enter the critical conversation on embodiment that involves the issues of con
tingency and instability. These concepts have been thoughtfully elaborated
recently within feminist theory under the terms dependence and vulnerability.
Such concepts allow us to put embodied life at the center of our understanding
of sociopolitical relations and structures, subject formation, felt and ascribed

identities, interpersonal relations, and bioethics. Conceptualizing human sub

jects as embodied ensures a materialist analysis that accounts for human

particularity. Focusing on the contingency of embodiment avoids the abstrac

tion of persons into generic, autonomous subjects of liberal individualism, what

legal theorist Martha Albertson Fineman calls one of the myths of

foundational

Western culture (Fineman 2005; 2008). The concepts of misfitting and fitting
guarantee that we recognize that bodies are always situated in and dependent
upon environments through which they materialize as fitting or misfitting.
Vulnerability is a way to describe the potential for misfitting to which all

human beings are subject. The flux inherent in the fitting relation underscores
that vulnerability lies not simply in our neediness and fragility but in how and

whether that vulnerable flesh is sustained.13 The elaboration of dependency

and vulnerability developed by Fineman can illuminate the misfitting relation
ship. In her 2005 book The Autonomy Myth and her more recent work on

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 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson 599

vulnerability theory, Fineman argues that the fact of embodiment creates uni
versal vulnerability and defines dependency as the need in all human beings for
care. Although the ethics of care has been a concern in feminist theory for a
number of years, Fineman moves the conversation toward politics and law by
arguing for responsibility for dependency
collective and mitigating the social

injustice caused by the disavowal and denial of dependency.14 The reciprocal

nature of care and the denial of that truth by the dominant liberal order leads
Fineman to call for state responsibility for care and protection from inherent
human vulnerability. What makes us vulnerable to what I'm calling misfitting
is, according to Fineman, not only the fact of our embodiment but also the
stigmatization and devaluing of the care-giving relationship in traditional
liberal orders.15
Fineman's emphasis on the fact of our need for care from others underscores
the relational
aspect of embodiment
expose the myth of autonomy.
as a way to
Butler, in her book Precarious Life (2004), also founds sociopolitical justice in
the fact of bodily vulnerability. Whereas Fineman emphasizes our shared need
for reciprocal bodily care as the stress point where vulnerability occurs, Butler
finds human attachment to be the source of our fundamental vulnerability.
Although Butler acknowledges interdependency as crucial to our humanness,
she sees the common condition of our injurability as our bond to one another.
A sustaining fit for Butler would consist of the emotional presence of beloved
others, which is always haunted by human mortality and the specter of our ev
anescence. That our body needs resources and attending to is more Fineman's
concern, whereas Butler sees us as vulnerableto the loss of the other, to grief in
the sundering of emotive bonds inherent in our bodily fragility. Fineman's vul

nerability lies in the fact that we all need to eat, be sheltered, and be comforted;
Butler's vulnerability lies in the fact that we must grieve and die. Aloneness

seems the ultimate misfit for Butler.

Like Fineman and Butler, sociologist Brian S. Turner understands embod
iment as the source of our common vulnerability. In his 2006 book

Vulnerability and Human Rights, Turner rights adds

par a focus on human and

ticularity that corresponds with my theory of misfitting. The inevitable

contingency of human existence is the basis of human rights for Turner. The

self is neither abstract nor autonomous. It grows from a body in a particular

social and material location. The abuse of human rights destroys the con
ditions that make what Turner calls our "embodiment, enselfment, and
emplacement" possible (Turner 2006, 27). Similar to Butler, Turner sees our
bond as being our shared capacity for suffering. Like Butler, what Turner un

derstands as ontological
contingency is the fragility of the material
body, its
vulnerability to wounding, injury, pain, suffering, dying. The concept of rights
accorded equally to all humans regardless of their particularity that Turner
finds central to his theory is exemplified in the first comprehensive human

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600 Hypatia

rights treaty of the twenty-first century, which is the United Nations' Con

vention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional Protocol,

adopted in December 2006. This wide-ranging treaty conceptualizes embod

iment as unstable and disability as contextual and takes us of the way to a

some

theory of misfitting: "Disability," the preamble to the treaty states, "is an

evolving concept and disability results from the interaction between persons
with impairments and attitudinal and environmental barriers that hinder their
full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others." The

treaty's language implies that the misfit between "persons with impairments"
and an unsustaining environment made up of "barriers" materializes our in
herent vulnerability.
The relational and contingent quality of misfitting and fitting, then, places
vulnerability in the fit, not in the body. This concept also accounts for the

problem of differential vulnerability, of apparent sturdiness in some and fragil

ity in others. Vulnerability is universally inherent—as Fineman, Butler, and
Turner insist—but it is a potentiality that is realized when bodies encounter a
hostile environment and is latent in
sustaining environment.
a Fineman rightly
suggests that the "quality and quantity of resources we possess or can com
mand" depend upon our social position and determine in large part the
particular form in which our vulnerability is realized (Fineman 2008, 27). To
fit and be fit, I have suggested, is to be ensconced in an environment that sus
tains the particular form, function, and needs of one's body. Although
resources and privilege certainly mitigate misfits, the relationship between

body and world is rangier than this. A misfit occurs when world fails flesh in the
environment one encounters—whether it is a flight of stairs, a boardroom full
of misogynists, an illness or injury, a whites-only country club, subzero temper
atures, or a natural disaster.
A theory of fitting and misfitting includes, then, the premise of universal
vulnerability, but it has the virtue of expanding the conversation from the
threat of what Fineman calls "the ever-present possibility of harm, injury, and
misfortune from mildly adverse to catastrophically devastating events"

(Fineman 2008, 25). Our enfleshment certainly makes us mortal, open to loss,
and exposed to suffering. But our bodies are also the agents of our lived expe
rience and subjectivity. An embodied engagement with world is in fact life
itself.

Bioethics, Agency, and Misfits

A bioethics of social justice inheres in the concept of misfitting. Misfits can

exceed the experiences of oppression and subordination and lead to a demand
for and recognition of better fits. Disability and other equal rights movements
work toward building a sustaining environment that offers fits where misfits

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 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson 601

have occurred. To misfit into the public sphere is to be denied full citizenship.
The aspirational goal of creating a universally sustaining environment would

provide equal access to a democratic public sphere comprised of open inte

grated institutions such as the workplace, marketplace, media, transportation
facilities, and public institutions such as schools, health-care centers, archives,
and governmental
spaces. sphere is the space in which citizenship
This public
is enacted and in which democratic intercourse among citizens occurs.16 Si
ebers argues that "political membership relies on the ideology of ability"
(Siebers 2008, 179). This ideology of ability produces a world into which peo
ple with the embodied particularities we think of as disability do not fit. Access
to civil and human rights becomes, then, a proper fit.
As I suggested, the individual and collective experience of misfitting can
produce the subjugated knowledge, outsider/insider standpoint, or privileged
epistemic state from
one could which
launch a liberatory identity politics of the
kind suggested by Patricia Hill Collins (2000) or Alcoff (2006). The mediation
of experience through theory that critics such as Satya Mohanty (2000) call for

occurs materially in misfitting, creating the potential for a politicized con

sciousness, an epistemic epiphany regarding the relativity of exclusions that the

status quo explains as natural or essentializes as inherent inferiority. For exam
ple, a white cane or a brailled book is an element of the sustaining environment
for a blind person to encounter a fit that accommodates the minority embod
iment of blindness in an environment built for the sighted. Such prostheses
ease the material divergences between bodies and their locations, making
misfits into fits.
Misfitting can materialize identity as an epistemically privileged political

position from which, a progressive politics might arise. The form, function,
comportment, and sensory modes of human bodies inform the ways we interact
with human, built, and natural environments. This interaction between self
and world can produce politically liberatory, material effects. Such "epistemic

significance" Cherri'e Moraga calls "theory in the flesh" (quoted in Moya 2000,

91). other words, the experience

In of misfitting, if it is theoretically mediated,
structures the narrative aspect of identity and is structured by the material
world. Misfitting has explanatory power to produce a coherent narrative of how
inferiority is assigned and literal marginalization takes place. Realist identity
theory proposes a materially located subject narrative of both particular
whose

and communal self—whose "epistemic privilege"—arises from the misfit be

tween what Alcoff calls one's "first person and third person selves," or what

sociologists call one's achieved and ascribed identities (Alcoff 2000, 337).
Such politicized potential results from the dissonance between what I call felt
and attributed identity, the jolt of what W. E. B. Dubois terms "double con
sciousness" (Dubois 2008, 6). Misfit moves this idea of dissonance from
epistemology into phenomenology.

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602 Hypatia

By framing the materialization of identity subjectivity as perpetual,

and

complex encounters between embodied variation environments, fitting

and

and misfitting can help reconceptualize the reigning notion of "oppression,"

with its suggestion of individually enforced, hierarchically structured subjuga
tion. Misfit does so by stressing the relational rather than the essential, insisting
that reality is a product of contextual relations rather than stable, atomistic
essences. The utility of the concept of misfit is that it definitively lodges in
justice and discrimination in the materiality of the world rather than
predominantly in social attitudes. Misfitting operates independently of opp
ressive agents or even groups who might exercise active antipathy or discrim
ination. A wheelchair user, for instance, might be socially accepted in a
workplace, but the only way to get to the office is via stairs, a wheelchair
if user
will not have access to the economic benefits a stair climber has. Similarly, a
blind person is disadvantaged in a world that demands reading printed text in
order to fully participate in the public sphere. personA with dwarfism is
excluded primarily because she must navigate a world whose
scale is wrong for

her body. And someone whose body does the configuration of a key
not fit

board will not turn out text in the same way that ten nimble fingers produce. In

other words, inequality occurs not purely from prejudicial attitudes but is an

artifact of material configurations misfitting with bodies. This is of course not

exclusive to disability discrimination; what we commonly call institutional
racism functions similarly. Nevertheless, the experience of disability highlights
the disparity between the physical realities of our lives, between the ways our
bodies function and are formed and the ways the world is built for certain kinds
of bodies.

A Bioethics of Resourcefulness

The most pressing question for a feminist materialist disability theory is devel

oping an argument for why disabled

people should be in the world—not only in
the public sphere, but in our shared world. While civil and human rights ini
tiatives worldwide strive to integrate people with disabilities and to provide

access to those rights, at the same time advanced technologies such as medical
normalization and pre- and post-embryonic eugenic selections work toward
eliminating the particularities of embodiment we think of as disability. Misfits
who fall into varied devalued social categories have been purged through forms
of eugenic eradication such as the European Holocaust, American lynching,
the prison-industrial complex, and coercive
heteronormativity.
This paradoxical but virulent cultural mandate to expunge disability has
been countered over the last thirty years by civil and human rights initiatives
such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabil
ities, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and other similar national

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 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson 603

legislation. The misfitting that would exclude people with disabilities from the
world is also countered by the kind of positive
identity politics in a postpositive

realist theory of identity such as AlcofF formulates. By positive identity politics,

I am not suggesting reductive or essentialist dogma such as refusing to surgically
treat cleft palates or mitigate pain, or holding candlelight vigils in praise of
breast cancer. Rather, I mean an identity politics that would reimagine disabil

ity as human variation, a form of human biodiversity that we want to recognize

and accept, even embrace, in a democratic order.17 In arguing for a disability
bioethics, Scully advocates what I would call an ethical fitting enabled by
reconstructing narratives that revalue the particularities we think of as impair
ment and deviance to bring forward "information or strategies that disabled
people need to survive and flourish that are missing from existing accounts"

(Scully 2008, 128). Misfits are the agents of these strategies through the process
of misfitting.
Misfits can also be agents of recognition who by the very act of misfitting
engage in challenging and rearranging environments to accommodate their en
trance to and participation in public life as equal citizens. Attending to the
dynamics of misfitting and fitting urges us to cultivate the rich particularity that
makes up embodied human diversity. Although modernity presses us relentlessly
toward corporeal other forms of standardization, the human body in fact
and

varies greatly in its forms and functions. Our experience of living eventually
contradicts our collective fantasy that the body is stable, predictable, or con
trollable, creating misfits for all of us. What we call disability is unavoidable,
insistent in its misfitting. Our conventional
response to disability is to change
the person through medical technology, rather than changing the environment
to accommodate the widest possible range of human form and function. The
concept of misfitting shifts this model. The body is dynamic, constantly inter
acting with history and environment; sometimes it fits and at other points or

moments, it does not. We evolve into what we call disability as our lives de
velop. The misfits that constitute the lived experience of disability in its
broadest sense is perhaps, then, the essential characteristic of being human.
Rather extirpating disability to achieve
than fits in the world, we should

attend to
processes of fitting and misfitting to which we are all vulnerable in the
interest of accommodating and ultimately valuing disability in its broadest

sense as a form of human variation. First of several reasons is that we might see

disability not as anomalous but as a significant universal human experience

that occurs in every society, every family, and most every life. Second, we

might accept that fact. Third, we might better approach social justice by inte
grating disability into our knowledge of human experience and history and
integrating disabled people into our societies. Fourth, we might more fully rec
ognize interdependence rather than independence by becoming more aware
that all people rely on one another for life tasks and survival. Fifth, we might

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604 Hypatia

expand toward intrinsic rather than instrumental valuing of human beings,

which is the foundational principle of egalitarian political culture. Sixth, we
might communally develop what Scully calls "the particular moral understand
ings that are generated through the experience of impairment" (Scully 2008, 9).
Let me linger on a final reason why disability misfits should be in the world.
The moral understandings, subjugated knowledge, or ethical fitting that can
emerge from what might be called socially conscious, or even theoretically me
diated, misfitting can yield innovative perspectives and skills in adapting to
changing and challenging environments. Acquiring or being born with the
traits we call disabilities fosters an adaptability and resourcefulness that often is
underdeveloped in those whose bodies fit smoothly into the prevailing, sus

taining environment. This epistemic status fosters a resourcefulness that can

extend to the nondisabled and not yet disabled as they relate to and live with
people with disabilities.18 For example, people born without arms all learn to
use their toes to accomplish tasks that those of us with arms never are able
to do. Blind
people navigatelearn to
through the world without the aid of
light, a skill useful when sources of artificial light that seeing people depend
upon fail. Deaf people develop modes of communication that are silent. Such
misfitting can be generative rather than necessarily catastrophic for human be

ings. For example, Claude Monet painted more impressionistically as he

became blind. The artist Chuck Close evolved a distinctive style of realism in

response to paralysis. The philosopher Jiirgen Habermas recently wrote that the
experience of having a cleft palate and the accompanying multiple surgeries
positively shaped his intellectual development (Habermas 2004).
The resourcefulness and adaptability that can emerge from the interactive
dynamism between world and body I've named here as misfitting answers
Wendy Brown's proposal that our politics should not focus on what we are but
what we want (Brown 1993). To get what we want, it is not necessary to sac
rifice identity or identity politics as Brown suggests, to frame identity as a
"wounded attachment." The critical concept of misfitting emphasizes location
rather than being, the relational rather than the essential. Understanding
identity as a set of variable fits and misfits, a potentially productive fusion of
coincidence and disparity between particularity and the material status
one's

quo, provides a way to convert being wanting to

without neutralizing identity.
These instances of resourcefulness arising from misfits are not "wounded at
tachments" nor is this a politics of resentment; this is the productive power of
misfitting.

Notes
1. See, for example, Davis 1995; Wendell 19%; Thomas 1999. For an overview of
these arguments, see Barnes, Barton, and Oliver 2002.

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 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

2. See, for example, Linton 1998.

3. See Scully 2008 and Siebers 2008. Also see Clare 1999; Mitchell and Snyder
2006; Schweik 2009.
4. Material feminism has emerged from the work of theorists such as Sandra Har
ding (1986), Elizabeth Grosz (1994), Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000), Evelyn Fox Keller
(2002), Donna Haraway (2003), Elizabeth Wilson (2004), Karen Barad (2007), and
others, several of whom are feminist scientists. This broad evolving of constructivist
theory is often characterized as the material turn. The various critical turns—from lin
guistic to material—are spatial-temporal metaphors that posit theory as a material
phenomenon (I think of a skier) navigating a solid surface at a certain speed.
5. My contribution to disability studies has been to provide four critical keywords:
"extraordinary," "normate," "the stare," and "freakery" (Garland-Thomson 1996; 1997;
2009). A keyword, a term I borrow from Raymond Williams, is a single word that in
vokes an entire, complex, critical conversation. Indeed, "normate" and "extraordinary"
are no longer mine; they belong to disability studies in general. I see them used often
uncited; sometimes I've heard them attributed to other scholars. Like good children,
they have successfully separated from their parent and are making mature contributions
to the larger world. I hope misfits will answer a critical need as well.
6. See Scully 2008, especially ch. 4.
7. Bynum acknowledges three aspects of identity: individual personality; ascribed
or achieved group affiliation; and spatio-temporal integrity, which is the sense of iden
tity upon which she focuses (1999). Her fundamental question is, "How can I be the
same person I was a moment ago?"
8. See Garland-Thomson 2009, ch. 4- Sander Oilman describes aesthetic surgery
as the quest to be visually anonymous (1998); Erving Goffman describes "civil inatten
tion" as a form of social capital (1980); and William Ian Miller discusses the advantages
of being "disattendable" (1997).
9. I have developed a similar argument about the importance of visual interchange
and identity formation and social justice in Staring: How We Look (Garland-Thomson
2009). Our shared cultural conviction that the truth of identity is visually perceptible
comes from modernity's faith in and preference for the material and the visually appre
hensible as the ground of knowing. Commonplace affirmations of this conviction
abound: "I know it when I see it," "show me," and "plain as the nose on your face."
10. For a detailed discussion of this example, see Shapiro 1993.
11. For discussions of normalcy and standardization of bodies, see Hacking 1990;
Canguilhem 1991; and Davis 1995, among many others.
12. Queer theory has similarly challenged the primacy of normal. Both disability
and homosexuality are embodiments that have been pathologized by modern medicine.
Robert McRuer has theorized this affinity most thoroughly in Crip Theory (McRuer
2006), in his useful neologism "Compulsory Ablebodiedness," which alludes to Adri
enne Rich's germinal concept of "Compulsory Heterosexuality" (in Rich 1986). Also

see Warner 2000.

13. In her 2006 book Frontiers of Justice, Martha Nussbaum continues the elabo
ration of her capabilities approach by considering what might be called significant

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 Hypatia

dependence—the kind characteristic of childhood and disability—to determine the

threshold of human capability that produces what she calls "a life worthy of human
dignity" (Nussbaum 2006, 70). In my view, capability lodges too firmly in bodies
and not enough in environments. What makes the capabilities approach untenable is
that judging the worth of a life through quality-of-life arguments has been used to
justify eugenic euthanasia, selective abortion, forced sterilization, institutional ware
housing, and a variety of other discriminatory practices based on prejudicial attitudes
and lack of imagination on the part of dominant majorities who do not understand
disabled lives.
14. The feminist ethic of care has been articulated for the last several decades. For
the ethics of care in relation to inevitable dependency and disability in particular, see
Kittay 1999.
15. Fineman differentiates between inevitable dependence and derivative depen
dence (Fineman 2008). Inevitable dependence is the universal need for care, the bodily
vulnerability that all human beings experience in differing ways and degrees over a life
time. Derivative dependence is the vulnerable position of those who are actively caring
for others in a liberal social order founded on the myth of the autonomous subject.

16. See Habermas 1991 and Arendt 1998 on the political significance of the pub
lic sphere.
17. The complex question of the relationship between reproductive freedom and
eugenic discrimination is a topic I cannot fully address here but only gesture toward. For
fuller discussions, see Saxton 1998; Parens and Asch 2000; and Scully 2008. I have
argued for conserving disability as a form of biodiversity in "Welcoming the Unbidden:
The Case Conserving Human Biodiversity" (Garland-Thomson
for 2005).
18. This is what Maria Lugones calls "world traveling" (1987).

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