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Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship

Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship Page 533 Rayna Rapp and Faye Ginsburg II n trying to portray my son in the literary model known as a novel, I have passed through . . . stages. In the case of a person like him with a mental disability, it isn’t the individual himself but rather his family that has to pass from the “shock phase” to the “acceptance phase.” In a sense, my work on this theme has mirrored that process. I have had to learn through concrete experience to answer such questions as how a handicapped person and his family can survive the shock, denial, and confusion phases and learn to live with each of those particular kinds of pain. I then had to find out how we could move beyond this to a more positive adjustment, before finally reaching our own “acceptance phase”— in effect coming to accept ourselves as handicapped, as the family of a handicapped person. And it was only then that I felt the development of my work itself was at last complete. (Oe 1995: 46, emphasis added) In 1963, when the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe’s son Hikari was born with a dangerous brain tumor, Oe and his wife http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Public Culture Duke University Press

Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship

Rapp, Rayna; Ginsburg, Faye
Public Culture , Volume 13 (3) – Oct 1, 2001
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References (65)

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2001 by Duke University Press
ISSN
0899-2363
eISSN
1527-8018
DOI
10.1215/08992363-13-3-533
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Page 533 Rayna Rapp and Faye Ginsburg II n trying to portray my son in the literary model known as a novel, I have passed through . . . stages. In the case of a person like him with a mental disability, it isn’t the individual himself but rather his family that has to pass from the “shock phase” to the “acceptance phase.” In a sense, my work on this theme has mirrored that process. I have had to learn through concrete experience to answer such questions as how a handicapped person and his family can survive the shock, denial, and confusion phases and learn to live with each of those particular kinds of pain. I then had to find out how we could move beyond this to a more positive adjustment, before finally reaching our own “acceptance phase”— in effect coming to accept ourselves as handicapped, as the family of a handicapped person. And it was only then that I felt the development of my work itself was at last complete. (Oe 1995: 46, emphasis added) In 1963, when the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe’s son Hikari was born with a dangerous brain tumor, Oe and his wife

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Public Culture – Duke University Press

Published: Oct 1, 2001

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