Afternoon of Alterity - Nazareth College

Projecting Otherness ontothe DisabledSancia S. HuffmanMonsters? In the twenty-first century, they have become demystified.Yet, they are incorporated within cultures to include “differencemade [into] flesh” that has “come to dwell among us” (Cohen 7).The monsters have been subsumed into categories of not me and havecome to define people’s existence as monstrous and dangerouslythreatening. Before examining monsters in the medieval imagination,I was of the impression that monsters do not exist. Truly, there arenatural and unexplained abnormalities within our universe that Ihave rarely wondered or thought about because of fear of what Imay come to find. Indeed, such fear can cause the malignant andbenign anomalies of our world, or should I say cultural implicationsof our world, to go unnoticed. One such cultural implication isthe inferior treatment of the disabled because of their cognitive orphysical characteristics to which society attaches multiple stigmasand stereotypes that marginalize the disabled. By examining monstertheory as a phenomenon that correlates with the disabled, I intendto analyze how society projects otherness onto the disabled. Thefindings of my research are based on a mini-interview of two disabledpeople along with extensive library research. The implication of myargument is that as non-disabled we do not know what the disabledare thinking. Yet, non-disabled are the ones with the power to make 19