Rupturing Concepts of Disability and Inclusion

CHAPTER 2
The artistic challenge to the researcher seeking to gain a fuller understanding of
inclusion is how can these socio-ethical fabrics be configured, laid out, and used in
a way that may involve reshaping and rupturing, yet respecting the integrity of
previous research.
These decisions are enmeshed in analogy. Similarities include the creative
tensions between aesthetics and function; interrelatedness and uniqueness; public
and private; individualism and corporateness; open-endings and boundaries;
passion and order. This research, as a creative process, can be likened to a birthing
process of craft. As well as embracing realism and suspicion, excitement and
uncertainty, expectation and mystery, it is also tedious, yet intentional. As such
therefore, it involves a process which culminates with the tenacity of labour and
action to present a product of incomplete possibilities – a process that necessitates
structural rupture and severing for transformation, reconstruction and refigurement.
Mary Catherine Hilkert, who promotes the use of the patchwork quilt metaphor
in feminist scholarship, draws attention to another aspect when she states:
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While the quilting process is clearly creative, the pieces come from the earlier
fabric of one’s life. The art involves collaboration ... The pieces they work
with come from that past, but the inspiration and art come in designing
something new. 130
Women’s stories are woven within quiltmaking. Although stories are sometimes
recorded in other forms such as autobiographies, anecdotes, personal essays, biographies,
and interviews in periodicals, their presence within the quilt reflects an
expression of the quiltmaker’s experience. Narratives are “not merely information
storage devices.” 131 According to Jerome Bruner, the “culturally shaped cognitive and
linguistic processes that guide the self-telling of life narratives achieve the power
to structure perceptual experience and organize memory in their role to segment
and purpose-build the very ‘events’ of life.” 132 The self-telling of life narratives is
part of a creative process. The writer takes control: to participate in transformatory
processes which create new selves, new stories, and new social realities. 133
Narratives woven into a patchwork quilt are autobiography in fabric. Barbara
Hillyer describes autobiography:
... as a selective retelling of one’s story, reordered, retrospective, and biased
by both the requirements of form and changes in the writer’s understanding
of the meaning of what she remembers. 134
Braham speaks of women’s autobiography as always understanding the need to
compose a life from the bits and pieces of the past which are “marinated in
memory, resurrected by the imagination and imbued with meaning”. 135 Hillyer
warns that autobiographies can be seen as suspect as sources of academic research,
for the “biases of writer and reader are assumed to contradict the ethic of scholarly
objectivity.” 136 However in the context of, and intersection with, disability, a
woman’s autobiography enables one to think about what is known or can be known
about disability “as women experience it in its complex, multiform, disorganized
dailiness”. 137 Women’s narrative in disability embraces the intimacy and risk of