Disability and Mothering by Lewiecki-Wilson Cynthia;Cellio-Miller Jen; & Jen Cellio

Author:Lewiecki-Wilson, Cynthia;Cellio-Miller, Jen; & Jen Cellio [Lewiecki-Wilson, Cynthia && Cellio, Jen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815632849
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2016-01-14T05:00:00+00:00

1. I put terms like “fitness” and “health” in quotation marks because they are cultural constructs with prejudicial regulatory functions. “Fitness,” as a metaphor, highlights this fact since it implies that bodies must be made to “fit” a certain size or shape dictated by religion, fashion, political exigency, cultural taboos, etc.

2. See Mairs’s Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, Renewal (1993) for a more extended view of her “disability theology.”

3. As a Catholic, myself, I am well aware that modern Catholicism is not often practiced in the liberal and mystical fashion that Mairs embraces, as Catholicism, too, has been changed by the individualistic rationalism in “the West” today. (Here, the connotation and denotation of “West” clearly diverge, as cultures to the south of the United States are more likely to maintain a mystical or communal Catholicism.)

4. Moraga explains her journey back to her roots as having begun in contemporary Mexico, where she encountered her own “cultural outsiderhood” as a Chicana lesbian, leading her back beyond the reach of living cultures to the pre-Columbian temples, where it was not the peoples or their visible legacy but “the natural landscape in which those templos were placed” and “the buried history” contained within them “that brought a shudder of recognition to the surface of [her] skin” (Moraga 2001, x). This is a past emptied of people—people who would inevitably judge, exclude, or resist a Chicana feminist understanding of indigenous Mexico—and felt through an organic or mystical connection, free from the constraints of history. The connection Moraga feels to ancient Mexico is an ideal, rooted in ideas and cosmology, not a realist genealogy.

5. Mairs’s understanding of Catholicism is equally resistant to hierarchy and oppression. In Ordinary Time, Mairs argues that “the Community of God” translates into “just distribution of all goods” and “a new world order—a wholly fresh way of conceiving relatedness as inclusive and egalitarian rather than exclusive and hierarchical” (1993, 188, 190). Mairs argues this as a “Catholic worker,” but she suggests that any spiritual path (God, Allah, Mother Earth, chaos) can lead to this conclusion (8).

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