ABSTRACT
The failure of Scottish literary criticism to embrace disability as a legitimate category of analysis is puzzling when considered alongside its commitment in recent decades to develop approaches informed by gender, class, and race studies to evade the straitjacket of cultural nationalism. This marginalisation comes as no surprise when one considers the negative significance with which disability is invested on a cultural level. Siebers (2010: 26) notes that in ‘every oppression system of our day’ the ‘oppressed identity is represented in some way as disabled’, so that disability can be considered ‘the master trope of human disqualification’. However, the interest of this for the cultural critic lies in ‘understanding the work done by disability in oppressive systems’ (Siebers, 2010: 26). In this chapter, my specific interest resides in exploring the encounter between narratives of disability and Scottish culture in order to grasp the unexamined rationale that discourages analysis of disability in Scottish writing from a disability studies perspective attentive to its socio-cultural implications. My exploration, therefore, concentrates on how in Scottish literary studies a more general phenomenon of critical avoidance (Bolt, 2012) is compounded by patterns of avoidance rooted in Scottish culture. Snyder and Mitchell (2006: 20) ask, ‘What circumstances lead to cultural devaluation in the midst of an outpouring of textual, statistical, and visual materials on the subject?’, intimating that disability suffers a ‘paradox of devaluation in the midst of perpetual discussion’. My suggestion is that in the context of Scottish studies, the ‘paradox of devaluation in the midst of perpetual discussion’ that attends disability is rooted both in the politics of belonging of the field, and in the extent to which these gain urgency and justification from the link they establish between cultural confidence and the political context to which Scottish studies is bound by its national determination.
