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Home > Journal > Issue Ten > Our mirrored selves: Reconfiguring disability and technology Our mirrored selves: Reconfiguring disability and technology - Charmaine Brosnan From recent qualitative research I have conducted, mainly semi-structured interviews, I began to realise that, although cyberspace maybe seductive for some in terms of escaping the 'disabled' body, it is a space that can bring disabled people the opportunities to navigate space for themselves: "I'm not lifted into a chair, or waitin' for a bus or am causing inconvience �I can do whatever the hell I like without people even lookin' twice at my wheels�I can be whoever I wanna be�It's class, for anyone." Another important element is the "sharing of information." It is not sharing in the sense of the transmission of information that binds disabled communities together but the ritual sharing of information that pulls it together. "Life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by activities of proximity." We, as humans, are seeking out community in other spaces as it dissolves in the places we physically inhabit. What is it then that discourages people from using physical space and opting for a virtual one?? Imrie argues that a lot of the problems encountered today by contemporary cities, and previously by industrial cities, is the fact that, underpinning 20th century architecture, was the propagation of an engineering aesthetic based on the idea that pure, distilled, design could be produced when fixed around the unified body of the Vitruvian image, the body of geometric proportion and symmetry. An image modelled by the famous Parisian architect Le Corbusier, a seemingly able-bodied body- normal, male, upright, healthy and vigorous. On a similar note Golledge argues that indeed disabled people inhabit 'distorted spaces' and that the naturally 'limited' body itself is that which encounters the surfaces of urban landscapes as daunting barriers to meaningful social interaction. However, he does acknowledge that the impaired body is not the sole reason for spatial 'distortion', but it is the physical urban environment and the way it is structured that magnify the distorting effect of disability through careless design. Discourses and systems of representation construct places from which individuals can position themselves and from which they can speak. The media, providing us with information, tells us what it feels like to occupy a particular subject-position: the beautiful woman, the skinny teenager, the clean citizen. This 'information' works to confuse identity formation. In a built environment that fundamentally blocks disabled people out, this failure to recognise bodily and physiological diversity has also seeped into the design of cyberspace and is the sole reason why we disengage from our physical inabilities and disembody when on-line. These conceptions of the body have their roots in the post-Galilean view which conceives of the physical body as a machine and as a subject of mechanical laws, an object with fixed measurable parts, without sex, gender, race or physical difference. It may be argued, therefore, that identity itself is limited because it does not mark the same place- no one is identical. This however does not stop people playing others into stereotypes such as 'ill' or 'disabled'. It is because of these representations that disabled people 'flee' to the virtual world, ridding themselves of their shell. Essentially what they then feel is a world without steps, railings, physical awareness or judgement.
Architectural Association of Ireland |