The Ecosomatic Paradigm in Literature: Merging Disability Studies and Ecocriticism

Abstract

Maps render foreign territory, however dark and wide, fathomable. I mean to make a map. My infinitely harder task, then, is to conceptualize not merely a habitable body but a habitable world: a world that wants me in it. –Nancy Mairs, Waist-High in the World The cartographic metaphor that Mairs employs in the epigraph calls attention to the double-edged challenge that she faces as the result of her multiple sclerosis: as the number and severity of bodily impairments connected to her disease increase, Mairs must continually renegotiate both her sense of self and her place in the world. That is, not only does she have to reconcile herself to her changing body, but also she has to learn how to navigate a world that privileges the able-bodied, and that is, therefore, a less habitable (and even disabling) world for those with physical and cognitive impairments. Through maps made of words—like each of the essays collected in Waist-High in the World, for example—Mairs is able to conceptualize a new way of being in the world, one that imagines her wheelchair-bound body at the middle of an ongoing collaboration between her changing body and the various places (built and wild) that she inhabits. In this way, Mairs's cartographic metaphor highlights the deep entanglement between bodies and places. This deep entanglement—the dialectic of embodiment and emplacement—is the central subject of this essay as this dialectic forms the basis for what I call the ecosomatic paradigm. The ecosomatic paradigm assumes contiguity between the mind-body and its social and natural environments; thus, under this scheme, the work of negotiating a “habitable body” and “habitable world” go hand in hand.

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