ARCHIVING GIFTS

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Throughout this paper, I use a variety of terms for similar bodies, partly in order to keep this body of knowledge somewhat in flux: ‘dwarf’, ‘dwarfed’, ‘achondroplastic’, ‘with achondroplasia’, ‘Little People’, and so on. Each has its problems and its politics. For example, ‘achondroplasia’ is a medical term, and many people whose bodies are described by medicine resist the circumscription of their identity by such terminology. Similarly, some claim ‘Little People’ as resistant to the alleged ‘belittling’ of ‘dwarf’, whilst others prefer using ‘dwarf’ to self-identify. 2. I keep the word ‘normal’ in scare quotes here because, as will become clear through this paper, there is far more invested in the production of particular kinds of bodies as ‘normal’ than common sense would usually claim. 3. It should be noted here that the appeal to ‘enhancement’ does not fully escape the logic of the norm, bound up as it is with the hierarchisation of embodiment. 4. Although Ahmed Ahmed , Sara . 2006 . Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others . Durham, NC : Duke University Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar] often uses the word ‘object’ to include human others, given the heuristic distinction of the three intersecting aspects of archives of bodily-being-in-the-world sketched earlier, I am first going to discuss objects in our habitual sense of them, as excluding those we identify as ‘others’, as engagements with others will be discussed in the next section. 5. I use the erratum mark [sic] to draw attention to the use of the masculine as the universal in this context. There have been numerous critiques of Merleau-Ponty, suggesting that his theory universalises embodiment and risks being unable to account for difference. See, for example, Grosz (1994 Grosz , Elisabeth . 1994 . Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism . Sydney : Allen & Unwin . [Google Scholar]).