Chapter 4 - Writing Rehabilitation

Summary

Double amputee Ivor Gates’s bitter insistence on corporeal absolutes and his virulent refusal of rehabilitation conjoin two contradictory but potent discourses of male damage in the aftermath of the Second World War. On the one hand, Ivor subscribes to the dominant myths of masculine agency: since masculinity is fundamentally about doing, a man cannot be a man without hands; equally, masculinity valorises conformity (masculinity is about fitting in), and the damaged, incomplete male body can never attain the social privilege of normative invisibility. The wounded hero would indeed be better off dead. On the other hand, Ivor’s refusal of conventional rehabilitative measures designed to enable independence and comfort the non-disabled – his refusal to be managed and his weaponisation of his dependent state – makes him a radical assertion of otherness that insists on being seen and recognised as disabled. He is confrontational, active, ironically powerful. Through these contradictory states, Ivor exposes the tension between visibility and invisibility at the heart of normative masculinity and, in the process, draws attention to the paradoxes underpinning discourses of disability in the war and its immediate aftermath.