Deshae E. Lott, Ph.D. now teaches at Louisiana
State University in Shreveport. She previously worked at
Texas A&M University and the University of Illinois at
Springfield. Lott integrates her contributions to the field
of disability studies with her studies of American spirituality
and literature (She currently co-edits the American Religion
and Literature Society Newsletter; she has published on a
variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americans including
Margaret Fuller, George Moses Horton, Mary Mann, Julia Smith,
Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, George Oppen, Maya Angelou, and
Annie Dillard.): A mixture of syncretism and individualism
appears in mysticism, and the mystics whom she studies endeavor
to contribute constructively to their communities. Through
Lott’s contributions to disability studies, she demonstrates
ways that difference can strengthen both the individual and
the community and proposes approaches for understanding and
responding to such differences. Her work in this area has
resulted in regional and national presentations, including
a presentation at the 1998 MLA Convention; the chapter “Going
to Class With (Going to Clash With?) the Disabled Person:
Educators, Students, and Their Spoken and Unspoken Negotiations” in
Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture (2001);
the poem “Inspiration for Self” in Quest (2005);
the article “From Where I Sit: Medicaid Reform Must
Come Now for People with Severe Disabilities” in Quest
(2005); “His Choice: My Life” in Ventilator-Assisted
Living (Fall 2005); and the forthcoming article for Ventilator-Assisted
Living on sexuality among vent users as well as a collection
of personal essays.
Conférence
Augmented Spirit: Extreme Embodiment
Vent user Deshae Lott’s life demonstrates the complications and triumphs
emergent in using technology to sustain life and invites others to locate embodiment
and commonality amidst the biomechanical and deviant. The machines necessary
to sustain her life (ventilator, suction canister, oxygen concentrator, wheelchair,
chest vest, in-exsuffulator, nebulizer) whoosh, whirl, alarm, drone, buzz, blink,
vibrate, and tone around her, creating interfaces of tubes and devices whose
intrusiveness, cumbersomeness, and cacophony seem antithetical to personal freedom.
The frail body and engineering feats to sustain it demand unrelenting attention,
yet the very presence of an individual life connected to the interfaces fosters
a creative process whereby the patient and caregivers cooperate with the interfaces
without being dictated to or dominated by them. Interdependency with machines,
people, and systems add texture to the song while Deshae’s voice carries
the melody and, faint though it is, vibrantly arises amidst and because of the
interfaces. Through the use of digital images, projected images, sound, and video,
we will create a multilayered sculptural installation mapping how daily real
time fluctuations in data measuring physical health, time navigating the healthcare
system, and medical costs as well as therapies restrict or fortify the volume
of Deshae’s voice. This project demonstrates how the human consciousness,
sustained by medical interfaces, emerges to create meaningful connections with
others and the environment. Viewers of the piece will be led, as persons are
in Deshae’s presence, to see in the foreground the life itself rather
than the unfamiliar and imposing infrastructure sustaining her life.
