Unfortunately, the numbers don’t necessarily affect elections in the way one might expect, said Faye Ginsburg, Ph.D. and Rayna Rapp, Ph.D., professors of anthropology at New York University and founders of the Council for the Study of Disability. The two took turns reading from prepared remarks, while a transcript of the lecture flashed across a screen, and an interpreter provided a translations in American Sign Language.

The researchers made their remarks at the Fordham Distinguished Lecture on Disabilities, delivered on April 27 at the Rose Hill campus. The lecture, “Disability Publics: Toward a History of Possible Futures,” examined how the presence of disabilities is dramatically increasing and transforming national consciousness. It was initially thought that growing numbers might wake a “sleeping giant,” during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“Given the stark contrast between the Clinton and Trump campaigns around disability issues, we nonetheless assumed . . . that the disability vote would indeed rally for Clinton, whose policy recommendations addressed areas of key importance to this constituency,” they said.

The speakers said they had been optimistic because of the increased visibility of the community through social media, including a campaign called “#cripthevote” which rallied the disability vote.

Candidate Trump’s mocking of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, seemed to shore up the disabilities vote for Clinton, they said. And the Clinton campaign capitalized on the gaffe by running an ad in which a teen age cancer survivor with a limp watches footage from the rally and tells viewers: “I don’t want a president who makes fun of me, I want a president who inspires me.”

A month later disability activist Anastasia Somoza was a featured speaker at the Democratic National Convention. Ginsburg and Rapp said the infrastructure of the convention was notable for its attention to accessibility.

“For a brief moment, it seemed as if political arithmetic might work to alter the electoral process,” they said.

However, the two said they were stunned when Trump won the electoral vote. “We had to revisit our overly optimistic assumptions about a unified disability constituency and scrutinize what actually happened.”

It turned out that the disability vote was split along party lines, as it had always been—despite Trump’s egregious behavior, they said.

The speakers said they’re profoundly concerned about enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act, particularly after Secretary of Education Betsy deVos’s confirmation hearing revealed a lack of knowledge of the legal entitlements to special education.

While Attorney General Jeff Sessions is more knowledgeable, they said, he has shown “contempt” for the legal guarantees for free and appropriate public education of American children with disabilities. They said it’s time to make the political platforms on disability rights more transparent, so that the entire voting block understands what’s at stake.

“Clearly, we cannot take longstanding federal legislation for granted; the ADA is under threat as is the very recognition of the personhood of those with disabilities,” they said. “As scholars and activists, we need to understand what happened, as we collectively imagine how we might move forward.”

Most research in disability studies, however, almost exclusively features a disabled character that the viewer or reader can point to, she said. This somewhat obvious approach misses a great opportunity to look at other works of art from a fresh perspective.

In the book, Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature (NYU Press, 2015), Sanchez offers that underutilized perspective by examining modernist works of art through the lens of American Sign Language (ASL).

“I wanted to make good on the claims that disability studies has always been making,” she said. “I wanted to pull a text that’s experimenting with language and to think about the relationship between bodies and language, but where there’s no obviously disabled character as the subject.”

Among the many modernists examined in Deafening are several outside of literature, including director Charlie Chaplin. But the bulk of the book examines writers and poets, such as Sherwood Anderson and Hart Crane.

Sanchez examines Anderson’s short stories set in Winesburg, Ohio and the way he deals with non-normative bodies. Through his characters Anderson looked at how people’s lives are damaged when they are forced to interact with and communicate in normative ways.

“Part of the film’s argument is that you don’t have to speak or communicate normatively to tell a story that you can do with your body,” she said. “There are other ways to pass information and that was hugely relevant to what was going on in deaf education at the time, where people argued that you have to learn to speak.”

Sanchez notes that the beginnings of the modernist movement are set against the backdrop of a societal push for conformity, eugenics, and other ideologies that proved fertile ground for fascism and nationalism.

“There was a panic in the U.S., specifically in the fact that we had such a heterogeneous citizenry, and there was a desire for a language that a lot of people were calling ‘American,’” she said. “The language had to be standardized and people’s bodies had to look a certain way.”

At the time those who were considered different—from indigenous Native Americans to the disabled—were sent to boarding schools where they were stripped of their identity and taught to conform. At the flip side of this movement were the artists.

“The artists were doing interesting things in the opposite direction,” she said.

She added that looking at the modernism through deaf studies might help unpack some of the obsessions of the movement, including “difficulty.” She noted that T.S. Eliot once said the modern world is difficult, so, therefore, the art has to be difficult.

“This is how you get texts, like Ulysses, that are deliberately trying to challenge you to look at language in new ways, and to be aware of how sentences and words get constructed so that the artifice is always in your mind,” she said. “Sign languages function in that way. And that gives us a new lens through which to look at some of these things they were doing with language.”

It is what the area of disability studies is doing now, she said.

“We can have a nuanced conversation without saying that all bodies can or should be the same, or that [sameness]should be some sort of societal goal.

“Deafness is not a problem to be fixed.”