Miss Fritz and Norm Mate – The Love Story

Written by Brenda Brueggemann with support from the DAC team

This short video-composition, “Miss Fritz and Norm Mate” –  represents what “doing Disability Studies in the Humanities” is about.  I often share it in my disability studies courses as a way to anchor and acclimate our critical and creative work ahead with “doing disability studies.”  

The moves we make when we do disability studies in the humanities are to:

• Examine (with more than just the eye but with multiple sensibilities and embodiments)
• Revise and reclaim
• Subvert and invert
• Question, state, exclaim
• Invent, reinvent
• Hack, remix
• Dance with multidisciplinary rhythms

–around, through, and with constructs of disability in language and literary, cultural, historical, philosophical, political, social, medical, religious/spiritual, global, national, regional representations. 

I know –that was a mouth (and sentence) full. 

Let me try again.  

Let’s take, for example:  Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë’s super-novel, one of the most critically acclaimed and analyzed texts in the English canon. 

Even an attempt to study the many, many, many covers of Jane Eyre over the ages will yield infinite options for the ways that both disability/embodied difference and gender/woman might be read in the text.   There are, literally, hundreds of different cover images for the novel over the ages. 

The video composition that follows is yet another covering of Jane Eyre, done in the spirit of Disability Studies in the Humanities and used often in my classrooms as an illustration of that work.  It features two key critical terms advanced by Rosemarie Garland Thomson for person-constructs around disability in literature and culture:  the misfit and the normate.  [citations to RGTs first book here] 

And a re-purposed critical film interpretation term “the gaze” (first used by Laura Mulvey) as reviewed by blind writer, Georgina Kleege. 

In one pandemic-moment video call conversation with Rosemarie and Georgina, we were talking about these terms and all the ways they had been used in the last 20 years in the field of Disability Studies; and then too, rather comically, how they were being mis-represented in the zooming era of auto-captions. (Where deaf almost always comes up as death in auto-captions!)  In our auto-captioned Zoom conversation in November 2022, for example, misfits became Miss Fitz (for Rosemarie) and then when repeated to me in our Zoomed conversation, it further transformed into Miss Fritz.  The normate then became “Norm Mate” –as the AI behind the auto-captioned conversation  worked very hard to make the “Miss Fitz” narrative make further (romantic) sense.  “The Gaze” first came up as “the gays” but then began to auto-correct itself since it gender-coded the previous terms as male/female.  

And so:  I re-composed a caption-play creation of “Miss Fritz and Norm Mate –the Love Story” to the tune of Jane Eyre.