Reframing Disability Through “Uselessness” in the Zhuangzi

Huizi said to Zhuangzi, “The king of Wei left me the seeds of a big gourd. I planted them, and when they grew, the fruit was a yard across. I filled them with water, but they weren’t sturdy enough to hold it. I split them into ladles but they were too big to dip into anything. It wasn’t that they weren’t wonderfully big, but they were useless. So I smashed them.”

Zhuangzi said, "You, sir, are certainly clumsy about using big things… Now you have these gigantic gourds. Why not lash them together like big buoys and go floating on the rivers and lakes instead of worrying that they were too big to dip into anything? Your mind is full of underbrush, my friend.^[1]

In the first chapter of the Zhuangzi, the titular philosopher’s friend Huizi finds himself with some gourds that are simply too big. Because he cannot find a use for his giant gourds, Huizi smashes them to pieces. I am beginning with this passage because of how striking the image of the gourd is to me. It is incredibly uncomfortable to ask what we do with useless things — and to ask what we do with people whom we decide are useless. It is not as though Huizi did not try. He thought of different ways to make the gourds productive but could not imagine coexisting with gourds that are useless. The Zhuangzi, a proto-Daoist text written between the fifth and third century BCE, is a fascinating and occasionally bizarre text full of stories and parables that are intended to shine the way toward the good life. Zhuangzi questions many societally accepted ideas, including the idea of the “useless.” As we will see, Zhuangzi looks at vegetables, trees, and human bodies that fail to meet societal benchmarks of productivity. This text is valuable to disability studies as an ancient and poignant example of a philosopher regarding disability as a form of natural diversity and contending with a society that wanted to push away or marginalize “useless” life forms. In this article, I will show that Zhuangzi counters the forces of compulsory able-bodiedness by raising up disabled exemplars in his work. However, unlike many other discussions of disability, the Zhuangzi does not aim to show that disability is useful to society. Rather, Zhuangzi argues that people with disabilities reflect an important dimension of life as it is, a principle that aligns with his wider spiritual and philosophical goal of valorizing “uselessness” to celebrate what is natural. By praising the useless, and raising unlikely disabled exemplars, Zhuangzi gives us a framework for living with diverse and changing bodies that do not need to be productive to be good.

In my analysis of Zhuangzi’s work, I engage with Robert McRuer and his theory of compulsory able-bodiedness.^[2] McRuer’s work builds on Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concept of “the normate.”^[3] The normate is a conceptual strategy rather than a label for actual existing people. Garland-Thomson writes that “this neologism names the veiled subject position of cultural self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries.”^[4] If the normate is the culturally idealized person, then it is easier to identify what the normate is not. Because of the benchmark of the normate, people with disabilities as well as people of other marginalized identities are othered by their wider communities and are unable to be as neutral as the normative figure.^[5] Instead, the disabled figure is societally identified by deviance from the normate. Garland-Thomson challenges the normate view of disability by writing that a “feminist disability theory denaturalizes disability by unseating the dominant assumption that disability is something that is wrong with someone.”^[6] Rather than defining disability by the bounds of the normate, Garland-Thomson asks us to value disability as more than a deviance from a societally constructed myth.

McRuer amplifies the idea of the normate in order to point out a cultural hegemony of able-bodied heterosexuality, arguing that because heterosexuality and able-bodiedness are considered “normal” in society, they are not only normative but cultural imperatives.^[7] McRuer builds on queer theory to show that just as heterosexuality is normalized and queerness is seen as deviant, able-bodiedness is defended as the “normal” existence in modern Western society.^[8] Compulsory able-bodiedness is defended by a cultural assumption that everyone desires to be able-bodied and “healthy.” McRuer points to the example of Michael Bérubé, an author who faced compulsory able-bodiedness in encounters about his son. Bérubé wrote in his memoir that these encounters subliminally asked, “In the end, aren’t you disappointed to have a retarded child? […] Do we really have to give this person our full attention?”^[9] Able-bodiedness is constructed as universally desired, and therefore thoroughly normalized.

However, just as queer people exist despite compulsory heterosexuality, people with disabilities actively disrupt the hegemony of able-bodiedness.^[10] Beyond people who identify as disabled, the very materiality of human bodies challenges the notion of “normal healthy bodies.” Humans get sick, age, and are in a constant state of bodily change. Therefore, the able-bodied hegemony has enormous power via social policing but is also fragile because it rests on an unrealistic hope for bodily perfection. A queer/disabled perspective recognizes that “such a system is never as good as it gets.”^[11] Both queer/disabled bodies and the relatively new field of queer/disability studies are actively providing a challenge to compulsory able-bodiedness.

As new as disability studies may seem in a Western academic setting, challenging able-bodied hegemony is not a new idea. Over 2,000 years ago, the proto-Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi was facing his own society’s norms and imperatives. Zhuangzi spends much of his text contending with the traditions and hierarchies of Confucianism, an ancient Chinese tradition that can be drastically oversimplified as the study of virtue. Confucian exemplars are known as junzi, or gentlemen. The junzi act properly and in accordance with tradition, and are often scholars, noblemen, government officials, or all three at once.^[12] Zhuangzi playfully questions Confucian values and ways of knowing, often finding wisdom in unexpected corners of life and society. Karen Carr and Philip Ivanhoe call Zhuangzi’s exemplars “under-heroes:” people who make up a much more diverse crew than is found in other texts of the same time.^[13] In the Analects, Kongzi discusses the ritually correct way to treat a blind Music Master.^[14] This rare acknowledgement of disability is a piece of instruction for nondisabled gentlemen rather than a story that centers disabled experience. In her piece “Marked Out for Greatness, Perceptions of Deformity and Physical Impairment in Ancient China,” Olivia Milburn discusses the Music Master passage, writing that “treating a disabled person well was a simple and easy way of showing gentlemanly behavior, and laying claim to a higher status within society.”^[15] In stark contrast, Zhuangzi brings forward disabled individuals as teachers and examples of human flourishing, rather than passive means to show gentlemanly behavior in their nondisabled counterparts. While it would be incorrect to call Zhuangzi a scholar of disability in our modern sense, he was a radical in his time for upsetting the social hierarchy and bringing people with disabilities to the center of his work.

The visibility of disabled folks in Zhuangzi’s work is especially significant for his then unique portrayal of disabled folks as exemplars rather than victims. Ancient Confucianism clearly saw disability as something that needed to be accommodated, as shown in the example of the blind Music Master. Zhuangzi does not write very much about accessibility aids for disabled folks; instead, he points to diverse bodily forms as examples of good ways to live. In her book chapter “The Littlest Sprout: The Dao of Disabilities and Challenges,” Erin Cline examines Zhuangzi’s descriptions of disabled exemplars to find that disabled individuals often have viewpoints that are unharmed by socialization — viewpoints that nondisabled individuals may lack.^[16] One element of Zhuangzi’s work that Cline focuses on is the “unflinching” way in which he describes disabled exemplars. In Chapter 4 of the Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi describes a physically disabled man named Shu:

Splay-limb Shu’s chin is sunk in his belly. His shoulders are above his head, pinched together so they point at the sky. His five organs are on top, his thighs tight against his ribs. Plying a needle and taking in laundry he makes enough to fill his mouth. Winnowing leftover grain he gets enough to feed ten people. When the people in charge are calling out troops, Splay-limb wanders among them waving goodbye. When they are press-ganging workers he is exempted as a chronic invalid. When they dole out grain to the sick, he gets three measures, and ten bundles of firewood. With splayed limbs, he is still able to keep himself alive and to live out the years Heaven gave him. What if he had splayed Virtue?^[17]

Zhuangzi describes bodies that sound painfully contorted and does not gloss over any details of bodily deviance. Splay-limb Shu is an especially striking description of disability that is meant to evoke a reaction from the reader. And yet, Zhuangzi does not think there is anything wrong with Shu’s life, forcing the reader to question why they might feel uncomfortable with Shu’s body. In her analysis, Cline explores this straightforward description of Shu’s body in the Zhuangzi:

Zhuangzi is completely unflinching in his approach to disability: he never minimizes or attempts to avoid describing the disabilities of his characters[…] What Zhuangzi did in approaching disability this openly was deeply countercultural in his own time, when people with disabilities were devalued, disregarded, and marginalized.^[18]

The characters in Zhuangzi’s work are visible to an extreme, and their differences are highlighted with unguarded detail. The reader is invited to learn from disabled characters without pity and without looking away.

Further, Zhuangzi’s disabled exemplars are more than visible. Beyond his unflinching descriptions of disability, Zhuangzi challenges the able-bodied hegemony by showing that people of all body types do not have to be “useful” in the traditional sense to live good lives. As previously referenced, in Chapter 4, Zhuangzi describes a physically disabled man named Shu that lives on the margins of his society. In this passage, Shu can be identified by his deviance from the figure of the normate. While there is no one normative figure, the normate can be seen in what Shu is not: a typical, ordered body that stands up straight. Shu is shown on the margins of society, picking up the leftover grain and living outside of the masses of soldiers and ordinary workers. In this passage, his skills at sewing and laundry are only shown as helping to keep himself alive. In terms of societal productivity, Shu is not useful.

However, in this passage, Zhuangzi does not make the normate position particularly appealing. Along with compulsory able-bodiedness comes compulsory service, either in the military or as forced labor. When I read this passage, I imagine lines and lines of able-bodied troops. Perhaps these people feel that they are being useful to their society and feel some fulfillment in the uniformity of the lines of bodies ready to go to war. The forces of compulsory able-bodiedness are strong, and I can only imagine that they look down on anyone who does not fit into their straight lines of “normal” people.

Wandering among the troops, Splay-limb Shu clearly does not fit the norm. This can feel uncomfortable. There may be an impulse to show that Splay-limb Shu actually is useful to his society. In a culture that perpetuates compulsory able-bodiedness, one might wish for a narrative that cures Splay-limb Shu. In “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence,” Robert McRuer brings forward the question that all disabled bodies face under able-bodied hegemony: wouldn’t you rather not be…? Fill in the blank with any disability, and the assumption remains the same. McRuer writes, “The culture asking such questions assumes in advance that we all agree: able-bodied identities, able-bodied perspectives are preferable and what we all, collectively, are aiming for.”^[19] And yet, Zhuangzi does not agree that able-bodiedness is something to aim for. He does not imply that Shu should hope to be “normal,” and thus able to serve his society as a soldier or worker. Instead, Shu “wanders among them waving goodbye.”^[20] He wanders, and he survives.

For Zhuangzi, the best way to live is wandering effortlessly through the Dao, the multifaceted and undefinable spiritual center of Daoism. The Dao is associated with spontaneity, natural proceedings, and nurture. Ivanhoe writes that Zhuangzi’s "true goal is to accord with — become one with — the Dao and live a life characterized by the “free and easy wandering” that serves as the theme of the opening chapter of the text.^[21] For Zhuangzi, Shu’s wandering through the troops shows that he is living a much more worthwhile life than one that would fit with compulsory norms. The people that are useful to society are marching off to die, while Shu is able to “live out the years Heaven gave him.”^[22] Existing outside of compulsory able-bodiedness puts Shu in a position to serve himself, rather than be useful to society at the expense of his life.

At first glance, “uselessness” seems like an incredibly insulting association to have with disabled folks. However, Zhuangzi consistently praises the useless as being able to avoid harm. Shortly after the chapter about Splay-limbed Shu, Zhuangzi writes, “The mountain tree plunders itself. The candle fat scorches itself. The cinnamon tree is edible, and thus it gets chopped down. The lacquer tree is useful, and thus it is cut down. Everyone knows how useful usefulness is, but no one seems to know how useful uselessness is.”^[23] Unlike Splay-limbed Shu, those deemed useful by society die a premature death at the chopping block of productivity. In “The Human and the Inhuman: Ethics and Religion in the Zhuangzi,” Eric Nelson writes that “Zhuangzi reverses conventional opinions by praising the useless, the unusual, and the malformed as opposed to common anthropocentric attitudes about what constitutes the natural and the order of heaven and earth. These attitudes and judgments lead one to misjudge things according to their calculative and instrumental value for conditional human purposes and uses.”^[24] Society is so preoccupied with productivity that it will use the useful down to dust. While “useless” may come across as an insult, Zhuangzi shows that usefulness is a singularly human value that interferes with a natural life and can even shorten the natural lifespan.

Embracing what is natural and seeing beyond harmful norms is at the heart of the Zhuangzi. When I use the word “natural,” I do not mean simply the opposite of human or human-made. In Western thought, we may assume that “nature” refers to the parts of the world that human culture has not touched. Zhuangzi makes no such distinction. In the cosmology of the Zhuangzi, all things come from the Dao, and thus retain a certain oneness. As David Chai explains in his book Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness, “the Zhuangzi, taken as a whole, is a text devoted to espousing the holistic nature of both the world and the cosmos.”^[25] This includes being and nonbeing, human and nonhuman. What is unnatural for Zhuangzi is the idea that humans are the center of the world, and that the names we have come up with hold objective meaning. Thus, our categories of “useless” can be turned on their head when we realize how useful the useless is. The sentence “With splayed limbs, he is still able to keep himself alive and to live out the years Heaven gave him” gives a clue as to how this might be. Shu is valorized for embracing his place in the organic oneness in the world, and simply living out his life. Chai writes, “To be useless in a manner that is not artificial entails harmonizing oneself with the world. Through the process of unification, the nothingness of Dao supplants the uselessness of the Thing such that it incurs a measure of usefulness.”^[26] The ideal in Daoism is to return to the Dao, and to forget artificial categories like “useless.” I use “natural” as a shorthand to describe this organic wholeness that comes with forgetting standards of usefulness and the freedom that comes with accepting natural accordance with the Dao.

In contrast to the destructive process of societal “usefulness,” Zhuangzi shows that “useless” people and non-people are able to exist peacefully in harmony with the rest of the world. In Chapter 1 of the Zhuangzi, directly after the aforementioned passage of the great gourd, Huizi tells Zhuangzi that he has a huge gnarled tree for which he has no use. Zhuangzi responds, “You have a big tree and are upset that you can’t use it. Why not plant it by a nothing-at-all village in a wide empty waster? You could do nothing, dilly-dallying by its side, or nap, ho-hum, beneath it. It won’t fall to an axe’s chop and nothing will harm it. Since it isn’t any use, what bad can happen to it?”^[27] As in the case of the great gourd, Zhuangzi proposes an alternative use for something that is deemed useless. However, in both passages, Zhuangzi urges Huizi to look past the narrow standards of human productivity. He asks Huizi himself to stop being useful for a time, and rest. Huizi’s assumption is rooted in compulsory able-bodiedness, as he cannot imagine engaging with the tree outside of the norms that have been set for him as a productive body. What Zhuangzi suggests is for Huizi to change his relationship with productivity both for his useless property and for himself. In reference to the gnarled tree in this passage, David Wong writes, “Because it is of no use to anyone who would otherwise cut it down, it is of supreme use to itself.”^[28] The tree does not exist to serve people. Likewise, Huizi does not exist to find productive uses for trees. Uselessness can lead to peaceful coexistence, in the marginal but ultimately less harmful world beyond human productivity.

Zhuangzi portrays useless life forms as they are, existing naturally in the world. In the case of Splay-limbed Shu, he does not show that Shu is somehow useful to society despite his disability. In fact, Zhuangzi’s exemplars never fit neatly into society despite their disabilities. Instead, he celebrates them for avoiding the harmful effects of socialization that encourage bodies to exist solely for productivity. This response to compulsory able-bodiedness resembles Garland-Thomson’s argument in “The Case for Conserving Disability.” She writes:

The case for conserving disability I offer rests on what I call because-of-rather-than-in-spite-of counter-eugenic positions. In other words, I explore what disability-as-disability and what disabled people-as-they-are contribute to our shared world. By contribute, I do not mean economic productivity, nor contribution through individual agency or acts, but rather I consider the generative work of disability and people with disabilities through their presence in the world. This because-of-rather-than-in-spite-of framework refuses the dominant understanding of disability as a deficit to be tolerated and protected and seeks to bring forward the benefit disability brings to the human community.^[29]

Garland-Thomson shows that disabled folks do not need to justify their existence by fitting social norms of productivity, or by the normate understanding of what a good life looks like. She defends disability from “eugenic logic” which seeks to destroy disability and literally make able-bodiedness compulsory. Unlike Garland-Thomson, Zhuangzi does not write an explicit defense of disability. However, his work does resonate with her call to face “disabled people-as-they-are”^[30] by portraying people with disabilities living fulfilling lives in their natural state. He does not appeal to the economic productivity of disabled folks; rather, he shows disabled exemplars avoiding the harms of compulsory usefulness. In the simplest terms, Zhuangzi shows people with disabilities living their lives. Their existence as people living their natural lives is what makes them valuable, not their material contributions to society.

In a society governed by compulsory able-bodiedness, disability is under threat of complete erasure. It is tempting to defend disability by the rules of our own social norms, to show that disability is useful, and ultimately to prove that disabled skills can be co-opted by capitalism. It is a neat way to side-step compulsory able-bodiedness — people with disabilities can fit into able-bodied identities by joining the ranks of productivity. However, proving that people with disabilities are materially useful to society reduces the value of disability to its service to capitalism. Zhuangzi did not live under capitalism, but he still was able to see the harms of being perceived as useful. In the text of the Zhuangzi, we see that disabled folks are valuable for their natural existence, and that life forms of all kinds have value outside of their usefulness. This framework makes more room for a natural plurality of bodies. Uselessness is not just a label for those who are marginalized, it is a strategy for self-preservation for all types of people (and other life forms) in a world guided by extractive norms. Uselessness is an opportunity for rest. Ultimately, it is a sign of accountability to the self and to others to see ourselves as more than productive bodies.

In this article, I have drawn out Zhuangzi’s conception of the useless as it relates to disability. I have considered Zhuangzi’s disabled exemplar “Splay-limbed Shu” in the context of a society that exhibits compulsory able-bodiedness. Beyond his unflinching portrayal of disability, I have demonstrated that Zhuangzi uses figures seen as useless to show that our value does not come from our productivity. Rather than defending disability by its material contributions to society, Zhuangzi asks us to accept all bodies as a natural plurality. His portrayals of the useless guide us toward a societal ideal that allows us to be gentle with ourselves and wander freely without working ourselves to death. My hope is that the radical idea of the useless body can be a resource for disability resistance in a culture that constantly idealizes “the grind.” Zhuangzi is proof that anti-eugenic logic is grounded in ancient theory, philosophy, and spirituality, and that we are not alone in countering ableist forces. By studying the Zhuangzi, we can find representation and new frameworks for conserving disability. Above all, we find figures that embody hope for those on the margins and resist compulsory able-bodiedness by simply living out their years.