la_vie_noire | (no subject)

Disabled Bodies and Ableist Acceptance.

I think the combination of positive and negative reactions is worth noting, in light of Campbell’s writing on culture and disability. Mullins and Pistorius are admired for “overcoming” a perceived disability, and this admiration feels especially safe for people embedded in able-bodied culture because they are conventionally attractive in every other respect. But this is a story with which we only feel comfortable provided that it doesn’t present any kind of threat to our conventional categories of abled and disabled bodies. It is unacceptable for a disabled body to be better at what it does than an abled body. It is even slightly uncomfortable when a disabled body manages to be “just as good”.

After the images of Mullins and Pistorius, I also showed my students an image of speed skater Apollo Ohno:

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Like the images of Mullins and Pistorius, Ohno’s body is explicitly being presented here as an attractive object. By most standards, Ohno is as able-bodied as one can get. But as I pointed out to my students, he manages this on the back of technology – on specially designed skates, in special aerodynamic suits, with the help of carefully balanced exercise and nutrition plans; almost no athlete is really “natural” anymore. But at least in part because of the closeness of his body to an able-bodied ideal, this presents no explicit threat to our categories. Ohno fits the accepted model of “human”. Who would look at him and doubt it? And if Mullins and Pistorius are perhaps not as close to that ideal, they at least fall into line with it, by virtue of the fact that they don’t explicitly question its legitimacy as an ideal – unless they seek to transcend it.

My point, in short, is this: we are uncomfortable with disabled bodies that question or trouble our accepted, hierarchical categories of abled and disabled, of human and non-human, of organic and machine. We are far more comfortable with them when they perform in such a way that they reinforce the supremacy of those categories. They become acceptable to us.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

reminds me of rugged individualism mythology plus model minority myth (in a u.s. context). able-bodied ppl can thus ignore structural problems and the ppl who don't fit standards of exceptionality/greater acceptability.

critical analysis of helen keller also goes into this stuff, that she was more acceptable to eugenicists like alexander graham bell bc she lost her hearing/sight due to illness and not due to genetics.

Very interesting.

Once again, as this quote demonstrates, the category of Normal is so questionable. Why normal? What normal? So unconsciously accepted, this concept, this idea of a Normal existence. And, of course, people with disabilities are measured against a nonexistent standard of Normalcy.

Thanks for sharing.

This is really thought provking.