This Article Is Not about Disability

This morning’s Denver Post runs the following headline: Lakewood cop helps boy get wheelchair.

When the owners of the [stolen] car, Joel Hidalgo, 31, and his wife, Esmeralda Torres, 29, arrived, Fairbanks greeted them and noticed they had left their young son in the car.

"The mother started crying that the wheelchair had been stolen from the car," Fairbanks recalled. "While she was crying, I looked over at the little boy and it just hit me that he was just the sweetest little kid."

Lt. Fairbanks went out of his way to find someone (Peter Kopp, Kids' Mobility Network) to donate a wheelchair to the family, helping the son to have greater access and mobility again. Fairbanks is a hero, but not exactly for the reasons the article implies.

While Mike McPhee, the author, uses pathos (or emotional appeal, for the non-rhetorically minded) to capture the reader (in the second sentence we learn that Jesus Hidalgo has cerebral palsy; he is described, on sight, as being “the sweetest little kid), the real ugliness of the situation is not that a young wheelchair-user had his wheelchair stolen, but that the cost of a wheelchair is a barrier to many who would otherwise use them to navigate our built environment.

Thus, this story is not exactly about disability, but about the market. Lt. Fairbanks knew the right thing to do was to restore Jesus’ independence and autonomy, so he found someone who would buck the market and give away a wheelchair. Although Jesus is only seven, his situation suggests some realities for the community of people with disabilities.

In 2000, the unemployment rate for adults with disabilities who wanted to work was 9.5 percent (the same rate across the U.S. in July 2009, the very same apoplexy-inducing number) compared to 3.4% for the entire U.S. population, and over 30% of those who did work did so at or below the poverty line¹. Now, combine those numbers with the fact that in order to receive any federal benefits, a person with a disability must be unemployed, and you begin to see how the employment gap further disables the disability community.  What do I mean? If a particular wheelchair costs $5,000, and you (an adult PWD (person with a disability)) work yet live at the poverty line, which for a single-person household is (buckle up) $10,400, and your job prevents you from collecting benefits under current federal regulations, you can see spending 50% of your annual income on the device that helps you go from the car or bus to the front door of your place of employment just does not seem tenable.

Ultimately, McPhee builds this story around the concept of charity (which strikes me as a wicked phonetic pun), too long the position dominant culture takes toward people with impairments, and suggests that the lesson to be learned is that we should be charitable to those less fortunate, when in fact we should be trying to insure access, access to spaces and to the tools that enable mobility. In fact, this story is about socio-economic status.

Truly, the Denver Post has told a good story for many reasons—too often we only hear about the bad cops; too often we do not hear about the life experiences of people with disabilities—but when we read these kinds of stories, so often laden with uni-focal pathos, we might read them as instances of overdetermination, situations or identities that are not reducible to one term (disability) but are articulations of many causes that together give rise to the situation presented before us.

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¹Work in America: M-Z. Carl E. Van Horn, Herbert A. Schaffner.

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Kettle. “Pot.” Black.

Amid the uproar over the nomination of Honorable Sonia Sotomayor—the “reverse racist” and “hack,” at least to Rush Limbaugh, a deejay who should know about qualifications for the bench (I believe they taught that lesson during one of the two semesters he attended Southeast Missouri State University before dropping out¹)—Republican critics have been unable to assail her on her record: it is impeccable. Instead, they have attacked her for one sentence in one speech and for one court decision.

The sentence: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life” (Berkeley Law lecture, 2001).

The case: Ricci v. DeStefano.

But these two criticisms are not the point of this post.² Senator Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III (R-Alabama and new ranking member of the Judiciary Committee) is.

In a recent interview with CBS’ Bob Schieffer, Sessions said:

"[Sotomayor] criticized the idea that a woman and a man would reach the same result," something he said is "philosophically incompatible with the American system."

"I am really flabbergasted by the depth and consistency of her philosophical critique of the ideal of impartial justice," he said.

Aside from misrepresenting (or simply not understanding) her positions (see the footnotes), Sen. Sessions knows first hand the trials and tribulations of being nominated to the federal bench. His was an unsuccessful appointment to the U.S. District Court in Alabama by President Reagan in 1986. As Sarah Wildman reported in The Atlantic:

Senate Democrats tracked down a career Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, who testified, albeit reluctantly, that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) "un-American" and "Communist-inspired." Hebert said Sessions had claimed these groups "forced civil rights down the throats of people." In his confirmation hearings, Sessions sealed his own fate by saying such groups could be construed as "un-American" when "they involve themselves in promoting un-American positions" in foreign policy. Hebert testified that the young lawyer tended to "pop off" on such topics regularly, noting that Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a "disgrace to his race" for litigating voting rights cases. Sessions acknowledged making many of the statements attributed to him but claimed that most of the time he had been joking, saying he was sometimes "loose with [his] tongue." He further admitted to calling the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a "piece of intrusive legislation," a phrase he stood behind even in his confirmation hearings.

It got worse. Another damaging witness--a black former assistant U.S. Attorney in Alabama named Thomas Figures--testified that, during a 1981 murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he "used to think they [the Klan] were OK" until he found out some of them were "pot smokers." Sessions claimed the comment was clearly said in jest. Figures didn't see it that way. Sessions, he said, had called him "boy" and, after overhearing him chastise a secretary, warned him to "be careful what you say to white folks."³

The entire article contains many more examples that demonstrate why Sessions is an authority on racism, although they simultaneously argue his inability to know it when he sees it.

For a party in crisis, Sessions seems like a curious choice for standard-bearer especially on this issue.

Especially when, for Justice Samuel Alito, making decisions based upon ethnicity is cool (source Glenn Greenwald).

At his Senate confirmation hearing, Sam Alito used his opening statement to emphasize how his experience as an Italian-American influences his judicial decision-making (video is here):

But when I look at those cases, I have to say to myself, and I do say to myself, "You know, this could be your grandfather, this could be your grandmother. They were not citizens at one time, and they were people who came to this country" . . . .

When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.

Two weeks ago, Alito cast the deciding vote in Ricci v. DeStefano, an intensely contested affirmative action case. He did so by ruling in favor of the Italian-American firefighters, finding that they were unlawfully discriminated against, even though the district court judge who heard all the evidence and the three-judge appellate panel ruled against them and dismissed their case. Notably, the majority Supreme Court opinion Alito joined (.pdf) began by highlighting not the relevant legal doctrine, but rather, the emotional factors that made the Italian-American-plaintiffs empathetic.

Did Alito's Italian-American ethnic background cause him to cast his vote in favor of the Italian-American plaintiffs? Has anyone raised that question? Given that he himself said that he "do[es] take that into account" -- and given that Sonia Sotomayor spent 6 straight hours today being accused by GOP Senators and Fox News commentators of allowing her Puerto Rican heritage to lead her to discriminate against white litigants -- why isn't that question being asked about Alito's vote in Ricci?

Two words, Glenn: Rocky. Balboa.

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¹He may feel he is an expert, though, because his family is loaded with Reagan-appointed judges (cousins, uncles, etc.), part of the 200+ judicial appointment juggernaut that conservatives tend to forget when a Democratic president appoints, say, anyone.

²With respect to her statement about a “wise Latina woman,” over 30 years of feminist scholarship has amply demonstrated the importance of standpoint with respect to issues of discrimination—marked as Other by dominant culture, any person whose identity has been constructed as beyond-the-pale by dominant culture has a unique ability to interrogate that culture’s dominant ideology in a way those whom the ideology validates simply do not. Why? Those who are valorized by dominant culture rarely if ever see that ideology work against them. The ideology—and this is the nature of hegemonic ideology, a la Antonio Gramsci—makes itself seem natural, common-sense based, and most of the people who the ideology favors do not consciously participate in the marginalization of and discrimination against others. Such unconscious participation is a product of institutional racism, sexism, ableism, and so on. For most of us—who institutionally marginalize one or more groups without meaning to—the worst part of the issue is the denial that such institutional discrimination exists and the reluctance to acknowledge one’s own complicity with that ideology (let alone changing one’s behavior).

In short, to really breakdown these institutionalized, hegemonic ideologies of oppression, we all have to do what Michel Foucault calls “negative work,” meaning we must question the validity of our own beliefs, disrupt the seemingly-causal narrative of history, and imagine how, in our given historical moment, a given belief, action, or utterance is made possible.

Ricci v DeStefano, however, is fascinating, and not just for the reasons the mainstream media has been touting. Consider this, from Media dis&dat:

People for the American Way, a liberal group, noted July 13 that Ricci got his firefighting job in New Haven "by claiming discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which protects Americans from discrimination over disabilities." Ricci has dyslexia, a learning disability that impairs the ability to read.

First, dyslexia and the people who have it are routinely disserviced by this oversimplification of it. Second, the perspective of this article (and rightly so, to a point) is to suggest that Ricci is being represented by this “liberal group” as an emblem of all people with disabilities, in that he is self-focused and narcissistic (meaning, he is so wrapped up in his own narrative and suffering that he does not or cannot see the issues of others without disabilities around him). Agreed.

However, and here’s what the article does not really account for, from all accounts and details of the case, he IS self-focused. Discriminated against because of deficits attributed to his dyslexia, Ricci was able to use the ADA of 1990 to get his job in the first place. However, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (under which Sotomayor ruled on the case before it went to the U.S. Supreme Court) upheld the New Haven' Fire Department’s decision to abandon the results of the written and oral examinations (as designed by I/O Solutions ("IOS")) for Captain and Lieutenant positions.

Most accounts explain the NHFD’s motivations thusly (and here comes a general paraphrase of most spokesholes): The NHFD was afraid, because none of the top scorers who would receive promotion for the results were minority candidates, that they would be sued. This sentiment prestructures the reader or listener (i.e. you, me, and Joe the Plumber) to the idea that candidates who are minorities will sue your business or government agency for discrimination and win no matter the validity of the claim, now doesn’t it? What if, though, the tests were designed (inadvertently or otherwise) on standards that seem “natural” due to institutional racism? If so, aren’t certain candidates being discriminated against? Admittedly, the NHFD seems to have acted out of hysteria, not interest in making sure their firefighters were being treated equally, and examples like this are what conservatives always cite when speaking ill of affirmative action (Ricci v DeStefano will be with us for awhile, folks).

But back to Ricci. As a person who at first was denied his job because of a perceived lack of ability due to a biological characteristic, he might be expected to be sensitive to other minority groups’ oppression at the hands of a dominant majority. He might be expected to believe that there could be merit to the claims that the test was an unfair measure because it did not account for deficits that could be attributed to culture, not biology. Moreover, Ricci exemplifies the problem with disability identity group formation—the tendency to see one’s problems as different and individual, not part of a large social bloc of the oppressed.

³ Like Stevens, I have often been disappointed by Caucasian Americans for their pot-smoking, but mainly when it interferes with my ability to navigate quickly out of a parking spot at Red Rocks Amphitheater or to purchase stamps at the local post office.

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Ballad of the Amputee: The Song Remains the Same

You might know this photograph. The object of this photograph is what Mike Simpson calls, “The Lobster Box,” meaning a shoebox that holds two prosthetic arms. The Arm on Top connects to the Terminal Device in Middle; the Cosmetic Hand below can also attach to the Arm on Top; and the Arm at Bottom is fully-assembled, the first prosthetic I had when I was an infant. If you do know this photograph, you probably know it from The Dismodern Bodcast (which is, coincidentally, up and running again after a late-spring hiatus).

The Lobster Box holds my earliest and most recent prosthetic limbs—the Arm on Top dates to sixth grade, approximately 1985, and I think I wore it about four times. I never wanted to use a prosthetic limb, and I felt that they got in the way.

Flash-forward: July 10, 2009, to Hanger Prosthetics and Orthotics, 38th Avenue, Denver, Colorado.

I am sitting in a strip-mall storefront, a prosthetics and orthotics office with an adjoining shop for orthopedic footwear. (It is incidental that the man being fitted for new shoes tells his wife and the fitter that if he has more trouble with “that toe” he will “cut it right off,” although through the power of retrospection, it creates an odd foreshadowing. let’s just say it isn’t incidental, and let’s agree that it is foreshadowing.)

Hanger is a nationwide company that creates many types of prosthetic devices, and it is the company that famously provided the base limb for Aron Ralston’s “bag of tricks.” In the past year, I’ve met Ralston, read his book, wrote about him¹, and in general had him rub off on me a little bit, specifically his stories about paddling and mountain biking. Using a special terminal device designed by TRS, people with upper-extremity amputations can hold onto a kayak paddle, something I now cannot do but sincerely wish I could.

So, at the age of 35, I made this appointment with Barry (not his real name), the prosthetic fitter.

An evaluation for a prosthetic is mind-bending for the person with the amputation. In daily life, people stare at you, and their looking is rude, no matter their intentions, upbringing, etc. In the evaluation room, though, Barry stares, judges, photographs, measures, feels, and determines, all while you sit there fighting your basic human feelings about being measured in such a way. You are objectified, fragmented, atomized—you become estranged from a body you know better than anyone else.

If you know me, you know my left arm (which has a just-below-elbow congenital amputation) also has a hand. Five fingers, a palm. The hand is small, has no bones, and I cannot use it to grip anything. What it does have: Nerves, which I suspect are more highly-concentrated there than almost anywhere else on my body. Although it does not look like a normative hand or have normative functions, it is my hand.

As you can imagine, a prosthetic arm is a value-added product of an industrial process. Meaning, to make the highest return on the sale, the prosthetic manufacturer standardizes many of the parts that go into the artificial limb. According to Barry, amputations that result from medical operations tend toward a uniformity—there are standard shapes and positions on the limb that the surgeon attempts to meet. Thus, while creating the abject, the abject is normed.

However, my left hand (which I called “my little hand” growing up) is not typical of either a medical or congenital amputation, nor is it similar to the bodily differences attributed to phocomelia or thalidomide. Contrary to Tyler Durden’s opinion, I am a unique snowflake.

Within the first five minutes of the evaluation, Barry had taken my left hand into his fingertips and asked, “Have you ever thought of removing this?”

For the third time in my life, I’d been asked that question (or, more accurately, that question had been asked of me). At birth (btw, the physical condition of my left arm was a surprise to everyone at that moment), the doctors advised my mother to have my left hand removed. When she asked why, they could not provide her a practical, medically-sound answer other than convention. She declined, forcefully.

When I was being fitted for Arm on Top, the prosthetic maker (at Hershey Medical Center) asked the question near me, but directed it mainly to my mother. Other than that question, the prosthetic maker was exceptionally kind an considerate.

Now, an adult, I was being asked this question seriously. Here is a snapshot of my internal responses:

• Anger: I had a hard time believing that a professional prosthetic maker did not have more tact (to ask a question based upon function or design, etc.) or awareness than to ask this.
• Fear: With that question, all the weight of ableist ideology settled on my shoulders—medical discourse wanted me to be a different extraordinary body, and I wondered how many people kind of shrugged when asked that question and later, post-op, wished they had not trusted the experts so fully.
• Sickness: My limb is just material to an industry. I am just matter. (Truthfully, I thought of Yossarian in Catch-22: “Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.” Yossarian realizes his body is just material and materiel for the war effort; what is my body, in this industry, material for?)
• Confusion: I am “healthy.” In our culture, “healthy” people are considered sick or ill if they have apotemnophilia, yet Barry, as a mouthpiece for the prosthetics industry, seems to suggest that the desire to electively amputate is normal or healthy for someone who is already stigmatized.

I had so many acerbic almost-said’s on my lips that I cannot believe I did not utter one of them, but instead said, “Why?”

When he explained the obvious (the sockets of prosthetic arms do not come with room for a hand like mine), I said “in the past, I’ve had prosthetic arms like the one I’m interested in now, and I still have this hand. The socket needs to be bored out with a drill.”

Then Barry told me I should meet with the “specialist” (I thought Barry was a specialist) who comes up from Arizona once a week. So now I’m on the books for an appointment with the same person who helped Ralston design his prostheses, and I am feeling marginally better about things.  Still, after 30 years of strident disability-rights efforts, those trained to work with people with disabilities still use dehumanizing language without a second thought—coincidentally, a student who will be beginning the prosthetics program at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti this fall was shadowing Barry, and I plan to keep in touch with him to see what, if any, training about interacting in mixed contacts the students receive. From my spot in Ann Arbor, maybe I can help out somehow.

Insurance and cost, however, is the subject of another post. And on this process, I’ll keep you posted.

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¹No matter how deranged my senses at a given point, I would never write the headline “Amputee Aron Ralston Lives to the Fullest after Self-Amputation.” It is offensive on several levels—first, it foregrounds his physicality, not his humanity; second, it is conventionally triumphal. The original was “Catching up with Aron Ralston,” which (while sounding like a Depeche Mode greatest hits) suggests that Ralston, the human, is on the move (you can see it in the full URL).  Apparently, sometime recently, the editors have decided to rename the article.  Awful.

The Dismodern Bodcast Goes Live

This morning, our new project (The Dismodern Bodcast) has gone live. 

The Dismodern Bodcast examines contemporary issues of the body, including normalcy and difference. The Dismodern Bodcast examines representations of bodily difference in order to understand how dominant culture uses rhetoric about the body for ideological and political purposes. This methodology disrupts what is often static, essentialist thinking about the human body in order to generate new ways of conceptualizing the body that are perhaps more inclusive and democratic.

Podcast the Dismodern Bodcast directly from iTunes or subscribe through an RSS feed.

The statements or opinions expressed in The Dismodern Bodcast should not be taken as a position of or endorsement by The University of Colorado at Boulder or its affiliates.

BBC Goes "Overboard," Hires TV Presenter with Visible Impairment

Cerrie Burrell, a new presenter featured on the BBC's children's network CBeebies, may  be enjoying her new position, but she also finds herself at the center of a controversy. Some British parents have been objected to her inclusion in programming, one even claiming in an e-mail that, "'I didn't want to let my children watch the filler bits on the bedtime hour last night because I know it would have played on my eldest daughter's mind and possibly caused sleep problems'" (MSNBC.com).

Citing the BBC, MSNBC.com claims,

most viewers have been supportive of Burnell, who took over a daily slot [...] at the beginning of February with Alex Winters. But a handful have written to the station complaining about her disability. Some say she may frighten the children. Others accuse the network of going overboard in the interests of diversity. Some say they don’t want to have to address such issues with very young children.

Admittedly, parenting is a tough responsibility, and viewers' attitudes toward Burnell's body will likely force a conversation in any home where her spot on CBeebies is viewed, and in 2009 it seems there are more "parental debriefings" required than ever before. Amid the bustle of our daily lives, who among us wishes for an additional, intense situation that we alone must negotiate and at such high stakes: establishing a child's view of a group of people, the personal tightrope walk of managing our internal perceptions and beliefs either against or with social codes and an inclusive ideal.

To all those parents, we sympathize, but get over yourself.

Would you allow your child to be terrified of a man who is black?¹ Would you allow your child to be terrified of a female who is bisexual? Personally, I am terrified of close-minded bigots, but I understand that a democratic society affords one the space to be a bigot; I would just never condone or support it. (I suppose, in this regard, I'm intolerant. Sue me.)

Yet each time we turn our heads, resist or ignore the opportunity to punch a hole in ableist normativity, we are collusive with a systemic model, an ideology, that actively marginalizes people because of their bodies and their bodies alone.

If we allow that, how can any of us sleep at night?

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¹What remains to be seen is who is actually terrified of the woman with an amputation, the child or the parent him- or herself? My money is on the latter, but not in a shriek-out-loud, lift-the-hem-of-one's-dress kind of way, but more in a my-body-won't-always-function-like-my-body-functions-now-and-oh-god-what-if-that-means-i'll-get-old-and-die?

Pistorius Can Run!

After months of setbacks, South-African sprinter Oscar Pistorius has won his appeal before the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland. The Court's decision overturns a ban imposed by the International Association of Athletics Federations, allowing Pistorius the opportunity to qualify for the 2008 Oympics in Beijing.

The IAAF had made a series of escalating arguments against Pistorius in order to prove that he should be ineligible, but the CAS decision immediately overturns all of them.  The IAAF first claimed that Pistorius might fall, injuring himself or others, and should be barred from competition for safety. The IAAF made this decision without evidence that demonstrated that Pistorius was any more likely to fall than an athlete without a disability. In short, their first claim was based upon incorrect, biased assumptions about people with disabilities.

Next, the IAAF claimed that Pistorius' running blades did not provide the same wind resistance as a normative shin. In a sport decided by hundredths of a second, this argument seems to have validity; however, the rules governing the sport do not (yet) include a provision for a minimum shin size, so to exclude Pistorius alone for lack of drag would be completely unfair.

Finally, the IAAF has argued that Pistorius receives a mechanical advantage from his running blades. Again, no tests demonstrate this to be true. In fact, tests do demonstrate that he is mechanically disadvantaged when leaving the starting blocks.

Now, the CAS has cleared the way for Pistorius (and other athletes with disabilities) to compete on the world's largest stage for sport.

According to an ESPN.com report:

"The panel was not persuaded that there was sufficient evidence of any metabolic advantage in favor of a double-amputee using the Cheetah Flex-Foot," CAS said. "Furthermore, the CAS panel has considered that the IAAF did not prove that the biomechanical effects of using this particular prosthetic device gives Oscar Pistorius an advantage over other athletes not using the device."

Pistorius' training has been disrupted by the appeals process, and his Paralympic-record 400-meter time is a second off the qualifying pace for the 2008 Olympics, but now he has the summer to focus, compete, and attempt to qualify. Moreover, he can be placed directly on the South African 1600-meter relay squad.

When commenting about the appeal, Pistorius said, "'It is a battle that has been going on for far too long. It's a great day for sport. I think this day is going to go down in history for the equality of disabled people'" (ESPN.com).

Somehow, FOXNews Doesn't Drop a "Bombshell"

On April 4, 2008, FOXNews.com ran a story on Agusta Urica, a 31-year old Angolan woman recently crowned Miss Landmine 2008.

Let FOXNews never be accused of sensationalism, yet the front-page story¹ seemed to promise gross spectacle. However, coverage of the event was respectful, if not enthusiastic.

Miss Landmine is the brainchild of Morten Traavik, a Norwegian theater director who traveled to Luanda, Angola, in 2004 and saw first hand the effects of twenty years of civil war. It is estimated that 8 million landmines are still buried throughout Angola, and over 80,000 people who live there have amputations resulting from landmines. The situation gave Traavik the idea to celebrate the beauty of Angolan women despite the stigmatized trait of amputation, a spirit capture in the pageant's Miss Landmine Manifesto.

THE MISS LANDMINE MANIFESTO²
(in no particular order)

• Female pride and empowerment.
• Disabled pride and empowerment.
• Global and local landmine awareness and information.
• Challenge inferiority and/or guilt complexes that hinder creativity- historical, cultural, social, personal, African, European.
• Question established concepts of physical perfection.
• Challenge old and ingrown concepts of cultural cooperation.
• Celebrate true beauty.
• Replace the passive term 'Victim' with the active term 'Survivor'

The Miss Landmine Pageant seems to run counter to dominant American ideology about pageants, a fact that Traavik himself has acknowledged:

"We tend to associate beauty pageants with sleaze and exploitation of women and so on, but this felt very different. This was much more of a celebration, much more of a carnival-esque in many ways," [Traavik] said of his first pageant experience in Angola. (FOXNews.com)

Traavik's use of the term "carnivalesque" is perhaps unintentionally reminiscent of Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin's usage of the term. To Bakhtin, the carnivalesque represents a collective within which dominant socioeconomic and politic classes cease to matter. Within the democratic space of the carnival, "[A]ll were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age" (Bakhtin 10). Moreover, carnival augurs an inversion of dominant social practices--all carnival goers engage in activity that is commonly associated with lower social classes, and in carnival the fool is king.³

In this regard, the celebration of a stigmatizing bodily characteristic is requisite for the competition. By incorporating this anomaly into the cultural ritual of the pageant, Traavik and Miss Landmine inflect cultural assumptions about beauty and normativity.

However, for all the democratic work of the pageant, there can be only one Miss Landmine. Or, in this case, two. A group of ten women competed for two titles, Miss Landmine 2008 and Miss Landmine Internet Winner. Miss Urica, the brick-and-mortar winner, was chosen by a panel of five Angolan government officials, while Miss Cuanza Sul, Maria Restino Manuel, was chosen as the Internet winner.

Both winners received custom prosthetic limbs among their prizes, an award that highlights the material reality of their lived conditions not as young women who treat pageants as their careers, but as survivors who are integrating their difference into their and our lived experience.

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¹At the time, the main headline was for a story set in Fenway Park in which a girl named Alexa Rodriguez was attacked by a red-tail hawk. Remember, the date was April 4th.

² http://www.miss-landmine.org/

³ This is, of course, problematic, but one could argue that only through the inversion of social roles might the hegemonic class be inclined, encouraged, or coerced into change.

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Bakhtin, M. M. [1941, 1965] Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Showstopper at the Democratic Debate in Austin? Disability.

Regardless of whether or not you have a license to participate in political "silly season," Senator Clinton's concluding remarks have been universally lauded as her most memorable, her most genuine of the debate.¹ The crowd--and the CNN pundits--gushed over Senator Clinton's self-effacement when compared to wounded U.S. veterans from the war in Iraq.

Both senators were asked to describe a moment when they were tested and overcame adversity. Obama framed his response in the narrative of his life--born to a teenage mother, abandoned by his father when Obama was two years old, poor choices as a teen. Senator Clinton reflected on the personal trials she has undergone that were public domain because her husband was in the White House when they occurred. However, she minimized her own personal problems by contrasting her situation with soldiers who had undergone amputations as a result of injuries sustained during combat. Senator Obama nodded in agreement as Senator Clinton painted the injuries to these men and women as far worse than her own trials.

However...

By using disability in this rhetorical way, Senator Clinton claims (and Senator Obama does with his agreement) that physical injury, specifically amputation, deserves the greatest respect and, implicit in her remarks, pity. Such a representation undermines PWD's work towards social equality and further ghetto-izes those soldiers (and others with these particular impairments). No doubt, a soldier without a disability faces many obstacles when he or she becomes a person with an impairment, but the benefit of Senator Clinton's commentary is questionable. In fact, representations such as these are regressive, reminiscent of how telethons frame disability and use emotional appeals to touch a presumably normative audience.

As a person with a congenital amputation, I know what I would choose if offered the option of (somehow) having my impairment eliminated or having my spouse commit adultery (let alone having that betrayal made international news). Here's to hoping my box of unused, left-hand gloves continues to accumulate new members.

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¹As she built up to the final, presumptively-controversial lines, the Vegas oddsmakers must have been going wild trying to settle a line on the likelihood that she would cry. No one watching had any doubt, yet Senator Clinton did disappoint.

Icarus 2000, One Apple's Story

As [Daedalus and Icarus] flew the ploughman stopped his work to gaze, and the shepherd leaned on his staff and watched them, astonished at the sight, and thinking they were gods who could thus cleave the air.
—Thomas Bulfinch, The Fall of Icarus

America is terrified of the black hole. Within a universe that was presumably reordered for the last time with the displacement of the Ptolemaic model in favor of the Copernican, a change that dislodged Earth from the center of the scheme and placed it as one among many secondary objects within the solar system, the black hole represents a limit, an emptiness filled with our cultural anxieties.

The black hole is disorder incarnate. It is, for now, unknown and unknowable--composed of a singlularity so dense that it distorts and attracts completely, that it renders the escape-velocity null--the black hole is a myth that is filled so many of our collective fears: the event horizon may be a kind of death, and the black hole a vehicle toward non-existence; the black hole is perceived as a destroyer of matter, an object that annihilates without creating; the black hole produces distortion, creates a space where normative concepts of light, movement, perception are unhinged. The black hole is a limit, a gateway to the incomprehensible.

So should it is no surprise that perhaps the world's only celebrity astrophysicist, Stephen J. Hawking, a pioneer in the study of black holes, can neither "speak or move," that he is diagnosed with a progressive neurological disorder, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly called Lou Gehrig's disease (CNN.com). Hawking's 1988 book A Brief History of Time was a long-standing bestseller; written for a general readership, A Brief History of Time offers an explanation of the universe "from the big bang to black holes," as the cover tells us.

The cover also tells us that the mind capable of conceptualizing the entirety of time and retelling it so that we, the uninitiated, might understand is housed within a prodigious body. Thus, Hawking becomes a sign from antiquity--the oracle, the magician whose incredible powers of intellect or perception are paid for by what is seen as a physical impoverishment. His impairment is the counterweight to his extraordinary intellect. When we see the cover or A Brief History of Time, we see a maxim affirmed. In the juxtaposition of non-normative qualities—extraordinary body, extraordinary intellect—we are reminded that no one can have it all, that excess is compensated with lack, that suffering is the coarse bed from which our most delicate flowers bloom. All of this is untrue, but we believe it.

Now, Stephen Hawking has taken flight. In a widely-publicized event, Stephen Hawking, cloaked in his The Sharper Image-emblazoned flight suit, has experienced zero-gravity aboard a flight chartered from Zero Gravity Corp.

This moment is Hawking's emancipation. As an astrophysicist, Hawking through this flight "walks the walk," experiencing some of the material events which he has written about in theory, and in so doing achieves a kind of supposed union of the body and the mind. In Hawking's flight, we see, in part, a holistic sign; Hawkins becomes the warrior-poet of astrophysics.

Yet would we be so rapt, so full of joy and astonishment, filled with wonder, if it were Einstein afloat in the hold of the airplane? In a word, no. We applaud Hawking because of his impairment. The Associated Press claims that Hawking is the first person with a disability to experience zero gravity (CNN.com). One wonders that no private citizen who has paid for Zero Gravity Corp's service has worn contact lenses, had high blood pressure, was asthmatic, and so on. However, the AP's claim rests on our cultural assumptions of disability—disability looks like Stephen Hawking; those with disabilities are burdened; and the extraordinary measures of modern science hold the key to emancipating those with disabilities.

As published on CNN.com, the AP article continues: "The scientist floated in the air, free of his wheelchair and electronic communication gear for the first time in 40 years." Are we then to believe that Hawking has been in one chair for forty consecutive years, that he is bathed in the chair, that he sleeps in the chair? Just as the flight of Icarus (or Superman, as Zero Gravity Corp's marketing collateral claims) promises freedom from our Earthly burdens, as the physical freedom from gravity is offered as a palliative to the metaphoric weight and gravity of situations and psyches, zero-g flight is framed as the method by which Hawkins is furloughed from the prison of his body.

As we watch handlers tug and pull Hawking's body, rolling him, righting him, we are reminded that in this weightlessness Hakwing is not free. We no longer think of Hawkins as the warrior-poet; instead, we think of telethons, we think of United Way commercials where NFL athletes, signs of mythic corporeality, attend to children with disabilities. In the grin of Hawking, within the frame of media discourse surrounding that grin, we are fed the image of the cripple. In the tube protruding from Hawkins' pants leg, we are reminded of Icarus, of the moral lessons we learn about those who dare fly to close to the sun, to escape the boundaries and the limits nature has established.

As we are meant to do, we look upon Hawking's body, its rigidities and supplenesses, and it becomes our event horizon--the demarcation of a line, a limit, beyond which many of us cannot comprehend, a line that we are afraid to approach, a point with gravity enough to attract us all and render us powerless to escape. Like a black hole, when we see Hawking float obscure; we are unsure about what we are, in fact, witnessing. Thus, Zero G's staff suspends a Newtonian apple beside Hawking, whose body becomes the apple's analogue—both are objects meant to illustrate.

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"Physicist Hawking experiences zero gravity." CNN.com. 27 Apr 2007. 28 Apr 2007. http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/04/26/hawking.flight.ap/index.html

Be All that You Can Be: Find a Super-limb in the AR-MY!

Originally posted Thursday, February 24, 2005.

According to the Tuesday, Feb. 22, LiveScience section of MSNBC.com, the “[U.S.] Military aims for better limb replacement.”

Perhaps prompted by the media attention phantom statistic in modern warfare, the disabled soldier, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is setting an aggressive agenda for its prosthetic limb research—the development of “advanced prosthetics that look, feel, and act like the limbs they replace” (Than).

While it is certainly noble for the military to develop methods to “restore some of the lost functionality” to the men and women injured in service, the ultimate goal (”to have a prosthetic device that looks and feels like a real arm, that can respond to the whims and thoughts of its user, and that blends seamlessly with the body”) certainly raises many questions, problematizing the body, especially the U.S. Army’s take on it (Than).

In April of 2004, I sat in a conference room at Emory University. The MLA was holding its first national conference on the topic of Disability Studies, and during the first plenary session, one of the leading scholars mentioned theories of the “cyborg.” It seemed a prognostication of all I hoped the conference would not be: charlatanry, the kind of thing relegated to a distant sideroom at the National Popular Culture Conference. It turns out, the only charlatan in the room was me–I thought I knew something about disability, about being disabled, but I found out I knew very little.

Science and technology has moved at such an alarming rate that “discoveries” are made and made available before we have time to fully evaluate their impact. Prosthetics and other devices are connecting the body with machinery in what is almost a Cartesan nightmare–what was once a metaphor for the body is becoming the body. Or the body is becoming it. Or, when one utilizes a prosthetic limb that “blends seamlessly with the body,” the dividing line is unmarked and meant to be unremarkable.

I suppose I have a bias—I am anti-prosthesis, and I have been my whole life. Born with a congenital amputation of my left arm at the elbow, I never took to prosthetics. They got in the way of the things I had learned to do without them. I have a shoebox of them (I was young; they are small) that I still move from home to home, but I treat them as curiosities, artifacts from some other time¹.

Who can say what I would think if I were to lose an arm after having learned to do things with two hands—Oliver Sacks suggests that a “phantom” limb would make use of a prosthetic easier to learn, would allow the prosthetic to be more “seamless” with my body. And for soldiers returning from combat, this might be a better solution than what is available today.

Regardless, this program begins to raise interesting questions. If a machine is connected to the body and controlled neurologically, in what real ways is it any different from a transplanted organ? How is the person still “human,” and does our sense of humanity change? And how can we eventually keep Skylab from building the Matrix? That last question was a joke, but it was half-hearted.

I suppose, though, worse things could happen: any initiative that inspires a DARPA researcher to say “‘our soldiers [should] be able to play the piano. […] Not chopsticks, but a classical piece, like Brahms,’” well, they could be training them on far deadlier instruments.

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¹Mike Simpson, the writer, calls this my "Lobster Box."

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Than, Ker. “Military aims for better limb replacement.” MSNBC.com. 22 Feb. 2005.

Target Hates Crips (No Word on Bloods)

Originally posted October 12, 2006.

So already discussion boards are filling up with posts about the NFB's lawsuit against Target Corp. for deploying an inaccessible website.

You can guess, most posts are not favorable. Here is a sample taken from Fark.com, written by a user known as "Lamune_Baba":

"You're handicapped. Great. Sorry, really. We'll do what we can, but that doesn't mean the world should suddently revolve around making your life easy. If you can't read their store page, don't farking shop there." Read the post here.

Spelling aside, Lamune_Baba's claims reflect what is likely the majority sentiment in the U.S. about this case, and this sentiment is precisely why the suit is a positive step.

It doesn't take Lionel Trilling to close read the implications of the opening sentences in Lamune_Baba's post--here, the "handicapped" are situated as a cultural other, and the rest of this quotation suggests that separate but unequal is not only constitutional, but common sensical.

Aside from the obvious problems inherent in such a suit--rendering virtual space a tangible space that is subject to U.S. law (prepare for the e-mail tax if this claim is upheld)--the benefits can be legion if presented correctly even if the suit ends in dismissal.

While Universal Design is slowly becoming a paradigm of course design at the university, the slaverous commercial sector is slow to understand the ableist ideology and will most assuredly be the slowest segment of the population to disrupt it. Too much time and effort has gone into propagating a normative, ableist ideology, and one lawsuit (or one law, like the ADA) is unlikely to budge the inherent prejudices, no matter how big a lever the NFB can wield.

However, if this lawsuit can foreground a rational position and clearly define it (and no one knows how long it will take to spread the idea of "disability" as a social construction), the suit might begin to augur a sea change in perception about people with disabilities.

Lamune_Baba's position would likely change if, while in service at his grandfather's business (and how often the inheritors of wealth become the most vocal of defenders for it), he were to suffer even a temporary loss of vision. L.B.'s problem of perspective is not singular; it is the acting falsehood of an ableist ideology--"I am healthy. Other people are not. And, I'm not likely to be one of them."

The helix of health, worth, and privilege is a knot in American consciousness that requires a New England sailor to disentangle. Perhaps this suit might be another salvo in what normative culture has clearly established as a war for basic human rights within the "greatest country on Earth."

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Read Lennard Davis, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, and Paul K. Longmore if you're interested in the history of subordination of the U.S.'s invisible minority culture.