Reply to comment

 I guess like others I'm most curious to find connections between disability studies and g&s studies. Terrible2s mentioned the definite thematic links and anecdotal connections, but I'm looking for something further than that. 
I feel very new to this subject, and I seem to simultaneously have all these thoughts and questions reeling in my mind and nothing to say. I didn't get into the Davis reading, but I loved the Thomson reading and I cannot wait to get to the library and dig through the books Kristin listed in the bibliography. I still don't know how I feel about gender or sexuality as disabilities, though I'm intrigued by the discussion of it. 

We read Exile and Pride by Eli Clare in Theresa Tensuan's Arts of the Possible class last year, and I remember a passage I really loved in the book: "Disabled. The car stalled in the left lane of traffic is disabled. Or alternatively, the broad stairs curving into a public building disable the man in the wheelchair. That word used as a noun (the disabled or the people with disabilities), and adjective (disabled people), a verb (the accident disabled her): in all its forms it means "unable," but where does our inability lie? Are our bodies like stalled cars? Or does disability live in the social and physical environment, in the stairs that have no accompanying ramp?" (Page 67).  He goes on later to say that he understands his relationship to words like these: handicapped, disabled, cripple, gimp, retard, differently abled.

HE is very much a capable person, even though others didn't (don't) view him that way, and it's only because of other peoples' perceptions that he had to form a relationship with words like "gimp" and "retard." I'm angry about this; I'm angry that there is an "ideal" body dictating how people treat one another when approximately 1% of our population fits the "ideal." And while I believe that there is something different about "normal"--the ideal is an archetype, a construct we've made while normal is the standard, the ordinary...akin to "average"--it isn't much better. The normal is as good as a number, it's a statistic, and what does that mean? But when we have outliers that fall beyond the normal broken down into "good" and "bad" or "inspirational" and "shameful," we face a problem similar to the problem of the "ideal."