Disability

In this image we can see three people, presumably men, competing in a race. They are all wearing shirts and tie, so they are not professional runners, but office workers. I’m not sure if they are compering for an interview, or a promotion, and I’m not sure if that matters. The point of the metaphor is to dat that the man in the wheelchair cannot jump over the hurdles like his colleagues can. The hurdle represents discrimination. What we don’t see in the picture is what happened before the three men reached the hurdle. First, I think it should be highlighted that the man in the wheelchair was participating in the race in the first place!

As a part of the work I've been doing with the club I'm president of here on campus, EnAble, I've been trying to compile a list of fictional characters with disabilities. On the whole, I've been trying to focus on positive characters, but in some cases that has proven difficult. It's incredibly disturbing as to how many characters with disabilities are portrayed as somehow villainous. One of the few works I've found where most disabled characters are either portrayed more positively or in a very nuanced manner is the manga/anime series Fullmetal Alchemist.

I chose the photo that I found this summer while reading a Huffington Post article. The article was about an Italian photographer, Olivier Fermariello,  who was quoted saying " I see disability as a mirror for society, Most of us belong to the 99% of people who do not fit in the standards of manipulated beauty". The people with disablities were pictured within their sexual fantasy. Fermariello's quote really resonated with me. The majority of people feel that they are not beautiful enough compared to the standards made by society and so this shared between able and disabled bodies alike.

The image I chose to use was a frame from an Archie Comic focusing on the character of Moose (or “Big Moose,” as he is often called). From the inception of Archie Comics, in the early 1940s, Moose was portrayed as large, dumb, and essentially good for nothing except for beating up anyone who came within a few feet of his girlfriend, Midge. I remember beginning to read Archie Comics when I was around 10, and not thinking much of the character. It wasn’t until several years after that when I read somewhere that the authors of the comics had chosen to attribute his intellectual difficulties to dyslexia.

The Supercrip story is one that sticks with me, one that I think about every day. Supercrip – the disabled people who “overcome” their disability and become inspirations for people.

The dominant paradigm is, I think, that these Supercrips are people who have a single “severe” disability. As Clare gives as examples – “A boy without hands bats .486 on his Little League team. A blind man hikes the Appalachian Trail form end to end. An adolescent girl with Down's syndrome learns to drive and has a boyfriend. A guy with one leg runs across Canada.” [2] In these examples, every individual is described with their disability as the focus, and they have a singular disability or their disability is condensed to a single word/idea.

In the area where I am from, there are no mountains. Unlike Eli Clare, I am from a place often called "the flyover zone", the Midwest, an area that's an odd mix of East Coast-style urban mixed with urban sprawl and some incredible, ingrained, capitalist prejudice, slowly mixing and melding into a "bible belt" of slowly failing rural areas, ex-urban housing developments, and liberal urban transplants trying to make their environmentalist beliefs into a reality. Like Clare's northwest, there are many people who believe they are on some sort of frontier, a cutting edge of independence--yet in most cases they are continuing an era that is dying out.

Clare’s idea of the body as home keeps coming back to me as I think about intersections of the author’s identities. In “The Mountain,” Clare discusses the conflict between claiming one’s own body and simultaneously having that body claimed by someone else, and having it violated, and oppressed. It wasn’t until he found friends and support from the queer community that he was able to take pride in that aspect of his identity. Not until he became aware of a vast community of people who self identify as “crips” and “gimps” did he come to claim his own disabled body as home. This made me think about our discussion of horizontal and vertical identities.