October 3, 2014 - 18:41
Words dictate who you are. Therefore, “Handicapped” handicapped Eli Clare’s life. “Disabled… That word used as a noun (The disabled or people with disabilities), an adjective (disabled people), a verb (the accident disabled her): in all 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? … That word locates the condition of being nondisabled, not in the nondisabled body, but in the world’s reaction to that body.” (Clare, 82). Similar to the obstacles a disabled person faces as described in Eli Clare’s book Exile & Pride: disability, queerness and liberation, he faces the same as being branded handicapped. It wasn’t his cerebral palsy that made him handicapped, but the way society treated him. They handicapped him, pitied him, made him seem pathetic, useless, and less than what he is. Being called handicapped by his parents and society insinuated the excessive burden that made him inferior (his cerebral palsy), therefore reducing the equality he innately possessed.
Handicapped stems from the mid-17th century phrase hand in cap, a lottery game in which “one person claimed an article belonging to another and offered something in exchange, any difference in value being showed decided by the umpire. All three deposited forfeit money in a cap; the two opponents showed their agreement or disagreement with the valuation by bringing out their hands either full or empty. If both were the same, the umpire too the forfeit money; if not, it went to the person who accepted the valuation.”(English Oxford Dictionary) The term was later applied to a horse race in which one horse, the faster one, would be handicapped by adding extra weight onto the bottom of its shoes. Adding the excess weight reduced the advantage the faster horse had over the slower horse. “Likewise the favorite in a footrace would be handicapped by being made to start further back than the others, or perhaps from the same starting point but only after the others had a head start.”(Snopes.com)
The word “handicap” is now used more generally to describe any circumstance that makes progress or success difficult, and it seems to have acquired. No longer is the handicapped figure the superior one, capable of outperforming their opponents or peers; a handicapped person is often pitied because they are viewed as incapable.
Eli Clare testifies to this understanding: “I scoff at handicapped, a word I grew up believing my parents had invented specifically to describe me, my parents who were deeply ashamed of my cerebral palsy and desperately wanted to find a cure.”(Clare p. 83) Throughout Clare’s life, the word handicapped was used in a negative manner. He was not seen as being superior; handicapped in order to be equal his inferiors or inferior to those who were once considered beneath him. Being handicapped meant having an impediment. Clare doesn’t embrace the word “handicapped”; instead, he appropriates the term cripple, which at first seemed weird to me, since both terms were used in hateful ways. But Clare shows how different their associations are.
“Handicapped. A disabled person sits on the street, begging for her next meal… Seattle, 1989: a white man sits on the sidewalk, leaning against an iron fence, he smells of whiskey and urine, his body wrapped in torn cloth. His legs are toothpick-thin, knees bent inward. Beside him leans a set of crutches. A Styrofoam cup, half full of coins, sits on the sidewalk in front of him. Puget Sound stretches out behind him, water sparkling in the sun. Tourists bustle by. He strains his head up, trying to catch their eyes. Cap in hand. Handicapped.” (Clare, 81) Clare contrasts this scene with, “Cripple. The woman who walks with a limp, the kid who uses braces, the man with gnarled hands hear the word cripple every day in a hostile nondisabled world.” (Clare, 82) In comparing those two paragraphs, I see that the handicapped people seem more pathetic, and their situations seem more permanent and severe. In reclaiming the word ‘cripple’ as a positive term, Clare also draws on the writing of another disabled activist, Nancy Mairs, uses the word cripple to describe herself, and says that even as a cripple, she still “swaggers” (Clare, 82). Clare elaborates: “we in the disability rights movement create crip culture, tell crip jokes, identify a sensibility we call crip humor” (82). Another factor in his reclamation of cripple is the shortening of it. When shortening a word it represents familiarity, your level of comfort with the word, and acceptance; similar to giving a nickname to a friend. Something he didn’t do with handicapped.
In addition to the English Oxford Dictionary, I used Urban Dictionary to find a modern connotation of the word handicapped. What I found on Urban Dictionary helped coagulate the interpretation I received from the author. Some words related to handicap included: retard, disabled, dumb, idiot, gay, slow, special, mental, etc. Whereas the related words for cripple included: wheelchair, gimp, crip, and sex.
Eli Clare’s representation of handicapped in this book was harsh in the way it was used against him and the way he used it to describe people. But, when one is seen as less than, not because they actually are, but because of the stigma society put on a word you don’t even use to describe yourself, resentment begins to foster. Cripple’s connotation in society isn’t as extreme as the one for handicapped. With cripple, the ailment seems less severe and permanent. I, as someone who doesn’t suffer from any diseases, was described as cripple when I broke my ankle. Cripple is curable, handicapped is forever.