I stumbled upon a great website yesterday. If I Can’t Dance Is It Still My Revolution. Before I proceed, it must be said, if I could dance I probably wouldn’t. I’ve never been comfortable or drunk enough, for that matter, to seriously “cut a rug.” But I love the analogy.
And within said site were these words, by Tanya Titchkosky, speaking of “Supercrips;”
“Those people who can exclude attending to disability by attending fully to their ability to participate in society, as normally as is possible, and they ultimately and inevitably signify having a ‘positive effect on others,’ ‘contributing fully to the community,’ and ‘maximizing their potential’… The stories of the abled-disabled demonstrate that even disabled people are able to fit in and take up an appearance which shows that their conduct is undoubtedly oriented to an unquestioned normalcy. Through this way of conceptualizing disability, disability becomes the space in which the value of normal shines forth without ever having to be directly spoken of, and disabled people are held to be asserting their individual ability (value) when they can be seen as oriented to serving this normal order.”
Wow, Supercrips, sound like truly amazing people…
Disclaimer: For the record, I don’t consider myself a “Supercrip,” although some will and have argued the above does apply to me. Go figure. But I, genuinely, think people fitting such a distinctive definition really “sound like truly amazing people…”