Interrogating disability: the (de)composition of a recovering Paralympian

Abstract

In this autoethnography, I weave personal narrative with Foucauldian and critical disability theory in order to interrogate the role of parasport in the formation, disciplining and internalising of my own (in)coherent disabled, Paralympian identity. The paper begins with an interrogation scene: a composite of the many times that I have had my body and my disability questioned. I then move through ideas of truth, storytelling, disability, power and subjectivity, borrowing strongly from the theories of Michel Foucault and to a lesser extent, the works of literary authors, disability scholars and scholars of disability sport. The body of this paper continues weaving these earlier influences throughout autobiographical stories of diagnosis, classification, basketball games, media interviews, conversations, internal struggles and attempts at resistance: stories of how I have been composed, and have composed myself, as a disabled Paralympian. In particular, these two sections draw heavily from Foucault’s conceptualisation of the confessional, the examination and the Panopticon. The paper then moves towards ideas of de-composition. That is, it explores the critical and political possibilities of deconstructing and reimagining dominant narratives of disability, and of disability sport. Finally, I end with a return to the same interrogation scene with which I began this paper. In so doing, I attempt to de-naturalise and to de-compose the dominant stories and practices of disability; I attempt to open up new possibilities of imagining, narrating and doing disability otherwise.

Keywords:

• Paralympics
• Foucault
• autoethnography
• critical disability studies
• disability sport

Acknowledgements

Stories are never created alone. An enormous thanks goes out to Zoe Avner, Lindsay Eales, Pirkko Markula and Melisa Brittain for their advice, critiques and encouragement. Thanks also goes out to the Vanier Canada Scholarship and the Trudeau Foundation for their generous support.

Notes

1. Thomson (1997) coined the term normate as a way to de-naturalize the bodies and subjectivities of those who are not (yet) read or identified as disabled, freakish and/or abnormal within dominant Western cultures.

2. According to the International Wheelchair Basketball Federation (IWBF 2010, p. 5), classification involves, ‘the grouping of players into categories (classes), based on the players’ physical capability to execute fundamental basketball movements … Players are assigned a classification from 1.0 (being the player with least physical function) through to 4.5’. The classifications of the five players on the court must add up to no more than 14. Those certified to declare an athlete’s classification are termed as classifiers.

3. I use a wide variety of disability language in this article because different terminology represents different ways of thinking about disability. In particular, the term disabled is intended to connote a person who is being disabled by society. The phrase person with a disability, by contrast, is intended to reflect a belief that disability is in a person’s body.

4. Parasport, like so many alternative terms (wheelchair sport, adapted sport, disability sport, etc.), has its own exclusions, detractors and inconsistencies. I use parasport, herein, to refer to highly structured, competitive iterations of sports that are featured in the Paralympic Games.

5. Some of the narratives from this section appear, in altered forms, within my master’s thesis (Peers 2009b).

6. The term panopticism is derived from a nineteenth century prison design called the Panopticon, in which the prison guards were in a central tower, from which they could always see any of the prisoners, but the prisoners could not be sure if the guards were watching them or not (Foucault 1995).

7. Crip is a reclaimed pejorative term that, in some circles, refers to someone who engages critically with the stories, cultures, embodiments and identities of disability (Clare 1999, McRuer 2006).