(Dis)empowering Paralympic histories: absent athletes and disabling discourses

Abstract

The reputation and publicity campaigns of the Paralympic Movement revolve largely around its role of empowering those with disabilities. This reputation is secured and reproduced by stories about what predated the Movement, how it began, how it progressed and whom this progress has served. In this paper I look critically at the more implicit discourses about Paralympic pasts that sustain the explicit contemporary discourse of Paralympic empowerment. I begin by analyzing the discursive effects of my own stories about becoming a Paralympian. I then turn my analysis to two histories of the Paralympic Movement: Steadward and Peterson’s Paralympics: Where heroes come and Bailey’s Athlete first: A history of the Paralympic Movement.I argue that these histories represent Paralympians as passive and that they marginalize Paralympians’ stories, undermine their resistances and reproduce the tragedy of disability.

Keywords:

• Paralympics
• sports
• history
• disability studies
• athletes with disabilities

Acknowledgements

I extend my thanks to Donna Goodwin for her guidance and advice and to Melisa Brittain for her instrumental feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. I use the term Paralympian to connote athletes who have competed in the Pralympic Games or its precursors. Although this group was initially restricted to those with spinal cord injuries, it later came to include athletes with cerebral palsy, amputations, restricted sight and various other medicalized physical conditions listed under the umbrella term les autres. Athletes with intellectual disabilities did compete for medals in one Paralympic Games (2000), but were disqualified from further competition shortly thereafter.

2. I use the term disabled in order to signal the active construction of disability, showing that subjects are being disabled by the discourses of the Paralympic Movement. I also use various other terms for disability throughout this paper. These include terminology used by recently quoted sources, as well as the more theoretically interpretable term person experiencing disability. In my lack of consistency, as in my use of this last term, I intend to highlight the contextual, constructed, disparate and fluctuating conglomeration of bodily and social interactions that becomes classified as disability.

3. The covers of both books feature the same track athlete: Canadian wheelchair racer, and multiple world record holder, Chantal Petitclerc. I am able to identify Chantal because I have met her. There is, unfortunately, no way for me to identify the other athletes on the covers, and many other unnamed athletes within these histories, because there have yet to be alternative histories that tell these athletes’ stories.

4. The 1888 creation of the Sport Club for the Deaf in Berlin is often cited as the first sporting organization for the disabled. I acknowledge that members of deaf communities may not identify as disabled. I use this example not to conflate these two sporting histories, but to show how marginalized athletes created and organized their own sporting events. Notable deaf athlete builders include Antoine Dresse and Eugène Reuben‐Alcais, two organizers of the first International Silent Games in 1924 (Bailey 2008; DePauw and Gavron 2005).

5. Many have accused athletes of purposely underperforming in order to be classified in a category that gives them a competitive advantage (or that allows them to compete at all) (Bailey 2008; Steadward and Peterson 1997). They may also underperform in order to keep races (or games) close. Events won by large margins, especially in competitions involving women and those deemed to have more severe disabilities, are considered non‐competitive and, by extension, neither elite nor entertaining. Dominating wins, therefore, are often rewarded with the cancellation of the event in question, with little chance of it ever reappearing (Howe 2008; Howe and Jones 2006; Rayes 2000).