Almost Passing: A Performance Analysis of Personal Narratives of Physically Disabled Femininity

Abstract

This study explores the relationship between gender norms and able-bodied biases through a performance analysis of seven physically disabled women's open-ended personal narratives. Each participant has been medically diagnosed as physically disabled while appearing to fit the social categories of White, thin, young, and athletic. Findings map the ongoing cultural interpretations of their bodies as both atypical and familiar so that they almost (but do not quite) pass for “normal” in their daily lives. Consequently, the women enjoy social and professional acceptance as long as they reiterate normative cultural expectations for personal performances of femininity and do not require physical accommodations deemed disruptive and disproportionate to perceived ability. The study concludes that responses to almost-passing feminine bodies illustrate how their marginalization or acceptance is entangled in gendered cultural norms and related to their capacity to disrupt or reinforce existing power relations.

Keywords:

• everyday performance
• femininity
• passing
• personal narrative
• physical disability

Acknowledgments

I thank Dr. Joan Faber McAlister, the anonymous reviewers, and Dr. Bruce Henderson for their insightful feedback on this essay. I am also grateful to the National Communication Association's Performance Studies Division for awarding an earlier draft a Top Paper Award and encouraging me to pursue publication.

Notes

Across interviews, narrators wrestled with the social and visceral experience of embodiment. After transcribing all narratives in their entirety and reading them several times, the next step of analysis consisted of categorizing the shorter stories that made up each participant's larger narratives under overarching emergent topics. These topics were stories of professional identity, stories of embodied/visceral identity, and stories of social identity outside the workplace. These categories made up the analysis chapters in the larger project. The narratives featured are from the “social identity” category. Though some take place within professional contexts, all reference the intersections of gender and physical disability in daily performance. With the exception of a brief mention by Wendie (as noted), the participants did not bring up race. Despite efforts to recruit from diverse professional electronic mailing lists, all who responded for interviews self-identified as White.

Narrators’ experiences ranged from struggling with others interpreting them as asexual or having diminished sexuality to being hypermasculinized or hyperfeminized. This essay focuses on those coded as almost passing for “normal.”

In addition to the works cited throughout this essay, also see Wendell; Thomson Staring.

Please see Robert McRuer's work on how compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality both function as the “natural order of things.”

I explored this phenomenon through narratives of women who self-identified as bulimic. Refer to Works Cited.

Beatrice's warnings reiterate Angela Trethewey's essay outlining how the female body must be contained and controlled or it may lead to perceived disruption and, consequently, a loss of personal autonomy in the workplace.

“[Racial] passing became so common in the early twentieth century that some establishments in Washington, D.C. employed African American doormen to spot and bounce intruders whose racial origins were undetectable to whites” (Jablonski 172).

While my disability is evident only in my gait (my shoe choice does not elicit questions from others), I could empathize with Patty's struggle to wear feminine shoes.

Kurt Lindemann's work on wheelchair rugby players pretending to be more physically impaired than they actually are highlights how one may question a performance for personal gain. In the case of wheelchair rugby, being classified as more disabled comes with advantages on the field.

Wendie's father is partly of Israeli descent. She self-identified as both White and Jewish at different points within her narrative.