Complex Embodiment and Galehead

Week of 10/24-10/30

This week’s entry is dedicated to my friend who said to me in a conversation, “I’d rather be dead than disabled any day”. That just sent off an alarm in my head. The statement seemed off-handed, but he undoubtedly has a perspective on what it means to be able-bodied. So playing the devil’s advocate, I started to think, “What does he deem as disabled”? A certain ideology comes from his kind of thinking, one that centers on ability and its relation to human capacity. And what is the measure of his ideology of the human body and ability? To my friend, ability is the ideological baseline by which humanness is determined, and as such, thinking as someone having lesser an ability makes him or her seem lesser than human. Is there any way to bring disability out of the shadow of the ideology of ability, and to illuminate disabilities of its kinds, values, and realities? Here is where a complex theory of embodiment comes into play, in a way that defines ability as the fear of disability. It becomes a revolving point in which all our central actions of ability circle around, something that determines whether or not ability gives or denies human status.
According to Professor Linden in the Disabilities Studies Reader, reversing negative connotations of disability, like my friend exemplified, is not an easy task. But once it becomes identified as a positive identity, the extent of the ideology of ability collapses. But it is here we find that some people would say, in changing the ideology of disabled people as a positive identity it also changes disability into ability, instead of doing away with the meanings entirely. Inevitably, disability is regarded as a paradox in this sense.
If we question these sorts of theories of complex embodiment, it makes it possible to move forward in arguments currently about social construction, identity, and the body. Take the Galehead hut in the Appalachian Mountains for example. It became a big controversy when they were forced to make the hut accessible to people with disabilities. Even though the hut is at the end of a long trail through the mountains, people with disabilities still want to be able to access the hut at one of the stops. So if they can make it through a tough trail on a wheelchair, why do they need a ramp for building access? This example exposes the ideology of human ability, one that demands that people with disabilities always should be presented as able-bodied people as much as possible. This reveals how constructed our attitudes are about identity and the body.