I’d like to take a moment, as we all are currently, to mourn the loss of astrophysicist Steven Hawking. He passed away in the morning of March 14th, 2018, at the age of 76.
When you live in a community as underrepresented as disabled people are, I suppose you could say the upside is that you don’t have to write many obituaries for public figures. However, the ones that you do have to write hit you kind of hard. For many people around the world, Hawking was not only the greatest scientific theorist since Einstein, but also the most widely recognizable wheelchair user in modern history. His lifelong issues with ALS were difficult and they were visible, which made the reality of his disability prominent in ways that challenged social norms. He could not be infantilized, because he was a grown man with children and a complex romantic history. He could not be spoken for because he maintained a voice of his own, and he couldn’t be ignored because to do so was to silence the thoughts of a scientific genius.
Steven Hawking was the greatest proof that a disabled person’s equipment was a part of them; after a complication damaged his vocal chords, he famously bought up the rights to a computer voice he often used in order to make it uniquely his. Steven used it in public appearances and in some cases, he even did his own voice acting with it, until the computerized voice was more publicly recognized than his previously strained voice.
He was, in many aspects, a disabled superstar, and reached larger realms of visibility than anyone previously thought possible. Very few people can be as intellectual as a groundbreaking physicist, but in many other ways all disabled people were just like him. Rest in Peace, Dr. Hawking.
