I hate that Will dies at the end. Of course the disabled person dies. It’s so stereotypical. Why let the disabled guy live a full life when he obviously won’t enjoy any of it? That notion is the worst. People just assume that the loss of mobility means that life is not worth living anymore. Since a disabled person can’t live up to the standards of an able-bodied person, depression and suicide are the only ways out of a horrible, meaningless life. This is ridiculous. In Siebers’ text, he mentions that “The ideology of ability is at its simplest the preference for able-bodiedness. At its most radical, it defines the baseline by which humanness is determined, setting the measure of body and mind that gives or denies human status to individual persons”, making the assumption that those who are disabled are not actually human (279). People neglect to acknowledge the fact that we are all the same. We all come from the same stardust and consist of the same molecules. Treating a human as less than human is the same as treating all humans as less than human. We come in a variety of shapes, abilities, and colors. Siebers makes the point that the ideology of able-bodiedness hinders the way we view people with disabilities or impairments. “It affects nearly all of our judgments, definitions, and values about human beings...” because we are so caught up in what we think humans are supposed to be (279). The worst thing is not being disabled; the worst thing is dehumanizing those that have a disability.

Being fit and healthy means you are further away from death. Having a disability means you are closer to death. Just like death is inevitable, ending up with some form of disability is inevitable. With age comes disability. Hearing loss is just something that happens with age. Children can hear better than adults. They can hear higher frequencies, but those abilities disappear as they age. Loss of eyesight also happens with age. The body is not meant to live forever. We would all be suffering and living a lifeless life because our bodies would essentially fall apart. That’s just what happens. Siebers makes the point that “We are capable of believing at once that the body does not matter and that it should be perfected. We believe at once that history charts the radical finitude of human life but that the future promises radical infinitude. That we embrace these contradictions without interrogating them reveals that our thinking is steeped in ideology” (279). This is such genius to me because he is absolutely right. Every thought we have about what a body should look like it pure idea. Sure, science has made it apparent that we need to eat our fruits and veggies, that working out is good for the body and mind, but at what cost? What is the point of living life if we don’t live it the way we want to? I like my Dr. Pepper and fries from McDonald’s. I don’t do the yoga that I love as much as I probably should. But the knee that I’ve had three surgeries on hurts regardless of what I eat or how much I don’t work out. My disability is already apparent and it’s just going to get worse as I age. So since I will become disabled, and since I will die one day, I’m gonna live the way I want to live. Ability is temporary.

Andre was viewed by the public as a type of superhero. He was in the WWF for a number of years and was most famous for his role in the movie “The Princess Bride.” Although he was different from just about everyone else in the world, he made a career that flourished due to his hugeness. This brings up a question that I have been asking myself since I first came to know Andre: is being that big a form of disability, or is the connotation in which people see disability make it so? Andre didn’t necessarily lead a disabled life. In the spotlight, people saw him as a spectacle. He used his hugeness to his advantage. I still can’t help but wonder why being a spectacle makes his giantism okay, opposed to someone in a wheelchair or someone who is blind. In Andre’s circumstance, he was praised and even awarded for his genetic mutation. Why is the case any different for other types of disabilities or general differences? In her introduction of “Imagined Futures”, Alison Kafer says, “[...] recognizing illness and disability as part of what makes us human” is the point where people can look at all differences the same (4). While Andre didn’t have a disability that hindered his eyesight, his motor skills, or his ability to walk, he did have other problems. No doorway was tall enough for him. No bed was long enough for him. Did this not cause some of us to feel bad for him like we feel bad for someone in a wheelchair? If we can accept that in some way, we are all disabled, accepting the many differences we all have wouldn’t be such a demeaning thing. No doctors chased after Andre to try to “fix” his acromegaly. No one told him his height and weight would hinder him from a fulfilled life. His difference was viewed, by the whole of society, as a gift that should be celebrated. No one in a wheelchair gets that kind of praise. Kafer says, “The medical model of disability frames [...] the proper approach to disability is to ‘treat’ the condition and the person with the condition rather than ‘treating’ the social processes and policies that constrict disabled people’s lives” (5). If doctors can somehow resist their urge to fix Andre and just accept that he is what he is, why can’t they do the same for others? If society can accept Andre and love him for exactly who he is, why can’t we be that way for people with disabilities or impairments?

I found this picture of the Craft’s. It’s weird how intersectionality works. A black woman who appears white is on the lower end of the white social hierarchy because of her gender, and a black man is almost the lowest level of society as a whole simply for being black. Yet on the cover of their narrative, they are side by side, one looking white and one looking black, staring into the eyes of anyone who looks back at them. Her eyes look young and alive, his eyes look tired and dying. I feel like this is how intersectionality looks. Those who are privileged in society can exude a face that has no shame, that has no exhaustion behind them. Those who are deemed as “less than” hide behind sad eyes because that is what intersectionality taught them to do. Being white and disabled is a form of intersectionality, but it’s almost like the white disabled people are understood more than black disabled people. In the narrative, white disabled people get extra help without being looked as inferior. Although the man at the train station didn’t willingly sign for Ellen, she wasn’t looked at weird for having an impairment. A black person wouldn’t be looked at twice. A black person with a disability or impairment would probably receive hatred in one form or another from white people. The Craft’s did what they could with the best of their abilities to make it to safety. If it wasn’t for the binaries of intersectionality, they wouldn’t have made it. In their case, pretending to have ailments was a blessing, but it wouldn’t have been that way if not for the social constructs of intersectionality.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IocLkk3aYlk)