Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

by Rebekah Taussig

“Disability,” I read, “is not an object—a woman with a cane—but a social process that intimately involves everyone who has a body and lives in the world of the senses.” I was stunned. What was he saying? It was as if I’d spent years acting my part in an elaborate stage performance, squinting under a relentless spotlight I hadn’t even known was there, baking under the heat of one steady lamp, unable to see past the edge of my paralyzed legs. Wasn’t this just life? Suddenly, the spotlight moved to my left and I could see the set behind me, the chairs in front of me. What was this feeling? This relief? Disability isn’t just me? Located in my scrawny legs that drag instead of lift? Carried in the scars running down the length of my spine and the edges of my hip bones? Disability is something that expands beyond me? That involves everyone? This was my first experience hearing someone describe the forces that had remained entirely invisible and wildly powerful throughout my life. I’d always sensed people in an audience, other actors on the stage, and an elaborate set, but no one else confirmed they existed, so I’d tried to ignore them. I lapped up his words as he continued, “the object of disability studies is not the person using the wheelchair or the Deaf person but the set of social, historical, economic, and cultural processes that regulate and control the way we think about and think through the body.” The words sent tingles down my face, shoulders, arms, and through my por...