SEX, SPORT & THE NONDISABLED MYTH
During the summer of 2024, Cripple Productions launched an event series across Europe called Sex, Sport & the Nondisabled Myth.
The event series was held during the backdrop of the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris and includes panel discussions and community gatherings focusing on the embodied experience of those with disabled bodies. We asked the question - what is the cultural location of disabled sports and what does it mean in the context of disability?
The Manifesto
High atop the clouds of Mt. Olympus sit the gods of ancient Greek mythology. Zeus first, depicted as the broad shouldered, infinitely chiseled ideal of sacrosanct masculinity. Beside him Hera; powerful, maternal, protean of every era.
Below, on the mortal plane, casting javelins and extricating man of his assumed limitations are the humans showcasing a moment of immortal aspiration. They too are just out of reach of gods themselves. This desperate, upwardly grasping embodiment of ideals is deemed the Olympic Games.
I. EVERYTHING IS NATURAL, NO ONE IS DISABLED
Disability is spoken of only in binary absolutes; individuals are disabled or nondisabled. Disability is articulated as a categorical errant deviation from what is normal, what is right and what is natural. If it is socially agreed that the nondisabled bodymind represents the biological equivalence of what a natural manifestation should look like, then we need look no further for the inherent wrongness of the presence of disability.
But how did we get here? What do the gods on Mt. Olympus have to do with the construct of disability?
It is here that the antipodal nature of the Olympic and Paralympic Games is elucidated. The two distinct events represent a schism in the cultural significance of sporting when done by differing bodies.
To understand how we find ourselves located in this social milieu, some core components of ableism must be reviewed;
1. The Construction of Natural
There are many myths that must be told in order to manage the realities of the human experience. One of these fundamental myths is that our natural human body can perpetually improve. Today, to speak about a natural lifestyle is to summon the image of a muscular, so-called healthy body, superimposed over the backdrop of an environment untouched by man. This version of embodied experience of naturalness is one that supposes the body, as the natural world, is infinitely regenerative and regenerating - becoming more, not less, capable over time. The vision of a healthy body needs no elaboration because the aspirational form is so clearly defined in Western consciousness.
But these are neither the realities of nature nor of life. Life and nature exist as ephemeral phases in the constant struggle against atrophy; a struggle that each of us is destined to lose. And herein it can be evidenced the need for a story that gives reason and purpose to the struggle away from death. By aligning the nebulous states of “healthy” and “nondisabled” with a version of nature that is eternal, we construct a story wherein an individual can live forever.
And for this story to hold true, a counterweight must be added. A different story must exist to explain the bodies of people that are showing signs of movement away from the idealized state of nondisabled.
2. Disabled People as the Scapegoats of Mortality
It has long been said that the cultural fear of disability is a misplaced fear of death. Disabled people are charged with the unique burden of reconciling a fabricated paradox of occupying a bodymind that is not, in fact, infinitely regenerative and nonetheless still desires to live. For this, pathologies are created and assigned arbitrarily. The reconciliation charged upon us is stuffed with determinations that there are legs that are “too short”, though not ears “too big”. Speech that is “too slow”, though no speech that is “too fast”. There must be something wrong with us as disabled people so that there can be something right for others to achieve. And to underline this Abled aspiration for immortality, it must be further asked if disabled people even deserve to live given how markedly distant we are from the construct of ideal nature. The question leads itself to an answer, manifest in our socially held desire for reproduction of “healthy” babies. As though to say; every generation is to be born each one an idealized Abled Adonis or not at all.
The marginality in defining what it is specifically that is being referred to when using the word disabled and what constitutes the definition becomes utterly senseless upon investigation. It instead becomes clearer that the employment of defining disability is little more than an offloading of a certain fear onto a single community. Ableds become less concerned with disabled people as individuals and more with where they themselves sit within the binary weight of the “nondisabled” light switch position.
This trivialization has adeptly led to the usurped understanding that embodiment is to be experienced in a single, perfect way or not at all. Abledness must remain amorphous as to sit necessarily out of reach of some. It is not solely covertly believed but additionally practiced that the elimination of Us, the disabled, will lead to the purification of Them. Of their natural species, of their rightful claim to the embodiment of the eternal, perfect man.
II. SELLING THE PERFECT MAN
Olympians are culturally imbued with a certain quality that makes them natural, or even - above natural. They exist as a perfect vision of what man is capable of. And what man is capable of, as the Olympic Games display, is becoming more capable over time. Each olympiad must be marked by new world records each in turn, placing the trophy in the hand of a new Olympian as a talisman that supplants each achievement preceding it.
And it just so happens that there exists an enormous opportunity to exploit the image of a perfect body.
While the Olympic Games retain their historic origin as a fight to the fittest, the event has evolved additionally into an ostensible tradeshow of bodies. Athletes are competing not only for the glory and recognition of being the best in the world but moreover to become the latest marketing tool for corporations built on their achievements.
The tool of paramount importance here is in the absorption of the message “Olympians are not like you, they are better. They are gods. But you could be like Olympians…” For this tool to continue to work, the perfect man must sit necessarily out of reach of the ordinary man. He and his image must remain a mechanism for infinite sales. Like the eternal flame of the torch carried outward toward the heavens, his body can represent and can be made to represent an image for consumers to avariciously grasp toward generation over generation. His body is made into the symbolic pinnacle of natural selection and natural selection is articulated into a social ideology manifest not as an ongoing process of adaptation to a changing environment but instead as a reinforcement of a continual refinement toward a defined and indisputable location in the future.
It is here that the schism dividing Olympians and Paralympians may be most clearly viewed. Paralympians cannot participate in the same cultural space as Olympians because the Olympic Games is the platform that determines the highest value body of reproducibility. Disabled people cannot enter the arena of sport on an equal playing field of meaning. We instead must contend first with our contradictive overarching social narrative as to what our existence represents for Ableds. Due to this, sporting with a disabled body cannot exist simply in the context of a game but must be made to answer to what our value is as humans. It is through this distortional narrative kaleidoscope that the Paralympics is made into a spectacle of athletes’ ability to overcome disability. Given that overcoming a disability would require multiple violations of the laws of physics, Paralympians have proven an ineffective sales tool to be slapped on a box of Wheaties.
III. SPORT AS SOCIAL EXCLUSION
There is a fundamental gap between the world of sport and the disabled community. On one very distant end of the spectrum there are disabled people who proudly embrace their ontological claim as members of the global disabled community. On the other end of the spectrum, there are disabled people practicing sport as a means of minimizing the perceived impact of their disability.
This is an oversimplification ad absurdum but one that exists nonetheless in the shared consciousness of the disabled community. Bodies like ours at play are never left to be free of narrativization nor safe from being married to an assigned meaning determined by people outside of our own community.
Sport is used as a mechanism from a very young age to usher disabled children into a pipeline of meaning centered around overcoming. While Abled children are introduced to sports as tools for self-esteem development and empowerment, disabled children are often brought in via the societal grease trap of ableism.
The meaning of sport within the lived experience of disabled people cannot be separated from the ecosystem that has grown around it. This ecosystem includes the economic barriers to even begin playing an adaptive sport (sport wheelchairs alone beginning at $5000 USD), charities that peddle access to this expensive adaptive equipment in exchange for branding athletes as endless wells of inspiration fighting against their own bodies, the physical inaccessibility of sporting stadiums and infrastructure, and the attitudes of spectators yearning to feel unashamed for being inspired by disabled people (and whom ensure that even spaces that are physically accessible to disabled athletes maintain a quality of socially enforced ableism).