Post 3
One of the most common strategies in representing varied embodiments is the redemption of the child’s perceived bodily defect through a narrative that stages the “overcoming” of the limitations of their embodiment as a “miracle.” While not always construed as miracles in the religious sense, these bodies achieve beyond the limits of what is thought possible given their embodied limitations through their innocence and industry. The image of “Heaven’s special child,” so coined by Paul Longmore in “Heaven’s Special Child”: The Making of Poster Children,” presupposes a certain unconscious, yet pervasive idea about the nature of the body and the meaning of “ability”: disabled children are the ultimate tragedy and unspoken fear of every vulnerable embodiment. They are the most tragic images for us to see because their condition cannot be explained away as some flaw of character. Thus, the mainstream culture cannot look the other way. Further, the image speaks to the universal fear, and eventual inevitability of one’s mortality and fragility. Quoting a film called The Crippler, Longmore highlights the anxiety which plays to the image’s success in drumming up charitable donations, telling us disability is cast as “a figure leaning on a crutch-sinister in its invisibility- [it] stalks the land like death itself… [its] ‘especially fond of children” (36). When “TinyTims” exert themselves to the extent that they pathetically perform “ability,” or plead for help in finding a cure so they can be “normal,” abled-bodied people are challenged to both seek personal excellence and lend their sympathy to an otherwise unbearable tragedy. As embodied “miracles,” the burden of navigating one’s way through the social and physical environment with a “disabling” embodied characteristic is shifted from the oppressive, “normative” identity to the disabled body through this narrative. In addition to “Heaven’s special child,” Longmore broadly terms this representational strategy as “poster children,” and “TinyTim.” The conflicting narrative aspects central to the poster child’s body mirrors the refusal of the “normative” body to acknowledge its own mortality and the temporality of one’s lived experience. All at once, the poster child’s body must be pitiable, lest the consumer be forced to despair when she recognizes the fragility of her own embodiment in that of the “Other”. The body must also be inspiring -worthy of praise or grief- but the performance of modal binaries implicitly acknowledges the “crippled” plight as an act of self-determination or total dependency; thus, representations are frequently depreciative and paternalistic. Bodies must also be negotiable, for any attempt identify with the “defective” body subverts the authority of “normative” embodiment’s preeminence. By pushing the limitations of the human body, the “cripple” is a site of self-evaluation, a critical exercise in questioning the limits of the consumer’s own abled-embodiment. On the other hand, it can be a site of grief, a site on which one can project unconscious anxieties about their lived experience. Both spur the obligation of the affected consumer to acknowledge their own failure to master the world around them, much less their own bodies, and to pay penitence to the “champion” of the afflicted in order to relieve their own anxiety. Longmore demonstrates how penitence is paid not only through charity, but also through the obliquity conferred on the disabled child’s body as a universal litmus test for one’s good character. Laws, entire agencies at every level of government, and national discussions on a range of issues often spring from the discursive site of the poster child.
Here I examine a news report about a young girl who, though once able-bodied, has become disabled. Her life-long dreams to model seemingly crushed by forces beyond her control, her future spent in a wheel chair seemed bleak. However, she heroically demonstrates brave determination to succeed despite her tragic circumstances and walks down the run way, with the assistance of a walker, performing the overcoming of her intrinsic limitations. It’s hard not to feel some emotional reaction. While we should never take a position that discredits the ways in which variably embodied people at the margins of acceptability come to internalize and express their situated experience, it is worth noting how well the coverage of the child and her embodiment fits the criteria for “poster children” used to solicit charity and stabilize “normative” ideas about embodiment, as Longmore theorized in the paper quoted above. She is pitiable: young, and through no fault of her own, she is robbed of her capacity to navigate and fulfill her lived experience before she ever has the chance to explore the world. It inspires the able-bodied person to push their own bodily limitations, their mental constructs of “ability” and “disability” having been shown to be a matter of one’s “choice” to perform one way or another. That the young lady is able to overcome the barriers between disabled and abled redeems her existence in the eyes of the consumer, who is now relieved of the guilt of innocence lost and the dread of universal fragility. Her choice to perform ability reaffirms our desire to believe that “able-bodied” is beautiful, desirable, and at all costs the preferred mode of being. While we may acknowledge these cultural interactions to be taking place in the production and consumption of the media item itself, we do not have to disregard the humanistic beauty to be gleaned from the embodied totality that is this young lady who does negotiate her own terms of personal identity and forges her own path in navigating her body through her immediate and social environment.