Abstract
This critical autoethnography draws upon the performance of daily life and existential phenomenology to problematize the artificial, ableist binary between fit and disabled through embodied narrative. Through telling personal stories we live through our disabled bodies allow us to map how our communicating bodies create and re-create shared cultural understandings through our ongoing daily communicative encounters. Ableism and athleticism seem constant and natural but are co-created and struggled over through human interaction and vulnerable to challenge and dismantlement as they emerge and re-emerge across cultural spaces and places.
This critical autoethnography draws upon the performance of daily life and existential phenomenology to problematize the artificial, ableist binary between fit and disabled through embodied narrative. Through telling personal stories we live through our disabled bodies. Personal stories allow us to map how our communicating bodies create and re-create shared cultural understandings through our ongoing daily communicative encounters. Ableism and athleticism seem constant and natural but are co-created and struggled over through human interaction and vulnerable to challenge and dismantlement as they emerge and re-emerge across cultural spaces.
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Notes
- 1.
A note on my word choice. I reject person-first language. I am not a woman with whiteness. I am a white woman. I am not a woman with straightness. I am a straight woman. I refuse to defy the common grammatical rules of how we use adjectives in the English language to talk about my body. I am disabled. It is just another identity marker for me.
- 2.
I use the term “crip” to denote that I claim and embrace disabled identity and that I am committed to infusing disabled consciousness and standpoint into dominant cultural understandings, values, rituals, and narratives. I use the term “Fit” strategically. I toyed with the terms Criplete (a play on athlete) or Crip Jock. Criplete implies that I formally compete in sports. I do not. Jock implies a performance of masculinity and/or anti-intellectualism which are not part of my experience. Fit, denoting a perception of cardiovascular and physical health and endurance, is the most accurate term to describe my identity. Parathlete and Super Crip literature do not speak to my lived experience because I am not a competitive athlete. I do not desire to join a space designed for disabled bodies to train and compete. Desiring the physical cardiovascular activity for embodied experience is different than the desire to compete in organized sports and requires a separate line of inquiry.
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Scott-Pollock, JA. (2023). Performing FitCrip in Daily Life: A Critical Autoethnographic Reflection on Embodied Vulnerability. In: Jeffress, M.S., Cypher, J.M., Ferris, J., Scott-Pollock, JA. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Disability and Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14447-9_8
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