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This logo of a wheel chair user was designed to replace the logo typically seen on handicap parking signs and to depict wheel chair users more empoweringly. List below from https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/icon-for-access/ , which has both a blog post and accompanying podcast:

Head is forward to indicate the forward motion of the person through space. Here the person is the “driver” or decision maker about her mobility.

Arm angle is  pointing backward to suggest the dynamic mobility of a chair user, regardless of whether or not she uses her arms. Depicting the body in motion represents the symbolically active status of navigating the world.

By including white angled knockouts the symbol presents the wheel as being in motion. These knockouts also work for creating stencils used in spray paint application of the icon. Having just one version of the logo keeps things more consistent and allows viewers to more clearly understand the intended message.

The human depiction in this icon is consistent with other body representations found in the ISO 7001 – DOT Pictograms. Using a different portrayal of the human body would clash with these established and widely used icons and could lead to confusion.

The leg has been moved forward to allow for more space between it and the wheel which allows for better readability and cleaner application of the icon as a stencil.

— Accessible Icon Project

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Welcome to our blog! Here’s a user guide:

Beginning at the top of the feed, where you are right now, you will find an introduction to our reading “Trip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability.” You can also find a post with key terms and definitions, followed by a summary of each section of the reading. Along the way, you can also find links to media references, photos, and some of the most important quotes. At the bottom of our feed, you can find some related content in case you were particularly interested by the relationship between queerness and disability. You can also check out the ���likes” tab of our blog to see other related content we have saved just for you. 

Enjoy! 

-Julia, Megan, Emily, and Dean 

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Introducing the Author

Robert McRuer is said to be one of the founding scholars of queer disability studies. His work focuses on queer and crip studies and theory. He currently teaches at George Washington University. 

https://english.columbian.gwu.edu/robert-mcruer

Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Gqueer/Disabled Existence explores the connection between able-bodies and heterosexuality through their compulsory nature, as opposed to connecting queerness and disability through pathologization as many scholars before have done. “However, despite the fact that homosexuality and disability clearly share a pathologized past, and despite a growing awareness of the intersections between queer theory and disability studies, little notice has been taken of the connections between heterosexuality and able-bodied identity.”. In doing this, McRue has put forth a theory of what he calls “compulsory able-bodiedness” which he argues that the system of “compulsory able-bodiedness, which in a sense produces disability, is thoroughly interwoven with the system of compulsory heterosexuality that produces queerness: that, in fact, compulsory heterosexuality is contingent on compulsory able-bodiedness, and vice versa.”

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Important Terms!

compulsory able-bodiness: The idea that everyone wants to be normal instead of deviant and this leads to lack of actual choice. To attain normalcy, you are forced to able-bodied. This is complicated by the fact that an able body is “intrinsically impossible to embody.” 

flexibility: Able to be easily modified to respond to altered circumstances or conditions. The condition of postmodernity. The economy of the late twentieth century necessitates flexible specialization, flexible production, and flexible, rapid response to an ever-changing market. The postwar period was largely characterized by mass production and on the production side of the process, labor pools and practices are positioned as flexible, mobile, and most importantly replaceable. Past, present, and future are constantly reconsolidated to make it seem as if a subject or worker is exactly situated to each new role. 

Flexible subject:  The flexible subject is successful precisely because they can perform wholeness through each recurring crisis. They manage the crisis and ultimately adapt and perform as if the crisis never happened. To draw too much attention to the subjective crisis, and to the fragmentation and multiplicity it effects, would be to perform--or act out--inflexibility. Not always an able-bodied subject; heterosexual, able-bodied characters work with queer and disabled minorities(as seen in As Good As It Gets), flexibly contracting and expanding, while queer, disabled minorities flexibly comply. 

heteronormativity: a system of normative regulatory cultural expectations that privilege and reinforce hetoerseuxality as the right and natural way to exist 

ability trouble: [Able-bodiedness] offers normative… positions that are intrinsically impossible to embody, and the persistent failure to identify fully and without incoherence with these positions reveals [able-bodiedness] itself not only as a compulsory law, but as an inevitable comedy. Indeed, I would offer this insight into [able-bodied identity] as both a compulsory system and an intrinsic comedy, a constant parody of itself, as an alternative [disability] perspective.

disability: mental or physical deviance from a healthy, fit and able norm

neoliberalism: The dominant economic and cultural system in which, and also against which, embodied and sexual identities have been imagined and composed over the past quarter century 

Heteronormative epiphany: a moment of unparalleled subjectivity. A temporary consolidation of past, present, and future, and the clairity that describes that consolidation allows the protagonist to carry, to close of the narrative, a sense of subjective wholeness that he or she lacked previously. Heteronormative epiphanies necessitate a flexible able-body as other bodies must function flexibly and objectively as sited which the epiphanic moment can be staged. 

De-composition: a critical practice through which cultural workers resist corporate demands and position queerness and disability as desirable. 

Virtual disability: the idea that everybody is disabled, because able-bodied norms are inherently impossible to embody, and able-bodied status is always temporary. Disability is the one identity that all people will embody if they live long enough.

Critical disability: a resistance to the demands of compulsory able-bodiedness. It urges public spheres to configure a more accessible experience in which participation is not contingent upon an able-body.

Severe disability: a fierce and defiant calling out of the inadequacies of ableist situations, persons, texts, and ideologies in a thorough and careful manner.

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Able-bodied Heterosexuality

Heterosexuality is defined in opposition to homosexual and with heterosexual as the norm. Disability is defined in a similar way.  They are not equal to the norm and they are seen as an opposite identity. Institutionalization allows for subordination.

The OED Supplement from 1971

Heterosexuals: pertaining to or characterized by the normal relations of the sexes; as opp. to homosexual

able-bodied: having an able body, i.e. one free from physical disability, and capable of the physical exertions required of it; in bodily health; robust

As Warner writes in The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethic of Queer Life, everyone wants to be normal instead of deviant and this leads to lack of actual choice. To attain normalcy, you are forced to heterosexual. Desire for Normality is also implicated in relationship to disability.

The discipline of normality, as defined by Susan Wendell is “ to cohere in a system of compulsory able-bodiedness that similarly emanates from everywhere and not where.”

Michael Bérubé wrote a memoir about his son with down syndrome and feels burden to have to be his son’s official spokesperson. He remarks on peoples’ reactions to his child and the subtext of questions.

“In the end, aren’t you disappointed to have a retarded child?... Do we really have to give this person our full attention?”

The assumption being that able-bodied identities are thought to be preferable and the goal.

The system of compulsory able-bodiedness want an answer to the question, “Yes, but  in the end, wouldn’t you rather be more like me?”

Butler’s theory in Gender Trouble  can be rewritten supposing heterosexual for able-bodied, an “ability trouble.”

[Able-bodiedness] offers normative… positions that are intrinsically impossible to embody, and the persistent failure to identify fully and without incoherence with these positions reveals [able-bodiedness] itself not only as a compulsory law, but as an inevitable comedy. Indeed, I would offer this insight into [able-bodied identity] as both a compulsory system and an intrinsic comedy, a constant parody of itself, as an alternative [disability] perspective.

Able-bodiedness is not truly achievable and attempts at it are destined to fail. It is not a problem of disability, it is able-bodiedness’ impossibility.

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“In 1964, for example, Jenkins could be viewed ‘as the victim of some illness, physical or emotional, whose transgressive behavior did not symptomatize his (homosexual) identity but rather bespoke an exceptional falling away from his true (heterosexual) identity’

McRuer, 11

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These and other heterosexual coming-out stories helped reassure and consolidate a newly visible ‘heterosexual community’

McRuer, 12

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Reinventing the Heterosexual

I. A Sex Scandal

October 7, 1964: Chief of Staff Walter Jenkins is arrested for “indecent gestures” with another man. This sex scandal “codified contemporary anxieties about masculinity, homosexuality, American national identity, and national security during the Cold War” (McRuer 11). 

Response to the scandal took three forms:

- Jenkins is defined as a “homosexual” and this category is portrayed as legible on the body.

- Being homosexual is understood as a disability because of the mental differences and physical differences that Jenkins is said to have. This links ability to heterosexuality. 

- The contradictions of masculinity within heterosexuality are exposed. 

II. Reinventing the Heterosexual 

The increased visibility of queerness leads to a perceived vulnerability of heteronormativity. Thus, “The coming out of the homo provoked the coming out of the het” (McRuer 12). 

-In response, celebrities reassure the public that they are straight. This reconsolidates the visibility of the heterosexual community. 

III. Flexibility

McRuer is interested in the production of flexible bodies. “Flexible bodies” include: 

-”gay bodies that no longer mark absolute deviance”

-”heterosexual bodies that are newly on display” (heterosexual bodies that tolerate queerness to some degree)

Because there is a time of crisis surrounding heterosexuality in the late twentieth century, heterosexual bodies must be able-bodied in order to be flexible. 

IV. Key Takeaways:

-Because homosexuality was put into discourse, heterosexuality had to be similarly put into discourse in order to uphold heteronormativity. The heterosexual person had to “come out.” 

-Health and ability are linked to heterosexuality, making heterosexuals able-bodied. Because homosexuality is believed to have a dichotomous relationship with heterosexuality, it is deemed a disability; there is a physical difference from that of an able body. 

V. Relating to other class readings 

As Gayle S. Rubin said in “Thinking Sex,” sex is always political. The Jenkins scandal set off a moral panic in the heteronormative U.S.. Lauren Berlin and Michael Warner explain in “Sex in Public” that heterosexual culture maintains its dominance by preventing non-normative sexual cultures to develop in public. A sex scandal within the White House was already an attack on the American values that “stipulate a privatization of citizenship and sex” (Berlant and Warner). The fact that Jenkins was caught with another man demonstrating briefly the fragility of heteronormativity. Queer acts are forced to take place in public spaces, in this case a YMCA restroom. This bathroom made queerness accessible to Jenkins, and in return, the heteronormative public worked to squash the man’s reputation. 

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“There can be no place on the White House staff or in the upper echelons of government...for a person of markedly deviant behavior” 

Walter B. Jenkins was arrested for sexual relations with another man in a YMCA bathroom. 

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This image of Rose and Jack at the edge of the Titanic is arguably the most famous screen-shot from the movie. A canonical image of heteronormativity. 

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“Titanic suggests suggested that the problem of the century had not been---as W.E.B. DuBois predicted it would be in 1903--the color line, or even the class line....No, the problem of the twentieth century, symbolically resolved in its final years by this film, had been heterosexual separation and reunification (p.15).”

What best represents the separation and reunification of the heterosexual couple better than Celine Dion’ s My Heart Will Go on? Despite death, catastrophe, and years of separation, Jack will forever be the love of Rose’s life and whom she is forever faithful to. Against all odds, heterosexuality, and therefore heteronormativity, will prevail.

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Able-Bodied Sexual Subjects

The year 1988 can be seen as the year of the Spectacular Heterosexual. The ex-gay movement achieved national prominence during this year, president Clinton’s affair become a public scandal leading to his impeachment, and the two biggest movies of the year were Titanic and As Good As It Gets. All of these had a similar preoccupation with the reunification and solidity of heterosexuality requiring flexible bodies.

The ex-gay movement had obvious pro-heterosexual implication which posited the idea that heterosexuality was the norm that could be returned to, gayness could be cured and set aside. In and through Clinton’s confession and apology, proper, i.e. monogamous, heterosexuality was restored, not unlike the way in which “natural” heterosexuality was restored in and through the ex-gay campaigns. Both instances were saturated in rhetorics of healing, confirming that heteronormativity is the healthy/natural norm.

The Oscars for best actor and actress were rewarded to the two leads in As Good As it Gets, while Titanic was awarded the Oscar for best pictures. Jack Nicholson was rewarded for his portrayal of an obsessive-compulsive romance novelist, whose racist/sexist behavior isolates him from the world. Helen Hunt was awarded for her portrayal of a tired waitress who ends up “fixing” her romantic interest. Titanic suggested that the problem of the century had been heterosexual separation and reunification. In fact, both movies required  heterosexual epiphanies which are necessarily able-bodied epiphanies. 

The epiphanic moment marks for the character a temporary consolidation of past, present, and future, and provide clarity that and a sense of subjective wholeness that he or she previously lacked. The cultural representation of such moments require flexible bodies; the bodies experiencing the epiphany must be flexible enough to make it through a moment of crisis. Additionally, other bodies must function flexibly and objectively as sites on which the epiphanic moment can be staged (surprise those others are usually queer and disabled). Flexibility can be described as the condition of postmodernity.  

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Able-Bodied Heterosexuality: As Good As It Gets?

McRuer examines the portrayal of disability in the 1997 movie As Good As It Gets. 

Films are a representation of the time.We claim that to value diversity, yet media has been subordinating the LGBT communities and people with disabilities.

The movie As Good As it Gets is a romantic comedy about the love affair between Melvin and Carol. There are two supporting characters with disabilities, Carol’ son Spencer, who has Asthma, which has lead to hospitalization, and Simon, Melvin’s gay neighbor, who went from able-bodied at the beginning of the film, to physically disabled after a burglary, which results in him in a wheelchair and then a cane. Melvin is aligned with disability through his OCD.

Melvin is an unlikable character, his is a rude bigot. Yet, through his heterosexual romance and increasing able-bodiedness, he is transformed into a better man.

Melvin is disrespectful of Carol’s son Spence.

John Nguyet Erni’s concept of “a fantasy structure of morbidity” was written in response to AIDS, but can also apply to disability. “That AIDS is “invariably fatal” and people with AIDS are in some ways already dead or better off dead.” Disabled bodies are also thought to face “imminent deterioration.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z7YDo44-xE

Melvin responds to how Carol must care for her son Spencer, with asthma. He remarks, “Well, we’re all going to die soon--I will, you will, it sounds like your son will.” His response implying that due to Spencer’s asthma, he won’t live as long because he of his physical differences.

Melvin is linked to disability due to his OCD. He is brought into the medical and psychiatric institutions and Foucault’s “docile bodies”; “A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved.” This leads to the subjugation of bodies with physical and behavioral differences that would impede productivity.” Because Melvin’s behavioral differences position him outside the relations of docility-utility, he is of necessity caught up in the objectifying and taxonomic discourse that would ‘fix’ him as obsessive-compulsive.” He is label as OCD to allow him to be “transformed and improved” and exerting bio-power to control him.

McRuer lays out four reasons that Melvin is linked to disability and how his representation reinforced compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness.

1)From the beginning of the film, Melvin’s behavior is marked at non-normative. At first it not directly acknowledged. He is shown ritualistically locking and unlocking his door. He turns on and off the lights five times as well. He takes off the gloves he wore to protect him outside his apartment and washes his hands with two different bars of soap. Attention is brought to his behavior when he goes to dinner with Carol and brings his own silverware and she calls him out, “I’m finally going to ask--all right, what’s with the plastic picnicware?... Give yourself a little pep talk: ‘Must try other people’s clean silverware as part of the fun of dining out.” This comment showing she does not approve of the behavior and find it odd. Her pep talk comment shows she was to fix his behavior.

2)Melvin’s label of OCD is used as an explanation for his actions.He goes into his doctor’s office and yells, Help!” and when the doctor tells him to take responsibility for his actions Melvin responds, “Doctor Green, how can you diagnose someone as an obsessive-compulsive disorder and then act as if I had some choice about barging in?” The Doctor prescribes him medication,  “Melvin is thus ‘fixed” (contained, stilled, defined) by an institution that them offers to “fix” him in the Foucauldian sense (transform and improve).” This scene was short, but important because Melvin says the title, “What if this is as good as it gets?” Melvin body was quickly and easily placed into a discrete category of disabled. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTC3l89ll1Y

3)Melvin is also part of the filmatic tradition of “the cinema of isolation” as defined by Martin F. Norden. The film isolates disabled bodies from their peers and Melvin’s apartment represents this, The ritualistic locking represents the isolation as chosen, while the bigotry represents that isolation as deserved.”

4)Melvin’s disability is conflated with his bigotry. This link is naturalized and visually and narratively represented. This link is not true, OCD around cleanliness might make his peers uncomfortable, but it is not bigotry. Yet the film does not care about about the separation of disability from character flaws.

This conflation is scene between Melvin and Carol. Melvin talks about how much he hates taking pill, but after Carol said she would not sleep with him, he said that he started to take them. He explains to her, “You make me want to be a better man.” The claim being by taking the pills and overcoming his OCD, which is causing him to be a bad person, he thinks he will be a better man. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A75AgrH5eqc

These links to people with disabilities disappear as Melvin has a “heteronormative epiphany.” The romance leads to the non-normative behaviors disappearing and ends his isolation. By the end of the film, “Able-bodied status is achieved in direct proportion to his increasing awareness of, and need for, (heterosexual) romance.”

Simon embodied disability and nonheterosexual identity is used as to show a contrast to Melvin. “Simon, in fact, is so important that he provides what can might be seen as its thesis.” He tells his philosophy as a painter and says that he watches people on the street without their knowledge and “I mean, you look at someone long enough, you discover their humanity.”

The audience next sees Melvin’s legs avoiding cracks on the street, he is reduced to his legs, objectifying and bring focus to his deviant behavior. His behavior causes son on to fall off a bike. With this coming after Simon’s speech, this has three effects, “First Melvin’s humanity is not visible at this point; second, his disability, not his bigotry, is the sign of his humanity; but third, a transformation can and will come: the audience will see even Melvin’s humanity by the end of the film.” And this happens through his able-bodied/heterosexual romance.

Melvin drives Simon to Baltimore to ask his parents for more money to help his medical bills and Carol joins them.

There is a scene between Melvin and Simon where Melvin is upset that Carol with not have sex with him and talks about his distress. Simon says he is also having a hard time. Melvin’s troubles are transferred to Simon. Melvin thanks Simon for the conversation and they work together to understand their feelings towards their bodies. “However, Melvin progressively sheds his sense of physical difference, so that by the end of the scene difference wholly located in, and embodied by, Simon.” 

Thus, the audience discovers Melvin’s humanity through the disabled body of Simon, as he embodies the main representation not only of homosexuality but of disability.

Simon experiences a temporary heteronoramtive, able-bodied epiphany,  which teaches Melvin about the flexibility that he needs to successfully court Carol. 

Carol, tired of Melvin’s rude behavior at the Baltimore restaurant, storms into Simon’s hotel room, informing Simon that Melvin will not come looking for her if she id in his room. Carol draws a bath which suddenly inspires Simon to draw again. Simon so exhilirated, rips off the cast, performing an able-bodied epiphany. 

This epiphany angers Melvin. The next day Melvin demands to know if the two had sex, to which she replies “To hell with sex--it was better than sex. We held each other.”, informing Melvin of her needs. From this point forward, Simon and Melvin work together until the film’s conclusion.

Once back in New York, Melvin sets up a room for Simon in his apartment. 

However, this newfound friendship does not stop him from making his usual inflammatory remarks. Carol calls Melvin and apologizes for her anger, but isn’t sure if they should meet again. Melvin demands Simon helping him because, apparently, all gay people are emotionally intelligent; “you people are supposed to be sensitive and smart.”

Simon obeys, as his very last lines facilitate the affair between Carol and Melvin, instructing Melvin to go and see her in person. Thus, Simon’s disability and queerness are pushed offstage together. 

As Melvin leaves his apartment to meet up with Carol, he realizes that he has finally changed: he forgot to ritualistically lock the door.

The film concludes with the reconciliation of the male and female lead. In the final scene, Carol and Melvin enter a bakery when Melvin realizes he’s stepped on a crack in the pavement, something he wouldn’t have done previously. 

This conclusion thus visually links the heteronormative epiphany with Melvin’s own able-bodied epiphany. 

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Critically Queer, Severely Disabled

“What if this is as good as it gets?”

Just as Gayle Rubin argues that the failure to approximate the norm is not the same as its subversion, McRuer discusses the implications of virtual disability in relation to critical disability. He compares compulsory heterosexuality to compulsory able-bodiedness, and the different levels of intensity with which both are challenged (virtual, critical, and severe).

“According to the flexible logic of neoliberalism, all varieties of queerness—and, for that matter, all disabilities—are essentially temporary, appearing only when, and as long as, they are necessary,” (p 29). Virtual disability is the idea that everybody is disabled, because able-bodied norms are inherently impossible to embody, and able-bodied status is always temporary. Disability is the one identity that all people will embody if they live long enough.

Critical disability, on the other hand, is a resistance to the demands of compulsory able-bodiedness. It urges public spheres to configure a more accessible experience in which participation is not contingent upon an able-body.

McRuer pushes this concept further, calling for a severely disabled critique. Severe disability is a fierce and defiant calling out of the inadequacies of ableist situations, persons, texts, and ideologies in a thorough and careful manner.

The neoliberal systems of heteronormativity and able-bodied norms depend on a queer and disabled existence that cannot be contained. Able-bodied heterosexuality’s hegemony is always in danger of collapse when there is a severely disabled critique to push its limits and test its “flexibility.”