Paralympic Bodies, Paralympic Struggles
About the relationship between the Paralympics and its own storytelling
This is Sara Giudice and you’re reading Crip 101. Every other month, Crip 101 comes to you with questions, not answers, on the everlasting topics of media diversity, narrative change and cancel culture. Spoilers ahead, blablabla — thank you for being here.
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Para-Struggling to Deal with Disability
“Sport for athletes with an impairment has existed for more than 100 years, and the first sport clubs for the deaf were already in existence in 1888 in Berlin”. Thus states the ‘Paralympics History’ page in the 2024 Paralympics webiste.
If we were to make a brief analysis of this opening, we would immediately notice how the word “impairment” (something that a person lacks) clashes with most of the debate around disability and could remind the reader about the “medical model vs. social model of disability” quarrel that revolves around the concept of impairment itself.
To better understand the disability model division between the medical and the social, we relate to one of the most useful texts about disability studies: ‘Disability Media Studies’ edited by Elizabeth Ellcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick (2017).
As stated in the book, the medical model of disability focuses on non-conforming bodies as unresolvable healthcare issues.
People with body differences “have something wrong with them” and are regarded as medical problems to be solved. This is still the dominant, ‘common sense’ way of thinking about disability. But pathologising inevitably leads to social and political marginalisation; for persons with disabilities, it can lead to existential threats, such ad involuntary sterilization, selective abortion, or euthanasia, while leaving unaltered the structures and ideologies that privilege able-bodiedness and devalue alternative embodiements (Ellcessor, Kirkpatrick, 2017).
On the other hand, the social model of disability distances itself from the medical in the way in which it approchaes the non-conforming body itself.
The social model draws a distinction between ‘impairment’ and ‘disability’ […] it posits that while bodies may have impairments, those impairments become disabilities only in the context of specific physical and social environments. In that sense, disability is not (as in the medical model) a ‘fact’ about a person, but a status imposed by society […] (Ellcessor, Kirkpatrick, 2017).
Net of the post-structuralist critical approach to both models (also highlighted in Ellcessor and Kirkpatrick’s book), we can summarise the whole issue by saying that the impairment is inherently personal from a medical lense, whereas it is collectively produced from a social one.
This all could be perceived as a matter of words, but it is truly a matter of point of view and world-reading.
Para-Words for the Paralympics
But again, how can such an empowering sports event be “problematic” towards disabled people, regarding words? By having a paradoxical relationship with the diagnostic, as highlighted by John Loeppky on Disability Debrief. In fact, because they revolve around sport and its spectacle, the Paralympics cannot but be an occasion of conflict.
And what better field of combact than media representation.
In Easterseals’ 2024 campaing against ableist language, the slogan is “Say disability with pride!”, focusing on how we should use words to describe non conforming bodies. And this focus on words, which could sound boring to disinterested people, is fundamental to act against the sterotyped storytelling that still characterised the Paralympics. It acts upon the discomfort that could come with addressing a non comforting body or a person that we perceive as different from us. In addition, it also operates upon the assumption that the Para Games are often the first time people approach disability, if they don’t experience it first hand. It could be through the TV live broadcast, the already controversial TikTok account or it could happen through the inspiration-porn-y storytelling chosen by mainstream journalism, which uses words like “hero” to describe a person that simply does their job. That is why you act on words: to act on the storytelling that ultimately acts on decision making, even if it seems impossible to achieve.
And yet, 2024 saw a hard change in the paralympic storytelling, in the way in which disabled athletes themselves have taken the toll of showing the games to the audience through their social media accounts. This close up kind of action inevitably functions as narrative change strategy, as it gives the narration tools to the same person that was before forced to be passive on the storytelling field. It authorifies the disabled person, even if para-sports still see inheret ableism in their day-to-day life… because they are sports, and thus their goal is to present the public with a Ubermensch of sorts, one way or another.
📰🌈 Diversity News!
Italy has its official anti-ableist manifesto targeted at journalists and writers. The goal is to promote a better use of disability language.
Verso Books has tons of free ebooks on mass protests, student rebellion and Palestine that you can just download from their online store.
Will Ferrel didn’t know anything about transgender people, until his best friend came out as trans. The documentary about their friendship just premiered at Sundance Film Festival.
Jenna Ortega has a somewhat normal opinion on how we should approach remakes, IPs and feminist retelling in North-American cinema.
US-based organisation Justice in Aging is accepting application from their next racial justice fellow and health law fellow.
📚 A thing I'm doing next month…
On the 14th-15th October I'll be at the Outcasts. Theories and Practices Conference in Lisbon.
In the beautiful University of Lisbon, I'll be presenting the research I've done for the Italian Coalition for Liberties and Civil Rights. The title of my research is “The Autistic Mediated Body”.
Here you can find more information about the conference.
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Thanks for reading the Crip 101 Newsletter. This project was born out of sheer enthusiasm for media diversity and narrative change and is completely run by yours truly, Sara Giudice. Keep reading, keep supporting and, most of all, keep writing.