D I S A B I L I T YA N D

MASCUL I N ITIE S
Corporeality, Pedagogy and the Critique of Otherness
EDITED BY CASSANDRA LOESER,
VICKI CROWLEY, BARBARA PINI
Disability and Masculinities
 Cassandra Loeser • Vicki Crowley • Barbara Pini
Editors

Disability and
Masculinities
Corporeality, Pedagogy and the Critique of
Otherness
Editors
Cassandra Loeser Vicki Crowley
Teaching Innovation Unit Communication, Information Studies and
University of South Australia Languages
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia University of South Australia
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Barbara Pini
School of Humanities, Languages
and Social Science
Griffith University
Nathan, Queensland, Australia

ISBN 978-1-137-53476-7    ISBN 978-1-137-53477-4 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53477-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936991

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

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Cassandra dedicates this book to her parents Lynette and Deane Loeser and
to her much loved grandmothers Lena Porter and Joy Sarre. This dedication
is extended, especially, to her brother Sam. She also gives thanks to the
unwavering motivation of her beautiful twin daughters, Imogen and
Zaylei.

Barbara dedicates this book to her brother Michael Pini.

And Vicki writes:

For us all—those who have come before and those still to come—we
continue to learn.
 Contents

List of Figures   xi

List of Table   xiii

Foreword   xv

I ntroductory Essay: Disability and Masculinities:

Corporeality, Pedagogy and the Critique of Otherness   xxv
Cassandra Loeser, Vicki Crowley, and Barbara Pini

Part I  Of Pedagogy   1

1 ‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal Lake 40’s Mirror

on Global Northern Disability Studies and Public
Pedagogies  3
Leslie G. Roman and Sam Eldridge

2 A Pedagogy of Movement and Affect: A Young Man

with Autism Spectrum and Intersubjective Possibilities  45
Sarah Reddington
vii
viii  Contents

Part II  Corporeality  65

3 The Disability and Diagnosis Nexus: Transgender

Men Navigating Mental Health Care Services 67
Damien W. Riggs and Clare Bartholomaeus

4 Intersex Men, Masculinities and ‘Disabled’ Penises 85

Stephen Kerry

Part III  (Re)presentation  103

5 More Than Puddles: Disability and Masculinity in

Alan Marshall’s I Can Jump Puddles 105
Dylan Holdsworth

6 Media Representations of Disabled Veterans of the

Kurdish Conflict: Continuities, Shifts and 
Contestations 125
Nurseli Yeşim Sünbüloğlu

7 Formatting Disability in Contemporary Variety TV:

Experiments with Masculinity in The Last Leg 145
Gerard Goggin

Part IV  and Critical Self-Stylisation  171

8 Men, Chronic Illness and the Negotiation of

Masculinity 173
Kim Pearson and Barbara Pini
   
 Contents  ix

9 Hearing (Dis)abled Masculinities in Australian Rules

Football: Possibilities for Pleasure 191
Cassandra Loeser and Vicki Crowley

10 Disidentification and Ingenuity in the Sex Lives of

Disabled Men 213
Sarah Smith Rainey

About the Contributors233

Index237
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Shoal Lake 40 Winnepeg’s Diversion Blocks SL40 from

access to both reserve lands and the Trans-Canada
highway11
Fig. 1.2 Museum of Canadian Human Rights Violations challenging
Canadian hypocrisy 20
Fig. 1.3 Shoal Lake 40 Museum of Human Rights Violations
(MHRV) Brochure p. 1–2, excerpt 21
Fig. 1.4 Water bottle storage handling facility 22
Fig. 1.5 Stewart Redsky comforting junior chief and council
members upon on the announcement of Canada’s
refusal to commit to the construction of ‘Freedom Road’
on June 25, 2015 26
Fig. 1.6 #BoilNoMore 30
Fig. 1.7 The future site of ‘Freedom Road’ 31
Fig. 2.1 Typical boy 53
Fig. 2.2 Leo’s self-portrait 54

xi
 List of Table

Table 8.1 Description of interview sample 177

xiii
 Foreword

As the term ‘masculinities’ suggests a key theme in critical masculini-

ties scholarship has been identifying and exploring the multiple ways
in which being a ‘man’ is imagined and lived. In recent years, attend-
ing to differences and diversity amongst men has been given additional
impetus as a result of intersectionality theory. Despite this, a key gap
remains in terms of knowledge about masculinities and disability. The
2004 publication of the volume Gendering Disability devoted three chap-
ters to the analysis of the intersection of disability and masculinities
(Shuttleworth, Wedgewood and Wilson, 2012). The 2006 special issue
of the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research ‘Disability and Gender’
explored how gender and disability, age, sexuality, ‘race’ and ethnicity
intersect in the experience of people with disabilities without focused
attention on men and masculinities. As much recent and not so recent
critique has attested, intersectionality is, itself problematic (Everalles &
Minear, 2010, Hewitt, 1992). It is imperative therefore, that the gaps in
the literature and theorising begin to be addressed through the publica-
tion of this first book-length study.
The chapters in Disability and Masculinities: Corporeality, Pedagogy and
the Critique of Otherness locate the embodied subject in the relations of
disability and masculinity. The book rejects disability as a deficit social
category, moving it inwards from the margins to the centre of identifica-
tory power. The authors draw on diverse methodological and theoretical
xv
xvi  Foreword

approaches to illuminate the multiple ways that disabled masculinities

are lived, performed, represented and practiced.
As the proposed title indicates, Disability and Masculinities: Corporeality,
Pedagogy and the Critique of Otherness takes up the study of the dynamic
interplay of disability and masculinity with a focus on three inter-related
themes of corporeality, pedagogy and otherness.
An emphasis on corporeality recognises the embodied subject in the
intersection of disability and masculinity. The consideration of the dis-
abled masculine body in each of the chapters of the book offer a strat-
egy for thinking masculinities, disabilities, bodies and identities in new
ways—ways that stress the creative conduct, constraint and contingency
that go into the construction of any embodied subjectivity as an ongoing
and laborious task.
Further to corporeality, the book focuses on pedagogy and positions
the subject of disability and masculinity as a site of cultural pedagogy.
This is because the diversity of methodological, representational and ana-
lytical approaches to disabled masculinity included in this collection act
to confront and challenge historical essentialist ideations and consider
unique possibilities for creativity, resistance and the critique of other-
ness. The chapters in the book each work to affirm different knowings of
masculinity beyond dominant ideologies that normalise a specific mas-
culine body and relegate disabled masculinities the position of abnormal
‘Other’. Through focus on the intersections of disability and masculinity,
the book explores the ways that abelism, and the regime of representa-
tions that it produces in the name of ‘normalcy’, appears as a generality—
that is, as not particular, ‘special’ or noteworthy.
The chapters in this collection critique taken-for granted conceptions
of masculinity and disability, to open the possibility of otherness by chal-
lenging dichotomies of abnormal/normal, masculine/feminine. Identity
is perceived as an ongoing project of becoming, reconstructed in dialec-
tical relation with other identities that traverse categories of ‘race’ and
ethnicity, gender and sexualities, socio-economic status, age and cultural/
geographical location. A focus on the interdependence and intertwin-
ing of identities refuses essentialist rhetorics that assume identities are
linear, static and self-same, problematising those categories of self-defi-
nition that divide self from otherness. In revealing the complex multiple
   
 Foreword  xvii

layerings in the making of masculinities, the book unsettles those histo-

ries of dichotomous thinking complicit in the relegation of disability to
the position of essential ‘Other’ of a socially privileged normative mascu-
linity. It shows how dominant conceptions of masculinity as fixed, visible
and self-present conceal the conflict and antagonism that determines the
intricate work involved in the re-production of masculinity.
Analysing the dominance of a mythic heterosexual able-bodied mascu-
linity necessarily includes an analysis of the marginalised or ‘Other’ and
what cultural, political and discursive forces operate to create instances of
marginalisation, exclusion and subordination. The book is conscious that
where there is power there are also opportunities for resistance, subver-
sion and dissidence. The book focuses on possibilities for pleasure in the
cultivation of disabled masculinities and the creativity involved in the
subversion of ideals of gendered and corporeal normalcy. In these ways,
the collected edition will build on a scholarly and political commitment
to promote new forms of theorising and knowings of the complexities
and diversities of gender, sexualities and embodiments in and across cul-
tures and societies.

Structure of the Book

Ten empirical chapters constitute this edited collection. Each of the
chapters represent an inter- and trans-disciplinary array of work that uti-
lise multiple methodologies.
The Introductory Essay is authored by Cassandra Loeser, Vicki Crowley
and Barbara Pini, the editors of this collection. It maps the theoretical,
conceptual and methodological terrain that the ten empirical chapters
in the book take up in varying ways. Divided into four sections, Loeser,
Crowley and Pini highlight the significance of speaking to and recog-
nising those issues of intersubjectivity, situatedness, subjectivity and the
lived in methodological designs and approaches that focus on research
and writing about gender and disability. The editors also reflect on the
social, political, economic and geopolitical logics that influence the mate-
riality of masculinities and disabilities and conclude with a reflection on
future directions for research.
xviii  Foreword

Following the Introductory Essay, the ten empirical chapters in the

book are presented in four parts, each which explore disability and mas-
culinities in diverse ways and contexts. These parts are ‘Of pedagogy,’
‘corporeality’, ‘representation’ ‘and critical self-stylisation’.
Chapter 1 authored by Leslie G. Roman and Sam Eldridge speaks to
the theme of pedagogy. Through the materialities of ‘medicalized colo-
nialism’ (see Chapter 1 Roman and Eldridge and also Roman, Brown,
Noble, Wainer & Young 2009), imprimaturs of ‘relational genealogies’,
‘compounding differences’ and an analytical exposition of some of the
neo-colonial conditions of the Global South within spatially-considered
places of the Global North, this agenda-framing chapter examines the
denial of human rights to the Indigenous Anishinaabe community of
Shoal Lake 40 in Canada. This includes material rights and, in particu-
lar, the right to clean drinking water and an accessible all-weather road.
Offering a range of pedagogical and theoretical applications, Roman and
Eldridge’s chapter carefully chronicles the activist campaign of the people
of Shoal Lake 40 as a case-study to detail what it can teach us about social
justice public pedagogies. It theorises masculine corporeality in ways that
go beyond neo-liberal conceptions of individual bodies to think anew
about the disabling of an entire populations such as Shoal Lake 40. It
raises the significant question of how scholars in the field of disability
studies might begin to think pedagogically and theoretically anew about
corporeal masculinities and the cultural politics of medicalized colonial-
ism. The chapter’s broader pedagogical message is that disability studies
scholars need to attend to the field’s own margins, namely isolating from
view the present-day effects of disabling human rights through lack of
clean drinking water, access to adequate health care and the resultant
debilitating conditions, disproportionately impairing Indigenous people
collectively and women and children in particular. Chapter 1 stands as
a powerful demonstration of how First Nations experience and knowl-
edge can facilitate material analyses that acutely attend to ‘bare life’ in
dis-abling policies and practices—now entrenched in routine ideas—but
which can be challenged through collaborative interventions attentive to
the repercussions and continuities of medicalized colonialism.
As with Roman and Eldrige’s chapter, pedagogy is the framing device
for the second chapter written by Sarah Reddington. She explains that the
   
 Foreword  xix

pedagogical relationship for boys in school has largely been territorialised

by the hegemonic order with dominant boys positioned above subordi-
nated. Writing against this grain she describes the affective geographies of
one young man with autism spectrum, Leo, as he engages with other boys
in a school in Nova Scotia, Canada. While some of Leo’s schooling expe-
riences are marked by violence and harassment he resists the dominant
pedagogy taking up a masculinity that situates itself against the norma-
tive. In analysing this sensitively rendered narrative Reddington skilfully
applies Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of de/reterritorialization
in order to understand how Leo finds space within school filled with pos-
sibilities rather than constraints.
The second part of the book is embedded in the notion of corporeality.
Damien W. Riggs and Clare Bartholomaeus address this notion through
an exploration of the nexus of disability and diagnosis in the context
of transgender men’s experiences of mental health. Data derived from
two surveys with Australian people who were assigned female at birth
but who do not identify as female are engaged in the paper. In a careful
and insightful analysis Riggs and Bartholomaeus detail how in a clinical
setting the focus may be solely or primarily on gender issues so mental
health concerns are obscured. They highlight the ways in which medical
professionals may fail to acknowledge the daily stresses and anxieties of
cisgenderism which may lead to mental health problems. In concluding
the chapter the authors emphasise the need for further research which
identifies how a disability framework could be usefully adopted as a lens
through which to understand the experiences of transgender men.
In Chapter 4 the theme of corporeality is taken up by Stephen Kerry
through an investigation of the still under-explored topic of intersex men
and women. In opening the discussion, Kerry addresses questions of voice
and methodology and the vexed politics of speaking about those who
have been deemed ‘other’. Xie draws on narratives of ‘intersex women’
who were surgically assigned ‘female’ at birth, but as adults either ques-
tioned their gender identity as ‘women’ or underwent a gender transition
as well as narratives of ‘intersex men’ who have undergone phalloplasty,
that is, surgery to construct, reconstruct, or ‘correct’ the penis. Kerry
argues that all the participants live with what xie labels a ‘disabled penis’,
that is, either no penis or an inadequate penis in a society in which the
xx  Foreword

penis is hegemonic. Cumulatively, the research participants offer a pow-

erful counter to the medicalisation of the intersexed body and the posi-
tioning of such a body as both object and abject.
In the third part of the book authors turn their attention to representa-
tions of disabilities and masculinities. Dylan Holdsworth opens this sec-
tion with an analysis of Alan Marshall’s first autobiographical novel I Can
Jump Puddles (1955). He skilfully engages Ghassan Hage’s (2010) notion
of interpellation of the racialized subject to explore how Marshall, as the
disabled male, is negatively interpellated and misinterpellated and how
these interpellations are resisted. Woven into the chapter are the politics
of place and a critique of the ways in which disability and masculinity
are mediated by geographies. Thus, Marshall is not just interpellated into
the discourses of normative masculinity and disability but also into dis-
courses of rurality and being nationality.
While moving to a very different context Nurseli Yeşim Sünbüloğlu
also focuses on representations of disability and masculinity in Chapter
6. In the chapter she examines media characterisations of disabled vet-
erans in Turkey in the context of the Kurdish conflict between the PKK
(Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan—Kurdistan Workers’ Party) and the Turkish
Armed Forces that has been continuing since 1984. The chapter analyses
nine mainstream news reports from two time periods during a time of the
most severe conflict and a time of the peace process. What Sünbüloğlu
demonstrates is that representations of disability and masculinity are
embedded in politics. She reveals the deep ideological work of media
images identifying the ways in which they conceal or suppress impair-
ment thus alleviating anxieties about the damaged veteran male body and
broader concerns about the conflict.
It is the political imperatives of the media in relation to depictions of
disability and masculinity which are also of concern to Gerard Goggin in
Chapter 7. In this instance, however, his interest is in a very different type
of media from that of Sünbüloğlu, that is, the television talk-show, The
Last Leg. Compered by comedian, Alan Hills, along with counterparts
Josh Widdicombe and Alex Brooker, the program has received attention
for its nuanced and productive representations of disability. What has not
been afforded much attention, Goggin contends, is that such representa-
tions are also inscribed by masculinity and heterosexuality. In taking up
   
 Foreword  xxi

this broader remit Goggin illustrates that the program both rewrites tra-
ditional masculinity via disability just as it reinscribes it. He consequently
reminds us of both the fluidity and multiplicity of representations of dis-
ability and masculinity and highlights the need for further work in this
rich and important area of inquiry.
In the final section of the book authors take up questions of self-styli-
sation. As Kim Pearson and Barbara Pini comment in their chapter which
opens this part of the book, the aim is to continue the task of bringing
the body back into disability studies. Pearson and Pini take up this chal-
lenge through interviews with a group of Australian men with chronic
illness, that is, Lyme Disease (LD). They posit that an embodied perspec-
tive is critical to understanding disability for disability is not just the
result of social or physical factors but is experienced through and on the
body. Interviewees recount experiencing a material body as a source of
frustration and grief because it lacks the corporeal capacity to undertake
past practices of masculinity—such as employment, leisure activities,
heterosexual relationships and masculine friendships. They articulate a
new mode of masculinity tethered to a different set of bodily practices
and discourses, consisting of complementary and alternative medicine,
online communities, and lay discourses, giving the men a sense of control
and self-direction.
As with many chapters in this collection, Cassandra Loeser and Vicki
Crowley examine lived experience to demonstrate that disability and
masculinity as experience and category is as outmoded as a category of
contained activity as it is monolithic in scope. Through the stories of
two young men with hearing disabilities and their gendered accounts of
playing Australian Rules Football we see and hear a nimble subversion
of dominant paradigms in the domain of a quintessentially Australian
sport. In this chapter Loeser and Crowley underscore that disability can
be an incisive vector for demonstrating the labour that is required in
any achieving of masculinity, and that sport can provide strategic and
material opportunity for a sense of masculine achievement that may not
be afforded in other spheres of masculinist identity achievement—most
particularly the work place. What emerges from the analysis of the inter-
views are the ways that hearing (dis)abled masculinities in football allows
heterosexual desire to be heard as a productive powerful force for inciting
xxii  Foreword

and producing diverse pleasurable heterosexual modes of embodiment,

subjectivity and intimacy for the young men. The football code of
Australian Rules grants a heterogeneity of embodied pleasures and pos-
sibilities for inciting desirable modes of heteronormative ‘able-bodied’
masculinity that the institution of paid work does not permit.
The book closes with Chapter 10 that is authored by Sarah Smith
Rainey. Chapter 10 draws on rich and nuanced textual interview and
autoethnographic data via Sarah Smith Rainey’s experiences of her late
partner, Max, who had multiple sclerosis and used a wheel-chair. The
analysis is underpinned by José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of ‘disidentifica-
tion’ which a mode of identity expression that simultaneously works with
and against dominant ideology. The chapter is divided into two parts. In
the first part of the chapter the author catalogues how men with a dis-
ability reinscribe notions of hegemonic masculinity in their own intimate
relationships so as to be viewed as legitimate. They take up scripts of
disability as a badge of courage requiring strength and toughness. They
also adopt the subject position of recipient of care. The second part of
the chapter explores disabled men’s sexuality ingenuity. Smith Rainey
reveals how men with a disability may actively disidentify with modes of
sexual identity that focus on the penis. In contrast to normative hetero-
sexual masculinity they may create a subject position that focuses on their
capacity with giving rather than receiving sexual pleasure.

References
Deleuze, G & Guattari, F 1987, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Everalles, N & Minear, A 2010, ‘Unspeakable offenses: Untangling race and
disability in discourses of intersectionality’, Journal of Literacy & Cultural
Disability Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 127-145.
Hewitt, NA 1992 ‘Compounding differences’, Feminist Studies, vol.18. no.2,
pp. 313-326.
Roman, LG, Brown, S, Noble, S, Wainer, R & Young, A 2009, ‘No time for
nostalgia!: Asylum-making, medicalized colonialism in British Columbia
(1859-97) and artistic praxis for social transformation’, International journal
   
 Foreword  xxiii

of Qualitative Studies in Education, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 17-63, <doi:10.1080/0

9518390802581919>.
Shuttleworth, R, Wedgewood, N & Wilson, N 2012, ‘The dilemma of disabled
masculinity’, Men and Masculinities, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 174 – 194.
Traustadóttir, T (ed) 2006, ‘Disability and gender’, Scandinavian Journal of
Disability Research, vol. 8, no. 2/3.
 Introductory Essay: Disability and
Masculinities: Corporeality, Pedagogy and
the Critique of Otherness
Cassandra Loeser, Vicki Crowley, and Barbara Pini

Introduction
This Introductory Essay maps the theoretical, conceptual and method-
ological terrain that the various empirical chapters that constitute the
book take up in varying ways. Divided into four sections, the essay
engages with the literatures and research cultures of those disciplines
and fields of practice within which masculinity and disability are (re)
constructed.
The first section analyses some of the major theoretical influences
and debates informing prevailing assumptions about disability and the
subject of masculinities. It provides an exposition of the theoretical and

C. Loeser (*)
Teaching Innovation Unit, University of South Australia, Adelaide, South
Australia, Australia
V. Crowley (*)
Communication, International Studies and Languages, University of South
Australia, Adelaide, Australia
B. Pini (*)
School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University,
Nathan, Queensland, Australia

xxv
xxvi  Introductory Essay

conceptual terrains that underpin and shape this book which work to
canvas a series of often disparate sites of contestation, and suggest that
disabled and masculine embodied subjectivities are much more than sim-
ple, static, seamless and ahistorical constructions. The analysis of some
dominant classical and contemporary theorisations of masculinity, dis-
ability and the body, particularly as they emerge from medical and social
frameworks, will show that these approaches remain mired in dominant
epistemologies and discourses with tendencies towards essentialism. At
the same time, the essay will examine the contributions of anti-essentialist
feminist literatures and research on masculinities that conceptualise bod-
ies as unfinished materialities that gain meaning through symbolic rep-
resentation and material practice. It is argued that anti-essentalism also
retains aspects of essentialist theorisation ultimately reinforcing an align-
ment of the white, heterosexual and ‘able’ male body with non-difference.
The essay then explores the terrains of post-essentialism where the ques-
tion of embodied subjectivity is central, and in so doing, demonstrates
that a post-essentialist position allows the disabled masculine subject to
be heard as a materiality that is (re)constructed in and through changing
historical, social and discursive conditions. A post-essentialist approach
facilitates recognition of the embodied subject’s capacity for multiple
resignification and experience and brings to the fore new knowings about
the diverse possibilities for gender creativity and being across time and
space. Identity is understood as constructed in and through difference, so
identity is seen as a process of becoming that requires labour in its produc-
tion. A post-essentialist approach, in which chapters in this collection may
be read to draw on in different ways, expose the limited capacities of essen-
tialist approaches for theorising disability and masculinity. Importantly,
they demonstrate the disabled masculinities ought to figure as crucial
issues of current scholarly concern1. This is because a focus on disabled
masculinities can work to highlight the fragility and contested nature of
both ‘disability’ and ‘masculinity’ and, in so doing, demonstrate the cre-
ativity and contingency that mediates embodied being and becoming.
1
 Different authors in this issue use different terminology when referring to people with disabilities.
These include ‘people with disabilities’ and ‘disabled people’. The utilisation of different terminol-
ogy is contingent upon the theoretical, conceptual and methodological framework utilised in each
of the articles and is the informed choice of terminology used by the individual author(s).
   
  Introductory Essay  xxvii

The second section investigates masculinity and disability’s relational

construction with and within different socio-political spheres and their
affiliated institutions and gendered practices. The analysis works to dem-
onstrate the ways disabled and masculine bodies are produced, under-
stood and experienced among competing truths in time, place and space.
As will be shown, the ways that various technologies and devices, cultural
events, politics and policies, institutions and locales impact upon the
lived experience and shaping of disabled masculinities reveals the differ-
ent ways the subject of disability and masculinity is both supervised and
constrained. This is evidenced particularly in reference to the material
implications that the socio-political and economic dimensions of work,
welfare and social provisions have upon both the socio-economic sta-
tus and the employment prospects and experiences of many people with
disabilities.
The third section addresses the question of intersubjectivity and situ-
atedness in the practice of (re)presenting research and contains reference
to the gendered identities of the editors and their identification with,
and experiences of, disability. Disability scholar Rob Kitchin (2000) has
drawn attention to the ways disabled people, carers, family members and
researchers are all subjects collectively situated in contradictory loca-
tions that overlap in the shaping of lived experience in the intersubjec-
tive everyday. He maintains that researchers should draw on an approach
to disability that deconstructs the oppositions between ‘abled’ and ‘dis-
abled’, and ‘self ’ and ‘other’. Through a series of reflections of some of the
editors’ previous experiences with disability, identity and corporeality, a
methodological need is highlighted that calls for acceptance of the notion
that although there are unique human experiences, these experiences are
situated and dependent on other knowledges and identities in the inter-
subjective domain. Instead of an ‘abled’ or ‘disabled’, or a ‘masculine’ or
‘feminine’ condition of being, the multiple points of interchange, the
discontinuities and contingencies that make up all embodied experiences
are what is critical when researching, writing about and (re)presenting
gender and disability (Inahara 2009). What is significant conceptually
and methodologically for this book, therefore, is the centrality of under-
standing the body as a pedagogic site where representation always already
matters.
xxviii  Introductory Essay

The concluding section considers some of the future challenges for

studies of disability and masculinities. Here we propose, following the
argument of Corker and Shakespeare, that this ongoing project necessar-
ily involves contributing ‘to the emancipation of disabled people, who-
ever they are, and whatever they decide that emancipation means, and to
the development of inclusive societies’ (2002, p 15). Future research must
continue to confront and challenge ‘medicalized colonialism’ (see Roman
and Eldridge Chapter 1) and ableist beliefs, processes and practices
based on enforced notions of humanity that assume a globalist norma-
tive understanding of what is ‘fully human’ that erases difference (Davis
2002; Ghai 2002; Kumari Campbell 2009, p. 6; Meekosha 2004, 2006;
Meekosha and Soldatic 2011; Connell 2011). There must be recognition
of the specificities of gender, identity and subjectivity since one unitary
model or set of ideas cannot accommodate the everyday lifeworlds and
sensory, kinaesthetic and cognitive experience of masculinities and gen-
dered being.

Section 1: Theorising Disability and

Masculinities2
Essentialism and Dualistic Thought

The disabled body and the masculine body have each been consti-
tuted in the context of a powerful effort to construct the ‘normal’ body.
Constructions of this ‘normal’ body retain a preoccupation with Cartesian
logics of dichotomous thought that posit a ‘healthy’ self and its medi-
cally diseased or disabled ‘other’. These oppositional pairs that divide
healthy from unhealthy, abled from disabled, self from other, further
work in the service of dividing and hierarchically ordering other binary
assumptions about of class, gender and sexuality. For Seymour (1998)
and Campbell (2009), biological essentialism has been used as a powerful
ideological weapon in constructing influential ideologies of gender and
2
 Section 1 draws upon elements of the unpublished 2005 doctoral thesis by Cassandra Loeser titled
Embodiment, Ethics and the Ear: Constructions of Masculine Subjectivity by Young Men with Hearing
Disabilities in Contemporary Australia, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia.
   
  Introductory Essay  xxix

disability that have subsequently been used to ‘legitimate relations of

inequality in other areas of social life’ (Loeser, Pini and Crowley forth-
coming 2017). Foucault (1994) writes that biological and medical dis-
courses share an analysis of the body that perceives it as the pre-social,
biological basis on which the superstructure and of the self and society
are founded.
Broadly, in essentialist theories of the body, the body is understood
as a biological entity with a fixed natural essence that can be seen and
‘known’. This process of reading and knowing the body is supposedly
achieved through the use of technologies including medical instruments,
classifications, psychological tests and the gaze (Snyder and Mitchell
2005). It is important to note that essentialist theories of bodies have
been important for many groups, particularly in relation to the role of the
cultural representation of oppressed groups who struggle for a collective
voice, visibility and empowerment. Yet, essentialist theories of the body
create a semblance of coherent fixed identities that subsume the possi-
bility of difference, contradiction, fragmentation and diversity within
identity categories. Predicated on concepts reducible to fixed attributes,
there is an embedded tendency in essentialist theories of the body to
reproduce binarised assumptions of what ‘is’ natural/un-natural and what
‘is’ normal/abnormal.
According to scholars including Wilson and Beresford (2002),
Goodley and Rapley (2002), Asch (2004), Garland-Thomson (2004),
Davis (1995), Goggin and Newell (2005), Snyder and Mitchell (2005),
Hickey-Moody (2009) and Campbell (2009), Harwood (2012) and
Jaworski (2014), medical ideologies, including those that involve the
psychopathologisation of particular bodies as ‘disabled’, ‘mentally dis-
abled’, ‘mentally ill’ and/or ‘intellectually impaired’, have been used to
blame the biological/psychological makeup of bodies as origin of their
‘abnormal’ functioning and position within society. Medical ideologies
represent physical impairment as the manifestation of a pathological and
deviant self. Within this framework, the boundaries of the normative
able-body become the limits of the social. Disability is a category of iden-
tity allocated to those bodies that fail to ‘do’ their gender or age ‘right’ in
the social everyday. There is no comment about the social and cultural
status of individuals or groups who meet these categorical items who are,
xxx  Introductory Essay

incidentally, also homogenised, their own variabilities suppressed in such

definitions (Crowley 2012).
The essentialisation of gender as a core aspect of the normal body
produces the contemporary effect of categorising and pathologising all
individual bodies. Adult men become classified as disabled, for instance,
when their bodily performance does not cohere with the expected natural
capacities of ‘a young, non-disabled, ‘ideally shaped,’ healthy adult male’
(Wendell 1996, p. 45; see also Gerschick and Miller 1994; Shuttleworth
2002, 2004). These physical capacities are extended to include the ability
to earn wages (Wendell 1996, p. 17), demonstrations of physical strength,
being able to ‘walk, hear and see, well [and] … work and play at a pace
that is not compatible with any type of illness or pain’ (Wendell 1996,
p. 39). The social consequences are vast—in fact there can be few who
do not experience these consequences, given the inevitability of ageing.
Feminist writers including Garland-Thomson (1997, 2004),
Zitzelsgberger (2005), Thomas (2006) and Inahara (2009) similarly
claim that bodies that do not enjoy the status of the ‘complete’ or ‘pro-
ductive’ human subject simultaneously populate the identity categories
of disability and femininity. Garland-Thomson writes:

Both the female and the disabled body are cast as deviant and inferior; both
are excluded from full participation in public as well as economic life; both
are defined in opposition to a norm that is assumed to possess natural
physical superiority. Indeed, the discursive equation of femaleness with dis-
ability is common (1997, p. 19).

Medical ideologies of impairment and gender attempt to identify coher-

ent and metaphysically stable bodily and gendered norms, and to dis-
tinguish them from their deviant counterparts. In this analysis of the
medical view, the disabled male body is used to illuminate a deviant and
abnormally gendered performance; a defective masculinity. Practices
consequent upon this marking of the disabled body as ‘other’ include
ongoing efforts to ‘rehabilitate’ and ‘cure’ disabled individuals from their
‘abnormal’ biological and social state of being (Asch 2004; Garland-
Thomson 2004).
The ideology of the disabled body as requiring rehabilitation in order
to fulfil a role that is classified as ‘normal’ (WHO 2001) resonates with
   
  Introductory Essay  xxxi

the view that the disabled body is already and always divergent from
those characteristics and capacities attributed to the normal (masculine)
body. The social presupposition is reinforced that people with disabilities
are dependent on medical experts to assist in their desires for amelio-
ration of deviance and suffering as a result of their ‘abnormal’ hearing
capacities. A male becomes disabled when he does not or cannot fulfil
the normative expectations of speaking, walking, seeing, thinking, and
hearing because of his physiological impairment. There is here an active
endorsement of the Cartesian principle: the disabled male subject is
aligned with the ‘feminine’ realm, assumed to be devoid of self-mastery
and control, social independence, physical and interactive competence
and social productivity.
This partial mapping of how socio-biological and medical paradigms
figure essentialist understandings of masculine identification and disabled
existence, reinforces the contentions of writers including Wendell (1996),
Garland-Thomson (1997, 2004), Inahara (2009) and Shuttleworth,
Wedgewood and Wilson, 2012) that gender consolidation is unequivo-
cally equated with the productivity of bodily strength, independence and
‘ability’. Disability is positioned as social and corporeal deviance, lack
and inferiority, as it is aligned with the ‘inability’ to fulfil sexed and aged
roles. Essentialist medical discourses work to invalidate and disfigure dis-
abled male bodies by articulating them as ‘strangers’ of and to a youthful
masculine normality. Yet these scientific discourses of Western medicine
also affect how all people experience and understand their bodies in the
social domain. The disruption to the modelling of self as produced by
‘disability’ definitions may have significance for the total social project of
identity definition.
Western medicine also ‘affects how a society describes our experiences
and validates or invalidates them, adding the burden of epistemic invalida-
tion to many people’s experiences of disability’ (Wendell 1996, p. 9). The
‘authority of medicine shapes and limits, through its effects on the flow of
communication about bodily experiences, what our culture knows about
the human body’ (Wendell 1996, p. 9). Western medical paradigms of
knowledge, disabled bodies are presented as disjunctive bodies in terms
of what counts as the ‘human body’ in the contemporary moment (Rock
1996). The disabled body is seen as a tragedy or cataclysm because of its
xxxii  Introductory Essay

supposed failure to conform to the masculinist norms of the historically

created biomedical human body (Inahara 2009). Medical vocabulary is
limited and limiting so that it is not possible within its parameters to
articulate the diversities of bodily difference. Medical discourse can thus
deny disabled people the possibility of having their descriptions of the
world and their bodies taken seriously, or accepted generally as a ‘truth’.
Medical experts are centralised instead as purveyors of the task of clini-
cally ‘extracting’ and ‘naming’ people as disabled and as in need of spe-
cific technological interventions (Goodley and Rapley 2002; Snyder and
Mitchell, 2005).
The medical approach to understanding disability and masculinity
is vital for understanding how men may occupy their masculinity and
their disability. Medical ideologies function as a powerful limit, regulat-
ing ways of defining and understanding the experience and subjectivity
of male individuals with a disability. Since medical and popular social
discourses are founded on the devaluation and rejection of both disabled
bodies and feminine bodies as deviant and inferior, then a universalist
model of masculinity, embedded within medical discourse, can be seen as
an ontological straightjacket for men with disabilities. A normative con-
ceptualisation of masculinity can be problematic for men with disabilities
experimenting with and performing modes of identity and corporeality
marked ‘outside’ those universalist characteristics and significations of
youthful masculinity. Medical and biological approaches to masculinity
and disability are thus reductive. Processes of natural selection are posited
to justify existing social inequalities, and to allow them to be considered
natural, and even desirable. The dualisms that provide the foundations
for medical ideologies are inadequate interpretations of corporeal reali-
ties. Medical ideologies ignore the overlaps in, and stress the differences
between, systems of classifying human bodies.

The Socially Constructed Body

There have been many attempts within the disability studies movement
and some feminist and gender literatures to contest the assumed ‘natu-
ralness’ of bodies. Many of these studies argue that what is popularly
   
  Introductory Essay  xxxiii

understood as the natural or biological body is instead a social construct

on which notions of ability/disability, masculine/feminine and self/other
have been built. The new awareness of the role of the body in the marking
of social difference has led some of these studies to cast out the body in
their rejection of biological determinism. A crucial example of such work
is the social model of disability.
Disability scholars (primarily from the United Kingdom and the
Global North) are credited with constructing the social model of disabil-
ity. Broadly, this model denies that any particular biological or psycholog-
ical attributes of individual bodies should be understood as constituting
a ‘disadvantage’ outside the social environment in which individuals live.
According to disability scholars Corker and Shakespeare (2002a) the
social model is a move from the personal to the political, as it emphasises
disability as a feature of society’s dysfunction and not the dysfunction
of an individual body. Likewise, Shakespeare, Gillespie-Sells and Davies
note that the notion of disability as a social construction is a ‘sociological
term similar to the feminist distinctions between biological sex and social
gender’ (1996, p. 2).
The social model has been useful in shifting attention away from a
medical model which assumes that the ‘problem’ for people with impair-
ment has to do only with their individual bodies and functions. Writers
including Finkelstein (1980), Oliver (1986, 1990, 1996), Lloyd (1992),
French (1993), Morris (1993a), Barnes (1996) and Barton (1996) have
employed various elements of the social model to draw attention to the
ways that a dominant discourse of normativity has historically worked
to control and exclude people with impairments from the mainstream
of society. This shift demonstrates how universalist conceptions of the
human (male) body have both material-physical and symbolic-interactive
consequences—outcomes that can shape the everyday experiences of men
with disabilities. Finkelstein (1980), for example, argues that changes to
social barriers including attitudes, social roles, environmental controls
systems, the built material environment and discriminatory social poli-
cies will result in the elimination of the social identity of disability. In
Finkelstein’s view, disability is an illumination of society’s inability to
structure itself in a way that allows a broad diversity of individuals to par-
ticipate. The social model attends to social roles, incorporating issues of
xxxiv  Introductory Essay

age and gender, revealing how society discriminates against and excludes
people with disabilities. It shows that normative social roles and the social
environment are powerful factors in the way disability emerges as a cat-
egory of identity and experience.
According to Corker, the corporeal experience of disability cannot be
resolved for all people solely through processes of social manipulation.
Her experience of being ‘unable to hear’ (2002b, p. 21), for instance, has
resulted in the ontological priority of vision and text as vehicles through
which she navigates the interactive world. Since her experience of hearing
disability has ontological consequences that become oppressive in a soci-
ety that privileges hearing and speech as primary basis for communicative
exchange, Corker herself implies a relationship between impairment and
disability. Hearing disability has physiological and social consequences,
effecting how people come to know the interactive world and position
themselves in relation to others. Corker’s statement is thus significant,
illustrating the social model of disability as restricted in permitting a
total exploration of the space between impairment and disability (see also
Inahara 2009). The social model preserves a hierarchical social organisa-
tion based on dichotomies of society/nature, maintaining a belief that
there is a space for disabled people to interact and live that is beyond
power.
The social model retains the assumption that a natural binary exists
between sex and gender. Shakespeare, Gillespie-Sells and Davies (1996),
for instance, maintain that there is a distinction between biological sex
and social gender. The perpetuation of this dichotomy ignores the extent
to which sexed identity is itself a discursive construction. The social con-
structionist approaches to gender implicit in the social model reify a posi-
tion which assumes that transformations at the level of gendered social
statuses can stop the oppression of women and other bodies that do not
‘fit’ a universalist model of (hu)manity privileging a young, white, het-
erosexual and ‘able’ male body. There is no question of superseding the
body or its various biological functions, as the body is still positioned as a
transhistorical, inert and passive object, from birth inscribed by gendered
discourse according to sex.
The social model of disability and social constructionist perspectives of
gender provide important insights into how power relations may affect
   
  Introductory Essay  xxxv

bodies and how the body can function as a social symbol. They are critical
resources for formulating conceptions of disability away from absolute
assumptions of ‘personal’ or ‘individual’ incompetence. Yet even these
modes of thinking perpetuate essentialist claims to absolute distinctions
between male and female, nature and society, impairment and disability.
The body is denied as an object of academic scrutiny, reifying a pre-social
‘impairment’ or ‘sex’ as a necessary condition for ‘disability’ and ‘gender
identity’. These are the presupposed biological components utilised in
medical discourses to justify and legitimise the socially ‘inferior’ capaci-
ties of female or disabled bodies.
Both the social model and constructionist perspectives deflect analysis
from the broader medical and biological mechanisms of ‘impairment’
and ‘sex’ invested in the objectification of men with disabilities. In pri-
oritising an analysis of the body as significant purely in terms of society,
they give little explanation of why men with disabilities might adopt cer-
tain styles of interacting and engaging in the social everyday, or of how
disabled masculine bodies may be used as resources central to human
action and desire as productive possibility. Both the medical model and
the social model of disability are reductive. Each, in a different way, has
tendencies towards essentialism.

Anti-essentialism

Some of the most significant debates to emerge through feminism and

post-structuralism have been that around identity. During the 1980s,
issues of class, race and gender produced an anti-essentialist position that
was seen as a political intervention into reductive and singular identity
constructions. Within this, Gayatri Spivak (1987) argued for retention
of a ‘strategic essentialism’, noting the political necessity and utility of
particular foci in particular circumstances. Paul Gilroy (1993) also made
a case about ‘anti anti-essentialism’, arguing that identity (such as ‘black-
ness’) is neither innate (as in essentialism) nor entirely fabricated (as
in social constructionism). For Gilroy, identity is a complex and lived
set of culturally informed behaviours, communications and traditions.
The arguments of both Spivak and Gilroy function as markers of the
xxxvi  Introductory Essay

trajectory and field of discussion in anti-essentialism that this section will

pursue. For the purposes of this book, however, the section will primarily
concentrate on anti-essentialist debates relating to disability and gender
theories that move from ‘victim’ or ‘object’ to ‘subject’.
Grosz writes that anti-essentialist perspectives are committed to a
‘decentring of identity’ (1994, p. 21). Anti-essentialist modes of theoris-
ing the gendered and disabled subject take seriously the idea that identity
is constructed and experienced through the lived body, and so are always
capable of being redefined and reconstructed. In an anti-essentialist
framework, the human body is never free from signification. It is always
circumscribed by layers of social meaning, ritual and custom. To have a
body is to be affected by social and cultural practices. There can be no
‘authentic’ depiction of corporeality that transcends history and society.
Anti-essentialist perspectives are important in that they produce an align-
ment between medical and social approaches to bodies as being phenomena
that are simultaneously biological and social. Anti-essentialist approaches
focus on how the body is affected by social factors, but do not allow the body
to be reduced to these factors. They avoid etherealising society by giving the
body a legitimate place in social creativity. Bodies are not simply passive
surfaces inscribed by social meanings, but active and thoroughly engaged
in processes of re-creating their bodies as meaningful entities. The body
becomes the source of subjectivity and agency (Crowley and Loeser 2009).
Anti-essentialist perspectives are also significant insofar as they open
up the role of masculine and disabled corporeality for discussion in socio-
logical explanation. A plethora of books and articles have been written
on gendered bodies, male bodies and masculine bodies. The impact of
physical, intellectual and sensory impairments on different gendered,
sexual, ‘raced’ and classed bodies has also been researched from an anti-
essentialist position in different scholarly fields. Feminist, disability and
gender scholars such as Davis (1984) Hannaford (1985), Asch and Fine
(1988, 1999), Hann (1989), Morris (1989, 1991, 1992, 1993a, 1993b,
1996), Murphy (1990), Hanna and Rogovsky (1991), Gerschick and
Miller (1994), Sabo and Gordon (1995), Seymour (1998), Garland-
Thomson (1997), Thomas (1999; 2006), Wendell (1996, 1999),
Shuttleworth (2002, 2002, 2007, 2012), Shuttleworth, Wedgewood and
Wilson 2012), Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli (2003), Meekosha (2004,
   
  Introductory Essay  xxxvii

2006), Meekosha and Soldatic 2011), Hickey-Moody (2009), Hickey-

Moody and Crowley (2012), Loeser and Crowley (2006), Loeser (2012,
2014), Bryant and Pini (2011) and Scott (2014) share a critical awareness
that disability is always and already gendered. These writers implicitly
and explicitly critique masculinist perspectives in disability theorisation,
problematising those works that do not take gender and the lived experi-
ences of disabled people seriously.
Two internationally influential approaches to conceptualising the mas-
culine subject and the disabled subject respectively are those offered by
Raewyn Connell and Wendy Seymour. Their work is read as responding
to anti-essentialism in that elements of their analyses provide important
tools for theorising masculine and disabled bodies as they are affected by
social systems, and as they in turn form the basis for, and shape, social
relations. Significant though their work is, it still retains some of the
essentialising tendencies inherent in universalism and essentialism.
Raewyn Connell is a crucial influence in shifting unitary understand-
ings of masculinity as transhistorical and fixed, to include a comprehen-
sion of the plurality of masculine embodied subject positions. Connell’s
concept of plural ‘masculinities’, as opposed to a single ‘masculinity’,
makes explicit the need ‘to recognize multiple masculinities: black as
well as white, working class as well as middle-class’ (1995, p. 76). She
stresses the requirement to ‘examine the relations between them’ (1995,
p. 76). Connell asserts, for instance, that ‘[w]hite men’s masculinities …
are constructed not only in relation to white women but also in relation
to black men’ (1995, p. 75). The socially subordinate symbolic meanings
attached to black masculinities and white femininities function to cen-
tre white masculinities as socially and economically privileged. Through
arguing that white men’s masculinities crucially hinge on investments
in both white femininities and black masculinities, Connell can be read
to reformulate universalist discourses of alterity as humanist processes
of difference and identification, opposition and solidarity. Recasting the
masculine as a social construct produced through relations of power
highlights the point that gender has no ontological status outside the
social discourses and embodied relationships that constitute it.
Connell addresses questions of masculinity as a relational construct
through analysis. She focuses on the ways that masculine bodies are
xxxviii  Introductory Essay

not only shaped by powerful discourses, but also how they come to be
marked with inequality. Western societies are characterised by hierarchies
of masculinity that privilege some configurations and subordinate and
marginalise others. She maintains that four patterns of masculinity order
the current Western gender system: hegemonic, subordinate, complicit
and marginalised masculinities. Each pattern is conceived in relation to
standards inherent in hegemonic masculinity, itself marked by a success-
ful claim to social authority and privilege.
Connell does not determine exactly what the characteristics and values
of hegemonic masculinity are. However, she does write that hegemonic
definitions are ‘normative definitions of masculinity’ (1995, p. 79; see
also Connell 2000) that consequently function to subordinate and mar-
ginalise those male bodies that do not comply with its ascribed attributes.
Forms of subordinate masculinities include, for instance, those gendered
configurations categorised as ‘blurring with femininity’ (1995, p. 79).
Connell writes that while ‘gay masculinity is the most conspicuous’
(1995, p. 79) form of subordinate masculinity, it is not the only one.
Vocabularies of abuse utilised during interactions between men can affect
the differentiation and subordination of those masculinities. Connell fur-
thers suggests that male bodies with disabilities are also often positioned
outside the realms of hegemonic privilege. She writes ‘[t]he constitution
of masculinity through bodily performance means that gender is vulner-
able when the performance cannot be sustained—for instance, as a result
of physical disability’ (1995, p. 54). Failure to perform the characteristics
and capacities of hegemonic normative masculinity can result in punish-
ment and social vulnerability for those bodies interpreted or named as
visually or physically disabled. Verbal, legal and physical acts of coercion
and violence thus function to regulate either disabled or gay male bodies
in the social domain, marking them as distinct and subordinate to hege-
monic norms.
Connell recognises two other dominant patterns of masculinity in
the Western gender order: complicit and marginalised masculinities.
‘Complicit masculinities’, writes Connell, refer to the large numbers of
men who adopt particular predominant aspects of hegemonic masculin-
ity. ‘Normative definitions of masculinity … face the problem that not
many men actually meet the normative standards … [but rather] have
   
  Introductory Essay  xxxix

some connection with the hegemonic project’ (1995, p. 79). In doing

so, they impact upon the categories of marginalised masculinities: those
masculinities which, while being exemplars of a hegemonic norm, do
not yield social authority. What is important in Connell’s discussion of
both complicit and marginalised masculinities is that while a connection
with specific attributes of hegemonic masculinity is maintained by some
men, certain bodies may remain excluded from the social authority and
privilege of hegemony. An oscillating circuit of the discursive and the
material constitute masculinity, as both meaningful bodies, and embod-
ied meanings.
The significance of space and place to the shaping of masculinities
is also crucial to this book. Connell claims that in order for masculin-
ity to be consolidated as a symbolic corporeal form, questions of space
and place must be analysed. Masculine subjectivities are differentiated
by relationships in space and the gendered practices that these spaces
celebrate or punish. The physical sense of masculinity experienced by
many men derives from the transformation of the body through spe-
cific social practices in certain spaces—particularly in the institutions of
competitive sports, bodybuilding and manual labour. These institutional
practices work to transform the size, shape and texture of bodies, where
‘masculine gender [becomes] (among other things) a certain feel to the
skin, certain muscular shapes and tensions, certain postures and ways of
moving’ (1995, pp. 53-54).
In addition, Connell notes, ‘the school is an important player in the
shaping of modern masculinities’ (2000, p. 151; 1989). Schools are
spaces where relationships between teachers and students, and student
peer relations, are performed within a regime of normalising practices
(Mac an Ghaill 1994; Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 1996; Epstein 1997)
in which particular, and frequently heteronormative (Mac an Ghaill
1994; Rasmussen 2006), forms of masculinity serve as an index of sub-
jectivity (with regard to boys with disabilities see for instance Benjamin
2001, Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli 2003; Nichols and Cormack 2009;
Nichols 2011; Loeser 2012; Stahl 2014a, 2014b, 2015). An analytical
engagement with the dynamics of masculinity in the spatial arenas of
sport, work, school, each with their specific interactive relationships,
becomes paramount.
xl  Introductory Essay

Connell’s work can be read to suggest that different representations

and performances of disabled masculine bodies have different social
implications and are differently experienced. Although Connell does not
develop the radical implications of this view of performance in regard to
the body, her notion of masculinities as spatial, historical and relational
corporeal configurations of practice suggests both their malleability and
their communicative function. Her attention to masculinities as con-
structed in both discursive and embodied relations of privilege, subor-
dination, oppression, intersection and reflexivity suggests the important
proposition that styles of masculinity contain possibilities and potentials
for agency in their disruption and remaking (see also Connell 2000).
A reflexivity in stylisation and performance is, however, problematised
by the terms ‘subordinate masculinities’ and ‘marginalised masculinities’.
While some men’s gendered identities may be perceived or recognised as
‘subordinate’ or ‘marginalised’ by others, the men themselves may not
consider their masculinities as subordinate or inferior, or relative to any
ideologically privileged norm.
What counts as the ‘masculine’ is, in fact, social attributes subject to
challenge and change. What precisely (and who decides what precisely) is
‘ideal’ masculinity? Either it is multiple and open to interpretation, or in
line with essentialism and its totalising tendencies, some men are in pos-
session of a privileged masculinity and others are not. Indeed, Connell’s
(Carrigan, Connell and Lee 1987, Connell 1995, Connell 2000) notion
of hegemonic masculinity has not escaped criticism from other gender
theorists (see for instance Clatterbaugh 1998; Kerfoot and Whitehead
1998; Lorber 1998; Wetherall and Edley 1999; Hearn 2000; Nordberg
2000, 2004, 2005, 2007; Demetriou 2001; Hooper 2001; Phoenix and
Frosh 2001; Beasley 2005; Collinson and Hearn 2005; Hearn, Nordberg,
Andersson, Balkmar, Gottzén, Klinth, Pringle and Sandberg 2012; Pini
and Pease 2013). We the editors suggest a need to recognise that differ-
ent bodies see and hear masculinity differently, rather than assuming that
some bodies have inferior eyes and ears.
Connell’s specific works on masculinities does not speak extensively
about masculine bodies that experience disability or the way that disabled
bodies construct masculinity. However it is pertinent to identify her recent
work that recognises the need for an understanding of disability in the
   
  Introductory Essay  xli

context of ‘the violence of colonisation and neo-colonial power’ (2011,

p. 1369). Her article ‘Southern bodies and disability: re-thinking con-
cepts’ calls for a reconceptualisation of disability studies via knowledges
and experiences that emerge beyond metropolitan genres of thought, such
as those of Indigenous knowledges, and people with disabilities that live
in the ‘global South’ (2011, p. 1372). Connell writes that despite that
the ‘great majority of disabled people … live in the global South’ (2011,
p. 1372), rich capitalist countries of western Europe and north America
remain the centre of scientific activity and theoretical and methodological
innovation, and in particular, the centre of knowledge production and
publication in the field of disability studies. A small number of researchers
have undertaken intercategorical analyses of gender, disability, ‘race’ and
ethnicity (see for instance Meekosha 2004, 2007; Meekosha and Soldatic
2011; Chouinard 2015), and the materialities of ‘medicalized colonialism’
(Roman, Brown, Noble, Wainer & Young 2009). Yet the global metropole
has continued to largely account for knowledges published and circulated
in disability studies—knowledges ‘conditioned by the perspectives on the
world that are available in the metropole, in the historical circumstances
in which metropolitan scientists work at the time’ (2011, p. 1372).
This is problematic, states Connell, since the global metropole has
escaped the destructive impacts of colonisation and the dynamics of neo-
colonialism including, but not limited to, violence, murder, poverty, sto-
len generations of children, cultural destruction, removal from land, the
devastations caused by elements of globalisation and neo-liberal regimes
and economics, and the disease and disabling conditions that can be pro-
duced by such traumatic and traumatising events and conditions (see
also Connell 2007). Moreover, non-Western forms of knowledge that
have escaped ‘destruction by the power of the global metropole’ (2011, p.
1377) are not accounted for in globalist conceptualisations of disability
that do not necessarily speak to or recognise “indigenous knowledge’,
involving debates about the articulation of indigenous and metropolitan
knowledge systems’ (2011, p. 1372). Globalist understandings of disabil-
ity also do not provide an understanding of the ways that ‘local gender
orders of colonised societies … have been subsumed in a global econ-
omy’ so that ‘a modernised partriarchy has become internationally hege-
monic’ (2011, p. 1376). Knowledges that emerge solely from the global
xlii  Introductory Essay

metropole are further limited in their capacity to provide nuanced and

depth accounts about disability from cultures and communities in the
global periphery where people with disabilities are credited with signifi-
cant spiritual and healing qualities (2011, p. 1370), or where the notion
of ‘disability’ does not exist at all.
Connell’s analysis of the possibilities offered for disability studies by
way of attention to ‘indigenous knowledge’ (2011, p. 1372), the knowl-
edges and experiences of people with disabilities that live in the global
periphery, and ‘southern theory’ (Connell 2011, p. 1372; 2007), is of
great significance to the future research directions for disability studies.
A close attention to the devastating impacts of colonisation and neo-
colonial power in the global South as it pertains to the (re)creation of
impairment and disability, and the ways that global dynamics of capitalist
accumulation and the transformation of gender orders of colonised soci-
eties, is crucial in order that a more depth and intricate understanding
of the meaning and material character of disability in local, national and
international socio-cultural and historical-political contexts can proceed.
Wendy Seymour’s work on disability, gender and the process of
re-embodiment can be seen to provide a useful addition to Connell’s
work because it encompasses a localised analysis in Australia of disabil-
ity and corporeality at the intersection of both masculinity and femi-
ninity. Wendy Seymour’s (1998) work has at its centre a focus on ‘the
impact of major physical impairment on embodiment, and the processes
involved in re-embodiment after catastrophic injury or disease’ (1998,
p. xiii). Drawing on interviews conducted with twenty-four individuals
with a spinal injury, Seymour explores how these individuals reconsti-
tute their embodied selves after what she terms ‘major personal disaster’
(1998, p. xiii). Seymour mobilises a theoretical framework that synthe-
sises phenomenological and social constructionist perspectives to permit
an exploration of the body both as forming the basis of social relations
and as offering vast opportunities for human action. She investigates how
the interviewed individuals actively renegotiate social expectations of
bodily appearance, mobility, social interaction, sports participation, and
intimate sexual relations, creating new possibilities of bodily experience
and aesthetic practice as they orient themselves into the future. Seymour
claims that disability operates as an identity category, and as a cultural
   
  Introductory Essay  xliii

concept, that can deepen and enhance the way scholars understand social
relationships, and the ongoing experience of re-embodiment that every-
body must undertake as part of the project of living.
Seymour’s work is extremely important for understanding how the
term disability has come to operate as a system of meaning. In her work,
discourses cannot be comprehended as passively inscribed on people
from outside. She emphasises the powerful capacity of disabled bodies to
recognise that a ‘disabled’, or ‘gendered’ positioning, cannot capture and
control identity and embodied subjectivity. Her work offers a perspec-
tive on embodiment as an ongoing project of uncertainty and unknown
possibilities. Disabled bodies, like all bodies, are figures of undecidability.
The distinctions between self and other are never final and firm. Seymour
purports that theoretical adherence to a delimited set of moral rules and
codes cannot and will not respond to the questions of difference that
characterise late modern society.
Seymour’s account of the multiple possibilities of what disabled bodies
‘can do’ blurs disciplinary boundaries, and shows both social construc-
tionist perspectives and existential phenomenology, as they address the
multiple complexities of re-embodiment. Despite the highly significant
contributions of Seymour’s study to understanding both the material-
ity of bodies and embodiment, and the social formations that interpret
bodily differences, it tends towards essentialism. There is, for instance, no
explicit interrogation of the category of ‘impairment’ as it is defined as
opposite and distinct from ‘disability’. By retaining an impairment/dis-
ability distinction, Seymour does not investigate the possibility that the
category of impairment is neither natural nor invariant. The discursive
production of impairment as a category of the ‘natural’ remains largely
uncontested and tends to endorse, rather than undermine, the restrictive
and restricting nature/society dualism.
The work of both Connell and Seymour provide just two examples of
internationally influential work on bodies as unfinished materialities that
gain meaning through various forms of symbolic representation and mate-
rial practice. While noting the anti-essentialist intentions and the universal-
ist reverberations of their work, it must also be noted that these examples
do not attend explicitly to the cultural sphere. There is a need for schol-
ars to hear beyond the social and into the cultural. There should be an
xliv  Introductory Essay

exploration of the multiple symbols, meanings, truths and possibilities

for the body across and within different cultural spaces and sites, not as
yet anticipated. The discursive resources needed to comprehend disabled
masculine bodies and any identities away from essentialist and restrictive
frames of reference need to be located. As feminist philosopher Elizabeth
Grosz writes:

Given the investment in restricting or containing studies of the body …

and disavowing all traces of corporeality that exist elsewhere (i.e., in epis-
temic, artistic, social and cultural concerns …), developing alternative
accounts of the body may create upheavals in the structure of existing
knowledges (1994, p. 20).

Frameworks that question the holism, universalism and essentialism

implied by any universalist model of masculinity mean investigating dis-
cursive arenas that contest neat dualisms of sex/gender, impairment/dis-
ability, heterosexual/homosexual and nature/society—each has, to date,
plagued both essentialist and anti-essentialist theorisings over disability,
as well as masculinity.
The field of cultural studies offers some possibilities in relation to the
issue of essentialism and anti-essentialism, especially where it argues the
contingency of all knowledges and knowledge claims made by, or on
behalf of, knowing subjects. Cultural studies is a discursive formation of
hybrid knowledges, where tensions and connections are constantly heard
as part of the practice of cultivating social relationships and identity in
everyday cultural spheres (Hall 1992). Cultural apparatuses produce
ever-shifting boundaries, constructing and being constructed by subjects
and objects whose beings can be persistent, yet remain problematic, con-
tradictory and, as noted, contingent. Thinking about the body in this
way enables us to see that the embodied subject is always situated or
positioned. Its perspective is necessarily partial. Moreover, it necessitates
attention to the ability of fragmented and partial embodied subjects to
make connections to other knowledges or identities. Acknowledgement
of this point entails openness to the experiences of differently constituted
‘others’, whose ‘ways of life’ and everyday ethical practices may, or may
not, intersect with our own.
   
  Introductory Essay  xlv

Studies of masculinity and disability, corporeality and subjectivity

ought not be limited to a political register of who dominates or what ‘is’.
To ‘recognize another body is’, as Gatens writes, ‘to leave oneself open
to dialogue, debate and engagement with the … other’s ethics’ (1996, p.
27). There is a need to engage with different bodies, each legitimate, in a
register of the ethical, rather than in subordinated versions of the same.
This ethical register should accommodate multiple and fluid forms of
bodies and identities, always moving and taking various positions in the
production of the present. It is important to note, however, that while
the field of cultural studies is utterly conversant with issues of diversity,
contingency and partiality, it is still, with few exceptions, not awash with
other embodiments that are identified ‘outside’ the rubric of sex-gender,
class, race and ethnicity. Yet, as a practice that seeks to bring together dis-
parate elements that hear the social and cultural complexities of embodied
subjectivity and intersubjective life, cultural studies become a resource in
this dissertation for shifting the analytical planes of investigation towards
the complexities, connections and exchanges that compromise embodied
engagement. Comprehending disabled masculinities as cultural practice
in these ways allow for hearing identities as temporal cultivations and
constructions that are interactive, reciprocal and open to exchange.
In opening the possibility of describing the risky and ambiguous pro-
cesses of becoming, with others, in the everyday intersubjective realm,
the next part of this essay responds to the call from Victoria Pitts for
the stylisation of a ‘new’ post-essentialist approach to the body. Post-
essentialist theoretical perspectives reject meta-narratives and the concept
of a rational knowing actor, hearing the body as site of a performing
self that has no essential or natural ontology. Post-essentialist theories
are expressed in multiple fields and disciplines including cultural stud-
ies, different strands of feminism, queer theory, gay and lesbian studies,
psychoanalysis, postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism
(Loeser and Crowley 2009, p. 14). Pitts writes that a post-essentialist
approach further draws on:

… other areas of thought [that] reject the notion that there is an ‘essential,’
proper, ideal body … [or] a natural model of the body … In addition to
overturning universal conceptions of the body, an important focus … [is]
xlvi  Introductory Essay

on the relationship between the body and the self … [and] theoretical
interventions that [stress that] … the self and the social order are guided
and shaped by invisible forces such as unconscious desire … and the ‘laws’
of language, … the role of gender in shaping desires and bodily practices
… [and] the historicity of such forces, their contingency on history, social-
ity, and politics, and explore the ongoing politics of shaping selves, bodies,
desires, and pleasures through language, representation, and ‘discourse’
(2003, p. 28-29 [original emphasis]).

Pitts credits continental philosophical interventions, particularly the

work of Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche and Judith Butler, as influ-
ential in the shaping of ‘current, post-essentialist body theory’ (2003,
p. 28). Their work, in different ways, emphasises how selves and bod-
ies are historically situated in power relations, yet also ‘continually cre-
ated’ (Pitts 2003, p. 40) within ongoing aesthetic practices that cannot
be pre-empted. ‘Instead of one truth of the body or of ontology’ (Pitts
2003, p. 28), post-essentialist theories, as inspired by such philosophical
accounts, allow bodies and selves to be heard as unfinished materialities,
produced amid ‘competing truths that are productions over time, place,
space, geography, and culture’ (Pitts 2003, p. 28). As the location for the
production of self, the body is both supervised and constrained yet ‘holds
capacities for rewriting and reinscription, through the creative use of dif-
ferent aesthetic practices. This does not however open self-definition into
absolute formlessness’ (Crowley and Loeser 2009, p. 14).
What is important to post-essentialist positions are those attempts to
think through the consequences of the proliferation of fluid and hybrid
identities (Grint and Woolgar 1995, p. 299). In developing their argu-
ment, Grint and Woolgar claim that ‘[f ]eminism, constructivism, and
other forms of anti-essentialism are insufficiently anti-essentialist and fail
to transcend essentialism [due to] their limited insinuations of antecedent
circumstances’ (1995, p. 300). The notion of antecedent circumstances
implies that an entity ‘can be neutral until such time as political or social
values are ascribed or attributed to it’ (1995, p. 289). Yet even this fails
to acknowledge how the significance of an entity ‘lies in the ongoing and
multiple interpretations of that entity, not the entity itself ’ (Crowley and
Loeser 2009, p. 14). Post-essentialist lines of inquiry work to analyse all
   
  Introductory Essay  xlvii

identities as strategically built, and ‘apprehended in radically different

ways by different people’ (Grint and Woolgar 1995, p. 304).

Towards a Post-essentialist Position: Postmodern,

Post-structuralist and Queer Scholarship and
Continental Philosophical Interventions

The past fifty years have seen a vast corpus of work in critique of moder-
nity and the Enlightenment. There is likely no field of scholarly endeav-
our or research practice that has evaded engagement with issues of truth,
scientism and positivism. The influence of continental philosophers,
post-structuralism and postmodernism, and to a lesser extent postcolo-
nialism, has profoundly reshaped traditional disciplines. There has been
great attention given to identity, subjectivity, space and place as vectors
of power—power that is ‘capillaried’ in fine detail (after Foucault), but
does not exclude force or duress. Importantly, the subject in all its com-
plexity and unevenness has returned to centre stage with renewed focus
on the constitution of being. Its central program has been a critique of
the modernist and Enlightenment ‘rational’ being, constituted through a
series of binaries that privilege a white, heterosexual, youthful and ‘able’
male body (Loeser 2005, 2014).
Since second wave feminism, attention to women and gender have
seen an increasingly focussed analysis of masculinity as a complex con-
struction amid webs of power, leading to that what might be called ‘new
masculinities’. Yet smaller discursive paradigms, such as that of disabil-
ity studies, are also subject to the debates, discussion and contestation
afforded through and by postmodernism, post-structuralism and conti-
nental philosophy. While it is impossible to trace here the vast impact of
these influences in recent scholarly thought, this part of the essay makes
the argument, after Victoria Pitts (2003), that a post-essentialist approach
is fruitful to the theorisation of disability and masculinity.
In the Western world, disability activism has contributed to an emer-
gent field of studies in disability. Writers in this field use postmodernist
and post-structualist theories for conceptualising disability as an effect
of Enlightenment knowledge. Within the evolving disability studies
xlviii  Introductory Essay

literature, postmodernist thought reveals declining ideological hege-

monies in politics and social life (Corker and Shakespeare 2002a, p. 3),
with a new emphasis on cultural formations selected from global popular
culture.
The attraction of a postmodernist approach to conceptualising the dis-
abled masculine subject lies in its ability to privilege diversity. Knowledge
is understood not as an absolute representation, but as a discursive con-
struction; a mediated enterprise of interpretation. Corker argues that
postmodernism refuses the incorporation of disabled peoples’ identities
and experiences ‘into conventionalized notions of ‘reality’, ‘truth’’ (1999a,
p. 639). Postmodernist approaches identify and critique how essentialist
language and its vocabularies of knowledge have no space for situated
knowledge and local diversities.
Post-essentialism takes up this ‘inadequate’, indeterminate state of
movement in language to allow for both the ‘other’ and for ‘more’. Yet
this is about lived reality, and not just representation. Grint and Woolgar
claim that post-essentialism is devoted to ‘a major reworking of the cat-
egories and conventions of conventional language use’ (1995, p. 299).
Post-essentialism does challenge universalist conventions of language,
and the representation that language implies—but through an inter-
rogation of the material, historical and social conditions from which
it emerges. Pitts (2003) contends that post-essentialism proposes that
language and representation are not natural and given but brought into
being by knowing and partial subjects who have stakes in constructing
them as such. Postmodernist and post-structuralist approaches, through
emphasis on the deconstruction of universalist languages that regulate
and limit the experiences of social subjects, have merit for the devel-
opment of a post-essentialist theoretical approach to theorising disabled
masculinities (Loeser 2014, p. 197).
Through a post-essentialist approach, disability and masculinity can be
conceptualised as identities constructed in those forms of language that
shape and regulate the experiences of hearing disabled masculine bodies
in the material everyday. Further, if all identities are constructed through
the play of difference in relation to others, the possibility of slippage and
exchange between identity categories is opened up for analytical con-
sideration. All identities are constructed through and across difference.
   
  Introductory Essay  xlix

In this context, and significantly so, the production of identity requires

physical labour (Loeser 2011, 2013, 2014; Crowley 2012).
Within the slippages and excesses of identity, queer theory can also be
seen as troubling universalist claims and meta-narratives. Queer theory
developed out of a ‘specifically lesbian and gay reworking of the post-
structuralist figuring of identity as a constellation of multiple and unsta-
ble positions’ (Jagose 1996, p. 3). Feminist and queer scholar Annamarie
Jagose notes that the term ‘queer’ attends to the multiplicity and diver-
sity of sexed, sexual and gendered identities that do not comply with
a heterosexual norm. Specifically for Jagose, queer theories draw atten-
tion to the implicit heterosexist biases of essentialist modes of theorising
sex and gender that normalise desire as heterosexual and fixed in a nor-
malised body. Heterosexist assumptions are imported into much research
and writing on men and masculinities, where the question of sexuality
often does not enter the analysis at all. When it does, there is too often
an uncritical use of the terms ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ (Petersen
1998, p. 114).
Queer scholars and writers in the field of LGBTIAP theorising such
as Luczak (1993, 2007), Tremain (1996, 2000), Sandahl (1999), Tepper
(2000), McRuer (2006, 2013), Samuels (2002), Wilkerson (2002),
McRuer and Wilkerson (2003a), Schildrick (2004, 2007a, 2007b, 2009)
and Colligan (2004) have taken up the question of sexuality as it is related
to disability6. McRuer and Wilkerson (2003b) argue that the routine
infantalisation of disabled people as passive and dependent has prompted
the representation of disabled people as asexual and lacking desire, or
alternately, possessed of an uncontrollable sexuality much like the ste-
reotypical queer, black and/or female body. They write that all relations
of oppression based on sex/uality, race and disability ‘create their own
classes of perverts and those in need of protection from them’ (2003b,
p. 8). Pathologisation can therefore act as a powerful discourse, shaping
the everyday experiences and social interpretations of queer, ‘raced’ and
disabled bodies in relation to sexual and gendered politics (see also Smith
Rainey 2011, Loeser and Crowley 2006, Liddiard 2013, Loeser, Pini and
Crowley forthcoming 2017).
In response to the power of pathologisation, there have been efforts to
explore how essentialist conceptualisations of the ‘normal’ body as white,
l  Introductory Essay

heterosexual, abled and male have been utilised to pronounce judgements

about disabled bodies and desires as ‘unseemly’ and ultimately pathologi-
cal. McRuer and Wilkerson write:

To have a sexuality that is socially intelligible, much less legitimated, one

must meet, along with heteronormativity, the norm of physical and mental
ability, and one way to deny intelligibility and legitimacy is to insist that an
identity or practice is unseemly and must be kept private (2003b, p. 8).

The inextricable relation of heteronormativity with physical and men-

tal ability has led to the construction of disabled sexualities as a viola-
tion of sexual propriety. Shakespeare reinforces this perspective when he
contends that because sexual confidence is defined by bodily norms of
‘beauty, potency and independence’ (Shakespeare 1996, p. 193), many
disabled people have ‘serious problems with self-image, having been
socialised to think of themselves as asexual or unattractive’ (Shakespeare
1996, p. 193). For Shakespeare, heteronormative ideologies are repeat-
edly able-bodied ones that frequently work to limit the possibility of dis-
abled bodies accessing positions of sexual privilege.
Heteronormative ideologies also work in the service of silencing the pos-
sibilities for certain identities to emerge. Reducing sexual intelligibility to
the white, heterosexual and able male body means that heteronormative
discourse cannot imagine disabled bodily desire, beyond the asexual and
lacking/uncontrollable and dangerous, polarisation, that marks disabled
sexualities as always already deviant or ‘impossible’. For this book, queer
theory provides a crucial resource in many of the chapters for further rec-
ognising the limitation of much theorisation and conceptualisations of
disability and disabled bodies—especially where sexuality is (apparently)
sidelined or completely erased. Queer theory works as a tool to identify
and analyse those expansive desires and possibilities of embodiment that
lie beyond the limits imposed by a heteronormative universalist model of
masculinity.
However, there is a problem embedded in postmodernist, post-
structuralist and queer informed theories of bodies and identities.
Postmodernist modes of theorising bodies and identities, as informed by
   
  Introductory Essay  li

poststructuralist perspectives, have been critiqued from the perspective

that they deny the reality or materiality of the disabled or gendered body
(see also Section 2 of this essay). In conceptualising the body as pro-
duced solely in language and discourse, the libidinal, sensuous, sensory
and fleshy body disappears as a subject of analysis. In effacing the body
as an active component of social ontology, post-structuralist informed
analyses close the question of the material, sensual and sensate relation-
ship between self and other in the constitution of embodied identity.
Corker (2002b), as mentioned previously, claims that disability does
not exist simply in the realm of discourse—it has ontological conse-
quences in that having a hearing disability affects how she experiences the
interactive social world. Adrienne Asch (1976, p. 28), a feminist writer
who identifies as having a disability, also notes that while disability is not
part of her self-definition, it is the basis of many other people’s definition
of her. This process of categorisation and naming affects Asch’s experi-
ences of corporeality and sensibility in the world. While a post-structur-
alist deconstruction of the impairment/disability dualism seems crucial in
shifting scholarly attention away from the essential ‘naturalness’ of these
categories, it seems that any move that abandons the category of disability
is also itself problematic. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes, ‘the
theoretical bind is that deconstructing oppressive categories can neutral-
ize the effects of real differences’ (1997, p. 23). The existence of material
bodily differences must be ‘claimed, not cast as lack’ (1997, p. 23).
In response to the limits of post-structuralist informed theories of the body,
and in the context of this book, there is a need for a post-essentialist approach
that can also speak acutely to the lived, embodied experiences of disabled
people. The argument of disability scholar James Overboe becomes impor-
tant here. Instead of an anti-essentialist ‘‘equality of rights’ based on identity
politics’ (1999, p. 23), Overboe calls for an ‘‘equality of condition’ that vali-
dates both a disabled embodiment and sensibility’ (1999, p. 23). He writes:

The shedding of the illusion of identity allows for our ‘lived experience’ to
come to the forefront … our lived experience would be an integral part of
the atmosphere and tone for any change within our lives and interactions
with others ….
lii  Introductory Essay

Instead of a hierarchy of levels [we must install an approach] that recognizes

difference without negation [that] would allow a disabled embodiment and
sensibility to be perceived as one way of being (1999, pp. 23-24, 25).

The embodied self materialises not only in discourse but also in and
through the lived, living, emotional and sensuous body—that is, iden-
tity materialises in response to an embodied engagement and connec-
tion with the social and concrete environment (Hickey Moody 2009;
Crowley 2012; Loeser, Pini, Crowley forthcoming). The explicit signifi-
cance of the scholarly validation of the lived experiences of disabled bod-
ies lies in their ability to write new stories about disability and recover
traditional ones. The recognition and validation of the lived and sensu-
ous experiences of disabled embodiment can ‘allow for able-bodied and
disabled narratives to be read across and against each other’ (1999, p.
26). In this book, validating lived experience seeks to create a critical
positionality from which to investigate the ableist, universalist and mas-
culinist assumptions underlying perspectives of hearing disabled bodies
as ‘abnormal other’. The lived and experiential allow for a plurality of
visions to come to the fore. They give rise to an awareness of the simulta-
neous, relational and interconnected dimensions of embodied experience
and identity construction.
Lennard Davis also provocatively suggests the salience of disability as
a device for unsettling universalist and essentialising categories of race,
gender and class. He proposes that the development of eugenics in the
mid-nineteenth century saw female bodies, ‘people of colour’, ‘homosex-
uals’ and ‘the working classes’ delineated as categories of disability whose
erasure would see the possible improvement of the human race. The
capacity of post-structuralist and postmodern theories to destabilise uni-
versalist categories of identity is problematised by the scholarly tendency
to attach disability to the traditional interpretive troika of race, class and
gender. What Davis proposes instead is the ‘instability of the category
of disability as a subset of the instability of identity in a postmodern era’
(2002, p. 25). For Davis, disability embodies, supplants and transcends
postmodernist classifiers. This is because the ‘instability of disability’ as a
category can permit disability studies to ‘provide a critique of and a poli-
tics to discuss how all groups, based on physical traits or markings, are
   
  Introductory Essay  liii

selected for disablement by a larger system of regulation and signification’

(2002, p. 29).
Davis signals an approach that amplifies the instability of disability
in order to forward the concept ‘that difference is what all of us have in
common. That identity is not fixed but malleable. That … [f ]orm follows
dysfunction’ (2002, p. 27) in the postmodern era. He names this new
way of thinking ‘dismodernism’. Dismodernism indicates a new mode
of universalism where all humans are seen as wounded, ‘a commonality
of bodies within the notion of difference’ (2002, p. 31). Dismodernism
further demands new ethics of the body that recognise: the care of bodies
through consumption and technology; care for bodies through indus-
tries and institutions; and care about bodies through discussion of the
liberation as well as oppression, subordination and violation of ‘so-called
abnormal bodies’ (2002, p. 28). ‘The dismodernist subject is in fact dis-
abled, only completed by technology [policy and law, consumption,
information technology] and interventions … it acknowledges the social
and technological to arrive at functionality’ (2002, p. 30). Dismodernism
as an intervention in universalism and identity politics is, in this sense,
contingent upon a partial and unfinished ethics of the embodied subject.
Both Overboe’s and Davis’s arguments illuminate the many ways that
dominant approaches to disability have worked to silence those ethical
mediations of corporeality, sensibility and identity that exist beyond a
universalist logic of representation that qualifies identity as working in
oppositional pairs. Another level of aesthetic and ethical sensibility and
appeal that concerns itself with hearing disabled masculine embodied
subjects’ lived relationships and experience of becoming in the world is
required.
As canvassed above, elements of Corker’s and Asch’s work combine
with that of Overboe and Davis to indicate that disability is a sensual, sen-
suous and lived experience and identity that is multiply mediated in and
through embodied encounters of interaction and exchange. Recognition
of this fact can enable scholars to hear the relational dimensions of
embodied experience and identity construction. There is a requirement
to hear difference as a process of ongoing negotiation and connection
between embodied beings, where there is potential for identity transfer.
In Margrit Shildrick’s terms, the issue might be described as ‘one not only
liv  Introductory Essay

of contesting the epistemological and ontological boundaries of bodies

and knowledge and bodies of matter, but reconfiguring an [embodied]
ethics of relationship’ (1999, p. 78). There is a need to find tools to look,
listen and hear anew, and to move towards an aesthetic performed and
actively navigated in pleasure and in pain, constrained and propelled
amid and by the experience of masculinity and disability.
A post-essentialist approach may be read to draw in varying ways and
registers in the ten empirical chapters that constitute this book, and can
open analysis to a consideration of the aesthetic practices, techniques and
sensuous pleasures involved in the reconstruction and performance of
embodied identities. A post-essentialist approach works to interrogate
the body that is presupposed in any of its sites of focus. This includes
academic fields and disciplines. It includes institutional and vocational
sites of care and work and the labours and layers of self-care that are
at work in non-institutional and ‘private’ spheres. It includes the ‘com-
monsense’ and ‘the ideal’ mobilised in media and advertising. For these
reasons, post-essentialism functions as a resource and tool (Crowley and
Loeser 2009, p. 15). It is also a concept for inquiry into the workings of
interdisciplinarity which does not by virtue of its existence necessarily
provide any paradigmatic shift to the body and its trace. In its capacity
to explore the various form of presence that the body takes, post-essen-
tialism makes it possible to consider the body as and through affect, as
lived and performative. It helps facilitate an analysis of being and becom-
ing through stylisation and techniques of the self that are routinely and
creatively practiced, while also being a site of sociality, control and invest-
ment. Finally, and as will be demonstrated in varying ways throughout
the chapters that constitute this book, post-essentialism works to show
‘those truly incongruous acts that humans routinely live—the ability to
be self-deprecating without falling apart or shattering ones self-esteem; to
make the space for foibles as well as acts of courage as one, for instance,
lives against the grain’ (Crowley and Loeser 2009, pp. 15-16).
The theoretical and conceptual treatment of disabled masculinities in
the various chapters of this book can be read to engage, in different ways,
a post-essentialist practice that attends to embodied subjectivity, not as a
fixed essence waiting to be ‘discovered’, but rather as an ongoing experi-
ential process of differentiation that is relentless in repetition, while being
   
  Introductory Essay  lv

subject to redefinition, transformation and exchange. Post-essentialism

demands a pragmatic interrogation of the lived, intersubjective condi-
tions in which embodied subjectivity is constructed. Section 2 addresses
the material and structural socio-political conditions that which inform
the lives of men with a disability. Following this, attention is drawn to
the ways that embodied experience also informs the process of scholarly
inquiry in this book, particularly in relation to the situatedness of sub-
jects in the social relations of research production. Section 3 forms part of
the broader critique of the isolated, trans-historical and self-same subject
assumed in essentialist models of identity, as well as those logics of repre-
sentation inherent in some strand of anti-essentialist thought.

Section 2: The Material Conditions of Disability

and Masculine Embodiment
The concern with highlighting the materiality of inequality in disabil-
ity studies speaks to broader debates in the field about the relationship
between academics and activists and the efficacy of theory for addressing
inequality. In terms of the latter a too familiar oppositional debate has
occurred between those who advocate for a materialist perspective and
those who take a poststructural approach to the subject. Illustrative of the
former is the work of Erevelles (2011: 26) who argues for a ‘materialist’
conception of disability that focuses on ‘the actual social and economic
conditions that impact (disabled) people’s lives, and that are concurrently
mediated by the politics of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and nation’.
What is problematic about such a claim is that it infers that a poststruc-
tural approach is devoid of material concerns and political imperatives.
This is somewhat of a simplistic and reductive characterisation of post-
structural theorising. Indeed, as work by poststructural disability scholars
such as Corker (1999a, 1999b) and Shakespeare (1999) has demon-
strated, the socio-material experiences of everyday life for people with
a disability can be brought to the fore through a focus on discourse and
language. Such writers have been attuned to what Probyn (2008, p. 403)
has eloquently described as ‘the heavy materiality of discourse.’ What is
also overlooked in the types of claims made by authors such as Erevelles
lvi  Introductory Essay

(2011) is the conceptual shift to ‘new materialism’ and the fact that many
contemporary disability scholars are fusing materialist and poststructural-
ist perspectives to illuminate the lives of people with a disability (Corlett
et al 2013; Soderstrom 2016).
In light of the above we are mindful of not reifying binary conceptions
of materialist and poststructuralist perspectives nor misrepresenting the
potential socio-political and socio-economic dimensions of a poststruc-
turalist perspectives. We are similarly aware that while some disability
scholars have positioned theory and politics in dualistic terms (Barnes
2012) others have not only seen them as interlinked but as mutually
beneficial (e.g. Symeonidou 2006).
With these caveats we nevertheless believe that it is important to empha-
sise some of the structural conditions which inform the lives of men with
a disability. Notably, regardless of their country of origin people with a
disability are more likely to live in poverty than their able bodied coun-
terparts (Palmer 2011). In a study drawing on data from fifteen countries
in the developing world Mitra et al (2013: 1) writes that ‘disability is
found to be significantly associated with higher multidimensional pov-
erty as well as lower educational attainment, lower employment rates and
higher medical expenditures’. In our own country, Australia, a quarter of
a people with a disability live below the poverty line (ACOSS 2014). The
most recent census data reveals that nearly half (45%) of people with a
disability of working age were not in the labour force and more than half
of these (59%) were permanently unable to work (ABS 2012). Relatedly,
school completion rates as well as university participation remain mark-
edly lower for people with a disability across the country (ABS 2009).
Despite the impoverished material circumstances of the great major-
ity of people with a disability government reform measures over the past
few decades have led to a withdrawal and/or reduction in welfare support
and in the provision of related social services. The diminishment of the
state and the promotion of the free market along with the champion-
ing of individualism and the linking of welfare to participation in the
labour market have had dire consequences for people with a disability.
In this respect Wilton and Schuer’s (2006) Canadian study of workforce
opportunities for people with a disability is instructive. They find that
some employers construct people with a disability as unemployable while
others talk of utilising a level playing field in recruiting but fail to provide
   
  Introductory Essay  lvii

address issues of access or accommodation. As the authors conclude the

championing of paid work for people with a disability occurs without
a willingness to dismantle the constraints of ‘disabling workplaces and
labour process’ (Wilton and Schuer 2006, p. 194). Writing from India
on the same subject, Kumar et al (2012) note that alongside neoliberal
reform, workplace discrimination against people with a disability remains
intact. Thus employment profile for disabled people is characterised by
low participation, poor pay and limited career advancement. In reporting
their results they remind us that the position of people with a disability
in India is inflected by a range of complex social locations such as caste,
religion and geographic location. For example, they note that while their
own sample was urban based three quarters of people with a disability in
Indian reside in rural areas.
As neoliberalism rose to ascendency across the globe the world faced
a global financial crisis. The austerity measures introduced by capitalist
regimes to address the economic problems they faced have had dire con-
sequences for people with a disability who have seen further significant
reductions in welfare and social provisions (Oliver and Barnes 2012). A
report from the European Disability Forum (2012) identifies some key
trends in national responses to the crisis which have been detrimental
for people with a disability. These include revisioning the definition of
disability so that fewer people can claim benefits, cutting disability allow-
ances and reducing hours for carers and support staff. They also explain
that massive reductions in mainstream services in areas such as health
and education unduly affect people with a disability. Also cut as a result
of austerity measures have been training and education budgets for dis-
ability service providers and money for the funding of advocacy and rep-
resentative organisations (ECF Study 2013). Thus, across the world the
material conditions of people with a disability has dramatically worsened
in recent years rather than improved.

Section 3: Representation Matters

We are concerned in this book to navigate across and though interior
worlds that are embodied experiences and that may simultaneously be
the externalised and observed world that may and may not be felt, and
lviii  Introductory Essay

known, through actual disability. It is clear that ‘disability’ is incommen-

surate and while structural and historical oppressions and erasures feature,
their minutiae filtered through forms of ‘disability’ make for important
particular insights that hold and practice potential resonance for others.
Being incommensurate presents possibilities—the creative interpretation
and application to one’s experience, knowing and conjecture as we indi-
vidually and collectively build towards more liveable worlds informed by
an openness towards what is, what might, and what can be.
It is experience that brings each of us as editors and authors to this
edited collection, it’s making and the development of its content. On
the one hand, there is the irony and banality that three observably white
women have worked on the project that is disability and masculinities.
On the other hand, the conditions of corporeality, pedagogy and the
critique of otherness attached to the central theme interrupt (we hope)
the pull of any reductiveness in the banality of ‘three observably white
women’ editors.
The observably banal is no small issue. Indeed, it warrants serious
attention as, in many ways, the banality of this observable ‘irony’ is very
significant. First, it begs the question inside any disability discourse of ‘the
observable’—the ‘obvious’—what is and what is not read and readable as
‘disability’ and where a default position of disability lingers. The default
position of disability, we would contend, has profound and enduring
connections with ‘deformity’, ‘impaired cognition’, ‘madness’, the ‘gro-
tesque’—the mentally and/or physically ‘crippled’. While the chapters
in this book intervene and explore depths beyond the default we believe
that is important to pause to briefly consider its durability and enduring
presence. ‘Default disability’ is like a default position in computer set-
tings, the underpinning setting, a ‘pre-set’ outside of user intervention.
It is ever-present.
An example of default disability as ever-present was witnessed and
experienced recently while on a paid boat trip exploring remote reaches of
a river and its pristine forests. Passengers were greeted on board the boat
by a young man whose speech indicated that he was hearing impaired.
He wore a small hearing aid in one ear and a very large hearing aid in
the other. Later, one of the members of our group said, ‘Your little friend
   
  Introductory Essay  lix

is upstairs serving at the bar’. Many things are wrapped up in these few
words and it was heard with the sense of body blow—shock, assault, rage.
First, there was nothing ‘little’ about the young man. He was robust,
strong, tall, as ‘fine a specimen of young masculinity’ as one might imag-
ine, although after hearing him speak thoughts occurred about the con-
nection between hearing disability and physical fitness, how being deaf
is often accompanied with a retreat into the self and school-yard experi-
ences of, for instance, not being picked in sports teams. Simultaneous
figuring that one’s physical fitness is influenced by many things includ-
ing sheer whim, proclivity, desire, taste, interest—and this worker’s body
comportment at this time may have nothing to do with speech or hear-
ing. Immediately connected with ‘little’ is the infantilising of people with
disabilities. It is a default position that begs the question: Is it still not
possible to be read as fully adult when one has an obvious disability? Of
course, it is, but this is no small struggle and clearly it is a struggle that
is far from over. Secondly, there is the connection of ‘Your … friend’. I
had chatted to the young man, pretty much as anyone would chat when
greeted on board a boat a paid event that was by its very nature going to
be social as well as cultural. One performs certain civilities. I had noticed
his hearing and speech and actually looked to see if he had a cochlear
implant. I had been reminded of my mother and her hearing. She too
wore one very small hearing aid and one very large one, and while born
with a hearing problem (bone structure) it was rheumatic fever and mea-
sles that added to her problem as well as the third genetic factor of female
deafness in the family. But I had not spoken of these things. They were
interior musings. What then makes this young man ‘your...friend’? It is a
bunching together of disability as familiars—(y)our friendship instanced
because he and I both have hearing impairments. Each person in this
moment was stripped of individuality and the right to be more than the
very different hearing disabilities.
After years of knowing the struggles of the hearing impaired, of actu-
ally being employed in areas of social justice—how could it be that such a
phrase would so easily be uttered by someone who seemingly knows this
stuff? It was clearly witness to default disability—an always less, an actual
incomprehensibility of a whole of being if one is not abled. Likely many
on board the boat that and every other day, had a back-story and pre-set
lx  Introductory Essay

that, one way or another, impinged on, and undermined the world of
someone with a hearing impairment.
In wondering about default disability we, as editors of this anthol-
ogy, are also aware of the deep and profound historical contexts. We
are reminded of a friend from an Indigenous community in Central
Australia, a once brilliant soft-baller, pitcher and batter of local renown.
At forty-two years of age she had a stroke and because of her histori-
cally forced (re)location, living on an Indigenous community and her
colonially contingent health status, the consequences of her stroke were,
and continue to be, at the outer realms of good, immediate and constant
care. Infrastructurally impoverished, her community cannot care for her
24/7. She cries for her country and longs to live at home. Instead, on
two separate days a week she visits. But these visits have only been made
possible by the generosity of friends who found, bought and transported
from New South Wales to Alice Springs, a suitable, off-road and off-
footpath wheelchair that is rugged, comfortable and durable. Here, we
are reminded of default disability that does not take into account colo-
nialism and its legacies. Default disability is very rarely challenged for
the centrality of the disabling imprimatur of ‘medicalized colonialism’
(see Chapter 1 in this book by Roman and Eldridge and Roman, Brown,
Noble, Wainer & Young 2009). We may consider, ‘race, class, gender’,
but what of First Nations, colonialism, its dis-abling continuities, lega-
cies, immediacies and their aftermath?
For many years, one of us taught a large Honours Research Methods
class in media, communications and cultural studies. In one atypical year,
there were only 5 enrolled students and each, as it turned out, had a dis-
ability and the class assumed an altogether different pace. The literature
for this course was now read through a close collective and connected
awareness and each uttered and read word was never default disability
nor wholly able-bodied.
Two other examples spring to mind. One night an email was received
from a young acquaintance from a remote town in Western Australia. She
wrote of her despair and signed it with a male name—could she please
write to me using another name as the person he is at night, at home,
with his speech assistive device. What place in a remote town for queer,
trans-performing Christians with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis? How does
   
  Introductory Essay  lxi

one write of one’s sexuality, sexual desire on a device that has nothing to
indicate that it is sex-positive, that has no sexual language whatsoever?
Default disability is profoundly heteronormative. Transgender has been
a massive struggle in queer worlds, let alone white, able-bodied and even
disability discourse. Cisgender (‘non-transgender’ term for someone who
has a gender identity that aligns with what they were assigned at birth),
queer, normative, darque, kink-culture…words that can be difficult to
speak may be terrifyingly difficult in disability worlds that are dependent
on programmed machines. And in the instance cited above, the world of
religious belief, and religious communities of support, may be massively
disempowering. The default at work in assistive technology is as hetero-
normative as it is sexuality denying.
And then there are moments such as at the funeral of a young man
with muscular dystrophy, where other young men with muscular dystro-
phy create a guard of honour as the coffin entered and exited the funeral
service and the young girl-friend who had cerebral palsy and could not
wipe her tears, could not put her hands to her face for some privacy—
whose physicality meant that her grief had to be totally public. To observe
these events is, for most people, to be utterly situated in default disability
where one’s own ability is augmented as problematic and as incomplete.
It is an example of observing beyond the familiar and where category has
unequivocal particularity. Still further it is an example where death and
dying are on the one hand a kind of cavalier inevitability (disabled people
die young), and in the case of muscular dystrophy a slow everyday appar-
ent, and on the other hand as if out of reach and the realm of affective
experience of disability and disabled. This is over and above the norma-
tive strictures of contemporary western cultures and its avoidance and
denial of death, dying and grief.
Still further, as editors and activists we are struck by the absence of
disability discourse in the global and Australian analysis of the Syrian
refugee and asylum crisis. Until 2012 Australia, for instance, had clauses
in immigration that made it extremely difficult for people with disabili-
ties to migrate. What questions might we be asking of this given also that
migration to Australia is about employment and financial categories—
categories that have significant gender implications? What of refugees
and asylum seekers with disabilities? Are they unable to apply, must they
lxii  Introductory Essay

wait at home while their family members walk, catch boats and line-up
for recognition and safe-haven? Who cares for them at home? What is the
nexus of disability and masculinities in such events? How might analysis
and policy be disabling and disability making, especially in relation to
mental health? What is the almost inevitable status of disability in the
short and long-term?
These kinds of events and evidence of default and pre-set are men-
tioned here not to berate or depress, but rather to instantiate the need
for the question and quest of corporeality, pedagogy and the critique of
Otherness. It is to imprint departure, the actual presence of the so very
much more within the obvious and it’s often banality.
Pedagogy appears and occurs in all kinds of places and contexts. It can
be the interiorised workings of disability and the able-bodied. It may arise
and be enacted through observation that is confrontation with schema
and realisations that deep in western and eastern discourse is the able
body and histories whose legacies suggest a pre-set that must be altered.
Critique is, as Foucault (1990) and Butler (2002) argue, about the kind
of questions we ask, what the questions perform, how the subject is con-
stituted, what techniques of the self are in play and what kind of subjec-
tive crisis prompts analysis (Boland 2007). Thus ostensibly three white
women approach disability and masculinities as a collaboration that is
mindful of corporeality, pedagogy, and the critique of otherness in ways
that interrogate the banal and the obvious in a practice that we all hope
inspire further critique, reflection, action and creativity that defy an old
default and pre-set to replace with nuance, intricacies and an openness to
the more that is to come.

Section 4: Future Directions

This seminal book does not claim to be a comprehensive account of the
plethora of ways that masculinity intersects with disability in and across
the multiple sites in which it is imagined and experienced. The editors
are aware of the limitations of the research and data that comes primarily
from nation-states such as Australia, the United Kingdom, the United
   
  Introductory Essay  lxiii

States and Canada often inattentive to First Nations, warfare and dis-
placement (although Chapter 1 by Roman and Eldridge focuses on the
Indigenous Anishinaabe community of Shoal Lake 40, Canada). As an
amalgamated collection of works focused explicitly on disabled mascu-
linities, the book stands as a contribution to what we hope will further
initiate new and emerging studies that address this largely under-theo-
rised area of research.
In particular, and at this time, we note that the development of this
edited collection, for instance, has occurred during the Syrian refugee
crisis3 with the world seeing a mass movement and displacement of peo-
ples—a refugee and asylum situation without contemporary peer, and a
generation after the Rwandan exodus. The relationship between refugee
crisis and asylum-seeking to questions of disability and masculinities has
barely surfaced and is most certainly yet to be comprehensively inves-
tigated. In this collection, however, the very premise of understanding
‘disability’ is profoundly challenged with an argument being made by
Roman and Eldridge about colonisation as a disabling, disability-making
enterprise and in particular, as it immediately relates to First Nations
peoples. Critical in this challenge is the issue of expansively grappling
with rhetoric, rationale and ideation of practices of displacement and
removal via questions of effect and consequences that are inevitable, long
term, but not without the possibility of resolution.
Disability and Masculinities: Corporeality, Pedagogy and Otherness has
not been able to secure and include writing that takes the kinds of ques-
tions that Roman and Eldridge command to how we frame, understand
and query the position of asylum seeking and asylum provision, disability
and masculinities. Yet the parameters of the book most certainly open the
ground for questions that attend to and move deeply into issues of care,
how nations allow, or disallow, people with disabilities to seek asylum
and how this, in particular strikes masculinities. It is most certainly time

3
 The figure of 4.7 million Syrian refugees is listed as being in neighbouring countries with a figure
of almost 1 million people applying for refugee status in Europe and the UN estimating over 6
million internally displaced in Syria.  See  <https://www.mercycorps.org/articles/iraq-jordan-leba-
non-syria-turkey/quick-facts-what-you-need-know-about-syria-crisis> website updated 16 June,
2016.
lxiv  Introductory Essay

to engage with the historical and contingent wisdoms of First Nations

peoples and the material options, critique and possibility they offer.
Still further, we look forward to futures in which refugee and dispos-
sessed persons, persons living with HIV AIDS, parenting and fathering,
the Global South-Global North, Indigenous, First Nations, suicide sur-
vivors, elite athletes, ageing and older men, incarceration and disability,
disabled boys in pre-school, childcare, schools and tertiary institutions,
still more on eroticism and fetish cultures, work, social engagement and
friendship, the arts, social media, war, literature, digital media, and sexu-
alities are visible, heard and central.
Clearly, there is work to be done.

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Part I
Of Pedagogy
 1
‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal
Lake 40’s Mirror on Global Northern
Disability Studies and Public Pedagogies
Leslie G. Roman and Sam Eldridge

It would be a crime in any anthology on feminism, disability and mascu-

linity to go silent on Canada’s present historical conjuncture of neo-­liberal
“medicalized colonialism”1 and state-produced masculinist human rights
abuses--the making of some as ‘unfit’, unhealthy, disabled, and certainly
without basic human rights for over one hundred years in the First Nations
reserve called Shoal Lake 40 in Ontario, Canada. Global Southern perspec-
tives and priorities are rarely available or nearly as well-­known as Global
Northern issues and priorities within the interdisciplinary field of Disability
Studies. Indeed, just as the nation-building project of Canada has relied
on certain fictions and hidden narratives within its ‘founding’ histories, so
too does the work within Disability Studies scholarship that fails to engage

L.G. Roman (*)

Department of Educational Studies, Faculty of Education, UBC and Affiliate
of the Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Social Justice Institute, University of
British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
S. Eldridge
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

© The Author(s) 2017 3

C. Loeser et al. (eds.), Disability and Masculinities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53477-4_1
4  L.G. Roman and S. Eldridge

Global Southern perspectives on disability and health within Northern

First World countries such as Canada. While much of Disability Studies
scholarship enjoys the conferred privileges of its Global Northern epistemic
locations and perspectives, including those of class and race, the disabling
effects of masculinist neo-colonial state material deprivation and lack of
access to clean drinking water are still ongoing in Shoal Lake 40, as well
as in 130 other First Nations communities living on Boil Water advisories
or Orders in Canada.2 Limited recent efforts by a small number of authors
(Chouinard 2015; Grech, 2015a, 2015b, 2009; Connell 2011; Erevelles,
2011; Meekosha 2011; 2008; Hiranandani & Sonpal 2010; Roman, Brown,
Noble, Young, & Wainer, 2009; Soldatic & Biyanwila 2006) have begun to
recognize that Disability Studies as an interdisciplinary field of knowledge
has not confronted vastly unequal global patterns of impairment, especially
through a materialist analysis of medicalized colonialism within different
historical conjunctures and socio-political places and spaces. Our argument
goes one step further: it calls to task the denial of Global Southern realities
within Global Northern countries such as Canada. In Canada, the ring
of the national anthem, “O Canada”3 neither provides patriotic comfort
nor access to healthy enabling living conditions such as freely available
clean drinking water, infrastructure for sewage and sanitation systems, and
access to an all-weather road linking the small First Nation community to
the larger metropolitan city of Winnipeg where all of this is available due
to supply of water piped into Winnipeg from Shoal Lake 40. Confined
or marooned on a settler-made ‘island’ some one hundred years ago and
denied access to clean water and all-weather road, Shoal Lake’s cries for help
read like a “relational genealogy” (Roman, 2004, 2006; Roman, Brown,
Noble, Wainer, & Young, 2009) of Global Northern white settler privilege
and human rights’ abuses of medicalized colonialism in which modernity
has left its violent marks on the bodies and people of Shoal Lake 40.
The community constituting what is now considered the Shoal Lake
Reserve 40 was isolated on a peninsula in the early 1900s in a colonial
initiative in which two large portions of the reserve land were to taken to
gain valuable access to their lake for Winnipeg’s drinking water aqueduct
(Perry & Ives, 2015). The construction of a dyke and diversion canal
directed tannin-laden waters away from the settler city of Winnipeg,
funneling them instead into the now artificially displaced First Nations
community of Shoal Lake 40.4 While the clean water flowed west to
 1  ‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal Lake 40’s Mirror... 
   5

Winnipeg, the Shoal Lake 40 community was consigned to drink the

foul water. This has resulted in a cascade of oppressions for several decades
and a Boil Water advisory for the last two decades. To compound these
already difficult material matters, the Shoal Lake 40 community has no
all-weather road to leave their settler-made and hardly pastoral artificially
isolated island, bearing continuities with the parole and confinement of
the colonial asylums (Roman, Brown, Noble, Wainer & Young, 2009)
and trapping community members who are cut off from the mainland.
They must rely on an old barge during the summer and a treacherous
and at times fatal trek on foot over the newly frozen or thawing ice in
the Spring and Fall months (Puxley, 2015a). Winnipeg in effect got
the fresh water its residents needed at the expense of clean water and
access to health care, education, social services, and employment for the
First Nations people of Shoal Lake 40. Canadian Press writer Chinta
Puxley put the stone cold material reality this way: “while clean water
flows down the aqueduct, murky water is diverted to the First Nation”
(2015b). However, her statement tells only a small portion of the story. A
lack of a material road and all of the material conditions of equality and
justice that go with clean drinking water, access to health care, education
and employment available on the Winnipeg ‘mainland’ but out of reach
for this small Anishinaabe nation constitutes something graver than can
be addressed with an overture to a missing intersection or the theoretical
applique of feminist ‘intersectional theory’ to yet another missing social
group in the mantra of race, class, and gender. Indeed, the lack of a road
makes the recourse to intersectional theory immaterial.

 ompounding Differences, Problematizing

C
Intersectionality and Metaphorization
Our essay articulates what it means to take up the challenge of Global
South priorities within Global Northern feminist disability theorization
and political work. It also articulates the ‘zones of exception’ (Agamben
1998, p.6) in Disability Studies, a field which rarely engages with the
devastating consequences of colonialism for Indigenous peoples every-
where, most particularly women and children in the Global South of the
Global North, but also in the Global South beyond the borders of Global
6  L.G. Roman and S. Eldridge

North countries. Using feminist historian Nancy Hewitt’s declaration

that “compounding differences” (1992, p. 313) is analogous to chemical
concoctions mixed or compounded by chemists provides a better way
to think about the social constitution of nation, race, gender, dis/ability,
class, sexuality than the sometimes flattening metaphor and concept of
intersectionality. For example, women and children in Global Southern
spaces (or the spaces and places of the South within the Global North,
like Shoal Lake 40) are most at risk for suffering differences not ade-
quately captured through the metaphor or concept of ‘intersectionality’
since there is literally no road for Shoal Lake 40 to connect it to adequate
clean drinking water. For our purposes here, the failure to contemplate
medicalized colonialism in feminist Disability Studies is a matter of com-
pounding difference and inequalities rather than simply a missed intersec-
tion that must be integrated into existing theorization. We will point not
only to the much needed call for more work with Global South disability
activists and scholars to learn about the priorities of specific communi-
ties, our counter-parts in the world; but also for the need to understand
Global South material realities within Global Northern countries that
disable (both literally and metaphorically) actual women, children, men,
trans-genders, and elders in particular communities, places, and spaces.
The political spatialization of ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998, p.  6) and its
‘exceptions’ as residual ‘Global Souths’ within the modern states of the
Global North should draw our attention back to Helen Meekosha’s work
on the Global South and Disability Studies (Meekosha 2011, Meekosha
& Soldatic 2011; Meekosha, 2008). It should also draw our attention
to the often-misplaced priorities of Canadian, British, Australian, and
other Global North locales announcing themselves/ourselves as places of
greater accessibility for disabled people when the local Indigenous nations
are often living with or barely surviving and sometimes dying from in the
compounding effects of poverty, neo-colonialism and the unhealthy con-
ditions and havoc they reap for multiple generations. The unrecognized
or worse yet, erasure of the presence of communities living in Global
Southern conditions while making pronouncements of ‘new accessibility’
does an injustice to critical Disability Studies as scholarship, activism and
organizational community work. Pronouncements of ‘the new accessibil-
ity’ which occur without analysis of medicalised (neo)colonialism fail to
 1  ‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal Lake 40’s Mirror... 
   7

countenance the entwining systemic forces of racialized and Indigenized

poverty that (re)produce disabling effects in our present conjuncture
within Global North geo-political nations, cities, and rural spaces.5 In
Canada, for example, First Nations people experience disability at twice
the average national rate and have far higher incidences of ‘environmental
and trauma-related disabilities’ than the settler population (Durst et al.
2006, p. 35, emphasis added). As Naomi Adelson suggests in a review of
‘Aboriginal’ health statistics in Canada, “unacceptable living conditions,
simply put, make people sick” (2005, p. 57). She points specifically to pre-
ventable infectious diseases like shigellosis, a bacterial infection caused by
“poor water quality, inadequate sewage disposal, and, indirectly, poverty”
that at the time of her writing occurred in First Nations communities at a
shocking 19.3 times the national rate (2005, p. 57). First Nations women
continue to “face a disproportionate proportion of the burden of poverty
and its concomitant social and health effects” (Adelson, 2005, p.  53).
First Nations communities located on reserve are 90 times more likely to
be without running water than the rest of Canadian society, a disturb-
ing reality that Shawn A-in-chut Atleo, National Chief of the Assembly
of First Nations summarizes with the statement, “there isn’t a week that
goes by when a chief doesn’t come to me and say ‘the children in my com-
munity are getting sick and dying from the lack of proper access to clean
drinking water, to proper infrastructure in our communities’” (Mifflin
& Mifflin, 2015). As Stewart Redsky, an addictions counselor notes, “I
do know the forced isolation of our community on a man-made island
just compounds the addictions, the alcoholism, the drugs, and the social
problems in general” (APTN, 2014). Why are such priorities still absent
presences in our discourses, activism, arts’ movements and conceptions
of ‘new disability accessibility’? What taken for granted human rights
and privileges afford the capacity not to consider these spaces of political
devastation and Indigenous survivance (Vizenor, 2009)? What privileges
shape our continued lack of engagement with the unevenly dispersed ter-
rain of disability in our affluent Northern locations and perspectives at
home and across the world?
To encounter an intersection, one must first see where the signifiers for
race, class, gender, nation, and disability actually cross, a metaphor that
brings to mind roads crisscrossing. Shoal Lake 40 exists in a place where
8  L.G. Roman and S. Eldridge

there is no road to cross, on an artificial island where for much of the year
there is no safe means of going or coming, even by boat. The basic ser-
vices available in Winnipeg, including access to clean water, health care,
education, and employment, are rendered inaccessible to this community
without a road; this forced isolation has been ongoing since 1915 (Perry
& Ives, 2015). How can we confront the disabling physical absence of
an all-weather road to the Shoal Lake 40 reserve with metaphors that
require us to imagine the intersections of oppression as though they are
places where roads meet? Taking the absent road seriously highlights the
ways in which our theorizations as white settlers and feminist disabil-
ity scholars are complicit in the treatment of colonialism or disability
as metaphors. The absent road also troubles the idea that colonialism
is simply a process untouched by disabling nation-state practices that
endanger and disable communities not only with labels of ‘unfitness’ but
also with lack of adequate health care and basic human rights. The absent
road troubles both the primacy and conception of intersectionality as an
explanatory method or as an adequate metaphorical starting place for our
work, which has largely neglected practices of medicalized colonialism as
a priority within feminist Disability Studies. Consider this testimonial
evidence of just one kind of impact of the lack of a road, spelling the lack
of access to emergency health care services. Although more than 30 years
have passed, Janice Redsky still vividly recalls to Globe & Mail reporter
Chinta Puxley (2015c) that she could see the flashing lights of the ambu-
lance she needed desperately needed but could not access. She was in
crippling abdominal pain, stranded on her Shoal Lake 40 reserve—but
the ­ambulance sat on the opposite shore, less than a kilometer away in
sight but out of reach. Her husband, Stewart Redsky, tried to find another
way to cross. Breaking down in tears, he told Puxley, “All we could do
was look at the ambulance – a physical view of help waiting across the
water.” Both watched helplessly while the ambulance turned around and
drove away. Janice Redsky was taken to the hospital in Kenora another
two hours later. But that was too late: she miscarried, losing the baby.
Janice Redsky, who loves children, is a daycare teacher, and foster parent,
was then told she could have no more children. Her husband, Stewart
said, “It still traumatizes me to this day. I always wonder if we had help
 1  ‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal Lake 40’s Mirror... 
   9

immediately, if those three hours would have made a difference” (Puxley

2015c).

 odernity’s Medicalized colonialism,

M
Metaphorization and ‘Bare Life’
While it may be the literary trend to use disability or colonialism as meta-
phors, we argue that such metaphorization adds further symbolic violence
to the material and lived consequences of those made most vulnerable,
as well those who have died as a result of ongoing masculinist and dis-
abling state practices and policies that perpetuate medicalized colonial-
ism. By tracing the historical and present conditions of inaccessibility in
Shoal Lake 40 to their medicalised colonial roots and treating this case
as emblematic of the peoples’ living legacies, we will problematize the
dangers in current feminist Disability Studies of priorities that too often
render invisible and unspoken colonial, masculinist nation-building and
nation-destruction policies and practices. We begin to countenance the
policies and practices that fail to hear or drown out the cries of fathers,
mothers, and children for basic human rights—for the right to be heard,
responded to with dignity, and allocated the necessary material resources
and for the right to obtain commitment from many branches of Canadian
government to a politics that takes seriously Shoal Lake 40 residents as
human beings. The silence and complicity of the colonial Canadian gov-
ernment in the failure to finance the building of a material road which
would provide access to clean water, health care services, education and
employment to Shoal Lake 40 cannot be explained as anything other
than the long road to dead-end and deadening effects of medicalized
colonialism, culminating in former Canadian Prime Minister’s Harper’s
masculinist policy attack on First Nations women, children and men.
Harper’s masculinist and colonial state policies combine with one cen-
tury of violence under modernity’s medicalized colonialism to condense
the Shoal Lake 40 reserve into what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls
“zones of exceptions” and “bare life” (1998, p. 6) within the Canadian
liberal nation-state. We do well to recall Agamben’s conception of “zones
10  L.G. Roman and S. Eldridge

of exception,” conceived as a corrective to the Foucauldian thesis of dis-

ciplinary power (Agamben 1998, p. 9):

The Foucauldian thesis will then have to be corrected or, at least, com-
pleted, in the sense that what characterizes modern politics is not so much
the inclusion of zoe in the polis--which is, in itself, absolutely ancient--nor
simply the fact that life as such becomes a principal object of the projec-
tions and calculations of State power. Instead the decisive fact is that,
together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the
rule, the realm of bare life--which is originally situated at the margins of
the political order--gradually begins to coincide with the political realm,
and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and
fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. At once excluding bare
life from and capturing it within the political order, the state of exception
actually constituted, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on
which the entire political system rested. When its borders begin to be
blurred, the bare life that dwelt there frees itself in the city and becomes
both subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the one place
for both the organization of State power and emancipation from it.
Everything happens as if, along with the disciplinary process by which
State power makes man as a living being into its own specific object,
another process is set in motion that in large measure corresponds to the
birth of modern democracy, in which man [sic] as a living being present
himself [sic] no longer as an object but as the subject of political power.

What could be further from the margins of the political order—what place
could more embody Agamben’s notion of “bare life”—than the peninsula
on which the Shoal Lake First Nations have been “effectively marooned”
(Bell, 2015, para. 7) for over a hundred years? To understand how the
exception becomes or sustains the rule as Agamben (1998) unfurls in
his argument, we need to turn the clock back to the moments of the
expropriation of land from the Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, although we
simultaneously recognize “the disruption of Indigenous relationships to
land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence.
This violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but
is reasserted each day of occupation” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 5). One
such moment of colonial occupation is captured in a small paragraph
posted in the Kenora Miner and News on September 13, 1913, a para-
 1  ‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal Lake 40’s Mirror... 
   11

graph that ‘notified’ the Shoal Lake community of the Greater Winnipeg
Water District plan for “Utilizing Waters of Shoal Lake for Domestic and
Sanitary Purposes” (Kenora Miner and News, 1913). From this moment,
we travel over uneven and rocky times and spaces to the present, tracing
the ways in which Shoal Lake becomes “maintained in relation to the
rule” (Agamben 1998, p. 18) or maintained by colonial rule as a space
of “bare life” within the political order of Canada. We will connect the
disabling conditions of “bare life” present in the community of Shoal
Lake 40 to broader patterns of infrastructure neglect on reserves, demon-
strating that although Trudeau’s Liberal government, elected in October
2015, has committed long-awaited federal funding for the construction
of “Freedom Road” (Puxley 2015d), the historical trauma to date far
overshadows the symbolism of the road yet to materialize.

Fig. 1.1  Shoal Lake 40 Winnepeg’s Diversion Blocks SL40 from access
to both reserve lands and the Trans-Canada highway. Image credit
and ©2015: Cuyler Cotton.
12  L.G. Roman and S. Eldridge

The Shoal Lake 40 First Nations confinement on the peninsula and

their lack of an all-weather road to access clean water, healthcare, social ser-
vices, education and the employment opportunities of the mainland did
not begin with Canada’s recent former Premier Harper. In fact, it began
with colonialism and the re-territorialisation of First Nations peoples in
which territories were fragmented through treaties meant to isolate com-
munities to prevent unified resistance to colonisation and free large areas
for European settlement. In Shoal Lake 40 Chief Redsky’s own words,
“the Indian Act created…divisions. Their master plan is to divide us, to
make us fight for crumbs. Our communities are being divided rather than
the way it was before treaty” (Ball, 2015, para. 29). The Shoal Lake 40
First Nation was neither separated from its entire nation of people (at
the least those within the borders of Canada) nor the mainland until the
years between 1912-1919, when “the original Ojibwa village, located at
the mouth of the Falcon River at Shoal Lake, was displaced and moved
to a man-made island” (Shoal Lake #40, 2011; Perry, forthcoming 2016)
as the Winnipeg aqueduct project moved toward official completion in
1919. As the aqueduct drew water from a lake system (the Lake of the
Woods), straddling the provincial boundaries of Manitoba and Ontario
as well as the American-Canadian border, the City of Winnipeg had to
apply to the International Joint Commission for approval to divert water
for urban use (Scott, 1938, p. 1879). In its application and plan for the
aqueduct, the Greater Winnipeg Water District asserted “there is virtually
no settlement on the shores of the Lake of the Woods; there are only a few
Indians (sic) part of the year” (Scott, 1938, p. 1879). The deliberate era-
sure of the Indigenous presence in the Shoal Lake area helped justify the
colonial project of resource extraction. The re-visioning of traditional ter-
ritory as empty land epitomizes Agamben’s argument that “the rule applies
to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it” (1998, p. 18,
emphasis in original). Musician, songwriter, storyteller, and blogger Steve
Bell uses his blog and song-writing to create Canadian public pedagogies
about Shoal Lake 40 to address the ongoing “withdrawal” of the province,
state, and settler peoples from the reality faced by the community (2015):

If you don’t know the story, Shoal Lake is where Winnipeg gets its water
from. A hundred years ago, we displaced the community of Shoal Lake 40
First Nation (Kekekoziibii) from their prime land to make way for the
 1  ‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal Lake 40’s Mirror... 
   13

aqueduct that has watered Winnipeg since (some 50 million gallons a day).
The community was forcibly removed to a nearby peninsula that was soon
artificially turned into an island as a result of the aqueduct and canal neces-
sary for its construction. Shoal Lake 40 First Nation has been effectively
marooned since, and the sorrows and suffering as a result of their imposed
isolation are well documented. More recently, the unintended consequence
of the ongoing extraction, in concert with other factors of modernity, has
polluted the lake rendering its waters undrinkable. Winnipeg responded by
building a water treatment plant for its own citizens, but Shoal Lake 40
First Nation has been on a boil-water advisory for 18 years.

 eo-liberal Exceptions as Rules: Water

N
as tourism vs. Water as Human Rights’
Violations
What started as an exception—the forced move of the Shoal Lake 40
reserve to a settler-made island over one hundred years ago—became the
historical rule through an ongoing lack of federal commitment to fund
the construction of ‘Freedom Road’, a project proposed by Shoal Lake
40 to provide not only the physical means to leave their island to access
healthcare but a way to make feasible a water treatment plant, funding
for housing upgrades, economic development, and so on (Puxley, 2015a).
Under such a long history of surviving at the margins of the colonial
political order, Elder Stewart Redsky, who is a trained addictions educa-
tion counselor in the community and grandparent of one Shoal Lake 40
teenager, can no longer reasonably reach for hope or “sell hope” to his
Nation’s people, as he tells Shoal Lake 40’s media representative, Cuyler
Cotton (Personal communication of Cotton with Roman, November 14,
2015). In 2007, Daryl and Stewart Redsky were among the leaders of a
protest march to Winnipeg to signal their community’s resistance to the
Federal Government’s ongoing failure to fund the road and clean water
access so desperately needed in Shoal Lake 40 and to draw attention to
their community’s enforced isolation. The protesters camped out on the
future site of the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg. This
came as a response to the fact that the Federal Government under three
14  L.G. Roman and S. Eldridge

different Prime Ministers had offered varying staggering sums of money

to make the Canadian Museum of Human Rights a national museum
while not funding the construction of the road and access to clean drink-
ing water. Daryl and Stewart Redsky led a protest march of the Shoal
Lake community and its supporters, walking some 150 kilometers to the
intended site of the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in an attempt to
stop the Museum from showing Shoal Lake to tourists as a place of clear
blue rippling water without even the barest mention of the cascading and
compounding health issues caused by the downstream diversion effects of
the aqueduct in the First Nations community. In (2007), Stewart Redsky
also wrote on behalf of his community to the architect, Antoine Predock,
whose website described the Museum’s “Garden of Contemplation” as “a
place of healing and solace” that honors “the First Nations’ sacred rela-
tionship to water” (2014). Stewart Redsky’s 2007 unanswered letter was
resent by Chief Erwin Redsky to Predock in 2014 along with other let-
ters (dating back from 2007-2014) from the Shoal Lake 40 community,
Amnesty International, and Cuyler Cotton, policy analyst for Shoal Lake
40 and former Human Rights officer, attesting to the human rights vio-
lations surrounding the water in Shoal Lake 40 (Shoal Lake #40 First
Nation, 2014a).
Chief Erwin Redsky’s 27 May 2014 Open Letter begins with these
strong words:

Dear Mr. Predock,

RE: Use of Shoal Lake Water in Canadian Museum for Human Rights
I am resorting to this unusual form of open letter because you have not
responded to any of the earlier correspondence on this subject. I hope this
will encourage the courtesy of a reply.

My request is simple: Could you please explain your design decision to use
Shoal Lake water in the Canadian Museum of Human Rights?

In April of 2007, Stewart Redsky, a former Chief, wrote to you and advised
that the lives of and livelihood of our community members have continu-
ally been put at risk by Canada’s expropriation of our lands and our artifi-
cial isolation because of Winnipeg’s water diversion from Shoal Lake.
 1  ‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal Lake 40’s Mirror... 
   15

He then outlines the infuriating indignity of their unanswered letters and

reports (Redsky, 2014a) from Stewart Redsky (2007), Policy Analyst Cuyler
Cotton, a former Human Rights Officer and Amnesty International’s Craig
Benjamin, the latter of whom concludes in his own two page letter dated
June 14, 2011 addressed to Minister Duncan (para. 7) that:

The situation of Shoal Lake 40 First Nation amounts to the denial of fun-
damental human rights, including the rights to livelihood, health and cul-
ture. These rights are protected in binding international treaties to which
Canada is a party and which all levels of government are expected to
uphold.

Chief Erwin Redsky (2014a, p. 2, para 4) voices the outrage of his com-
munity, stating to the architect:

Frankly, it’s deeply disturbing insulting to hear your building promoted as

honoring “the First Nation relationship with water” when the water taken
from Shoal Lake so clearly presents Canada’s continuing violation of
human and aboriginal rights. Surely you must appreciate that as so long as
the water forces the isolation and marginalization of our First Nation ….so
long as our people’s lives are at risk because of that water, your building will
remain a shine, not to human rights, but Canadian hypocrisy.

No clearer declaration could have been made than in the words of Stewart
Redsky’s unanswered 2007 letter included in the Erwin Redsky’s package
of letters and open letter press release of May 2014 (Redsky S, 2007,
para. 3):

The water that you would use in your building has, in fact, been taken at
the expense of our community and our human rights. Our friends and fam-
ily members have literally died in that water. That water is making our
people sick, and Canada’s refusal to stand up for our rights and to correct
the isolation they imposed on us is killing our economy and our
community.

Yet, in a devastating example of disabling neo-liberal and neo-colonial

government practice, the Harper administration reneged on its earlier
16  L.G. Roman and S. Eldridge

promise to commit the estimated one third or 10 million dollars of the

total of $30 million in which the Federal, Provincial and Municipal levels
of government were to be equal fiscal partners to build the all-weather
access ‘Freedom Road’ out of the Shoal Lake 40 reserve. Yet in striking
contrast, the Federal government “essentially took over the [Canadian
Human Rights Museum] project in 2007 and has committed to cover
$21.7 million in annual operating costs” (CBC News, 2014a). Steve
Bell’s blog points out the noteworthy irony that the missing coopera-
tion, political will and material funding etches itself historically in sharp
contrast to the three-part funding cooperation necessary to maintain the
Museum (2015, para. 7):

Ironically, three levels of government (federal, provincial and civic) recently

contributed enormous funds to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights
in downtown Winnipeg, whose taps and toilets run with Shoal Lake water.
Given that 9 people have died in recent memory at the very source of that
water—forced to attempt crossing the channel when the ice was unsafe—it
can be fairly said that the serene contemplation pool at the Canadian
Museum for Human Rights flows with the blood and tears of Shoal Lake
40 First Nation.

In the same open letter press release to architect Antoine Predock, Shoal
Lake 40 Chief Erwin Redsky points out the glaring contradiction of a
Human Rights Museum that features water whose diversion has resulted in
“the denial of fundamental human rights,” to the First Nation, according
to Amnesty International (2014). Enclosing unanswered correspondence
to Predock dating back seven years, Chief Erwin Redsky asked the prize-
winning designer to explain why he would knowingly use such tainted
material in the iconic Human Rights building. Addressing a larger public,
Redsky mocked the pretext of human rights in the image of rippling water
in its Contemplation Garden without the mention of the diversion from
Shoal Lake 40, saying of Predock (Redsky, 2014a, para 3 & 4):

He says his building celebrates the healing properties of water. Ha! I invite
Mr. Predock to come to our community and see for himself what 100 years
of human rights violations over water really looks like. While he’s here,
maybe he can talk to the young mom and the 70 year old elder who fell
 1  ‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal Lake 40’s Mirror... 
   17

through the ice this spring. Maybe he can explain to them all about the
‘healing properties’ of the water he’s using in his reflecting pools because it
almost killed them.

The unresolved injustice of Shoal Lake #40’s forced isolation on a man-­

made island has been a matter of public record for many years. The com-
munity is cut off by the City of Winnipeg’s water intake which was imposed
on the reserve by Canada one hundred years ago. Despite being a short
distance south of the busy Trans-Canada Highway at the Manitoba/
Ontario border, Shoal Lake #40 First Nation remains without secure road
access, is denied normal economic opportunities and has been on a
­boil-­water order for nearly two decades. A number of lives have been lost
as a result of the man-made water-isolated conditions.

Chief Erwin Redsky unfurls the unanswered correspondence from Shoal

Lake 40’s then 2007 former Chief Stewart Redsky, describing the long-­
held concerns of their community sent to Antoine Predock April 24th,
2007 (Redsky S, 2007, para. 12 & 13):

Winnipeg has had running water for almost a century. Shoal Lake #40 just
got running water about eleven years ago but only after Canada forced us
to allow Winnipeg even more intrusions on our land. Our basic water ser-
vices were found to be inadequate to protect against parasites nine years
ago and a boil water advisory was imposed. Ten years later we are still on
the boil water order and Canada has not built a water treatment plant
because it’s too expensive to build on the island that they created!! To this
day, the water continues to be diverted by Winnipeg with the permission
of Canada at the expense of our safety, our lives, our human rights and our
economy. Recent statistics confirm that our community is dying. Unlike all
other surrounding First Nations, a majority of our members have been
forced to leave our homes and live elsewhere, all because of the negative
effects of Winnipeg’s water supply on our land and rights.

Just as Antoine Predock, the architect of the Canadian Human Rights’

Museum, was preening himself to address the opening reception of the
Festival of Architects Wednesday, May 28 of 2014 in Winnipeg in which
he was to receive an award, the community of Shoal Lake 40 summoned
its strength to once again oppose the Federal Government’s priorities
18  L.G. Roman and S. Eldridge

of treating water as tourism and taken-for-granted human rights for

Winnipeg residents while denying Shoal Lake 40 from the most basic of
human rights –access to clean drinking water, a safe road connecting its
community to the mainland’s economic and educational opportunities,
and freedom from the debilitating conditions causing death and impair-
ment due to lack of infrastructure for sewage treatment and an ice-ridden
unsafe passage on the Lake for several months of the year. To protest this
unequal set of relations, they staged a three or four-day occupation at the
Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg. Some seven years after
Stewart Redsky led his community in the 2007 march the 150 kilometers
to Winnipeg, Shoal Lake 40 turned its strategic campaign to protest the
hypocrisy of the healing pools and generate action regarding the total
disregard of human and water rights abuses in Shoal Lake 40 by organiz-
ing its own “Museum of Canadian Human Rights Violations” (Shoal
Lake #40 First Nation, 2014b). Looking to educate the world, members
of Shoal Lake 40 began offering guided tours to the public of Winnipeg’s
source of clean drinking water. Just two hours east of Winnipeg, Shoal
Lake 40’s tours began to attract major media and public attention to
the community’s lack of access to clean drinking water, enforced isola-
tion and lack of a safe all-weather road, lack of infrastructure for sewage
treatment plant and all the attendant basic human rights associated with
access to clean drinking water. Roxanne Greene, one of the organizers
of the Museum of Human Rights Violations and a former Councilor of
Shoal Lake 40 put it this way (Shoal Lake #40 First Nation, 2014b, p. 1):

At the settlers’ end of the water pipe, there’s economic prosperity, clean
drinking water and a 350 million dollar building that advertises ‘healing’
and brags about what a wonderful country Canada is. At our end of the
pipe, we have 17 years of Boil Water Order and no job opportunities. We
are forced to risk our lives for basic necessities. It is important that the
world has the opportunity to see that huge Canadian contradiction.

Volunteers aiding the guided tours asserted that their Museum of Human
Rights Violations is not a “flash in the pan,” vowing that as long as the
run waters run to Winnipeg and the human rights’ violations continue
in Shoal Lake 40, their program of guided tours in the living Museum
 1  ‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal Lake 40’s Mirror... 
   19

of Human Rights Violations will continue (Shoal Lake #40 First Nation,
2014b, p. 1). On September 15, 2014, they staged a peaceful educational
occupation on a hill opposite the Canadian Museum of Human Rights,
encouraging the public people to visit their new Museum of Human
Rights Violations and handing out brochures that describe the highlights
of their tours. Award-winning writer for Walrus magazine, Josiah Neufeld
notes the ironic juxtaposition of the two Museums (2015, para. 1, clari-
fication added):

…[A] knot of people stood outside a teepee opposite the colossal, glass-­
swaddled $350 million edifice [The Canadian Museum of Human Rights].
They handed out brochures advertising another museum—one without ala-
baster railings, interactive digital displays, or wealthy donors. The cheekily
named Museum of Canadian Human Rights Violations is housed in a boxy,
blue hockey arena on an island in Shoal Lake, 150 kilometers east of Winnipeg.

Adele Weder, an award-winning architect and critic of the Canadian

National Museum of Human Rights also observes bitingly in Walrus
magazine that in a province and city with the one of the highest child
poverty rates in Canada, the money wasted on the Canadian Museum of
Human Rights has become a national metaphor for the ‘fork in the road’
(2014, para. 1). Such a misplaced priority also bespeaks the violence of
particular metaphors since the Museum draws on pleasant naturalistic
imagery and metaphors equating Indigenous people with nature amidst
staggering child poverty in Manitoba in which one in every 3.5 children
grow up in poverty (Kaschor, 2015). This staggering figure is not remedi-
ated by a museum building of colossal proportions costing northwards
of 350 million dollars: “a twelve-story mountain of concrete and stone,
120,000 square feet of tempered glass, and 260,000 square feet of floor
space” renders that poverty and its intimate expression in part as the mar-
riage of ableism and colonialism as somehow attractive in metaphorical
terms (Weder, 2014, para. 2). She astutely writes: “the building exudes
metaphor from almost every facet, starting with the entry into its so-­
called Roots (big claw-like protrusions at the base), to a collection of
ramps called the Journey and the Labyrinth, to the pause in the Garden
of Contemplation, to the Cloud (the glass upper facade), and culminat-
ing in the light-filled Tower of Hope” (Weder, 2014, para 2).
20  L.G. Roman and S. Eldridge

Fig. 1.2  Museum of Canadian Human Rights Violations Challenging

Canadian Hypocrisy. Photo credit and copyright: ©2015, Shoal Lake
40 and Museum of Human Rights Violations.

On the other hand, the tongue-in-cheek Museum of Canadian

Human Rights Violations brochure invites guests to book a tour to Shoal
Lake 40 to: “Meet real people struggling to survive with little hope of
development in a severely restricted designated area”; “Be refused clean
drinking water”; “View stolen lands and desecrated burial grounds”; and
“Experience actual restrictions of your own freedom of movement!” (see
Fig. 1.3, Shoal Lake #40 First Nation, 2014b, p. 3).
Shoal Lake 40 began offering tours to the public, taking visitors past
the sewage and garbage dump, past the plastic water bottles either empty
or filled with drinkable water (see Fig. 1.4).
The Museum of Canadian Human Rights Violations is neither palatial
nor confined to the ad-hoc hockey arena. Instead, it is a living museum
that turns tourists into public witnesses of the painful consequences of a
more than a century of enforced isolation. In the absence of properly a
funded sewage and water treatment system, the first stop on the museum
tour is the town garbage dump—a pile of trash dogs forage. Garbage and
 1  ‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal Lake 40’s Mirror... 
   21

Fig. 1.3  Shoal Lake 40 Museum of Human Rights Violations (MHRV)

Brochure p. 1-2, excerpt. Photo Credit and ©2015: Shoal Lake 40 and
Museum of Human Rights Violations.

raw sewage are confined to the artificial island. Fall and Spring—when
the lake freezes and thaws—are especially treacherous when residents
must cross the water to purchase gas and groceries, and to receive m
­ edical
care. Visitors hear directly from the residents of Shoal Lake 40 about the
22  L.G. Roman and S. Eldridge

Fig. 1.4  Water bottle storage handling facility. Photo credit and
©2015: Angela Failler.

stories of people who have lost their lives from falling through the ice or
drowning while attempting to cross.
The concept of touring Shoal Lake 40 as a ‘living museum’ challenges
traditional ideas of what a museum represents. Instead, says Angela Failler,
a Gender Studies professor at the University of Winnipeg who heads an
exemplary Social Sciences Research cultural studies project on Shoal Lake
40, the town’s project is a provocateur of conscience and a challenge to
Western notions of a museum (cited in Neufeld, 2015, para. 6):
 1  ‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal Lake 40’s Mirror... 
   23

They call Shoal Lake 40 a living museum. That is such a great interpreta-
tion. Our idea of a museum is that it has four walls and a collection and
contents, and that authoritative knowledge lives there. This museum turns
that idea inside out and helps us imagine the potential for social-justice
issues to be meaningfully taken up, and for communities to play active
roles as opposed to being audiences or spectators.

In a sharing circle at a community gathering called “the Price of Water,”

Stewart Redsky and other community members share their stories with
officials from the Canadian Museum of Human Rights (Kinew 2014).
The idea that vulnerable ‘citizens’ fall through the cracks of our neo-liberal
societies, takes on new consequential non-metaphorical material mean-
ing when listening to the lived experiences of Shoal Lake 40’s commu-
nity. In a VICE Canada report titled ‘Canada’s Waterless Communities:
Shoal Lake #40,’ Angelina Redsky recalls (Davidson, 2015):

My family’s been through a lot, too, from being isolated and having no
road. My mom was one of the people who lost their lives trying to go
across, and, I believe it was in a canoe, and I believe she capsized and
drowned that night. One of my cousins found her the next day. The last
time I saw her I told her to go away, because I needed a break. And that was
the last time I saw her. So I feel really guilty about that, I think about it all
the time. Because if I didn’t tell her to go away, she’d probably still be here,
you know. I just don’t want anybody else to have to go through what I’ve
been through, and what my family has been through. My children don’t
have a grandmother.

Falling through the ice is life-threatening and since 9 of this small com-
munity have died this way, the lasting consequences bespeak a failing
report card for Canada’s efforts to meet the needs of the most vulnerable.
Linda Redsky testifies (Al Jazeera, 2013):

Me, I went completely under the ice. And I remember…looking up and I

could actually see the stars from underneath the ice. Sometimes…I was
telling my husband, I said you know, I hate living here. I hate living here
during those times. I said it’s frustrating. And sometimes I want to cry
because it’s so frustrating.
24  L.G. Roman and S. Eldridge

After listening to testimony from the people of Shoal Lake 40, includ-
ing the stories of Linda Redsky and her husband barely surviving a fall
through ice while trying to leave the island or Daryl Redsky watching
his mother and sister die in a house fire that burned unchecked due to
a lack of road access for an emergency response vehicle, the Canadian
Museum of Human Rights Director of Communications Angela Cassie
released the following statement: “as a Museum, we cannot play the role
of advocate and activist, or take a position in disputes, but we can work to
build awareness and understanding as part of our educational mandate”
(Kinew 2014, para. 22).
As authors, though, we cannot turn away from the terrible truths that
do not comport with historical fictions of Canadian nation-building.
Consider for example, Daryl Redsky, who witnessed his family members
trapped in a burning house in which there were no firefighters with access
to the water to put the fire in which the house burned. We cannot toler-
ate a disability politics and disability theorization that does not priori-
tize a conversation about his community through—at the very least—an
ongoing critical analysis of masculinist, medicalised colonial actions that
exclude Shoal Lake 40 from experiencing the material human rights sup-
posedly available to all in Canada. Such a conversation would prioritize
how the denial of human rights creates impairment and death for mem-
bers of this First Nation and would result in the building of coalitions
between their community and others like it with major disability rights’
organizations. In a community of a remaining 250 members despite the
economic, educational, and material motivations that might cause them
to move from their home on reserve, nine have died from falling into the
ice or drowning. Neo-liberal cost-accounting expectations demand that
this small community must “spen[d] $1000 per person on imported bot-
tled water and barge costs every year. By contrast, the City of Winnipeg
spends about a third of that, $300 per person, for water from Shoal
Lake. Winnipeg’s operating budget is almost 1,000 times greater than
Shoal Lake 40’s” (Davidson, 2015). It is imperative that we confront
these Global South spaces, places, and the disabling processes within
the Global North. As Chair and President of the Council of Canadians,
Maude Barlow told Steve Ball in his article for the Tyee, “the irony cannot
be lost on somebody like me who’s very involved in getting the UN to
 1  ‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal Lake 40’s Mirror... 
   25

recognize the human right to water. We usually think of that in some far-­
away country but here it is right in our country” (2015, para. 26, empha-
sis added). The “poisoned cup” that Canada proffers to the people of
Shoal Lake 40 is part of a long, medicalised colonial history of disabling
health disparities and unequal access to social/health services between
settler Canadians and First Nations people (Adelson 2005; Bowd 2005).
Notably, “as of January 2015, there were 169 drinking water advisories
(DWA) in 130 First Nations communities across Canada. That repre-
sents 20 per cent of all First Nations communities in Canada” (James and
Rowney, 2015).

Public Despair in Masculinist Disabling Times

On June 25, 2015 CBC News posted a broadcast of Stewart Redsky
and his community weeping out loud in pubic despair after a meeting
at which Natural Resources Minister and Local Member of Parliament,
Greg Rickford, refused to commit Federal resources to help fund the
actual construction of a road connecting the community with the outside
world (Puxley, 2015b). The room erupted with the stunned pained cry
of Stewart Redsky and the community’s junior Chief and Council. The
children featured in the photo below (Fig. 1.5) have grown up as activ-
ists fighting for ‘Freedom Road’, marching to Winnipeg, participating
in the guided tours of the Museum of Human Rights’ Violations and
posting Youtube6 videos to draw public attention to their community’s
desperate situation. The community’s collective cry left us speechless
when it was broadcast on the investigative Global News program called
16 x 9 (James & Rowney, 2015). It was news to our unknowing ears,
which we most certainly acknowledge as part of our own complicity as
settlers in the “state of exception” and “bare life” (Agamben 1998, p. 6).
Redsky’s spontaneous heartfelt tears profoundly affected witnesses who
came to see the Federal Government’s stance as deeply problematic. His
tears also disarmed (even if only momentarily) the disabling masculinist
neo-colonial nation-state, laying bare its pretenses of human rights for all
in Canada. In this regard, his tears can be taken as a deft emotionally-­
knowledgeable and historically-lived critique of national, provincial
26  L.G. Roman and S. Eldridge

Fig. 1.5  Stewart Redsky comforting Junior Chief and Council

Members upon on the Announcement of Canada’s Refusal to
Commit to the Construction of ‘Freedom Road’ on June 25, 2015.
Photo credit: John Wood, access granted to reprint from ©2015
Canadian Free Press.

and municipal policies nation-state set of policies which has traversed

Liberal and Conservative governments over the years. The community’s
tears spoke to a failure of political will to undo the debilitating, death
and disability-­causing distresses of an entire community of First Nations
people at the hands of Canadian officials.
Encountering the image of Stewart Redsky—a man—weeping and
blanketing his arms around Junior Chief and Council members visibly
disheartened after years of their own activist efforts to move the Canadian
nation away from disabling colonial practices and in support of ‘Freedom
Road’ prompts us to ask how Northern Disability Studies can turn its
gaze and activism to the disabling masculinist neo-colonial policies and
practices on the Canadian Federal Government’s part and to other such
related policies? Considering the scale and the devastating and dispiriting
consequences of Federal policy-making, should masculinities on an indi-
 1  ‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal Lake 40’s Mirror... 
   27

vidual level and scale be a priority for our thinking, writing, and activ-
ism in feminist Disability Studies when Stewart Redsky stands before the
public crying for a safe, accessible future for his community facing a his-
tory and material reality of disablement? Erevelles and Minear (2010) call
such examples of dispiriting a body-politic through institutional policies
and practices ‘spirit murder’ after critical race theorist, Patricia Williams.
Should masculinity cast in neo-liberal individualistic terms take a prime
place or be front and center-stage over medicalized colonialism in con-
versations and priorities for accessibility, health, educational, and eco-
nomic justice for disabled people and communities of the Global South
disabled by medicalized colonialism? How can we center our work on the
living conditions of vulnerable communities of the Global South within
the Global North? These are the ‘exceptions’ relegated to the margins of
a medicalizing colonial political order in Canada, as well as in Global
Northern Disability Studies more generally.

Austerity and Indigenous Poverty

The Global News documentary program 16 x 9 also revealed to the
Canadian public a two percent government funding cap on First Nations
infrastructure spending through a telling interview with Scott Serson,
the former Deputy Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada,
“the department known today as Aboriginal Affairs and Northern
Development Canada (AANDC)” (James & Rowney, 2015). Serson
stated that the two percent cap was negotiated in the 1990s as part of
austerity measures meant to help the federal government cope with
economic recession. When the recession lifted in 2004, the govern-
ment “started to reinvest in the provinces, [but] it didn’t reinvest in First
Nations infrastructure as promised. Instead, it kept the two percent fund-
ing cap in place,” a situation that Serson laments in the documentary
footage (James & Rowney, 2015). Former Minister of Aboriginal Affairs
John Duncan revealed after the fact that this underfunding was a deliber-
ate move to “create a larger incentive” for people to seek work (MacLeod,
2015, para. 8). Drawing on the twin ideologies of ‘blame the victim’
and ‘pull yourselves up by your bootstraps,’ Duncan responded to April
28  L.G. Roman and S. Eldridge

Charleson, a chief of the Hesquiaht First Nation, as she described some

of her community’s challenges with poverty at an all candidates meeting
(MacLeod, 2015). Conservative candidate Duncan responded that she
should not expect funding from Ottawa and the Federal Government.
Drawing on her experience in remote community similar to Shoal Lake
40, Charleson called on the candidates to respond, drawing the out the
sharpest contrast among them on the part of Conservative Party candi-
date, Duncan. With unmistakable clarity, she stated: “We’re struggling.
We’re poor,” describing her community on the West Coast of Vancouver
Island, about an hour by boat northwest from Tofino. She noted that her
community is spread out and not on the hydro grid. In case historical
amnesia clouded peoples’ memories, she reminded the candidates and
the public that federally funded assistance rates are tied to provincial wel-
fare rates and have been frozen since 2007! She observed that the few
hundred dollars people receive each month quickly disappear when it
costs a minimum of $250 to charter a boat to get to a place where grocer-
ies are available. The “do-it-yourselves” austerity plans became clear from
Duncan’s paternalistic response to Charleson (MacLeod, 2015, para. 6):

You posed a conundrum. I like to think your neighbours, your tribal coun-
cil, your aboriginal community can see a way past this. I think there should
be a redistribution system, but I think it has to be generated locally. There’s
no way the central government in Ottawa can come up with something
that will work.

Austerity measures which punish the impoverished for the sins of the
wealthy may be the iota of difference between conservative and neo-­
liberal discourses of masculinist nation-state policy rationalizations; how-
ever, both conservative and neo-liberal discourses share the meritocratic
ideology that individuals are responsible for their own so-called ‘plights’
and ‘destinies’. In other words, the thinly veiled medicalised colonial
logic goes: policies do not disable communities; individuals are wrong
to look to their federal government and instead, must look to their own
communities and leaders locally to solve such problems, which are seen
as deficits to be attributable to the communities themselves. With such
infuriating rationalizations, communities such as Shoal Lake 40 often
report feeling a mix of outrage, frustration, despair, and activist resilience.
 1  ‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal Lake 40’s Mirror... 
   29

 rudeau and Moving Forward: A Kinder

T
Canada?
The Canadian Federal election of Justin Trudeau in October 2015 wit-
nessed the end of Harper’s masculinist, violent and fundamentally anti-­First
Nations administration. Harper’s nearly decade-long government repeat-
edly refused to fund Shoal Lake 40’s ‘Freedom Road’, as well as to reverse
the two percent funding cap on First Nations structural development
despite growing international support to do so (Amnesty International,
2015). Although Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has indicated its
support for the ‘Freedom Road’, Steve Ball notes that (2015, para. 9-10):

…the Province of Manitoba, and the City of Winnipeg share equally in the
costs of a bridge and a road that will link Shoal Lake 40 to the Trans-­
Canada Highway (Canada’s main economic corridor) only 17 miles away.
The road would end the community’s isolation and make a water treatment
plant for their own use possible. Up until recently the Province and the
City have registered support for this co-operative redress, but the Federal
Government has refused to commit. However, the recent election of Justin
Trudeau’s Liberal government has changed the dynamic. What is now evi-
dent (from public events and private conversations with Federal MPs) is
that there is soon likely to be an announcement of Federal support and
available funds when the detailed road design is completed in January. The
Province of Manitoba is also preparing to have funds available so construc-
tion can begin upon completion of the road’s design.

…[H]owever,… the City of Winnipeg has been caught off-guard by the

sudden turn and is not prepared to have funds available, even though
Mayor Bowman wrote a strong letter last April to the now deposed Minister
of Aboriginal Affairs Bernard Valcourt suggesting it was the Federal
Government that was the obstacle to moving forward. Now, it seems, it is
the City of Winnipeg which will soon be derided internationally for unpre-
paredness and inaction as this particular issue is being presented by Human
Rights Watch at the U.N. in Geneva in February.

Of late, Shoal Lake 40 is increasingly in the national and international

media spotlight, with its presence, the community’s involvement, atten-
30  L.G. Roman and S. Eldridge

tion from the U.N., Amnesty International, and documentary film-

makers. All of this, plus the recent election of a Liberal government has
created a hopeful climate for a material solution to over a century of
man-made isolation in this community, it remains a distant and tenuous
future for other First Nations communities in similarly dire conditions
across Canada. When 39% of all water treatment systems of reserves are
deemed by the Canadian government to be in “high risk of contamina-
tion” (Mifflin & Mifflin, 2015), clean, plentiful, mountain-stream water
becomes even more clearly an iconic image indicating a settler Canadian
mythology of natural resource abundance, a narrative of national wealth
that masks the colonial theft of these resources and the subsequent exclu-
sions of First Nations peoples from safe and clean drinking water.

Fig. 1.6  #Boil No More, Image Credit and ©2015: Amnesty

International Canada Campaign for Human Rights of Indigenous
Peoples
 1  ‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal Lake 40’s Mirror... 
   31

On December 17, 2015, the day Chief Erwin Redsky dreamed of and
for which he worked but feared would never come to fruition in his
lifetime, finally did. Taking over the Manitoba Legislature in full regalia
to a packed audience of supporters, legislators, public, and media, Shoal
Lake 40 community members expressed tears of joy rather than despair.
While drumming a victory song which reverberated throughout the hal-
lowed halls of this colonial seat of power, the Shoal Lake 40 community
finally achieved “a lifeline to the outside world” (Puxley, 2015e). All three
levels of government finally committed publicly together to fund the $30
­million dollars to build an all-weather road connecting the reserve and its
270 residents to the mainland. Redsky’s voice was reported to be shaking
(Puxley, 2015e, para. 4):

The commitment marks a turning point for the community and for First
Nations in Canada. This is a new beginning. Let’s not dwell on the past.
Let’s move forward together. First Nations will be part of this country to
rebuild it again. Today, the work begins.

Fig. 1.7  The Future Site of ‘Freedom Road’. Photo credit and
©2015: Angela Failler
32  L.G. Roman and S. Eldridge

To make this a lasting turning point does require critically reflecting on

the past and the manner in which “compounding differences” and experi-
ences of disablement of whole communities are not recognized through
the metaphor of an intersection.
A long fought for symbol and future material body of hope, ‘Freedom
Road’ is a polysemic signifier of social struggle. For the Federal, Provincial
and Municipal officials quoted at this conjuncture, the historical victory
of ‘Freedom Road’ was a signifier of global Northern symbolic memory
mixed with the ambivalent guilt, redemption, conscience, and moral
obligation for Canada. Some officials reflected more of one feeling more
than the others, no doubt based on their specific geo-political locations.
Carolyn Bennet, for example, the new Indigenous Affairs Minister, called
the moment one of “moral obligation” as she noted that the Liberals had
promised to come up with the money to fund the all-weather road during
the election. She stated, “This couldn’t wait any longer. We see this as an
important first step in us partnering with First Nations and renewing the
relationship”, signaling it should not be the last step (Puxley, 2015e, para.
11). Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, however, speaking from Vancouver
and not present at the event, cast the moment as example of redemption
for the Federal Liberal Party government (Puxley, 2015e, para. 13):

Shoal Lake is a good example of how the new federal government is pre-
pared to work with First Nations and other levels of government. It’s about
doing the right thing. It is about doing the fair thing. That’s what we’re all
about as we begin this new mandate.

Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger stated that the plight of Shoal Lake 40 is
a “basic injustice.” He continued by recognizing that (Puxley, 2015e, para
13-14, clarification ours): [t]here is no better time in this period of recon-
ciliation to move on this project that will make a tremendous difference for
the people of that community. It will allow us [Winnipeg residents] to
sleep at night knowing they’re getting the same treatment that we’re getting
in Winnipeg.

As we have shown, even sleep is not innocent of historical memory.

Erwin Redsky quickly answered back to the Manitoba Premier’s redemp-
tive but guilt-ridden comments about sleep for Winnipeg’s residents,
 1  ‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal Lake 40’s Mirror... 
   33

acknowledging implicitly, the colonial “relational genealogy” with tears

in his eyes and his quite different understanding of this history (Puxley,
2015e, para. 16):

It’s been a dear price that we’ve paid for 101 years. I can go to sleep tonight
knowing ... ‘Freedom Road’ is a reality now

For Sharon Redsky, who lives off the reserve, ‘Freedom Road’ represents
“a road home” and a way of revitalizing their economically repressed
Shoal Lake 40 community (Puxley, 2015e, para. 18-20).

There are hundreds of people who have left that might soon be able to
bring their skills back to revitalize the community’s economy. A lot of us
can’t sustain jobs living on the reserve because you can’t safely get on and
off. We’re really looking forward to coming back to the community.

 rovisional thoughts: What can be learned

P
from Shoal Lake 40’s Public Pedagogy?
What makes Shoal Lake 40’s campaign and activism a model for social
justice as public pedagogy is its ability to prove time and time again that
despair can be martialed into hopeful resistance. How did community
members wage such a skillful public pedagogical campaign to educate the
wider public, particularly government officials across the City, Province
and federally, as well as internationally? It is important to learn from
this ongoing struggle and others like it how Global Northern Disability
Studies can become politically and pedagogically connected to some of
most marginalized communities in our midst—to act by invitation in soli-
darity with, in good conscience and re-aligned priorities so as to be useful
to communities living in the Global South of Global Northern privilege
and taken-for-granted human rights. Widening their circles of influence
and conscientious objection to the ongoing human rights’ abuses, Shoal
Lake 40’s public pedagogy treated as allies, supporters from the settler
community, and officials of political parties on both the right and left,
as well as some religious groups (Roman, Personal Communication with
34  L.G. Roman and S. Eldridge

Cuyler Cotton, 2016). Shoal Lake 40’s community members’ willingness

to recognize connections and recruit allies from diversely located groups
and institutions bears witness to the power of public pedagogy both as
direct action and peaceful protest, often with a wicked sense of humor,
parody, and poignant indignant anger.
A testament to the transnational public pedagogical impact of Shoal
Lake 40’s activism and educational campaign, in February 2016, Human
Rights Watch in Canada will release to the United Nations interview tran-
scripts taped with the living survivors of this particular medicalised colo-
nial nightmare. Their Report will document disproportionally high rates
of miscarriages, diabetes, ear infections causing deafness, mental health
issues, and a myriad of other disabling conditions due to the extreme
artificial isolation of the people on the Shoal Lake 40 reserve. As Puxley
writes for CBC News, “a delegation from the reserve is expected to travel
to Geneva, Switzerland, in February to make its case to a United Nations
committee on economic, social and cultural rights” (2015a, para. 3). As
we have evidenced, drawing on the reports of Amnesty International,
documentary work by Shoal Lake 40 community members, and their
testimonial narratives, the lack of an all-weather road to access health-
care and emergency services along with the lack of access to clean drink-
ing water, the infrastructure for a water and sewage treatment system, as
well as little freedom of movement to the mainland has compounded the
inequalities of disability and Indigeneity. Shoal Lake 40 teaches Disability
Studies’ activists and scholars why it is so urgent and necessary to shift
the gaze from the Global Northern perspectives to human rights abuses
of the Global South both within and without the Global North. Such
human rights issues should not remain outside the purview of the dis-
ability rights’ movement in Canada or worldwide.
We should not ‘withdraw’ from the exceptions pushed to the mar-
gins through violent medicalizing processes of colonialism, if we hope
to challenge the existing political order. Our uses of theory and meta-
phor can speak volumes to mobilize social change and justice or cre-
ate further symbolic violence. We all need to connect the geo-political
Global South dots within the Global North to other communities in the
Global South outside of Canada who may share some similar, as well as
some differing material conditions of neo-colonial disablement. Here, as
 1  ‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal Lake 40’s Mirror... 
   35

well as elsewhere (Roman and Henry 2015; Roman et al. 2009; Roman
2003a, b; Roman, 2006), we have found the term “relational geneal-
ogy” to capture how histories and social determinants connect in unequal
and historically-specific ways that defy categorical analysis, including the
multiplicity of categorical analyses of intersectional theory as argued by
McCall (2005) and others who draw upon her work. It behooves Global
Northern Disability Studies to contemplate how the processes of colo-
nialism in the past and in the present connect with disabling policies and
practices such that whole communities become impaired and relegated
to ‘bare life’ and ‘states of exception’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 6) as the rule.
In this way, histories of past conjunctures can be seen as connected to
present ones, bearing both the marks of continuity and possible social
change. When it comes to historical and social formations, politics do
not flatten as they might on a Columbus-like map—”Mainlander meets
Island Other”; Disabled People meet Indigenous People”; “Disability
meets Indigeneity”; etc. Social formations are not reducible to two-­
dimensional crossroads or intersections of different the categories of race,
class, gender, disability and sexuality or even as crashes at the intersection
of one category with another as is sometimes suggested by arguments for
the primacy of one category over another. We have drawn upon the con-
cepts of “compounding differences”, extending Hewitt’s work (1992) and
Roman’s “relational genealogies” (Roman, 2004, 2006, Roman, Brown,
Noble, Wainer, & Young, 2009) to illustrate that is just not so simple.
Chief Erwin Redsky put it best when he said, both drawing on and draw-
ing back from the metaphor of intersections and crossroads in an ­interview
with him for the television program recounting the geo-politics of differ-
ent America’s aired on Al Jazeera news in 2013 (clarification ours):

We’re [the Indigenous people of Shoal Lake 40] at a point though, with,
uh, in terms of relationship with Canada, we’re at a crossroads. Either a
crossroad – a road to reconciliation, or a road to confrontation.

In one pithy turn of phrase posing an underlying question, Chief Erwin

Redsky sums up what has been at once tempting and elusive but irri-
tatingly inadequate with the flattening common sense and theoretical
metaphor of intersectionality: its failure to contemplate relationships,
36  L.G. Roman and S. Eldridge

relationality, and relations, all of which have historical and social gene-
alogies and in this historical case, the failure to read critically the his-
torical conjuncture that locates the relationship to build the Canadian
nation-state at the expense of other Indigenous relations and relations
with Indigenous peoples, many of whom now suffer from debilitating
conditions and impairments or whose impairments have been made
worse through lack of access to basic medical care and clean water. Most
importantly, his question poses the issue of the social and political agency
of a social movement’s perspective on the particular historical moment.
Almost prophetically and certainly from his experience politically, he
asks, which the moment is: a ‘crossroads’, ‘a road to reconciliation’ or one
of ‘confrontation’? His statement cum question emphasizes the socio-­
political and experiential nature of social movement struggles, which take
place in real time, real spaces and places with human agency. Finally,
with no guarantees, his statement cum question recognizes the fact that
“history is lived, not dictated” as African American feminist poet Nikki
Giovanni (1976) declares. This seems to be the major public pedagogi-
cal light Shoal Lake 40 shines on Global Northern perspectives within
Disability Studies. The question remains: What reflection do we see in
their mirror on us?

Acknowledgments  The authors would like to thank the community of Shoal

Lake 40 for teaching us what it means to struggle on in the face of so much
injustice. We are grateful to Cuyler Cotton, media relations and strategic policy
analyst for Shoal Lake 40 for his expert historical memory and edits on an early
draft. We are grateful to Shoal Lake 40 permission to reprint with proper cita-
tion their copyrighted images of the Canadian Museum of Human Rights
Violations and excerpt from the brochure inviting the public to “tour” and
hence, perhaps unwittingly become ‘witnesses’ to the human rights violations
they experience in Shoal Lake 40. We also thank Angela Failler and her team of
researchers in the Cultural Studies Research Group, “In Solidarity with Shoal
Lake 40” at the University of Winnipeg, who have shared generously some of
their photos. Our thanks also go Michael Marker for his usual acumen and criti-
cal reading. Most of all, we thank the children and youth of Shoal Lake 40 for
being educators to us all.
 1  ‘O Canada’ or ‘Freedom Road’?: Shoal Lake 40’s Mirror... 
   37

Notes
1. Roman develops this term from her 2005 Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council-funded project to explain the mutu-
ally constitutive processes of ableism (e.g. designation of ‘unfitness’
and asylum-building with colonial processes of land deterriorializa-
tion of Indigenous peoples, often on land designated to be ‘reserves’,
where asylums were built to confine the so-called ‘insane’ or other-
wise designated as ‘unfit’ due to various diseases. See an example of it
in Roman, Brown, Noble, Wainer, & Young (2009). The neoliberal
form of medicalized colonialism may paradoxically involve the
removal or reduction of medical services but is still premised on con-
sidering some as ‘unfit’ and ‘unworthy’ of medical care—out of sight-
out of mind. North American spelling in the original will be
maintained here throughout for ‘medicalized colonialism’.
2. The exact daily number of boil water advisories and orders varies by
about 10 percent each day across Canada. See Roman’s personal com-
munication with Cuyler Cotton, January 30, 2016 confirming the
reason for minor discrepancies in the count on different days in a
given year. Boil water orders confirm that the water contains con-
taminants and is poisonous to drink, whereas advisories merely refer
to water that must be boiled to become drinkable.
3. ‘O Canada’ is the national anthem of Canada, originally commis-
sioned by Lieutenant Governor of Quebec Théodore Robitaille for
the 1880 Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day ceremony; Calixa Lavallée com-
posed the music, after which words were written by the poet and
judge, Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier.
4. Shoal Lake 40 was artificially separated from its sister community in
the area with the building of the aqueduct. Its sister community is
called Iskatewizaagegan #39 Independent First Nation (formerly
Shoal Lake #39). They changed their name about 25 years ago to
avoid confusion with Shoal Lake 40. Notably, unlike Shoal Lake 40,
the Iskatewizaagegan #39 Independent First Nation does have a road,
access to health care, state of the art water and sewage treatment, and
education.
38  L.G. Roman and S. Eldridge

5. See for example, the Gallery Gachet’s ‘Convergence’ titled, ‘For a New
Accessibility,’ a weekend-long symposium of workshops, art, and pre-
sentations on the theme of ‘organizing for accessibility and mutual
aid’ (http://gachet.org/convergence/). Our initial excitement over an
event meant to foreground ‘new’ coalitions between disability activists
working around and with First Nations people living in conditions of
poverty and those ‘incarcerated with mental illness or who experience
violence based on the presentation of their body’ (http://gachet.org/
convergence/) was replaced with concern as we read the list of partici-
pants. At an event promising to recognize that ‘the social condition of
disability is still rampant’ (http://gachet.org/convergence/) and taking
place in what is most certainly a Global Southern space and place (the
downtown eastside of Vancouver which is impoverished and over-­
represented by Indigenous people) within the Global North of
Vancouver, it appears that out of 14 participating artists, only three
openly identify in their online biographies as members of First Nations
communities and only one person identifies as disabled, a filmmaker
with Multiple Sclerosis; http://gachet.org/for-a-new-accessibility/.
6. See the remarkable video on Youtube made by nine year old Kyra
Wahpay from Shoal Lake 40, “I Dream ‘Princess Kyra Wahpay” (Shoal
Lake 40), December 10, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g
sGPyZWHRdM.

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 2
A Pedagogy of Movement and Affect:
A Young Man with Autism Spectrum
and Intersubjective Possibilities
Sarah Reddington

Introduction
The actions of affect are prominent in the works of Deleuze and Guattari
(1987) and they are used across this chapter to bring attention to the
affective movements of Leo, a 30-year-old white man with autism spec-
trum (AS), when entering into exchanges with other boys during his
elementary and secondary years, having attended school in Nova Scotia,
Canada. In particular are highlighted Leo’s affective movements when
navigating the hegemonic masculine order as a means to show alterna-
tive understandings on how he takes up his masculine subjectivity. Affect
here is understood as ‘irreducibly bodily and autonomic’, an ‘already felt’
state at ‘the surface of the body’ (Massumi 2002, p. 25, 28). I suggest it is
thinking through affect that can produce alternative knowledge outside

S. Reddington (*)
Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

© The Author(s) 2017 45

C. Loeser et al. (eds.), Disability and Masculinities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53477-4_2
46  S. Reddington

of medical criteria on how young men with AS experience their disability

and gender in educational contexts.1 Specifically, the chapter aims to dis-
rupt normalising conceptions of masculinity and widely circulating ste-
reotypes that position dominant boys as strong and capable, and young
men with AS as ‘extremely verbally restricted, largely socially incapable’
(Davidson and Henderson 2010, p. 156). There is a requirement to lib-
erate disabled men from gender hierarchy and normative structures that
have created static narratives about their lives. ‘Rather than attempting
to define masculinity as an object (a natural character type, a behavioural
average, a norm), we need to focus on the processes and relationships
through which men and women conduct gendered lives’ (Connell 1995,
p. 71).
Garland-Thomson (2002) explains how our present ability and dis-
ability system has produced subjects by differentiating and marking their
bodies, informing many of our ideas about disability and normality. This
is evident when examining educational research in North America that
has placed too much emphasis on comparing students with AS social
functionality relative to normative understandings.2 Such power assigned
to bodies meeting ‘normate’ standards is problematic for disabled men,
as to be granted full human status requires them to appeal to ‘normals’
and figure out how to manage relationships (Garland-Thomson 1997).
Biklen and Kliewer (2006, p. 183) acknowledge how ‘autism as an iden-
tity like gender and race has been linked to particular interpretations of
what that should be or look like’. This chapter advances the argument
to unsettle essentialised notions of masculinity and question the stable,
predetermined subject. Here, by focusing on Leo’s affective movements,
I suggest a shift can be made to increasingly consider the transient nature
of students with AS masculine subjectivities. With this, I propose a form

1
 The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, identifies a person with
autism spectrum as having impairments in social communication and social interaction as well as
repetitive and restricted patterns of interest (American Psychiatric Association 2013).
2
 Lynch and Irvine’s (2009) research provides an overview of the social skill approaches taken in
North American schools when creating social programming for students with AS. The social strate-
gies employed are based on teaching students with AS normative social cues when engaging with
typical peers.
 2  A Pedagogy of Movement and Affect: A Young Man... 
   47

of pedagogy that prioritises students with AS affective movements and

thinks through possibilities.

Masculinity, Disability and Education

The masculine body depicted in modernist approaches as ‘healthy’,
‘strong’, ‘macho’ and ‘tough’ restricts how a young man with AS can expe-
rience school. Hegemonic practices, ‘the culturally idealised form of a
masculine character’, are one of the largest constraints placed on boys as
they are expected to act in traditional white heterosexual ways (Connell
1990, p. 83; 2005; Kehler and Martino 2007; Lusher and Robins 2009).
In particular, the sizing up of boys is brought to attention when examin-
ing masculine practices with ‘toughness’, ‘fighting’ and ‘sexual talk’ iden-
tified as the key hegemonic requirements to be accepted by peers (Kehler
and Martino 2007). Masculinity studies, however, have suggested that
boys’ acts can no longer be viewed as forming one ‘singular, cohesive
masculinity’ critiquing the normal masculine body (Kehler 2004, p. 98).
The shift to thinking outside the traditional gender binary has pre-
sented opportunity to pursue alternative modes of embodiment on
the lives of disabled men (Benjamin 2001; Loeser 2010; Pascoe 2007;
Reddington and Price 2016). For example, disabled boys who histori-
cally have been ruthlessly pathologised demonstrate their capacity to
unsettle hegemonic idealised forms of masculinity (Benjamin 2001;
Loeser 2010). Benjamin (2001) highlights how physically disabled
boys can reconfigure their masculine subjectivities to make themselves
appeal to others. Loeser’s (2010, p. 423) examination of hearing dis-
abled men attending secondary schools in South Australia similarly
disrupts modernist approaches to masculinity and shows how con-
ceptions of masculinity are highly mediated productions, ‘open to
exchange and re-­articulation’. This chapter contributes to this grow-
ing body of literature with the aim to introduce counter-hegemonic
masculine ideals. To do this, I take up selected ideas from Deleuze and
Guattari’s (1987) work in A Thousand Plateaus, including their read-
ings of Spinoza’s affect.
48  S. Reddington

Deleuzoguattarian Concepts and Education

Deleuze and Guattari’s work has been used in education to explore new
modes of understanding student experience in school.3 Recently, theorists
and educational researchers have applied their ideas to reconceptualise
how disabled bodies are understood outside dominant medical discourses.
For example, Goodley (2007) employs their concept of the rhizome to
think beyond Western medical constructions and uproot deficit-driven
thinking in education. Goodley (2007, p. 324), when thinking through
rhizomes, attends to the emergent nature of the ‘ever-changing, ever-
moving, becoming learner’. This is emphasised in Deleuze and Guattari’s
(1987, p. 7) writing when they state, ‘[r]hizomes ceaselessly establishes
connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power and circum-
stances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles’. Kuppers (2009,
p.  223) similarly employs Deleuzoguattarian concepts to examine the
‘tactility of disability’, exploring disabled bodies through touch, vibration
and poetry. ‘The Deleuzoguattarian toolbox allows for thoughts to be
prized open, for familiar things to be disassociated, and unfamiliar things
brought into contact with one another’ (p. 222). Crowley (2010, p. 543)
also makes creative use of Deleuze and Guattari to engage in ‘the dis-
juncture between advocacy and experience’ and provides a multi-textual
production of deaf experience in the workplace. Her work reminds me of
the intricacy and complexity of disability, where we need to ask questions
and immerse ourselves in bodily thought. I am particularly inspired by
the works of Hickey-Moody (2006, 2009), who has been a pioneer in the
use of Deleuze and Guattari and Spinoza to reframe how disabled bod-
ies are known. In exploring performative dance with intellectually dis-
abled bodies, Hickey-Moody (2009) demonstrates how aesthetic affects
present new modes of understanding d ­ isability that medical discourses
are unable to do. It is her productive lens in Unimaginable Bodies that
inspired me to selectively take up Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) con-
cept of deterritorialisation and their readings of Spinoza’s affect to unfold
how one young man with AS negotiates his masculine subjectivity when

 See Gough (2006), Gould (2011), MacNaughton (2004), Munday (2012), Smitka (2012), and
3

Usher (2010).
 2  A Pedagogy of Movement and Affect: A Young Man... 
   49

experiencing elementary and secondary school in Nova Scotia, Canada

(Hickey-Moody 2009).

Conceptual Framework
The process of deterritorialisation emerges in social fields, and cuts across
socially gendered territories in which a body moves to disrupt arboreal
arrangements. The arboreal system is representative of the organisational
social forces intended to code students—a homogeneous entity (Youdell
2011). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) identify the territorialised social
order as following a molar line. Molar lines in the context of Nova Scotian
school settings include the embedded structures that allocate students to
fixed positions (i.e. classroom rules, timetables, special education policy).
Deterritorialisation ruptures such fixed states through movements that
travel outside molar designations. ‘D is the movement by which “one”
leaves the [ordered] territory … it is the operation of the line of flight’,
leading to movement in multiple directions (Deleuze and Guattari 1987,
p. 508). Lines of flight account for changes in the trajectory a body takes,
the small ruptures that form new becomings outside molar lines, with
no clear end point of designation (Youdell 2011). Throughout this chap-
ter, deterritorialisation is intended to offer a conceptual space to uproot
molar lines, to move elsewhere and rearticulate how one young man with
AS is known in the world. His moments of reterritorialisation are also
captured, through the effects that manifest when he is pulled back to the
gender order.
Reterritorialisation, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), is the
return to the strata of coded behaviours. The purpose of drawing on this
notion of reterritorialisation is to show how the body is never fully free
from the hierarchical masculine constructions and medical discourses
that circulate in and between bodies. Affect is then mobilised to keep
attuned to a person’s instantaneous states of being when cutting across
the gendered social terrain. Spinoza contextualises the instantaneous
states of being operating between bodies through two types of affect:
sad and joyful. A body producing sad affects with another body or thing
will diminish its capacity to move, while a body filled with joyful affects
50  S. Reddington

will increase the other’s action. Following Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari
(1987) explain that it is impossible to know the affects ahead of time—
that is, what a body might do when it enters into a composition with
other things (i.e. bodies, objects, atmospheres and spaces). ‘Affect’, as
Hickey-Moody and Malins (2007, p. 9) write, ‘is that which is felt before
it is thought; it has a visceral impact on the body before it gives subjective
or emotive meaning’.
By drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of deterritoriali-
sation and their readings of Spinoza’s affect, I aim to produce alternative
knowledge on how one young man with AS takes up his masculine sub-
jectivity. It is thinking through affect that can open up different ways of
understanding disability experience outside medical discourses (Hickey-­
Moody 2009). I turn now to share the affective movements of Leo, a
thirty-year-old white man with AS, and his social experiences with other
boys during his elementary and secondary school years having attended
an urban, public school in Nova Scotia, Canada. The many extracts of
dialogue I had with Leo are not only interesting, they serve to show how
his masculine subjectivity is not static, but forever changing.

Leo’s Social Experiences

When first meeting Leo he was frank about his school experiences and
stated early on in our interview that he felt ‘awkward’ in school and pos-
sessed what he called ‘autistic insecurities’. Leo surmised that his insecuri-
ties stemmed from feeling ‘old fashioned’ and disconnected from popular
culture. He did, however, develop strong affinities with one popular, fic-
tional television character, Shy Violet.4 Leo expressed how he wanted to
emulate Shy Violet as a young boy as he admired her intelligence and
confident demeanour. He even took measures to locate a pair of thick,
round glasses like Shy Violet’s to wear to school. Leo conveyed how he
felt connected to her when wearing similar glasses, and that he carried a
Rainbow Brite lunch box and donned a purple cape. He remarked how
other students made fun of his Rainbow Brite lunch box, stating it was

 Shy Violet was a female animated figure on the mid 1980s television program Rainbow Brite.
4
 2  A Pedagogy of Movement and Affect: A Young Man... 
   51

a ‘girl’s lunchbox’, but Leo did not care, emphatically stating, ‘it was my
lunchbox!’ As Smith (2007, p.  187) argues, ‘[s]ubordinated masculine
identities are ruthlessly pathologised and positioned as other for prefer-
ring pursuits that in their absence of physical aggression categorically
locate them as feminine’. Leo, determined to keep his lunchbox, chal-
lenged the limits placed on his body by the hegemonic gender order. His
desire to subvert masculine macho styles was identified when he com-
pared his interests to typical boys’ activities.
I was a softer personality. I wasn’t into the kinds of things that boys
were into Masters of the Universe, Transformers, tough-guy stuff. You
know watching “R” rated movies you know to prove they are all grown
up. I was still watching Rainbow Brite, and now I still do only now I
watch it to study the drawings… I mean I liked Rainbow Brite … I
wasn’t into being a jerk, you know a jerk, you know a typical boy. I wasn’t
into that.
Leo deterritorialised his body from dominant masculine stereotypes,
drawing a strong line of flight: ‘I wasn’t into being a jerk, you know a
typical boy’. In his flight, Leo found an alternative entry, a softer exis-
tence. By emulating the fictional character Shy Violet, Leo inserted and
located new social terrain. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 326) remind
us that ‘the territory is constantly traversed by movements of deterritori-
alization’. By dislodging hyper-masculine styles Leo divulged the capacity
he had to extend and find alternative trajectories to better suit his inter-
ests. The extensions made through affinities to Rainbow Brite produced
joyful affects. These joyful affects increased Leo’s movements to find new
paths to travel, not aligned with the collective. This was further evidenced
when Leo talked about refuting typical boy styles.
You know they pick a few play fights. They are basically shallow, you
know they’re yucky. Boys are yucky and that about sums it up … boys are
yucky right! Think of the movie the Nutty Professor. How you got Jerry
Lewis a doctor whatever, and he can bind love. He acts like a bit of a bad
boy. He acts like a bit of a rebel, a troublemaker. Whereas the scientist,
the chemistry professor except for blowing up the lab, he is basically a
goody-goody. He doesn’t have muscles’ cause he’s like you know, he’s like
52  S. Reddington

this guy. He’s this guy they love to give a wedgie to … [pause] … so the
popular guys you know have to act like a bad boy … a rebel … they had
to act like they have something to rebel against … you know they are
supposed to be tough, they are supposed to be athletic, they are supposed
to treat girls like a commodity … you know they are supposed to only be
interested in sex. They are supposed to be shallow. I didn’t.
In his definition of a typical boy Leo assumed I should have previous
knowledge of what a boy is like in school. He phrased his statements
with ‘you know’ as if we did not need to go down the path of defin-
ing a boy. I should know ‘boys play fight’, ‘boys are athletic’, ‘shallow’
and ‘only interested in sex’. Leo used popular media, like the Nutty
Professor,5 to create a productive image when explaining how typical
boys act. He then proceeded to include more descriptive language to
support his image by saying boys are ‘tough’, ‘bad’ and ‘rebels’. Leo
interpreted other boys to be one unitary subject, a tough machine. He
then derailed himself from the tough machine production, emphati-
cally exclaiming, ‘I didn’t’. Leo could not affectively pinpoint why he
was disconnected from hegemonic boy activities—he just was. This is
the essence of relations. They are complex and filled with intensities
rather than defined. The affects circulating between bodies can position
a body to move elsewhere, not knowing why they want to decompose
that relation; they just do.
Leo then added another dimension when explaining his connection
to typical boys, bringing in art to assist in his contextualisation. Visual
images are useful forms of expression for bodies when unravelling their
feelings and desires. Christie and Bloustien (2010) suggest visual that
images in particular contexts can educate others through affect, leading
potentially to new insights. Leo picked up a pencil and began to draw
(see Figs. 2.1 and 2.2). As he drew, Leo explained his art.

5
 The Nutty Professor was a movie produced in 1963 and remade in 1996 by director Tom Shadyac.
The plot of this comedic movie is an overweight professor named Julius Kelp (acted by Jerry Lewis),
who was desperate to lose weight and takes a chemical formula that transitions his body into ‘slim,
obnoxious Buddy Love’. As Buddy Love, the chemistry professor becomes successful in love by
acting in hegemonic masculine ways.
 2  A Pedagogy of Movement and Affect: A Young Man... 
   53

Fig. 2.1  Typical boy

Now a popular boy, a popular boy would always be straight, like clean
cut, straight I don’t know uh, a brand-name shirt, you know Umbro or
something. I’m just doing a quick sketch mind you. You know their hair
is either like that you know it’s always like this million-dollar Vanilla Ice
hairdo. They all seemed to have better looks than I did … I was like this
scrawny little runt. (see Fig. 2.1)
Leo then affectively explained his body in relation to peers and drew a
self-portrait (see Fig. 2.2).
I had big, my hair used to be all. I used to have bigger hair, though
not like afro; it used to be long hair like that and of course people used
to say I’d be popular if I got a rhinoplasty. And then of course I always
wore these big nerdy glasses. I always wore these thick black frames. I
didn’t really have acne, but I had freckles. And then of course my voice
54  S. Reddington

Fig. 2.2  Leo’s self-portrait

broke early so here I was twelve years old talking like a grown man, and
I never had that problem where I’d pass back between my kid voice and
my grown man voice. It took me a while to grow into my voice because
I always felt like I sounded like a monotonous robot with a cold [makes
cold sounds].
Leo’s drawings mark clear distinctions between his body and the bod-
ies of popular boys. He produced an image of a strong trunk when rep-
resenting a popular boy. The clean lines and well-defined, sculpted face
illustrate his understandings of essentialist notions of masculinity. He
then conjugated a different set of intensities when drawing himself. Leo
clearly deterritorialised his body from the dominant trunk, sketching his
body as a small, weak branch extending from the limb. His body, on a
lower branch, projected a weaker type of masculine, positioned on the
boundaries of acceptability as a boy in school. After drawing, I asked Leo
if he felt he had to act a certain way as a boy.
Of course … yes! You had to act a certain way. Even today I feel I have
to act a certain way. I mean I always felt that having ticks and being weird
 2  A Pedagogy of Movement and Affect: A Young Man... 
   55

is unacceptable … like you probably know about popularity, and you

know kids have to act a certain way and peer pressure … You know they
[masculine boys] have like big muscles, tough, over sexed, only interested
in sex, you know shallow. I was always a softer kind of man.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe how bodies are inseparable
from the overcoding and reterritorialisations within gender relations.
While a body may take a brief line of flight, it is always called back;
and this is Leo's experience, being reterritorialised to the hegemonic
gender order. By failing to meet normative constructions of masculin-
ity Leo ended up on the periphery. Living on the boundaries, he once
again returned to citing the characteristics required to gain access to
popularity.
Like I remember when I was in elementary school one of the things
they’d pressure you to have was brand name sneakers, really expensive
sneakers. So my parents bought me a hand-me-down pair and they were
this ugly blue and orange colour, but they were Reebok pumps. They
were this bloody … the pump thing didn’t actually work so I went back
to my twenty dollar generics. So the thing is peer pressure expects you
to dress a certain way but basically, the peer pressure got me to try these
things once, and then I’d realise it was not for me.
Locating a pair of Reebok pumps displayed Leo’s desire to connect
with others, intuitively figuring that a pair of brand name sneakers might
gain him entry into the social hub of school. As Deleuze and Guattari
(1987, p.  220) write, ‘a social field is always animated by all kinds of
movements of decoding and deterritorialization affecting “masses” and
operating at different speeds and paces’. Leo’s wearing of Reebok pumps
was a signal to others that, ‘I am one of the boys’. Acquiring the sneakers,
he deterritorialised his body from the fringe; however, in the process his
body was in rupture. The affects his body produced when wearing the
brand name sneakers drove Leo to make a change. In the act of ditching
the Reeboks, he ‘conjugate[d] deterritorialized flows’ and took a different
trajectory than his peers by returning to his generic sneakers (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987, p. 11). Leo then recalled a specific encounter he once
experienced in art class.
56  S. Reddington

I made this humongous papier mâché figure of a character I designed

and she [the teacher] never thought I’d finish it. We built frames out of
chicken wire, and I guess I just got carried away and built one that was
way too big … she never thought I’d finish it, but I did. So anyway p ­ eople
used to hang chicken wire from my collar and then hang little things off
it … just random bits like ‘kick me’ or ‘stupid’ or stuff like that. Then I
would go to English class, or I’d go to math class with papier mâché paste
on my legs of my pants, and they’d be like, ‘you know you really should
wash your hands after’ and I’m like, ‘it is papier mâché paste’ and they are
like … ‘that’s what they all say’.
Leo found his body physically violated by his adolescent peers when
they attached chicken wire to his collar and verbally ridiculed him with
sexual innuendos. His body became trapped by the masses, unable to flee
the hierarchical order of the classroom. ‘D is in turn inseparable from
correlative reterritorializations’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p.  509) is
apt here. Leo’s encounter exemplifies the power of hegemonic hetero-
sexual constructions that place restrictions on what a body can do. His
body was trapped in sexual discourse and the visible mark on his pants
heightened his striated position. Leo quickly tried to derail his territo-
rialised position by responding to his peers through language. His ver-
bal responses; however, were quickly reterritorialised when his classmate
responded, ‘you know you should really wash your hands after’. Leo’s
body was halted on ridicule, his desire punctured. ‘Once a [body] has
been obstructed, arborified, it’s all over, no desire stirs’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, p. 14). Rendered powerless, Leo affectively imparted the
hardship he experienced when socialising with others in school.
The hardest thing about school was that people act like you’re so popu-
lar but then when they have the opportunity to have popularity, they
abandon you … I mean even today people don’t have time for me … I
was always a bit of a ‘play a wanna be’ if you will. It is just I was clueless
about it. You know I was just so hopelessly clueless about it, and then I
never had a girlfriend ever, and I mean people saw me as a teacher’s pet
and a goodie goodie … I couldn’t sow wild oats, I wasn’t experimenting
with drugs, gratuitous sex, smoking. I wasn’t doing that and I was one
who would abide by the rules. No smoking in dances means – no smok-
ing in dances! And I still have never smoked because I was too afraid
 2  A Pedagogy of Movement and Affect: A Young Man... 
   57

of holding a match that close to my face and frankly, I wouldn’t know

how to smoke. So I mean … [pause] … but the hard part was popu-
larity. They had better looks. They were athletic. They came from rich
families. They were known to the neighbourhood, and sometimes I think
that if you want a woman now that’s whatcha need. A cushy job, lots of
money, exciting adventures, better looks, you know sometimes I think
that’s whatcha need.
Leo’s relations with his classmates were filled with intense affects. His
body was unable to successfully retaliate in violent ways, and using verbal
‘put-downs’ subjected Leo to a vulnerable position. The effect of unsuc-
cessful social connections left Leo feeling ‘clueless’ and disconnected from
popular social configurations. He continued to decode his social relations
through popular idealised versions of bodies, making mention that ‘bet-
ter looks’, ‘athleticism’ and ‘wealth’ were the criteria to gain acceptance by
others, including the standards to attain a partner in life. Leo exemplified
this when he stated, ‘I couldn’t sow wild oats; I wasn’t experimenting with
gratuitous sex, smoking’. The complexity of gender relations unravelled
in Leo’s narrative informs how powerful the hegemonic masculine order
is in school. His experiences highlight how dominant masculine scripts
must be followed to be accepted by other boys and that failing to meet
normative masculine classifications can situate boys in border positions
(Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli 2003).
Throughout our conversation, Leo’s affective intensities continued to
flow as he moved in and out of feeling territorialised, continually question-
ing what it means to be a boy. ‘In a hierarchical system … the channels of
transmission are pre-established: the arborescent system pre-exists the indi-
vidual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1987, p. 16). Leo returned to telling me how he felt ‘awkward’ as well as a
‘burden’ and a ‘clutz’ throughout his school years. He again acknowledged
his peripheral status, yet he desired something more, something better. I
turn now to pick up another situated social relation experienced by Leo.
He depicted the boys in this social event as ‘the masculine ones’.
Leo: In junior high, they [the boys] used to take a paper wedge … they
used to take an elastic like that with a paper wedge, and they’d coat the
paper wedges with Scotch tape so it really hurts and then they’d scare me
58  S. Reddington

into the corner and pop me in the face several times like it would leave a
mark, and anyway. They knew they could get a rise out of me just because
being obnoxious kids right.
Sarah: Did you ever do that to anybody?
Leo: I did not really know how to make a flicker, but if I did take
one to somebody, it would just be bare paper. I almost never used the
Scotch tape, annoying yes but not necessarily painful. Anyway, I would
pretend to fall backwards onto the floor after getting hit with a paper
wedge [physically acting it out; grabbing his chest and laughing]. I mean
I would over react, and that was the whole idea!
There was an abundance of movements flowing through this connec-
tion with Leo and the boys. A production of boys exerted power over
Leo while he attempted to make an entry into the hegemonic mascu-
line culture circulating around him. For his connection, Leo affectively
jumped in, making his version of the paper flicker. He recognised ‘the use
of violence [as] a compelling mode for masculine conformity’ when he
responded with his own individual paper wedge (Loeser 2010, p. 429).
Leo then flung his body in dramatic style, falling back on the floor, grab-
bing his chest, taking an exaggerated line of flight when exchanging blows
back and forth with the boys. His body, however, ends up territorialised
as unequipped to produce the same ‘punch’. Positioned in the corner and
pelted with paper wedges, Leo was again reterritorialised, unable to enter
at the same level as his dominant peer counterparts.
Part of his failure to meet dominant boy status was due to Leo acknowl-
edging what the paper wedge might do to another body. He recognised
the acts of violence towards him were painful, thereby he adjusted, creat-
ing a ‘softer’ type of weapon to sling at his peer counterparts. Martino
and Pallotta-Chiarolli (2003) suggest schools are central to the making of
masculinities, often constituted through acts of violence against others.
Leo’s experiences of violence towards him demonstrate the power other
boys can exert to secure their own masculine appeal. He then chalked
up the social encounter as a typical occurrence, stating that it was just
what ‘obnoxious kids’ do. Even years later he liked to think their violent
actions towards him were to be somehow warranted in the school setting,
 2  A Pedagogy of Movement and Affect: A Young Man... 
   59

an expected part of being a boy in school. Leo connected this episode to

another series of events with boys.
In elementary school, they’d used to walk up in front of me and grab
my knee like that [squeezes his own knee]. I remember we went to the
planetarium once in elementary school and as soon as the lights went out
at least five boys walked up to me and circled around me and squeezed
my knee! And anyway … [laugh] … it used to drive me crazy! … [laugh]
… and well what they used to do come to think of it is I’d sit in front, and
they’d put their feet on the back of my desk and push my desk forward,
either that, or they’d get behind me and hit me on the head with a dic-
tionary or a math book or something heavy … though I will admit there
was one of them who used to punch me in the shoulder for no apparent
reason all the time. He’d walk up behind me and punch me in the shoul-
der like that [physical demonstration].
Leo interpreted their gang tactics of circling him in the planetarium,
a dark public space, as ‘typical’ boy practices. His response of laughter
signalled how he learned to conform to particular hegemonic masculine
practices. As Connell (2005) suggests, there is a constant struggle among
boys in schools where certain types of (dominant) masculinities exert
their power and presence while more subordinated versions are oppressed
in this struggle.
Leo wanted to justify their acts as to be expected of boys in schools yet
he affectively felt the physical punch to his shoulder was going too far,
beyond the threshold. ‘Their [marginalised boys] view of the normal boy
appears to influence how they learn to see themselves as males and relate
to others, and they often engage in self-surveillance to police the bound-
aries of acceptable and desirable masculinities’ (Martino 2000 p.  103,
emphasis added). In this moment his body was ‘stuck’, required to navi-
gate the territorialised lines of boy practices (boys play fight; boys squeeze
each other’s knees and flick paper wedges at each other). Leo then turned
to discussing friendship.
I find friendships a little frustrating because like I said there’s not a
whole lot that is fancy about me and there’s not a whole lot … [pause]
… I don’t have exciting adventures, lots of money, a cushy job, etc. …
60  S. Reddington

people treated me like a burden, a fixation, a parasite, but when I look

back some of these people were real friends who just hadn’t … didn’t
know how to … [pause] … they were just too awkward to express it.
Leo interpreted his own body as an inadequate masculine by say-
ing, ‘I don’t have exciting adventures’, ‘there’s not a whole lot that is
fancy about me’. He felt deeply that others viewed his body as unac-
ceptable, ‘a parasite’. The affective intensities Leo embodied were
powerful; his body was unable ever to derail fully from his margin-
alised status.

Conclusion
Leo’s story shows his capacity to negotiate institutionalised codes of
masculinity and pursue alternative intersubjective possibilities. Even as
a spectre of demasculisation and marginalisation, Leo proudly identified
as a ‘softer kind of man’. This reinforces the notion that a multiplicity
of masculinities is possible and emphasises the importance in education
to listen to young men with AS school experiences. The application of
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of de/reterritorialisation was pro-
ductive in showing Leo’s workings of masculinity. His capacity to negoti-
ate his masculine subjectivity suggests that there are breaks and ruptures
in and across the gendered school terrain. In particular, his story shows
that masculine disabled subjectivities are experienced differently across
school contexts.
By contrast, Leo also explains the immense hardships he experienced
in school. He illustrated how he was subjected to acts of violence and ver-
bal ridicule from his dominant peer counterparts. For young men with
AS such as Leo, the pedagogical relationships in schooling continue to be
territorialised by the hegemonic order, with dominant boys positioned
above those subordinated. In particular, the culturally derived stereotypi-
cal masculine characteristics of being ‘tough’ and ‘macho’ place barriers to
schooling for students with AS, which are compounded by medicalised
discourse on autism. In attempting to unsettle these notions and focus
on what AS students can do, this chapter provided first-hand insight into
 2  A Pedagogy of Movement and Affect: A Young Man... 
   61

Leo’s efforts at mobilising movement and affect within the school context.
Such approaches posit a new form of pedagogy through applying Deleuze
and Guattari’s (1987) concept of de/reterritorialisation, in seeking to find
space within school filled with possibilities rather than constraints. Such
pedagogy includes dismissing popular masculine stereotypes, countering
hyper-masculine practices and manipulating tactics to secure alternative
forms of becoming. However, in applying such pedagogy it is also impor-
tant to recognise the challenges that continue to exist. For example, Leo’s
movements to secure alternative modes of masculinity were never fully
free from the normalising masculine practices that continuously reter-
ritorialised him to the hegemonic order.
Leo’s story suggests there is a need in education to understand more
fully the effects that normalising masculine practices have on disabled
boys’ gendered lives. Distinctly, there is a requirement to interrogate
and disrupt normative conceptions of masculinity that place significant
restrictions on how disabled boys negotiate their masculinity, gender and
subjectivity at school. This chapter argues that movement and affect as
a form of pedagogy can pursue more embodied knowledge on how dis-
abled boys take up their masculine subjectivity, where a more ontological
space is attended to. This includes prioritising in masculinity education
the affective body; and to conceptualise the disabled body as open and in
a constant state of transformation.

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Part II
Corporeality
 3
The Disability and Diagnosis Nexus:
Transgender Men Navigating Mental
Health Care Services
Damien W. Riggs and Clare Bartholomaeus

Introduction
As this edited book attests, there has been increasing recognition of the
importance of attending to the intersections of disability and masculini-
ties (e.g. Hickey-Moody 2015; Loeser 2015; Shuttleworth et al. 2012;
Wedgwood 2014; Wilson et  al. 2012). However, current work in this
area has almost exclusively focused on cisgender men living with dis-
abilities (i.e. men whose gender identity accords with that normatively
expected of their assigned sex), overlooking transgender men and issues
of gender diversity. Taking this gap as its starting place, the present chap-
ter asserts the inclusion of transgender men in discussions of disability
and masculinities. While we are cautious of conflating masculinities
with men, we believe this chapter provides an important opportunity to

D.W. Riggs (*) • C. Bartholomaeus

Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

© The Author(s) 2017 67

C. Loeser et al. (eds.), Disability and Masculinities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53477-4_3
68  D.W. Riggs and C. Bartholomaeus

address the absence of transgender men in the literature on disability and

masculinities.
More specifically, in this chapter we seek to examine the nexus of dis-
ability and diagnosis in the context of transgender men’s experiences of
mental health. In referring to a nexus between disability and diagnosis,
our intent is to highlight the ways in which transgender men may often
experience a competing set of demands when accessing mental health
care services, demands that potentially render invisible chronic mental
health concerns. The first set of demands experienced by many transgen-
der men is to obtain a diagnosis of ‘gender dysphoria’ in order to access
therapeutic responses such as gender affirming hormones and surgery
(Burke 2011). Whilst the ‘Standards of Care’ of the World Professional
Association for Transgender Healthcare do not mandate for such a diag-
nosis (WPATH 2011), it is nonetheless often required by those who pre-
scribe hormones and/or those who will perform surgery, despite the fact
that transgender people have long argued against the ways in which this
requirement for diagnosis unnecessarily pathologises transgender people’s
lives (Stone 1991; Whittle et al. 2008).
The second set of demands that many transgender men experience
is an injunction to present a particular ‘positive’ image of themselves as
part of an assessment for ‘gender dysphoria’. The presentation of such
a ‘positive’ image, it has been suggested, arises from the history of the
pathologisation of transgender people’s gender, the legacy of which con-
tinues in instances where clinicians refuse to accept transgender people’s
own accounts of their gender (Speer and McPhillips 2013). In order to
ensure support for accessing gender affirming hormones and surgeries,
then, transgender people may experience an expectation to minimise any
mental health concerns, and instead present an image of themselves that
is intended to ensure a supportive response from clinicians. Jones (2015)
suggests that this expectation to minimise mental health concerns is
potentially the legacy of what she terms ‘flawed and misinterpreted’ early
research on transgender people’s experiences of transition, in which it was
claimed that transgender people who experience mental health concerns
post surgery are proof that the option of gender affirming surgery should
not be made available to transgender people.
 3  The Disability and Diagnosis Nexus: Transgender Men... 
   69

Our concern in this chapter, then, is what falls by the wayside when
clinicians are potentially focused primarily on diagnosis, and when trans-
gender people may be primarily focused on accessing a diagnosis with
knowledge of the expectations that may be placed upon them in terms
of the ways they are expected to present. Our suggestion is that in some
instances actual mental health concerns may be overlooked because of
the focus on gender issues. Importantly, our point here is not to reify the
diagnosis of ‘disorders’. Rather, our point is that a significant number of
transgender people may experience mental health concerns, and that if
these are overlooked due to a focus on diagnosing ‘gender dysphoria’, this
can have a serious negative impact upon outcomes for some transgender
people.
In order to further unpack the points we have briefly made above,
in this chapter we focus upon the potential utility of working with
the idea of mental health as a disability in the context of transgen-
der people’s lives. Whilst we are very mindful of the point we made
above—namely that transgender people have rightly resisted the
pathologisation of their gender—we are, however, concerned not to
throw the baby out with the bath water. In other words, whilst we are
entirely supportive of the depathologisation of services provided to
transgender people, we nonetheless see the importance of recognising
that for some transgender people mental health concerns may have a
disabling effect.
In what follows we first outline in greater detail the theoretical
approach we take to the topic of diagnosis, disability and transgender
people’s lives. We then outline  something of the body of research that
has focused specifically on transgender people and mental health, though
we note that this has at times been pathologising and that it has failed
to engage with an understanding of mental health as disability. We then
proceed to present selected findings from two projects that focused on
Australian transgender men and mental health. From these findings we
then turn to discuss what a disability model of transgender mental health
has to offer, and conclude by calling for further research and theorising
that explores the intersections of masculinities and disability in the lives
of transgender men.
70  D.W. Riggs and C. Bartholomaeus

Theoretical Framework
In presenting our theoretical framework, it is important to clearly signal
that we are bringing together two somewhat competing ideas. On the
one hand, following Almassi (2010, p. 129, original emphasis), we ‘seek
to discuss disability less in connection to impairment than to atypical
modes of embodied functioning’. In this sense, our focus is on the disabling
effects of social norms in relation to embodiment, a point we discuss in
more detail below. On the other hand, our focus is very much on impair-
ment in terms of mental health. Following writers such as Shakespeare
and Watson (2002), we agree that it is important to examine the dis-
abling effects of an ableist society, but not to minimise what it means
to live with an impairment. In the context of mental health, then, we
would want to be critical of, for example, the stigmatisation of people
diagnosed with a mental health concern. At the same time, we would
also want to acknowledge the differing ways in which people live with
mental health concerns (such as ‘hearing voices’ approaches to schizo-
phrenia, which celebrate voices rather than attempting to regulate them
with medication). And further, we believe it is important to acknowledge
that for many people mental health concerns are experienced as negative
and unwanted.
In terms of understanding the disabling effects of living in the context
of societies that marginalise what Almassi refers to as ‘atypical modes
of embodied function’, we draw upon the work of Riggs, Ansara and
Treharne (2015) to suggest that cisgenderism—the ideology that dele-
gitimises people’s own understandings of their genders and bodies—pro-
duces disabling effects. In other words, living in societies where cisgender
people are treated as the norm means that for many transgender people
discrimination is a daily experience. As we suggested earlier, beyond
explicit intentional discrimination are the disabling effects of the require-
ment of diagnosis. Indeed, Riggs, Ansara and Treharne explicitly suggest
that their understanding of cisgenderism draws upon a critical disability
studies critique of the imposition of diagnostic categories onto people’s
lives. Finally, in terms of cisgenderism, the norm of cisgender bodies
means that transgender people’s bodies are seen as problems requiring
 3  The Disability and Diagnosis Nexus: Transgender Men... 
   71

correction, correction that then requires authorisation from clinicians

who diagnose a ‘problem’ (Clare 2013).
Riggs et al. (2015) also note that one of the potential effects of cis-
genderism is decompensation. Decompensation refers to negative out-
comes that may arise when an individual can no longer compensate for
a disabling context. With regard to transgender people, then, the effects
of cisgenderism can lead to the high rates of mental health concerns as
compared to cisgender people (rates that we explore in more detail in the
following section). Yet as we noted earlier, what falls by the wayside when
we focus solely on the relationship between cisgenderism and decom-
pensation in the form of impaired mental health are the mental health
concerns that some transgender people may experience over and above
the effects of cisgenderism.
We are of course mindful of the fact that the individual and the con-
text in which they live are inseparable, and we are not per se suggesting
that it would be possible to usefully or productively disaggregate certain
‘causes’ of impaired mental health. Nonetheless, it is potentially clini-
cally important to be able to discern differences in the histories of certain
mental health concerns for some transgender people. This is important,
we suggest, as whilst for some people the effects of cisgenderism may
be ameliorated by access to therapeutic responses (including timely and
affordable access to gender affirming hormones and surgery if desired),
for other people this will not be the case. Furthermore, if some trans-
gender people experience an injunction to present a particular ‘positive’
narrative about their mental health in order to access services, then again
what disappears from the picture are potentially chronic mental health
concerns that exceed those arising from the effects of cisgenderism.
All of these points in regards to the disabling effects of cisgenderism
and the importance of diagnosis in regards to mental health concerns
for some transgender people suggest to us the utility of disability as a
framework for understanding transgender people’s experiences of mental
health. In suggesting this, we are of course aware, as is Puar (2014, p. 77),
that

Historically and contemporaneously, the nexus of disability and trans has

been fraught, especially for trans bodies that may resist alliances with
72  D.W. Riggs and C. Bartholomaeus

­ eople with disabilities in no small part because of long struggles against

p
stigmatization and pathologization that may be reinvoked through such
affiliations.

Nonetheless, and following Baril (2015), we believe it is vitally important

to engage in an intersectional analysis of the relationship between trans
studies and disability studies. Puar (2014, p. 80) herself prefers ‘assem-
blages’ as a mode of analysis over ‘intersectionality’, and we certainly
agree with her injunction to consider not ‘What is disability? and What
is trans?’ but rather ‘What does disability do? What does trans do?’ For
our purposes within this chapter, our interest is both in what occurs for
transgender men living at the intersections of mental health impairment
and gender transition in terms of clinical services, but more broadly to
ask ‘What does disability do?’ in the context of transgender men’s lives,
and how might it be seen as a useful tool, rather than viewing it as always
already pathologising and marginalising.
This emphasis upon the importance of asking ‘What does disability
do?’ is highlighted, we thus suggest, by the relationship between diag-
nosis and disability in the lives of some transgender people. As Baril
(2015) notes, for those transgender people living with impaired mental
health, the ability to perform certain normatively accepted modes of
masculinity or femininity—including those expected by some clini-
cians—may be limited to the point that support is not forthcoming.
Whilst, as we explore in the following section, the question of ‘dif-
ferential diagnosis’ is often used to implicitly frame being transgender
as a mental health concern (a question that we suggest below is highly
problematic), it is nonetheless important to think about how clinicians’
views about mental health concerns may both prevent them from giv-
ing support to some transgender people, whilst at the same time a focus
on ‘differential diagnosis’ that aims to ‘correctly diagnose’ gender dys-
phoria may overlook actual mental health concerns. Before turning to
look at how this occurred for some of our participants, we first briefly
outline previous literature on transgender people and mental health
diagnoses.
 3  The Disability and Diagnosis Nexus: Transgender Men... 
   73

 revious Research on Transgender People

P
and Mental Health
Riggs et  al. (2015) summarise the majority of the available Australian
research on transgender people and mental health, and suggest that
whilst transgender women in general experience poorer mental health
than do transgender men, the rates of poor mental health amongst trans-
gender men are still significantly higher than amongst cisgender men.
For example, one study they review shows that a ‘major depressive dis-
order’ was indicated in 40.9 % of participants assigned male at birth
compared to 21.3 % of participants assigned female at birth (Couch
et  al. 2007). While there were significant differences between the two
cohorts, data using the same assessment tool with a general population
sample found that a much lower percentage (6.8 %) showed indicators
for depression (Goldney et al. 2000). Rather than repeating Riggs et al.’s
(2015) summary of previous research here, we first briefly explore some
of the potential factors for why transgender men may fare better than
transgender women in terms of mental health, before then summaris-
ing selected research on transgender people and mental health diagnoses
beyond depression and anxiety.
In regards to the consistent finding that transgender men fare better
than transgender women, it has been suggested that this may partly be
the product of differing expectations about gender placed upon people
assigned female at birth as compared to people assigned male (Riggs and
Due 2013a). More specifically, it has been suggested that people who are
assigned male at birth are likely to face much harsher and violent discrim-
ination when disclosing that they are transgender than people assigned
female at birth (Riggs and Due 2013a). In regards to protective factors,
Rotondi et al. (2011) draw on findings from the Canadian Trans PULSE
Project to suggest that transgender men are more likely than transgender
women to experience high levels of sexual satisfaction, and that this is
related to lower levels of depression, making it a strong protective factor.
Beyond depression and anxiety, other research has argued that the
prevalence rates of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) amongst transgen-
der people are higher than amongst the general population. A Dutch
74  D.W. Riggs and C. Bartholomaeus

study of transgender children and adolescents, for example, found that

the incidence of ASD was 6.4 % amongst children and 9.4 % amongst
adolescents, which is ten times higher than the general population (de
Vries et al. 2010). A study in Glasgow similarly found that 11.4 % of
a sample of 26 transgender participants had higher autism spectrum
quotients (AQ) than would be expected amongst the general popula-
tion. Amongst this sample, transgender men had higher median scores
on the AQ than transgender women (Smith 2014). Finally, it has been
suggested that transgender people may experience higher rates of schizo-
phrenia and schizophrenia-like personality traits than the general popula-
tion (Rajkumar 2014). Gender differences in rates of schizophrenia have
been found in some studies, such as an Irish study which found that
transgender women are more likely than transgender men to experience
schizophrenia (Judge et al. 2014).
While the above sources suggest poorer mental health amongst trans-
gender people as compared to cisgender people, such a focus on diagnosis
rates is often pathologising and medicalising and does not necessarily
allow the space to conceptualise disabling mental health issues as sepa-
rate to gender identity issues. This is especially true in the repeated use
of the clinical terms ‘differential diagnosis’ and ‘comorbidity’ (e.g. Eden
et al. 2012). This type of language, we would suggest, treats transgender
people’s gender as a pathology to be discerned from other mental health
issues, a concern that was evident in the findings we present below.

Method
Projects and Participants

The data analysed in this chapter were derived from two surveys with
Australian people who were assigned female at birth but who do not
identify as female. The first survey was a mixed methods study focusing
on the healthcare experiences of this population (n = 79). Selected quan-
titative findings from this survey have been reported elsewhere (Riggs
and Due 2013a, b), but for the purposes of this chapter responses to three
 3  The Disability and Diagnosis Nexus: Transgender Men... 
   75

open-ended questions about experiences with counsellors, psychologists

and psychiatrists were extracted for additional analysis. Specifically, we
focused on responses from the 28 participants (35 %) who identified as
male and who reported that they had previously been diagnosed with a
mental health concern. Of these participants, 17 reported that the diag-
nosis was depression, six reported that the diagnosis was anxiety and five
reported that the diagnosis was bipolar disorder.
The second source of data was a qualitative survey (n = 18) intended
as a follow up to the first survey outlined above. For the purposes of
this chapter, we examined responses to two questions included in the
survey: ‘Could you share some of the key experiences you have had with
healthcare professionals in terms of your gender identity?’ and ‘Are there
any additional things that you wish healthcare providers knew to better
support you?’ In terms of this survey, just under half of the participants
(n = 8) reported negative experiences with mental health professionals,
and less than half of the participants (n = 7) made suggestions about
additional knowledge that professionals should have in order to provide
support, specifically with regard to mental health concerns.
As noted above, all of the participants in the sub-sample analysed in
this chapter self-identified as male. We are thus aware that the findings we
report and issues we raise may not hold true for other people who were
assigned female at birth and who identify with a non-binary gender, and
indeed are unlikely to hold true for transgender women. Nonetheless,
our logic in presenting just this sub-sample is to consider what might
be needed into the future in terms of further exploring the relationships
between masculinities, disability and mental health in regards to trans-
gender men, given we know that men and women have differing experi-
ences of mental health (Rosenfield and Mouzon 2012).

Analytic Approach

For the purposes of this chapter, extracts were identified from both
surveys that highlighted the potentially negative impact of mental
health professionals either pathologising transgender men or failing to
engage with mental health concerns. Our intent in doing so was not to
76  D.W. Riggs and C. Bartholomaeus

over emphasise the negatives per se, nor to over emphasise mental health
concerns amongst the samples more broadly. Rather, our point was to
take up the issues we have already raised in this chapter, namely how the
collapsing of being transgender into mental health fails to see the actual
mental health concerns that some transgender people may experience.
More broadly, the analysis we present of selected extracts highlights what
it would mean to think about both disabling social contexts and mental
health as an impairment concurrently, a point we then explore in more
detail in the conclusion.

Results
Our analysis of the corpus of data outlined above identified three dif-
ferent ways in which participants spoke about the interactions between
mental health concerns, gender and service responses. We now present a
representative selection of extracts from the broader corpus of data.

Failing to See Mental Health Concerns

The extracts included in this first analytic section are drawn from a group
of 20 men who made comments to the effect that clinicians often focused
solely on gender issues, at the expense of focusing on mental health
concerns.

I wish the GPs/psychologists/psychiatrists asked the difficult questions.

When I saw all of them I highlighted certain facts and minimised others in
order get the GID diagnosis, which meant that my mental health issues
weren’t addressed.
I have seen three psychiatrists, two of whom were not very helpful in
treating mental health issues other than diagnosing me as trans.
The first psychiatrist I saw did nothing for me, never addressed my men-
tal health issues at all, just focused on my gender.

The comments included in the first extract highlight how some trans-
gender men may feel the need to present a particular ‘positive’ image
 3  The Disability and Diagnosis Nexus: Transgender Men... 
   77

of themselves in order to receive support. Whilst it could be suggested

that this resulted in the clinicians not addressing the participant’s mental
health concerns, we would propose that the assessment of any individual
by a mental health professional should be holistic and capable of taking
into account a range of factors. With regard to the other two extracts, and
as indicative of a repeated theme that ran through participant responses,
there was the idea that focusing on ‘diagnosis’ in regards to gender meant
that clinicians failed to see mental health concerns.

Failing to Acknowledge Impact of Cisgenderism

Almost a third of the men (n = 10) included in the analysis indicated

that clinicians had failed to understand the impact of cisgenderism upon
their mental health. In these responses there was a consistent pairing of
mental health concerns with factors such as ‘difficulties’, ‘discrimination’
and ‘stress’.

I applied to access my superannuation (based on disability, and specifically

mental health) and the health professional who assessed my application
didn’t appreciate the difficulties of sex affirmation in the context that I live.

I needed to see a psychologist to assist with depression through transition.

I was diagnosed with depression when I was young and it often comes back
during transitional periods of my life. The psych struggled to understand
that what I was going through in terms of how discrimination was affecting
my life.

I saw a psych for anxiety and depression due to the stress of being stealth
[i.e. not disclosing transgender status to others], yet they couldn’t under-
stand why it was so stressful for me.

Whilst these men did not explicitly orient to cisgenderism, we would

nonetheless suggest that what is being referred to in these extracts are
the stressors of cisgenderism for which many transgender people must
­compensate, and that for these men there is an indication that a key issue
in their presentation of mental health concerns was decompensation.
78  D.W. Riggs and C. Bartholomaeus

That the clinicians could not perceive the negative impact of cisgender-
ism potentially served to add to the lack of recognition and understand-
ing that the men already experienced.

Failing to See Gender Concerns

A small number of men (n = 5) indicated that they felt their clinicians

had overlooked their gender concerns, instead focusing solely on mental
health concerns. Whilst different to our focus in the opening sections of
this chapter, this type of experience highlights the importance of clini-
cians being able to discern between mental health concerns and other
issues that may cumulatively impact upon people.

I have struggled significantly with my mental health. At one point during

a heavy bout of depression I was hospitalised and when I offered hints as to
my dysphoria the doctors and nurses glanced over it, just wanting to get
me on medication for the depression.

Whilst for this participant medication may have been one necessary part
of the clinical response, also needed, it would appear, was a response to
their experience of dysphoria. Failing to address how this person’s sense
of dysphoria may have contributed to their mental health concerns thus
potentially compounded, rather than addressed, the presenting issue.

Discussion
The findings presented above highlight the nexus of disability and diag-
nosis in the lives of two samples of transgender men. Specifically, the
findings suggest that clinicians (1) over emphasise gender issues at the
expense of mental health concerns, (2) fail to take into account the effects
of cisgenderism and (3) over emphasise mental health concerns at the
expense of gender issues. The nexus of disability and diagnosis, then,
at least in the experiences of these participants, represents a lacuna in
clinical practice in Australia in terms of attending to how chronic mental
 3  The Disability and Diagnosis Nexus: Transgender Men... 
   79

health concerns amongst some transgender men may require specific tar-
geted responses from clinicians.
Sinnott (2015) indicates as much in her account of what it means
to engage clinically with transgender clients. She suggests that clinicians
must be cautious when accepting a referral for a client who wants assess-
ment in terms of accessing gender affirming hormones and/or surgery,
in addition to therapy. Sinnott suggests that whilst it is possible for one
clinician to undertake both roles (i.e. assessment and therapy), there is
something of a conflict between assessment (which in and of itself is
not therapeutic, even if what it authorises may be) and the provision of
therapy. Our findings would appear to imply that, for at least some of
our participants, being treated by clinicians whose primary role it was
to assess and prescribe may have resulted in a failure by such clinicians
to also consider that additional therapeutic responses were required.
Similarly, some participants appeared to have accessed mental health pro-
fessionals in order to engage in therapy, only to be met with some form
of assessment.
Moving beyond the specifics of clinical responses, we can return to our
earlier discussion about the utility of a disability framework in thinking
about mental health and transgender men, in light of our findings. Whilst,
as Puar (2014) notes, there may be considerable resistance amongst trans-
gender communities to the language of disability, Strassburger (2012)
nonetheless suggests that the logic of disability—in which discrimina-
tion on the basis of impairment may be seen as authorising legal and
clinical responses—may be advantageous to some transgender people.
As Strassburger states, whilst discrimination claims about gender or sex
may be limited by whether or not an individual is seen as meeting the
requirements of a very limited number of gender or sex categories, dis-
ability laws (and clinical responses derived from them) are based on the
assumption of mutability, meaning that responses are dependent on indi-
vidual need, not necessarily on adherence to a particular narrow set of
categories. Strassburger (2012, p. 354) provides the following example as
evidence for this claim:

An antidiscrimination framework would fail a transwoman [sic] attempt-

ing to secure medical coverage for a trachea shave, for example, if the health
80  D.W. Riggs and C. Bartholomaeus

insurer did not cover trachea shaves for any other population. However,
under an accommodation framework, a trachea shave could be seen as a
necessary body modification that could improve a transperson’s [sic] men-
tal health or employability. If the trachea shave were regarded as a health-­
improving treatment, health insurers would have to pay for it, just as they
pay for durable medical equipment for those who need it and not for those
without a medically necessary reason for it.

Whilst Strassburger suggests that these types of arguments work best for
people who have received a ‘diagnosis’ of gender dysphoria, they are cer-
tainly not limited to this population of people. Instead, the assumption
of mutability on which disability law and practice works accepts that
what might count as an impairment or a disabling situation is subject
to change, and hence someone who may require access to, for example,
mental health services due to the decompensatory effects of cisgenderism
may not always require such services: the application of disability as the
framing concept may be time-limited.
In regards to the disabling effects of cisgenderism, Strassburger (2012)
further suggests that disability laws and practice may be utilised to respond
to instances of cisgenderism. In other words, under scrutiny would not
be the transgender person, but rather the disabling contexts, institutions
or individuals who are complicit with the production of an impairment
(e.g. mental health concerns). This type of approach, Strassburger argues,
shifts the focus entirely away from a medicalised and pathologising ‘diag-
nosis’ of the individual, and instead focuses on diagnosing discriminatory
social contexts. This would constitute a radical shift in terms of how the
needs of transgender people are responded to.
Jack (2012) similarly makes a point about how clinicians engage with
transgender people who have been diagnosed as being on the autism spec-
trum. For this population of people, support in accessing gender affirming
services may be mediated by whether or not the individual is assessed as
both ‘competent’ and as needing of services. Jack suggests that the assess-
ment of transgender people often relies upon assumptions of neurotypi-
cality, which can function to exclude transgender people who are on the
autism spectrum. Shifting away from ‘differential diagnosis’, and towards
identifying how normative assumptions operate to exclude certain groups
 3  The Disability and Diagnosis Nexus: Transgender Men... 
   81

of transgender people from services, would thus also constitute a radical

shift in terms of how the needs of transgender people are responded to.

Conclusion
To conclude, in this chapter we have mapped out the beginnings of an
understanding of what it might mean to think about transgender people’s
experiences of mental health within the framework of disability, specifi-
cally with application to the lives of transgender men. In so doing, we
have explored the nexus of disability and diagnosis, and have suggested
that what often disappears when clinicians focus solely or primarily on
gender issues are the potentially chronic mental health concerns experi-
enced by some transgender men, concerns that may be both the product
of cisgenderism and of other factors beyond living in cisgenderist societies.
What is required next is research that looks more closely at how a
disability framework may be usefully applied to the lives of transgender
men, how this may improve clinical responses, and ultimately how it may
be used to combat cisgenderism. As we suggested earlier, such research
may consider how masculinities factor into transgender men’s experiences
of mental health, an area that has received very little attention in previ-
ous research. Whilst it is likely the case that for many transgender people
mental health concerns may be ameliorated by more adequate clinical
responses, there are likely to remain a considerable subset of people for
whom ongoing access to mental health services is required. Responding
to this need through a framework of disability, we have argued, need
not reinforce pathologising understandings of transgender people’s lives.
Rather, it may engender focus upon the unique mental health issues
that many transgender people face, and the specific responses that they
require.

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 4
Intersex Men, Masculinities
and ‘Disabled’ Penises
Stephen Kerry

Introduction
In 2005, I completed my PhD, the short title of which is Are You a
Boy or a Girl? While this title pertained to the topic, that is, intersex
Australians, it was also autobiographical. Growing up, I was often asked
this question. I was never quite sure of how to answer it as a child. It
is this ambiguity which has defined my personal journey over the past
few decades and it has been the motivation for my academic career. Not
only do I want to give a voice to those who live on the gender mar-
gins of society, I also want the work that I do to act as a force of social
change. While I am neither ‘intersex’ nor ‘transgender’, I do not identify
as cisgender, preferring instead to identify as ‘genderqueer’. During my
undergraduate studies I met ‘out’ intersex individuals at queer student
conferences and their stories inspired me to explore the lived experiences

S. Kerry (*)
Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia

© The Author(s) 2017 85

C. Loeser et al. (eds.), Disability and Masculinities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53477-4_4
86  S. Kerry

of intersex Australians in my PhD. Intersex Australians’ experiences are

similar to those in the international intersex literature. While this obser-
vation is not the focus of this chapter, what is necessary at the outset is
an understanding that what is to be said about intersex individuals must
find its source within the narratives of intersex individuals themselves.
Intersex individuals have made it clear that those who research the topic
of ‘intersex’ and who are not themselves intersex speak from an outsider
subjectivity and must do so with a consideration of the real life experi-
ences of intersex individuals. In 2002, Emi Koyama published Suggested
Guidelines for Non-Intersex Individuals Writing about Intersexuality and
Intersex People. Number three of these guidelines states:

Do not write about intersex existence or the concept of intersexuality with-

out talking about the lives and experiences of intersex people as well as
issues they face. Do not use intersex people merely to illustrate the social
construction of binary sexes. (2002)

All too often intersex individuals have been constructed as ‘Other’.

The intersex movement arose out of a late twentieth-century need to
give voice to the marginalised. Riki Wilchins writes that postmodern-
ists, such as Derrida, ‘called for decentering knowledge, which would
enable alterity to breathe, that would enable the excluded and erased
to reemerge’ (2004, p. 44). This chapter gives voice to several intersex
individuals who have been excluded and erased; individuals from my
own research and also others who have been quoted in the international
intersex literature. These individuals, while sharing a lived experience
which is ‘Other’, do not necessarily share experiences which are dis-
cursively nor physiologically similar. I will be exploring the views of
‘intersex women’ who were surgically assigned ‘female’ at birth, but as
adults either questioned their gender identity as ‘women’ or underwent
a gender transition. This chapter also discusses the views of ‘intersex
men’ who have undergone phalloplasty, that is, surgery to construct,
reconstruct or ‘correct’ the penis. While distinct, these individuals
share the experience of living with iatrogenic bodies. They are living as
women or men without penises or men with inadequate penises, what
I collectively refer to as the ‘disabled penis’.
 4  Intersex Men, Masculinities and ‘Disabled’ Penises 
   87

Intersex 101
Intersex is a contemporary term for what has been referred to histori-
cally as hermaphroditism. While true hermaphroditism is a relatively rare
condition, intersex is not. Intersex refers to a large array of chromosomal,
gonadal, hormonal and genital configurations. It has been estimated that
1–2 % of the population (Blackless et al. 2000) has some intersex status
and more specifically Fausto-Sterling has suggested a median figure of
1.7 % (2000). Thus, it has been concluded that intersex is more com-
mon than cystic fibrosis (1 in 2,500) (Dreger 1998, p. 43) and albinism
(1 in 20,000) (Fausto-Sterling 2000, p. 53). Furthermore, Haynes notes
that there are over 70 variations of intersex (2001, p. 4). Despite these
comparatively high frequencies, there remains an apparent lack of under-
standing and knowledge of intersex within mainstream discourses. The
failure to acknowledge the existence of intersex can be traced back to sev-
eral issues, one of which includes the fact that not all incidences of inter-
sex are marked externally. For example, only 1 in 2,000 births will have
some form of visible ‘genital ambiguity’ (Blackless et al. 2000, p. 161).
Having said that, these numbers are contested. What is considered ‘inter-
sex’ has been called into question (Sax 2002), and since the mid-2000s
attempts have been made to replace the term ‘intersex’ with such terms as
‘disorders of sex development’ (DSD) (Reis 2009). Although the intersex
movement remains a contested space, over the past 25 years it has prof-
fered a singular position, challenging the medicalisation of intersex.
In the early 1990s, intersex individuals coalesced into an international
social movement. Their primary aims were to bring together geographi-
cally, socially and discursively isolated individuals with similar experiences
in order to articulate concerns regarding the medical profession’s ‘treat-
ment’ of intersex. Previous social identity movements, such as Women’s
Liberation and the Gay and Lesbian Movement, formed around shared
social identities. However, the ‘institutionalisation of silence’ (Kerry
2011) which surrounded intersex, meant that not only is there no public
discussion on intersex, but that many intersex individuals did not know
they were intersex. Therefore, intersex individuals do not exist as a socio-
culturally distinct identity or community. It is not a coincidence that
the intersex movement emerged at the same time as the internet. This
88  S. Kerry

emerging technology allowed geographically and socially isolated indi-

viduals to find one another online. Dreger argued that the internet has
‘made intersexuals known and known to one another to recognize their
common problems and tell their individual stories’ (1998, p. 170). Still
agrees, noting how the internet has provided a ‘virtual neighbourhood’
(2008, p. 57), and goes on to say that ‘the Internet does work successfully
to enable intersex activists to get their messages, their views, and their
stories out when traditional resources are limited’ (2008, p. 93). While
challenging the medicalisation of intersex is not the only message coming
out of the intersex movement since its inception, it is the one which has
been championed most universally, especially in regards to campaigns to
change medical practice.
The medical profession, not unlike broader society, has been domi-
nated by a view that there exists two and only two, mutually exclusive
sexes and genders. The biomedical model is predicated on a sex/gen-
der binary which is written in the body and assumes that underlying
an ‘intersex body’ (that is, ambiguous genitals) there exists a ‘true’ sex.
During the ‘age of the gonads’ (Dreger 1998), it was argued that an inter-
sex individual’s ‘true sex’ could be found by examining the gonadal tis-
sue. Since then, the medical profession has arguably undertaken a more
holistic view, whereby a team of ‘experts’ would examine many aspects
of the body (Dreger 1998, p. 29). However, what remained was a deter-
mination that a child’s ‘true’ sex was written in the body. With the sole
exception of Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (which requires hormonal
treatments), early intervention is challenged because intersex is not life
threatening (Karkazis 2008, p.  292). Intersex is not a ‘medical emer-
gency’, but rather a ‘social emergency’ (Holmes 2002, p. 159). Despite
the fact that no empirical research exists to argue their case, the medical
profession insists that those individuals with intersex bodies, especially
those with ambiguous genitals, are unable to live appropriately sexed/
gendered lives, and that this will cause psychological trauma and/or lead
to suicide (Dreger 2004). On the contrary, narratives from those individ-
uals with ambiguous genitals who escaped ‘normalising surgery’ tell the
opposite story. According to Preves, ‘Suegee was raised without medical
attempts to diminish her/his sexual ambiguity’ and quotes their experi-
ences as a child:
 4  Intersex Men, Masculinities and ‘Disabled’ Penises 
   89

It was at some point in my youth when I was playing doctor with other
kids, or playing take off your clothes and show and tell, and realizing that
I was different from anybody else there. And I also remember it wasn’t a big
deal at all. Everybody was like, ‘Wow! That’s cool. Hey, you look like this,
I look like this. Oh, yeah cool, fine, whatever’. And that wasn’t really a big
deal at all. (cited in Preves 2003, pp. 64–65)

Intersex is considered a ‘social emergency’ because of the social expec-

tations surrounding genitals and, presumably, their ‘proper’ functions.
However, it is not about genitals per se, but the penis. Nothing speaks
more clearly about the emphasis of an adequately functioning penis than
the fact that 90 % of surgical reassignment procedures result in inter-
sex children being surgically ‘normalised’ as ‘female’, and raised as ‘girls’
(Preves 2003, p. 56). This disproportionate number is not because these
intersex children ‘really are’ ‘girls’, but because the medical profession
concedes that normalising a phallus into a functional penis is not pos-
sible. One often-quoted physician remarked that ‘you can make a hole
but you can’t build a pole’ (Holmes 2002, p. 169).
The medical profession’s determination that some phalluses are ‘inad-
equate’ ‘penises’ is associated with assumptions of urinary and hetero-
sexual practices. In Fausto-Sterling’s analysis, she argues that the medical
profession assumes that:

Young boys should be able to pee standing up and thus “feel normal” dur-
ing little-boy peeing contests; and, adult men, need a penis big enough for
vaginal penetration during sexual intercourse. (2000, p. 57)

Kessler adds, ‘given the number of references in the medical literature to

the “locker room”, one might think that boys and men spend most of
their waking hours there’ (1998, p. 69). To suggest this is phallocentrism
is a misnomer; it is not the phallus which is prioritised, but a specific
type of penis, which is capable of urinary and heterosexual functions. A
mirror for these practices can be found in the broad trope of masculinity,
in which exists a specific ‘hegemonic masculinity’. That is, a dominant
and preferred masculinity. In the early years of the term’s formulation,
Connell explained that ‘in modern social formations, certain construc-
tions of masculinity are hegemonic, while others are subordinated or
90  S. Kerry

marginalized’ (1992, p. 736). Later, Connell and Messerschmidt clarify

it by stating:

Hegemonic masculinity was distinguished from other masculinities, espe-

cially subordinated masculinities. Hegemonic masculinity was not assumed
to be normal in the statistical sense; only a minority of men might enact it.
But it was certainly normative. It embodied the currently most honored
way of being a man, it required all other men to position themselves in
relation. (2005, p. 832)

In regards to the configurations of the body, Grosz writes, ‘there are

always only specific types of body, concrete in their determinations,
with a particular sex, race, and physiognomy’ (1994, p. 19). Thus, the
trope of the penis is dominated by what I refer to as a ‘hegemony of the
penis’. What is necessary in dissecting ‘specific types of body’ generally
and ‘hegemony of the penis’ specifically, which are threaded through-
out the medicalisation of intersex, is an understanding of sociocultural
schematics which produce, and are in themselves, sex/gender normativi-
ties and power—schematics which go beyond suggestions that medical
practices are dominated by masculinist biases and Western societies’ pref-
erence for boys. To that end, Butler’s ‘bodies that matter’ becomes a use-
ful tool to (re)conceptualise the intersex body as a ‘materialised’ body,
done so through the medical profession. For Butler, matter is neither a
site nor a surface, but rather ‘a process of materialisation that stabilises
over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call
matter’ (1993, p. xviii). At birth, we are all exposed to what I elsewhere
refer to as the ‘birthing panopticon’ (Kerry 2009c); this is the emergence
of the intersex body into Benthamesque surveillance. The intersex body
may disrupt normative materialities, but the medical profession sorts the
intersex body into its own materiality; on the one hand, the intersex body
is deemed counternormative, it is ‘diagnosed’ as a ‘condition’ and a ‘treat-
ment’ is prescribed. On the other hand, this treatment itself becomes a
­materialisation for those intersex bodies, with what is labelled an ‘inad-
equate penis’, as incisions into the body result also in the materialisa-
tion of the ‘disabled penis’. It would be too simplistic to suggest another
dichotomy of the ‘hegemony of the penis’ versus the ‘disabled penis’. The
 4  Intersex Men, Masculinities and ‘Disabled’ Penises 
   91

intersex movement, and the narratives which have furnished this discur-
sive field over the past 25 years, are far more complex than this. Those
intersex individuals with ‘disabled penises’ are not attempting to reclaim
something which has been lost, undo what was done, nor support the
‘hegemony of the penis’. Rather, what is paramount in their lived expe-
riences are processes of recovery and returning to a state of health and
wellbeing, through a Butlerian rematerialization of the body and self-
identities either was women or men within tropes of a ‘disabled penis’.
What I am arguing in this chapter is that intersex women and men who
live with a ‘disabled penis’, not unlike others in the intersex narratives, do
so from the perspective of coming to terms with the impact, not of being
intersex, but of the medicalisation of intersex. Central to the initial emer-
gence of the intersex movement is giving intersex individuals a voice, in
order to tell their own narratives. This is an essential process in healing.
Their narratives speak of their bodies; the absent or damaged phallus is
a ‘disabled penis’. Frank (1995) argues that modernisation of illness has
removed the ‘voice’ from those who are ill, subsequently ‘they need to
become storytellers in order to recover the voices that illness and its treat-
ment often take away’ (1995, p. xi). To this end, comparisons have been
made between the intersex movement and disability rights movement.

Intersex and Disability
Robert Crouch was one of the first to draw a discursive line between
intersex and disability:

The long-term impact of sex assignment surgeries on the gender identities

of intersexed children is not dissimilar to the impact of cochlear implant
surgery on the identities of prelingually deaf children. Though at first
glance the deafness of a child may seem like an archetypal instance of a
pathology in need of medical management, the full story is more
­complicated. For those deaf persons who use American Sign Language
(ASL) and who identify with the Deaf community, to be Deaf is to be a
member of an active cultural and linguistic minority group, rather than to
be disabled. (1999, p. 42)
92  S. Kerry

Editor of Critical Intersex, Morgan Holmes, clearly states that ‘intersex

studies draws as much from the impulses, theoretical frameworks and
critical lenses of disability studies as from the development of queer
theory/studies and gender studies informed by feminist studies’ (2009,
pp. 5–6). In the same work, Spurgas cautions that despite ‘the promise of
utilizing disability studies to theorize and mobilize around intersex issues
… it is crucial that intersex is understood as a very special case within this
realm’ (2009, p. 109). Aligning intersex with the disability movement is
insufficient because the ‘special case’ Spurgas refers to is intersex as an
iatrogenic disability. Medical intervention, in the form of genital surgery,
has resulted in genital scarring, dysfunction, insensitivity, oversensitivity
and life-long pain. Some intersex men who possess a penis live with ongo-
ing reminders of what was done to them in order to produce an ‘adequate
penis’. Carey is a 40-year-old gay man who I interviewed as part of my
PhD project. On the one hand, he says that surgery was ‘necessary and I
could not have done without it’, adding ‘I am glad my parents made the
decision for surgery’. However, on the other hand Carey also states that
the penis did not look normal after the surgery to ‘correct’ hypospadias
and acquiesces that ‘I can’t do anything about that’. He goes on to reflect
on the pressures associated with living as a man with a ‘disabled penis’:

So much emphasis on being male revolves around the penis, its size and
ability. Having a penis different to the norm and one that does not work
properly makes you feel inadequate and less male, it’s very isolating espe-
cially through the teen years. I feel inadequate most of the time and then
being gay as well doesn’t help.

Another participant, Pat (aged 44), who identified as ‘intersex male-­

variant’ at the time of the interview, did not learn of his Klinefelter
Syndrome until the age of 35. While he does not refer specifically to the
penis, he speaks of the impact of attempts to ‘masculinise’ him through
hormone therapy. He resisted testosterone treatments at first, yet later
agreed. This resulted in ‘severe psychological and later physiological nega-
tive reactions. After six years on large doses of testosterone, developed
near-fatal Deep Vein Thrombosis from site of implants.’ After chang-
ing these treatments, Pat is left with ‘permanent fatigue, body-pain, low-­
 4  Intersex Men, Masculinities and ‘Disabled’ Penises 
   93

stress thresh-hold’. Reflecting on the pressure to undergo this therapy,

Pat remarks:

That all people with XXY (Klinefelter Syndrome) should [not] be coerced
into therapies simply in order to masculinize them. Choice [should be] left
to [the] individual who is provided with all the options—not just the rec-
ommendations of the medical profession.

These medical attempts to ‘masculinise’ him, that is, assigning Pat to the
sex/gender binary, ignores his feelings of gender ambiguity. He says that
he identifies primarily as ‘male’, but recognises ‘aspects which extend
beyond the classification of male. Don’t identify as female even though
I recognise that I possess feelings, emotional reactions and thought pat-
terns often associated with women.’ For Carey, questions around gender
identity pertain more specifically to the function of his penis. He says
that ‘experiencing erectile dysfunction often makes me not feel as male
as I should plus having a different penis which does not look normal
impacts on my feelings of maleness’. Another participant, Chris (33), was
living as a man at the time of the interview, describing his gender as ‘more
male than female’. He elaborated on his experience by stating that he
identified ‘as a man in all aspects of my life, albeit with breasts and atypi-
cal genitalia’. Like many people with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome,
Chris was assigned female and raised as a girl/woman, and he reflects on
trying as a child ‘to accept being a female which is what I was told I had
to do’. He concedes that being raised as a girl was not the problem, think-
ing it a sensible approach. However, he questions the surgical reinforce-
ment of this identity, stating that:

Irreversible non-therapeutic surgery and hormone treatment was stupid,

irresponsible, negligent, immoral, unethical, illegal and against my funda-
mental human rights. People with genetic conditions should have the same
level of protection as those born without them. Why are the genitals of
typical children protected but the genitals of those with intersex conditions
treated so ambivalently?

While the underlying intersex status of Carey and Pat is different (hypo-
spadias and Klinefelter Syndrome respectively), they both express attrac-
94  S. Kerry

tion to men. Carey identifies his sexual orientation as ‘gay’, and goes on
to elaborate:

I do feel however, that I have always been interested in other male genitalia
because mine was different, I was always interested in something I desper-
ately wanted but was never going to have and that was normal genitalia.

Pat says he:

Do[es] not possess a sexual orientation—don’t have a sex drive, sexual

awareness, nor have had much experience with sexual interaction. Attracted
to males, but not sexually—not interested or inclined to express visual
attraction via sexual contact. Able to establish non-sexual intimate rela-
tionships with males, more so than with females. Best described as being
a-sexual.

Earlier in his life Pat was:

Labelled as being homosexual in my late teens. Tried to accept this label,

but was very unsuccessful as I did not receive satisfaction or enjoyment
from sexual contact with males (or females for that matter). Experienced
severe trauma when I realised that I was neither straight, gay, bi—did not
have the knowledge or awareness at this time that there were alternatives.
On discovering my intersex state and discussing sexual orientation/identity
with other intersexed people discovered that a non-sexual identity was just
as real and as valid as a sexual identity. So now I choose to identify as not
having a sexual identity.

For Carey, Pat and Chris surgery and hormone treatment ‘failed’ to ‘nor-
malise’ their sex/gender identity, sexual practices and sexual orientation.
One of the social expectations associated with the ‘hegemony of the
penis,’ is that a penis should not only function ‘adequately’ but ‘hetero-
sexually’. Underlying medical intervention is what Fausto-Sterling refers
to as the ‘specter of homosexuality’ (2000, p. 71). Fausto-Sterling pon-
ders, ‘might one, in the course of treating an intersexual, end up creating
a homosexual?’ (2000, p.  71). Similarly, Dreger argues that ‘mistaken
 4  Intersex Men, Masculinities and ‘Disabled’ Penises 
   95

sex could also lead to accidental “homosexuality”’ (1998, p. 76). Having

said that, I posit that the fear of homosexuality has not been completely
overcome, rather it has been displaced into the ‘institutionalisation of
silence’. An essential feature of the medicalisation of intersex is the insis-
tence that intersex individuals not be told about their intersex status, and
that those who have undergone genital normalising surgery are not to be
told about their genital history. However, just because intersex individu-
als are not told, it does not mean they do not know.
Wilson and Reiner state that ‘children have a particular knack for rec-
ognizing when something is being withheld from them, especially when
scars, appearance, and frequent doctors’ visits document that something
about them is different’ (1999, p. 125). Many examples exist in the inter-
sex literature of adults reflecting on how they ‘knew’ something was dif-
ferent. Triea writes: ‘sometime before the onset of memory, I awakened
to the knowledge that I was different’ (1994, p. 1). Similarly Fran says:

I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know I was different. I believe I

am intuitive most of the time. One of my earliest recollections regarding
my syndrome is sitting in the bathtub weeping. I was weeping there, waist-­
high in water, at the age of 6 or 7, because I felt betrayed. I was positive that
I was ‘supposed’ to be a boy and my mother wouldn’t tell me. (2002, p. 4)

And Max states:

I knew I was different from the moment I was capable of thought … I knew
that something was weird and off. There were dark, secret, clandestine
appointments once a year in New York where they looked between my legs.
I knew there was something horrible there that wasn’t talked about. (original
emphasis, Max cited in Mason 2002)

Martha Coventry confronted her father and doctor about her concerns.
She recounts:

I was a grown woman when I started to ask questions again about my

body. I was careful this time, protective of this little girl terrified of her
own reflection. I had never been sure of my sexual identity and was still
96  S. Kerry

afraid that what the surgeon cut off was a penis. I spoke to my father
again, asked for my medical records, and listened to my gynecologist
read me to the summary the hospital sent. My father and my doctor has
the same sensible response when I ask what sex I really was: “You had
children, isn’t that proof enough?” No, as a matter of fact it wasn’t.
(1999, p. 72)

It is possible that what disturbs the medical profession the most is not
necessarily homosexuality per se, but any lived experience which is coun-
ternormative. So, while the ‘spectre of homosexuality’ and the fear of
‘creating a homosexual’ are plausible motivations, I argue that the fear
is more visceral, and that it is neither easily located nor articulated. To
elucidate this further, I evoke Creed’s ‘phallic panic’. While Creed writes
from the perspective of psychoanalysis within film, her positioning of the
‘male monster’ is useful. For Creed:

Proper masculinity embodies phallic power and asserts masculine qualities

of power, rationality, ascendancy and control. By his very existence, the
male monster points to the fact that masculinity, as defined by the sym-
bolic economy, is a fragile concept, one that is rarely, if ever, fulfilled. To
undermine the symbolic is to create a disturbance around the phallus, to
create a sense of phallic panic. (2005, p. xvi)

More explicitly, ‘phallic panic’ emerges when a man attempts to appro-

priate the function of a woman: that is, reproduction. I have made this
argument in my analysis of the science fiction television show Star Trek
(Kerry 2009a). When a male character becomes ‘pregnant’, he evokes
one of Creed’s male monster tropes: ‘man as womb monster’ (Creed
2005). By usurping the role of the woman, the character becomes mon-
strous. While fictionalised, the disturbance is around the uncanny and
the abject, both of which go a long way to explain the reaction by
Martha Coventry’s father and doctor noted above; perhaps the motiva-
tion for the m
­ edicalisation of intersex is not because of the ‘spectre of
homosexuality’ but the spectre of the ‘pregnant man’. The fear is not
that intersex individuals are homosexual, but that ‘intersex women’ are
‘he-as-mother’.
 4  Intersex Men, Masculinities and ‘Disabled’ Penises 
   97

Reconciling the Incongruities
Many intersex individuals have questioned their sex/gender and sexual
identities. Some have attempted several different ways to reconcile the
incongruities between their lived experiences and the normative notions
of sex/gender and sexuality. For example, Pat has used Buddhism and
says that ‘Buddhist practice and theory enable me to see beyond the
binaries’. Elsewhere, I have explored the role that religion and spiritual-
ity have played in intersex individuals’ paths to health and wellbeing
(Kerry 2009b). While it is not my intention to revisit that discussion,
what is key is the fact that throughout the intersex literature there is a
common theme of psychological trauma. Intersex individuals are not
traumatised by being intersex, but by medical intervention. The ten-
sions between intersex individuals and the medical profession has led
some to suggest that medical intervention is akin to childhood sexual
abuse. In her article ‘The Medical Management of Intersexes Children:
An Analogue for Childhood Sexual Abuse’, Tamara Alexander (1997)
clearly posits the idea that for many intersex individuals medical inter-
vention is traumatic and the intersex literature is replete with indi-
viduals’ reflections on their experiences during childhood, when they
were exposed to the medical profession, as being akin to sexual abuse.
One of the intersex movement’s earliest voices, Cheryl Chase, states
that ‘those of us who have been subjected to medical intervention and
societal invisibility share our experience of it as abuse’ (1998, p. 216).
Emi Koyama writes, ‘our experience is that intersex genital mutilation
and other medical management of intersexed children result in post-
traumatic responses similar to other forms of childhood sexual abuse’
(Koyama cited in Mason 2002). In her interviews with intersex North
Americans, Sharon Preves notes that ‘many participants I spoke with
viewed their medical exams and treatments as instances of sexual abuse’
(2003, p. 72). Graham writes:

My clinic visits were very humiliating as I remember, I would have to strip

below the waste and have doctors poke and prod at me, all done with the
consent of my mother, and what I now see as childhood sex abuse. (2002)
98  S. Kerry

Tony too considers what was done to him and writes ‘in today’s climate I
feel that the practice was tantamount to child abuse’ (2000). The ways in
which the medical profession would treat intersex children was reflected
on by Hawbecker as inhuman:

They would make me sit in frog-legged position, and invite teams of ear-
nest interns to come in and look at me while I was naked on the cold metal
examination table … peering at me as if I were a bug under a microscope.
(1999, p. 112)

This narrative, speaking to the ways in which their lived experiences are
analogous to more common discourses, is a way of making sense of the
physical and psychological harm. Above, it is mentioned that Pat turned
to religion to help him understand his experiences. When intersex indi-
viduals have questioned their sex/gender identities, not unlike Martha
Coventry also mentioned above, some have transitioned. Chris was
assigned female and raised a girl; as an adult he underwent a gender transi-
tion: ‘I reaffirmed my true self by trying to reverse what doctors did to me
as a child and adolescent.’ While there have been tensions between discur-
sive fields of intersex and transgender since the beginning (Spurgas 2009,
p.  105), some intersex individuals are transgender. Men such as Chris
express views about their experiences as men without ‘adequate’ penises
which are not dissimilar to someone who is female-to-male transgender.
Cromwell challenges ‘the obsession with having penises stereotype’, and
says that ‘surgery is a possibility for some but by no means a necessity or
obsession’ (1999, p. 113). He cites Alex W, who says ‘I’m comfortable
and happy where I am. I present as a man in my life but I have no prob-
lem with having a vagina’ (cited in Cromwell 1999, p. 113). In Holly
Devor’s pivotal work FTM: Female-to-male Transsexuals in Society (1997),
45 transmen discuss their experiences of transitioning from one gendered
body to another. Devor concedes that these men would have preferred to
have been born with penises, and felt incomplete without them. Yet some
‘believed that they were men and that they were males, with or without
that particular piece of flesh’ (1997, pp. 405–406). Possessing a penis, an
‘adequate’ penis, is clearly a social expectation—which some, but by no
means all, men adhere to.
 4  Intersex Men, Masculinities and ‘Disabled’ Penises 
   99

Conclusion
Medical intervention has resulted in a range of physical and psychologi-
cal problems. Intersex individuals are living lives with iatrogenic bodies,
whether they are women who question their gender identity, individu-
als who were assigned female, raised as girls/women, and later ‘reaffirm’
their identities as men, or men who live with ‘inadequate’ penises; they
are all experiencing a process of healing as a result of the ‘hegemony of
the penis’. Intersex individuals are living lives while attempting to recover
from medical intervention. Since the emergence of the intersex move-
ment in the 1990s, ‘intersex women’ and ‘intersex men’ have given voice
to a range of lived experiences, and they do not necessarily have discursive
or physiological similarities. However, those individuals to whom I refer
to in this chapter, whether they lived as women and questioned their
identity as women, transitioned to live as men and/or live as men with
absent or damaged penises, arguably they can all be collectively said to
be living with ‘disabled penises’. Their outsider, ‘Other’ status is founded
not in their intersex status, but in the materialisations of their bodies
by the medical profession, as counternormative to the ‘hegemony of the
penis’.

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 Part III
(Re)presentation
 5
More Than Puddles: Disability
and Masculinity in Alan Marshall’s I Can
Jump Puddles
Dylan Holdsworth

Introduction
Given that ‘the centrality of disability to human experience [has been]
recorded in our narrative and linguistic records’ (Snyder et  al. 2002,
p.  1), it is hardly surprising that some of the most significant scholar-
ship in disability studies has been undertaken by literary and cultural
studies scholars.1 As a field, Disability Studies is relatively new. Emerging
late last century, it is interdisciplinary in nature and parallels other new

1
 Some of these works include David T.  Mitchell and Sharon L.  Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis:
Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies:
Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature, and the increasing amount of work by
Michael Bérubé within the field, as well as the creation of the Journal of Literary and Cultural
Disability Studies in 2006 (Liverpool University Press).

D. Holdsworth (*)
Deakin University, Burwood, Victoria, Australia

© The Author(s) 2017 105

C. Loeser et al. (eds.), Disability and Masculinities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53477-4_5
106  D. Holdsworth

areas of knowledge (such as feminist studies and postcolonial studies)

resulting from the emergence of various rights movements, in the USA
and UK predominantly. Unlike aspects of gender, sexuality, race or class,
people with disabilities have a long history of being the other ‘Other’:
the identity strewn as the ‘real deviant’ from other forms of biologically
or psychologically based discriminations.2 Yet despite increased interna-
tional interest in literary representations of disability, there is, to date, no
comprehensive scholarship on representations of disability in Australian
literature that considers and examines disability as a valid identity cat-
egory.3 This could be because of various reasons: the lack of attention
paid to analyses of disability in literature in the Australian academy; the
invisibility of disability within Australian literary studies; or the scholarly
neglect of Australian literature within a global literary context.
However, as Snyder et  al. have pointed out, disability and the dis-
abled have a long, albeit understated, history within literary traditions
and, I contend, especially within the Australian literary tradition. In this
chapter, I consider representations of disability in Alan Marshall’s ‘classic’
autobiography I Can Jump Puddles.4 As Marshall’s autobiographical nov-
els articulate a personal account of disabled masculinity within an early-­
twentieth-­century Australian context, this chapter calls attention to the
complex relationship between disability and masculinity. Significantly,
although the representations of disability in I Can Jump Puddles are not
entirely unique to Australian literature, the intersections between dis-
ability and early-twentieth-century, rural Australian masculinity is. As
Edward Hills (1998) notes, ‘the narrative is driven by an almost eulo-
gistic celebration of Lawsonian bush values’ (p.  174). Although the

2
 Mitchell and Snyder (2000) note the history of disability’s displacement. The biological or psycho-
logical bases for discrimination against women, racial minorities and queer individuals were dis-
carded and placed upon the disabled.
3
 The only study on disability in Australian literature is C. A. Cranston’s 1991 PhD thesis ‘Deformity
as Device in the Twentieth-Century Australian Novel’, where Cranston understands disability in
literature as metaphor.
4
 Marshall’s I Can Jump Puddles has immense sociocultural significance to Australian audiences.
Since its publication in 1955, the novel has been on and off school syllabuses, was turned into a
film by Czechoslovakian director Karel Kachyňa Už zase skáču přes kaluže (I’m Jumping Over Puddles
Again) in 1970, as well as into a nine-episode TV movie in 1981, and has since joined the Penguin
corpus.
 5  More Than Puddles: Disability and Masculinity... 
   107

representation of disability in itself may not be unique, the ‘strict code

of values which are narrowly nationalistic and exclusively masculine’
(p.  174) make Marshall’s navigation of masculinity and disability an
altogether Australian fare. Given the significance of I Can Jump Puddles,
and Alan Marshall himself, to Australian literature, this under-theorised
­intersection demands critical attention. While there has been plenty of
discussion of disability in relation to the public sphere, especially within
economic and sociological studies, the intricacies of the private sphere
as represented in literature have been largely overlooked. This analysis of
Marshall’s I Can Jump Puddles will work to demonstrate how Australian
life writing navigates the complexities of disability and masculinity, and
its further intersection with Australian national identity.

Disability and Masculinity
As Tom Shakespeare, Kath Gillespie-Sells and Dominic Davies have
noted, there has been a proliferation of recent critical attention on the
complex intersection of disability and femininity, but very little on dis-
ability and masculinity (1996, p. 7; see also Shuttleworth et al. 2012). In
‘The Sexual Politics of Disabled Masculinity’ (1999), Shakespeare asserts
that ‘[There is] a claim by disabled feminists that disability studies has
neglected the experience of disabled women: that when writers talk about
“disabled people”, they are in fact talking about disabled men’ (p. 54).
However, Shakespeare suggests that in ‘[his] reading of the literature, and
observation of the disabled movement … women have always played a
key part, often in leadership roles’ (p. 54). As such, Shakespeare argues,

[T]he problem we face is not so much that a male-dominated literature has

constructed a ‘false generic’: saying ‘people’ when they mean ‘men’. It is
that a literature initially dominated by Marxists and other structuralists,
albeit mainly men, has focussed on the public at the cost of the private. (my
italics, p. 55)

Due to this focus on the public sphere, the intricacies of private life,
and thus the intersections between disability and other cultural identities,
108  D. Holdsworth

have been neglected. It is a return to the feminist assertion ‘the personal is

political’ that Shakespeare points toward, and that underpins this analy-
sis. The growing area of feminist disability studies, exemplified in the
work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and the edited collection Feminist
Disability Studies (Hall 2011), demonstrates the need to investigate the
complex relationships between gender and disability, and other identity
categories. As Garland-Thomson notes, ‘disability studies is now flourish-
ing in disciplines such as history, literature, religion, theater, and philoso-
phy in precisely the same way feminist studies did twenty-five years ago’
(p. 13). Although there is the growing area of masculinity studies, disabil-
ity is predominantly left out of such studies.5 Due to the specific focus on
women, both in gender theory and in feminist disability studies, and the
neglect of disabled men in anthologies on masculinities, a more in-depth
discussion of the intersections of disability and masculinity is required.

Hegemonic Masculinity
In Alan Marshall’s first autobiographical novel, I Can Jump Puddles
([1955] 2010), Alan, who contracts poliomyelitis at a young age, tries
to navigate his socially conflicting identities as both masculine and dis-
abled in early-twentieth-century rural Victoria. His attempts to enact
the hegemonic masculinity expected of him demonstrate the difficul-
ties of trying to marry the realities of disabled experience and dominant
concepts of masculinity. As such, Marshall highlights how hegemonic
masculinity and disability are stereotypically created as oppositional; as
Shakespeare et al. summarise, ‘Prevailing images of masculinity, and of
disability, offer conflicting roles and identities’ (1996, p.  62). Whereas
hegemonic masculinity is associated with the centre, logic, strength, viril-
ity, the Self, independence, agency and industry, disability is associated
5
 Some examples of studies which do not or only minimally discuss disability in their theorisations
of masculinities are Whitehead, S.  M. (ed.) 2002, Men and Masculinities, Polity Press, UK;
Gardiner, J.  K. (ed.) 2002, Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions, Columbia
University Press, USA; Roberts, S. (ed.) 2014, Debating Modern Masculinities: Change, Continuity,
Crisis?, Palgrave Pivot, Palgrave Macmillan, UK; significantly, disability as a concept seems to be
largely overlooked in Rosenfeld, D. and Faircloth, C.  A. (eds) 2006, Medicalized Masculinities,
Temple University Press, USA. There are, however, chapters on ADHD and PTSD.
   
5  More Than Puddles: Disability and Masculinity...  109

with the margins, irrationality (especially concerning cognitive and intel-

lectual disabilities), vulnerability/weakness, lack, the Other, dependence,
passivity and unemployment/welfare. In turn, these associations come
to resemble both a cultural hegemony and a homogenous entity where
all identity expressions are positioned in relation to these stereotypes.
As such, this makes each category distinctly delimited and oppositional,
creating a hierarchy of male selves in which the hegemonic male subordi-
nates the disabled subject. As R. W. Connell defines it, hegemonic mas-
culinity operates ‘as the configuration of gender practice which embodies
the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patri-
archy’ (1995, p. 77). Continuing from this, Connell also maintains that
hegemonic masculinity subordinates to reify its dominance (p.  78),
and argues the significance of ‘marginalization’ to the ‘authorization’ of
hegemonic masculinity. Through investigating the relationship between
disability and hegemonic masculinity, how the disabled male subject is
interpellated (or not) into sociocultural discourses of masculinity can be
analysed in Marshall’s text.

Variations on Interpellations
This analysis utilises Ghassan Hage’s (2010) application and extension of
Louis Althusser’s concept of ‘interpellation’ (1971) to demonstrate how
the disabled male subject in Marshall’s novel is positioned by both hege-
monic masculinity and the larger sociocultural climate of early-twentieth-­
century Australia. Although Hage’s reconceptualisation of interpellation
is specifically related to race, his theories can be applied to the disabled
male subject. This chapter is specifically interested in two of Hage’s
reconceptualisations: ‘negative interpellation’ and ‘mis-interpellation’.6
As he elaborates;

perhaps that most commonly associated with racism is negative interpella-

tion. Here the racialized is definitely noticed and made visible. And the
6
 Although Hage notes three different modes of ‘interpellation’, I have chosen to use only the latter
two as they have specific resonance to disability and masculinity in Marshall’s novel. Judith Butler’s
work also reconsiders the concept of interpellation, and is discussed later in my analysis.
110  D. Holdsworth

symbolic structure of society has a place for them, but it is a place defined
by negative characteristics. It hails them with negative attributes ‘lazy, dirty,
thief, social problem, etc.’ Rather than having to fight for visibility, the
racialized subject has to fight for valorization …

[Another] form of racialization, mis-interpellation, is a racism of a differ-

ent order, for it is a drama in two acts: in the first instance the racialized
person is interpellated as belonging to a collectivity ‘like everybody else’.
S/he is hailed by the cultural group or the nation, or even by modernity
which claims to be addressing ‘everyone’. And the yet-to-be-racialized
person believes that the hailing is for ‘everyone’ and answers the call
thinking that there is a place for him or her awaiting to be occupied. Yet,
no sooner do they answer the call and claim their spot than the symbolic
order brutally reminds them that they are not part of everyone: ‘No, I
wasn’t talking to you. Piss off. You are not part of us’. (my italics,
pp. 121–122)

In his discussion of Frantz Fanon’s seminal Black Skin, White Masks

(1952), Hage expands on the ‘vacillation’ between the desire for univer-
sality and the desire for particularity that the racialised person holds. He
highlights the double fear of being fixed in and being denied universality
and/or particularity. He notes, ‘they fear not being able to have a space
where they can vacillate at will between the universal and the particu-
lar’ (p. 117). It is when the racialised subject is forced into particularity
by the symbolic order that these kinds of interpellations take place. Just
as the racialised subject is both negatively mis-interpellated by multiple
discourses, the disabled individual is also subjected to these instances
through various institutions and sociocultural discourses. While hege-
monic masculinity forms the universal in which Alan is denied a place,
the discourses of ability and ‘health’ that are central to the construction
of hegemonic masculinity are what engender his dismissal. As such, it
is because he is negatively mis-interpellated by the discourses of abil-
ity and ‘health’ that Alan is rendered disabled. Due to these two points
of convergence, hegemonic masculinity and ability, the foregoing analy-
sis, while seemingly centrally about masculinity, is entirely concerned
   
5  More Than Puddles: Disability and Masculinity...  111

with the construction of disability as a result of these calls.7 Through the

­application of Hage’s work to an investigation of the representation of the
disabled male subject, insights into the processes through which disabil-
ity as a form of social oppression is created and maintained in Australia
can be achieved.

Resistance
While it is significant to note the ways in which disability and the dis-
abled subject are created and maintained by institutions and sociocul-
tural discourses, it is just as significant to note modes of resistance. The
sociological research of Thomas J.  Gershick and Adam Stephen Miller
(1995), concerning hegemonic masculinity and experiences of physical
disability, articulate some common modes of resistance for disabled men.
Although their study is focused on American men, the modes of resistance
they highlight can apply to all men and their relationship to hegemonic
masculine ideals. Similarly to the subordination of homosexual men by
heterosexual men, whereby ‘homosexuality’ comes to symbolise all that
is cast out of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, specifically anything related to
the ‘feminine’ (Connell 1995, pp. 78–79), so too are disabled men sub-
ordinated as symbols of the vulnerability of able-bodiedness, which is
intricately tied to hegemonic masculinity. In their study, Gershick and
Miller identify three specific strategies disabled men utilise in dealing
with hegemonic masculinity. They term these strategies ‘the three R’s’:

7
 As both Butler and Hage note in relation to gendering and racialising, the individual is also sub-
jected to disabling in the same manner. If we understand disability as an oppression that has impli-
cations in all aspects of life, and not as an individualised problem, then in the instance of being
called to be a part of ‘health’ discourses (as we so often are in contemporary society), the mis-
interpellation of the individual is one process through which they become disabled. As such, under-
standing disability as a sociocultural process that is attached to an individual who does not meet the
requirements of the call of the discourse of ‘health’ enables a deeper consideration of the power
structures undergirding concepts of and representations of disability. To indicate an acknowledg-
ment of this process, throughout the chapter I have used the phrase ‘disabled subject’ and other
variants. While in other analyses the first-person phrasing ‘people with disabilities’ can be utilised
effectively, I find that the phrase, rather than making the process of disabling distinct from the
individual, relocates disability as attached to the individual; that is, it reinstates the perspective that
disability is an individual attribute rather than a process of construction and oppression.
112  D. Holdsworth

reformulation, which entailed men’s redefinition of hegemonic characteris-

tics on their own terms; reliance, reflected by sensitive or hypersensitive
adoptions of particular predominant attributes; and rejection, characterized
by the renunciation of these standards and either the creation of one’s own
principles and practices or the denial of masculinity’s importance in one’s
life. (italics in original, p. 127)

As Gershick and Miller note, these strategies are not exclusive, but rather
‘it is best to speak of the major and minor ways each man used these three
patterns’ (p. 127). These strategies are ways to deal with hegemonic mas-
culinity’s negative or mis-interpellative call. When the subject is hailed
by hegemonic masculinity, and then refused their place in the ‘symbolic
order’, they are then made to reformulate, rely on and/or reject hegemonic
masculinity’s authority and the conceptualisation of them as ‘unworthy’
subjects. As such, many disabled men are continuously negatively and
mis-interpellated by hegemonic masculinity; they are called to occupy a
space from which they are then excluded because of their marginalised,
physically disabled status. Thereby they enter into a complicated cycle
where they are socioculturally required to be central as masculine, but are
continuously marginalised as physically disabled.
In understanding literature as both a reiteration and construction of
Australian cultural attitudes, it becomes possible to analyse different his-
torical, social and geopolitical creations of disability as types of social
oppression. Through utilising the works of both Hage and Gershick and
Miller, and applying those theories to literature, a deeper and greater
understanding of these processes of oppression and resistance within an
Australian context is acquired. Although this analysis is focused on one
specific text, this approach may assist further investigations into these
various areas and their intersections.

 is-Interpellation, Disability and Masculinity

M
in I Can Jump Puddles
In I Can Jump Puddles, Alan is subject to the pressures of hegemonic
masculinity and the task of fitting within this rigid structure to be seen
as an appropriately masculine individual. However, this navigation is
 5  More Than Puddles: Disability and Masculinity... 
   113

problematised when faced with the reality of disabled experience. As

Gershick and Miller suggest, ‘the body is a central foundation of how
men define themselves and how they are defined by others’, which
means that ‘bodies are vehicles for determining value, which in turn
translates into status and prestige’ (p. 125). As such, the relationship
between the non-disabled body and the masculine is naturalised, so if
the body is then positioned as lacking in some capacity, as the disabled
body is often seen, masculine identity becomes unstable. This natu-
ralisation and conflation, of the non-disabled body with hegemonic
masculinity can be seen in the first paragraph:

When my mother lay in the small front room of the weather-board house
in which we lived, awaiting the arrival of the midwife to deliver me, she
could see tall gums tossing in the wind, and a green hill, and cloud shadows
racing across the paddocks, and she said to my father, ‘It will be a son; it is
a man’s day.’

…‘I’ll make him a bushman and a runner,’ he said with determination. ‘By
God, I will!’ (p. 1)

From just prior to his birth, there are a number of determinations of

what and who Alan will be. As this day is defined as ‘a man’s day’, the
scenic images in this excerpt highlight specific hegemonic ideals of what
a ‘man’ is and should be. The ‘cloud shadows racing across the pad-
docks’ allude to athleticism, and specifically the characteristics of agility
and speed. The ‘tall[ness]’ of the gums insinuate maturation and thus
virility, as well as the literal reference to height, the strength of the gums
to withstand the wind and the deep root system point to centeredness.
These images are tied together with the image of ‘a green hill’, which
highlights the smoothness of the landscape as filled with paddocks and
appropriate bumps. Through the inferences of Alan’s mother in align-
ing this landscape with the masculine, we receive an essentialist vision
of the hegemonic masculinity of this specific historical and geopolitical
period, and of the idealised ‘male’ body: flat and smooth, athletic and
strong, with appropriate bumps. As Jenny Morris suggests, ‘the social
definition of masculinity is inextricably bound with a celebration of
114  D. Holdsworth

strength, of perfect bodies. At the same time, to be masculine is not to

be vulnerable’ (1991, p. 93).
The associations of these images, and the larger ideal they articulate,
demonstrate the significance of able-bodiedness to hegemonic masculin-
ity by naturalising and developing a biologically driven conceptualisation
of masculine identity, intricately bound to the fit, strong, able body. This
is also alluded to by Alan’s father’s determination of his son’s future. Bill
not only directs Alan’s future from birth, he also demonstrates a need
to maintain his patriarchal position of authority by constructing Alan
through the use of the words ‘I’ll make him …’. Alan’s subordination in
this instance comes from a didactic standpoint; Bill is effectively grooming
Alan to take his place, ‘I kept wondering if you would be like me’ (p. 2).
However this becomes problematised when Alan contracts poliomyelitis
and he is faced with the instability of hegemonic masculinity’s authority
in light of his now Othered status. Alan’s parents’ emphasis on the body,
especially in the correlations made between the landscape, masculinity
and bodies, rearticulates that the hegemonic masculine body is specifi-
cally not a disabled body. Through this, Alan’s body is thus positioned as
non-masculine. As such, it is through the alignment and naturalisation
of the relationship between able-bodiedness and hegemonic masculin-
ity that Alan is first mis-interpellated, and he is further distanced from
a ‘proper’ place in the ‘gender order’, complicating his navigation of his
disabled male identity. Due to this, Alan’s relationship to hegemonic mas-
culinity must change.
Alan’s desire to prove his masculine worth is then positioned as only
possible through a ‘performative’ physicality. Considering ‘performativ-
ity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its
effects through its naturalization in the context of a body’ (Butler 2007
[1999], p. xv), Alan, through later rituals of ‘risk-taking’ behaviours, both
creates and iterates a naturalised ‘masculine’ ideal centred on the body.8
Through the convergence of Alan’s mis-interpellation and masculine ide-
ology’s demand for certain performative rituals, Alan must reformulate,

8
 While Marshall does not include ages in his text, his death notice in The Canberra Times (22
January 1984) notes that he contracted poliomyelitis at age six. As such, it can be assumed that his
risk-taking behaviour begins after this.
 5  More Than Puddles: Disability and Masculinity... 
   115

rely on or reject hegemonic masculinity’s ideals; that is, Alan must alter
his approach to ‘doing’ masculinity and how he reacts to the expectations
of hegemonic masculinity. Alan can be seen to rely on many of the domi-
nant conceptions of masculinity; however, in doing so, he also reformu-
lates popular concepts of disability in order to prove his masculine value.
There are a number of instances in which Alan demonstrates a masculine
performativity through ‘risk-taking’ behaviours; such as, retrieving the
lollies at the hospital (p. 73), the fight at school (pp. 124–127) and learn-
ing to ride the horse, Starlight (pp. 223–239). All these events involve
Alan, in some way, ‘taking bodily functions for granted’ (Morris 1991,
p. 93), that is, taking the functionality, materiality and limitations of the
body for granted.
One of the most significant of these instances is the adventure into
the crater (pp. 149–154). On this occasion Alan, Steve, Skeeter, Joe and
Andy climb to the top of Mt Turalla and prepare to climb down into the
crater. This event articulates both Alan’s internalisation of the ideals of
hegemonic masculinity and his desire to belong. As such, the implicit
peer pressure Alan feels is also sociocultural pressure; the presence of the
other boys and their socioculturally accepted masculinities restates Alan’s
Otherness. As the other boys go down, Alan stays at the top, noting that
‘my crutches would not grip on this steep, crumbling earth and even
where the tips rested firm it was impossible to leap down so steep a slope’
(p. 149). After a brief argument with his ‘shadow-self ’, the part of him
who attempts to persuade him not to venture down the slope due to the
exhausting nature of the exercise, he decides to follow:

At first I crawled, crashing my way through ferns with little effort as I went
plunging downward. Sometimes my hands slipped and I fell on my face,
skidding on loose earth till I was stopped by some obstruction. On areas of
scoria I sat upright as in a sled and went sliding down for yards amid a
cascade of gravel and bouncing pebbles.

… I moved from rock to rock, taking all my weight on my hands to save

my knees, but when I at length reached a less crowded area where I
could crawl between them, my knees were scratched and bleeding
(pp. 150–151).
116  D. Holdsworth

After he reaches the bottom, and Steve and Skeeter leave, Alan, Joe and
Andy make their way back up:

I turned and began crawling back. In crawling up a steep slope the weight
is thrown on to the knees and mine were already enflamed and tender …
Now I had to struggle with each yard I traversed and I quickly tired. I had
to rest every few yards, sinking down with my face pressed to the ground
and my arms lying limp beside me. (p. 153)

As can be seen through these examples, the call of hegemonic masculin-

ity is one that insists on risk-taking and potential physical harm. Because
of the mis-interpellative circumstance, whereby he is excluded from this
exercise of performative masculinity, Alan forces himself to prove his
masculine worth at the cost of his body. As Alan describes his movements
as exhausting, the very venture down at the beginning becomes a self-­
destructive exercise. In constantly pushing himself, Alan demonstrates his
reliance on hegemonic masculine conceptions of what the body should do
and forces his body to reach as close to those standards as possible.
Alan’s desire to put his body through this ordeal in order to prove
his masculine worth is in direct response to the ease with which the
other boys perform this masculine feat. Alan’s exclusion from this act,
something that signifies masculine worth for him (but may not for the
other boys), instigates his desire to be signified as masculine and, subse-
quently, belong. While Andy and Joe keep Alan company, Skeeter and
Simon not only leave them behind and hurl insults back at them (Skeeter
notes, ‘Both of youse are cranky’ which Alan and Joe dismiss on p. 152),
they also push rocks down from the top of the crater toward Andy, Joe
and Alan below. Skeeter and Simon’s impatience, resulting from having
already completed their endeavour, marks Alan as non-masculine within
the frame of this peer-fuelled masculine adventure. Due to his internali-
sation of his mis-interpellation, Alan’s involvement in this specific ritual
comes to fulfil his desire to be signified masculine, although for the other
boys it amplifies Alan’s non-masculine status. This instance demonstrates
how performativity, internalisations, mis-interpellation and reliance on
masculine ideology converge. However, in his reliance on hegemonic
masculine conceptions of the body, Alan subverts dominant notions of
 5  More Than Puddles: Disability and Masculinity... 
   117

the disabled body and what it can achieve. By pushing his body to its
extremes, he purports that he, and his body, can ‘do’ masculinity as well
as any other man.
Through mis-interpellation the disabled male subject is created as mar-
ginalised, but it is through negative interpellation that the disabled male
subject is kept at the edges of hegemonic masculine ideology. This is pri-
marily present in socio-cultural stigmas and assumptions that manifest
in varied, and sometimes contradictory, forms. As David T. Mitchell and
Sharon L. Snyder note, ‘the effort to represent is inevitably fraught with
politics’ (2000, p. 40). These sociocultural attitudes, which typically come
in the form of stereotypes, can be internalised and sometimes difficult to
resist. As he is mis-interpellated, that is, called on by hegemonic mascu-
linity to occupy a place that he is then denied, Alan’s desire for universal-
ity is refused and he is forced to reckon with his own particularity. As
Hage notes of the mis-interpellated racialised subject, ‘the effect of racist
mis-interpellation on a person’s self-constitution is far more traumatic
… because it lures the subjects into dropping their defences vis-à-vis the
dominant culture thinking for a moment that they are not racialized,
that they can self-constitute themselves into “normal” universal subjects
of modernity’ (p. 125). Thus, mis-interpellation plays a significant role in
the constitution of the subject, denying them self-constitution and forc-
ing them to reckon not only with dominant society’s perception of them,
but also how and where they are positioned socioculturally.
The trauma that mis-interpellation can have on a subject’s sense of self
and their place in society, and the subsequent denial of universality, is
bolstered by negative interpellation. Through negative interpellation the
subject is not just denied universality and pushed into an acceptance of
their particularity, but they are violently made aware of the universal’s
dominance and their difference. Negative interpellation is an attempt to
justify the exclusion of the subject from universality. Moreover, exclu-
sion from key social and economic arenas can beget more exclusion from
other physical and experiential spaces. So while hegemonic masculinity
may exclude the disabled male subject, this can then cause chain reac-
tions and result in exclusion from other areas, such as discourses of nor-
mative sexuality, economic arenas or social spaces. This then has the effect
118  D. Holdsworth

of making exclusionary institutions and discourses difficult to resist and

can often be internalised, affecting the subject’s sense of self.

 egative Interpellation, Disability

N
and Masculinity in I Can Jump Puddles
Alan internalises problematic conceptions of masculinity, as well as prob-
lematic conceptions of himself as a disabled subject, and these are the
direct results of negative interpellation. As a young, disabled man, Alan’s
perception of self is predominantly coloured by his father’s opinions, and
occasionally as a reaction to educational, medical and familial institu-
tional perspectives. Although it may seem that Alan is given opportuni-
ties to govern himself, these are problematised as he is reacting to the
negative, and mis-interpellative, calls of hegemonic masculinity. In his
essay ‘The Cripple in Literature’ (1987), Leonard Kriegel argues,

The cripple is the creature who has been deprived of his ability to create a
self … He is the other, if for no other reason than that only by being the
other will he be allowed to presume upon the society of the ‘normal’. He
must accept definition from outside the boundaries of his own existence.
(pp. 33–34)

As Kriegel points out, self-definition is typically denied to disabled char-

acters. Instead they are defined by society and culture through negative
interpellation. The most significant weapon used to negatively inter-
pellate the disabled subject is language, and the way specific terms and
phrases limit creations of self and demean and degrade. In I Can Jump
Puddles this is most overt with the terms ‘brave’ (p. 15) and ‘lame’ (p. 79).
Although a term such as ‘brave’ is not in itself negative, the patronising
nature of how it is used, especially in relation to the disabled subject,
engenders a negative effect. For Alan, being called ‘brave’, complicates
both his sense of the word and his sense of self:

I used to puzzle over this bravery which was attributed to me by those I

met. To be described as brave, I believed, was to be decorated. I always felt
 5  More Than Puddles: Disability and Masculinity... 
   119

impelled to change my expression when visitors called me brave, the

pleased expression that was natural to me being inadequate to carry the
description.

But I was always afraid of being found out and it began to embarrass me to
accept these tributes to my courage, tributes which I knew I had not earned
…

But people insisted I was brave, and I accepted this attitude with some
secret, though guilty, pride. (p. 15)

As can be seen here, Alan is ‘defined from outside the boundaries of [his]
own existence’, which problematises his perception of self. As others
define him as ‘brave’, he feels ‘impelled’ to change his own demeanour,
resulting in him feeling guilty and embarrassed at the presence of the
term. The term is then shed of the significance Alan originally placed on
it, that it meant to be proud and ‘to be decorated’, and is now turned into
something diminutive and performative. However, this signifies a dispar-
ity between Hage’s discussion of the racialised subject and the nature of
the disabled subject. Where ‘the racialized subject had to fight for valori-
zation’ (p. 122), the disabled subject has to fight off valorisation. The term
‘brave’ in relation to Alan implies a level of pity, and positions disability
as a spectre of mortality rather than as liveable and viable subject position.
The immediate signification of the disabled subject through the term
‘brave’ forces the disabled subject to fight for identification as a person.
Similarly, the term ‘lame’, although it may seem in opposition to the
term ‘brave’, operates as a means of definition and comes with its own set
of associations. After Alan falls from the pram on the way home from the
hospital, a man comes to assist his mother, who exclaims ‘Don’t hurt him;
he’s lame!’ The interaction continues,

This last exclamation of mother’s shocked me into a sudden awareness of

my part in this unnecessary excitement. The word ‘lame’ was associated in
my mind with limping horses and suggested complete uselessness.

… ‘Lame, mum?’ I exclaimed with some force. ‘What did you say I was
lame for?’ (p. 79)
120  D. Holdsworth

Through the term ‘lame’, Alan’s disabled status comes to mean he is vul-
nerable, weak and fragile. He is also depicted as in need of assistance and
dependent on other people, as a ‘limping horse’ embodying ‘complete
uselessness’. These are all framings Alan repudiates, much more vehe-
mently than the term ‘brave’ and its associations. Unlike the term ‘brave’,
which is closely aligned with concepts of hegemonic masculinity, the
term ‘lame’ encompasses all that hegemonic masculinity rejects; ‘At the
same time, to be masculine is not to be vulnerable’ (Morris 1991, p. 93).
So, although these two reactions are quite different, they both serve to
demonstrate a reliance on hegemonic masculine ideology in defining and
delimiting both masculinity and disability. If one is ‘brave’ or ‘lame’, they
are marginalised as either in need of charitable uplifting or a socially use-
less being to be relegated to medical or care institutions. These negative
interpellations are thus predicated on society positioning the disabled
male subject as useless.
These conceptions of uselessness become internalised and Alan begins
to understand his body as a confinement. Through this, he objectifies his
own body, understanding it more as a prison than as a significant part of
his existence, and rather than living and experiencing through it, he lives
and experiences in it. As Tom Shakespeare (1994) suggests,

disabled people are ‘objectified’ by cultural representation: it is also …

assume[d] that disabled people are passive, akin to animals, objects rather
than subjects. In seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century British
society, the freak-show is a clear example of the way that human beings
were seen as non-human, as potential exhibits in what was perhaps a cross
between a zoo and a museum. (p. 287)

Alan’s ‘dog dream’ (pp. 113–115) articulates this quite aptly. His dream
is in direct response to his view of his body as ‘unresponsive’ (p. 113). He
views his body, unlike the body of a dog, as burdensome and completely
separate from his ‘real self ’. In his dreamscape, because he has left the
‘confines’ of his disabled body behind and transferred into the body of a
dog, he can experience everything that he feels his disabled body cannot
let him, noting of the bush that, ‘I was part of it and all that it offered
was mine’ (p. 114). Here it can be seen how the non-disabled body, even
 5  More Than Puddles: Disability and Masculinity... 
   121

that of a dog, is presented as privileged with opportunities and expe-

riences which the disabled body does not have. In Alan’s ‘dog dream’,
a large amount of significance is placed on physical capability, and an
emphasis on oppositions to his disabled body; ‘In this escape from the
reality of laborious walking I experienced speed that was tireless, leaps
and bounds that were effortless and the grace of movement I recognised
in men in action and in the running of dogs and horses’ (p. 114). While
he describes his movements as ‘laborious’, he posits a ‘tireless’, ‘effortless’
‘grace’ as the facets of able-bodied masculinity, even positioning ‘dogs
and horses’ closer to ‘men in action’ than himself. His ‘dog dream’ is in
direct juxtaposition with discussions of his own physicality:

I could not imagine exhaustion in uncrippled bodies. Exhaustion, to me,

was a condition arising from walking on crutches and had no part in the
lives of normal people. It was crutches that prevented me running all the
way to school without stopping, that increased the beat of my heart when
I climbed a hill, and made me cling panting to a tree while other boys
continued on. But I didn’t resent my crutches. I could not feel that way. I
left them behind in my dreams but I returned to them without resentment.
(pp. 114–115)

These juxtapositions emphasise the idea that Alan is indeed dissatisfied

with his body; he would, in fact, rather be a dog. While Alan notes that
he returns to his crutches ‘without resentment’, it is his continued resent-
ment that returns him to the world of his dreams. Subsequently, Alan
understands his reality as insufficient, undesirable and limited, whereas
in his dream he can construct a subjectivity he considers desirable and
freeing. He has internalised a discourse which defines him as crippled,
abnormal and whose subjectivity is worth less than a dog’s. It is through
his mis-interpellation and constant marginalisation that these concepts
become tools of negative interpellation, leading Alan to form the belief
that any non-disabled body is better than a disabled body, and that all
difficulties he faces are the result of his disabled body. The ‘dog dream’
sequence ends on the idea of two separate worlds; ‘In this period of
adjustment the two worlds I lived in were equally as enjoyable. I gained
from each the stimulus to pass into the other. The world of reality forged
122  D. Holdsworth

me; in the world of dreams I swung the blade’ (p.  115). Thus, the
dream enables him to cope with reality, and the dissatisfaction of reality
leads him to the dream. It is through this that he internalises the nega-
tive ­interpellations that bar him from the hegemonic masculine realm,
and it is his reliance on hegemonic masculine ideals that prevent Alan
from reconceptualising his identity in relation to the dominant ideologies
surrounding masculinities and disability.

Conclusion
In theorising the intersections of disability and masculinity, much empha-
sis has been placed on experiential and sociological research. Although
both of these approaches are significant in understanding the reality of
disabled existence, investigations into representations in literary and cul-
tural products can offer insight that extends beyond the individual and
offers sociocultural, historical and geopolitical critique. Through utilis-
ing and adapting Hage’s concepts of mis-interpellation and negative
interpellation, I have demonstrated a new approach to understanding
how institutions and discourse create and maintain disabled subjects.
Although Alan is consistently marginalised from hegemonic masculin-
ity, and despite his internalisation and reliance on hegemonic masculine
ideals, he does reformulate dominant conceptions of disability, of the dis-
abled subject and the disabled body, and what he can achieve. But further
inquiry into the intersections between disability, masculinity, geopoliti-
cal space, historicity and literature must be called for. New theories and
adaptations of theory exploring the intersections between disability and
multiple and diverse social categories need to be established.

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Connell, R. W. (1995 [2005]). Masculinities (2 ed.). Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
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Images of the disabled, disabling images (pp.  31–47). New  York: Praeger
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Marshall, A. (1955 [2010]). I can jump puddles. Camberwell: Penguin Group.
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Morris, J. (1991). Pride against prejudice: A personal politics of disability. London:
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Shakespeare, T. (1994). Cultural representation of disabled People: Dustbins for
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Shakespeare, T. (1999). The sexual politics of disabled masculinity. Sexuality and
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Shakespeare, T., Gillespie-Sells, K., & Davies, D. (1996). The sexual politics of
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Disability studies: Enabling the humanities. New York: The Modern Language
Association of America.
 6
Media Representations of Disabled
Veterans of the Kurdish Conflict:
Continuities, Shifts and Contestations
Nurseli Yeşim Sünbüloğlu

Introduction
Media representations of war traditionally involve screening out damage
and destruction to human bodies, particularly soldiers’ bodies (Butler
2009, pp. 64–65; Chivers 2009, p. 325). Damage to the body is either
concealed or is subject to strict regulation to uphold the public’s support
for the war efforts. Although war wounds have been referred to as ‘the
red badge of courage’, governments have tended not to disclose the actual
extent of war injury and death to the public, thinking such knowledge
is bad for public morale (Gerber 2003, pp. 5–6; also see Roeder 1993).
The postwar period creates another level of concern, which is the ten-
sion between the gendered assumptions about masculinity of the warrior
and the disabled body evoking feelings of fear and pity (Gerber 2003,

N.Y. Sünbüloğlu (*)

University of Sussex, Sussex, United Kingdom

© The Author(s) 2017 125

C. Loeser et al. (eds.), Disability and Masculinities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53477-4_6
126  N.Y. Sünbüloğlu

pp. 5–11). Research related to the rehabilitation of the disabled veterans

is particularly revealing about the anxieties around the disabled soldier’s
body (Koven 1994; Cohen 2001; Perry 2002; Gagen 2007; Carden-­
Coyne 2007).
This chapter examines media representations of disabled veterans in
Turkey in the context of the Kurdish conflict between the PKK (Partiya
Karkerên Kurdistan—Kurdistan Workers’ Party) and the Turkish Armed
Forces that started in 1984, in the predominantly Kurdish regions of
Southeast Anatolia and the Eastern Anatolia. This ethnopolitical issue,
which is yet to be resolved, has had dire consequences for the country,
including 40,000 deaths (soldiers, guerrillas and civilians), destruction of
villages and the internal displacement of around three million Kurdish
citizens of Turkey.
In this chapter I analyse nine examples of mainstream news reports—
eight newspaper reports both in print and online as well as one video
available on the newspaper’s website. The majority of the materials
appeared in Hürriyet, a leading mainstream national newspaper with the
second highest circulation rate in the country (Sezgin and Wall 2005,
p.  788). Hürriyet deserves close attention as it is ideologically aligned
with state elite viewpoints on the Kurdish situation (ibid. p. 787). The
other newspapers I refer to in my analysis are Habertürk, Milliyet and
Sabah, all of which are Turkish mainstream media outlets. The news
items regarding disabled veterans belong to two different time periods:
The 1990s, when the conflict was at its most severe, and the period after
2009 when the government put forth an initiative towards the peace pro-
cess in the Kurdish conflict. I will show that representations of disabled
veterans varies depending on the specific stage of the conflict, although
some elements of representational conventions are impervious to change.
In the examples analysed, impairment is usually concealed or screened
out through various visual or discursive strategies. I will argue that these
strategies are employed to alleviate the anxieties about the social and
political consequences of the armed conflict, and further, that these anxi-
eties are embedded in additional concerns relating to masculinity, and
the body of the disabled veteran. To this end, the chapter will first exam-
ine media representations of disabled soldiers in the 1990s, during which
time the conflict was at its height. The analysis will demonstrate that over
 6  Media Representations of Disabled Veterans of the Kurdish... 
   127

this period the disabled body became a convenient means to advocate

the continuation or ending of the war. The chapter will then focus on
the later stages of the conflict in the early part of the twenty-first century.
It will be argued that, at this point, disabled veterans were characterised
in such a way as to reintegrate them into the hegemonic discourse of
militarism. The final section of the chapter will explore a further shift in
the representation of disabled war veterans, which has been utilised as a
means to overcome the anxieties related to the disabled veteran body, and
the resolution of the conflict.

 nxieties of Nation-States About the Disabled

A
Veteran Body
The bodies of veterans that acquire a disability during combat embody
an uneasy position in relation to the hegemonic discourses of nationalism
that draw on ideals of modern masculinity for the functioning of norma-
tive society (Mosse 1998, p. 4), and militarism as the ‘blurring or erasure
of distinctions between war and peace, military and civilian’ (Sjoberg and
Via 2010, p.  7). Militarism and nationalism invoke the dichotomy of
the protector male and the protected female, a dichotomy which coin-
cides with a broader binary of active versus passive (Yuval-Davis 1997).
In the case of disabled veterans, what is in need of protection becomes
the impaired body of the ex-soldier, and his fragile masculinity. This is
evidenced on a sociopolitical level and a symbolic level. On a sociopo-
litical level, the disabled bodies of ex-soldiers generate anxieties about
the nation’s responsibilities towards their ‘heroes’. As Ana Carden-Coyne
(2007, pp. 543–4) has suggested, this means ‘disabled bodies trigger fears
regarding the return of soldiers and their ability to reintegrate into the
society that sent them to war. Angry or maladjusted veterans have long
been feared, representing a potentially disruptive force to social and polit-
ical order’. Therefore, it is no coincidence that in the period after the First
and the Second World Wars, photographs of disabled veterans doing
sports, especially physically demanding ones such as the cricket, were
widely circulated to reassure the public that the veterans were not leading
dependent lives due to their disabilities and that they ­were successfully
128  N.Y. Sünbüloğlu

adapting to their war-inflicted conditions (Carden-Coyne 2007, p. 549;

Serlin 2002, p. 51). On a symbolic level, the idealised standards of modern
masculinity that works to normalise a healthy, disciplined, well-propor-
tioned, powerful and ‘able’ male body reflect wider nationalist aspirations
to create and maintain a similarly ‘healthy’ social body. Following George
L. Mosse (1998), it can be argued that the impaired male body is at odds
with these ideals of nationalism, because non-­normative features of the
body have generally acted as the basis for distinguishing what is accept-
able and desirable, from what is outside the norm, for the sake of a well-
functioning society.
Through the existing conscription system in Turkey, militarism func-
tions as a significant constituent element of state power which influences
the processes of socialisation for men, regulates the citizenly ­relationship
between men and the state, and situates men in its existing gender regime.
Despite its pervasive influence, militarism has not been sufficiently prob-
lematised in public discussions in Turkey, primarily because of ‘the myth
of the military nation’. The myth of the military nation, as Ayşe Gül
Altınay (2004) has argued, is a crucial component of Turkish moderni-
sation regarding the military and soldiering as the core of the Turkish
culture. This ideology has greatly contributed to the normalisation of
military-related practices and experiences. The following sections will dis-
cuss how anxieties surrounding masculinity and disability manifest in the
Kurdish armed conflict.

 he Disabled Veteran Body as Instrument

T
to Create Outrage and as a Symbol
of Impediment to Economic Development:
1990s
Until the end of the 1980s, the state did not take the PKK seriously,
branding the organisation as ‘a handful of bandits’. Yet, approximately
five years after the beginning of the armed struggle, it became evident
that the PKK had actually gained power, to the extent that the state’s
control in the region had considerably weakened. From then on, the
 6  Media Representations of Disabled Veterans of the Kurdish... 
   129

PKK was referred to as a terrorist organisation, and the Kurdish issue has
started to be seen by the state through the lens of separatism. The state
policy, particularly during the 1990s, was to seek a military solution to
the ethnic armed conflict. This meant that the state had to sustain public
support for fighting against the PKK, rather than resolve the issue in
the political realm. Regulating media representations of disabled veterans
was thus an attempt on the part of the state to gain control of the public
perception of the conflict, in an effort to sustain the citizenry’s ongoing
support for the war.
A fundraising campaign for disabled veterans initiated in early
November 1992 by a highly influential national newspaper—Hürriyet—
is a telling example of manipulating the injured soldier’s body to mobilise
public opinion in favour of the Turkish army, and in support of the armed
conflict. It was introduced on the front page of Hürriyet on 4 November
as ‘The Most Exhilarating Campaign’, suggesting wide popular interest
and enthusiasm. The then Chief of Staff Doğan Güreş argued that ‘[c]
ontributing to the campaign is a duty that must be fulfilled towards our
soldiers’. This helped frame the event as a ‘vote of confidence’ by the
general public for the military solution. The beneficiaries of the funds
to be raised were clearly defined as the disabled veterans of the Kurdish
conflict. This message was visually consolidated with an illustration of a
medal, the upper part of which was a Turkish flag with the inscription
‘They are not alone’, implying that Turkish society embraces the soldiers,
despite their disability. The lower part of the medal depicted a generic
figure in a wheelchair.
Interestingly though, there was no explicit denotation of impairment
in the series of interviews with injured soldiers which accompanied the
campaign in Hürriyet. Impairment was rather subsumed and practically
disappeared under the category of the wound. All the injured soldiers
interviewed by the journalist Celalettin Çetin in two major military
hospitals were referred to as the wounded, even though some of them
were disabled: ‘I talked to around twenty wounded [soldiers] at Gülhane
Hospital. Most of their wounds were inflicted by landmines. They had
lost their limbs stepping onto landmines’ (Hürriyet, 1 November 1992).
Despite the avoidance of the word disabled/impaired, it does not seem
that the intention was to completely hide damage to the soldiers’ b­ odies.
130  N.Y. Sünbüloğlu

On the contrary, corporeal damage was described in graphic detail.

Newspaper accounts regarding the disabled veterans of earlier wars indi-
cate that the convention was to represent injured bodies in a highly regu-
lated form. I have elsewhere analysed media representations of disabled
veterans of the Korean War, military interventions in Cyprus and the
Kurdish conflict (Sünbüloğlu 2013). The examples I have included in
my analysis indicate that soldiers’ impairments are consistently concealed
in photographs. Particularly in the first two contexts, photographs por-
tray soldiers posing in hospital uniforms in an attempt to screen out the
messiness of the injured body.
There are exceptions however. A photograph of the injured soldier
Turhan Yıldırım in Hürriyet goes against the traditional visual code
of concealing corporeal damage by explicitly showing his ‘thoroughly
scorched leg’ stretching out towards the viewer, making it the focus of
attention. The text complements the visual exposure of the wounded
body with details of the incident: ‘[After a missile hit the military vehicle
he was in] I tried to get out of the car but could not pull my leg. I looked
at it; the flesh was dangling from my leg’ (Hürriyet, 02.11.1992). A dif-
ferent account from another missile attack has a similar tone: ‘A broken
piece off the missile sank into my stomach and ripped up my bowels’
(Hürriyet, 1 November 1992). In the absence of the dismembered soldier,
a witness states: ‘There was a fellow soldier in my unit. [PKK guerrillas]
cut off his mouth, nose and ears and then killed him’ (ibid.).
Detailing the damage done to the body serves to invoke fury against
the PKK. It is therefore no coincidence that the common theme in all the
interviews is the soldiers’ desire to continue fighting against the PKK. The
journalist’s concluding remarks emphasise that injured ­soldiers only regret
is that they have to wait until they can participate in combat again: ‘What
I have seen in all of them, which makes one very proud, is that they are
still full of passion for returning to battlefront and for fighting despite
their wounds and the horrible things they have been through’ (Hürriyet,
2 November 1992). Crudely fuelling the military activity rather than a
political resolution for peace, this final comment homogenises soldiers’
responses to the conflict and, at the same time, erases any individual
reaction to injury or disability. One soldier hopes to recover soon to take
revenge, and the other promises to continue fighting, even if he is left with
 6  Media Representations of Disabled Veterans of the Kurdish... 
   131

one arm and one leg. This somewhat ambiguous term of ‘wound’ opens
up the space for future military involvement by the soldiers interviewed,
because while impairment refers to a permanent situation, the wound
implies temporality. Just suffering a wound would allow soldiers to con-
tinue fighting. Disability, on the other hand, infers that the consequences
of injury will stay with the ex-soldier for a lifetime. Encompassing all the
injured under the category of the wounded in effect disguises the potential
permanency of corporeal impairment, and thus avoids negative reactions
against war activity.
During the same campaign, another kind of anxiety related to the dis-
abled body emerged in the opinions of the then chief editor of Hürriyet,
Ertuğrul Özkök. In his column on 4 November 1992, Özkök called for
support for the campaign: ‘We must show the veterans that their sac-
rifices have not been in vain’ (Özkök 1992, p. 5). Yet, contrary to the
underlying theme of the interviews that promoted continuation of fight-
ing against the PKK, Özkök advocated ending the war. How this view-
point changes the depiction of the impaired body and of the experience
of disability is noteworthy. Özkök’s plea, entitled ‘Walking Upright on
Amputated Legs’, begins with the description of a disabled veteran, whose
identity and image are not disclosed to readers: ‘His thin and delicate face
is carving into your mind the image of the changing and modernising
new Turkish youth. He makes you think that the new Turkish generation
is becoming more beautiful. His glasses with thin metal frames give his
slender face a more humane quality’ (emphasis in original). References to
beauty and humaneness are in striking opposition to the ‘sustenance of
war’ theme of the earlier interviews. The emphasis on the humane quality
of the soldier’s face helps disassociate him from a warrior typology. It is
as if the portrayal of a ‘civilised’ figure tells the readers that he should not
have been fighting in the first place.
Özkök resents that the armed conflict interrupts the emerging pros-
perity of the country symbolised by beautiful and healthy young bodies:
‘Young girls are flourishing and becoming more attractive thanks to fash-
ion industry and nutrition.’ He then goes on to describe the disruption
of the delicate-faced young veteran’s life after he became disabled, hav-
ing stepped on a landmine: ‘He is left with a lifetime questioning of the
incident that shatters his dreams and expectations about the future. It will
132  N.Y. Sünbüloğlu

not feel the same to hold his girlfriend with a prosthetic arm.’ In Özkök’s
description, disability invokes feelings of loss and grievance for the future
of the nation’s new generation, rather than aggression and heroism. As
can be seen, undertones of gender are more conspicuous in this example.
In this instance, the disabled male body signifies a loss of physical capital,
affect and intimacy in heterosexual relationships, which, for Özkök, are
symbolic of Turkey’s development and growing wealth. Therefore, the
soldier’s disability acts as a warning in Özkök’s article to end the war
for the sake of economic development and welfare. Özkök is concerned
about the future of the country as disability symbolises the risk of going
backwards economically and socially because of the war.

 he Peace Process in Late 2000s: Integrating

T
the Disabled Veteran into Hegemonic
Discourse
The first decade of the twenty-first century was marked by a relative decline
in war activity and violence, which resulted in some degree of distancing
from the heat of the conflict, and a return to some normality in everyday
life across the country. This new situation changed media approaches to
representing disabled veterans, most of whom had by then lived a matter
of years with their disabilities. In general, accounts of veterans that I col-
lected for my own research, and the ones that appear in Açıksöz’s (2011)
research, abound with experiences of negligence, hardship and prejudice
related to being to a disabled man in Turkey, and to being a participant
in an internal conflict. With the initiation of the peace process in 2009,
it became important for the state to contain and censor specific life sto-
ries of disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict. This is because resentful
veteran stories have a strong disruptive potential to open up for question-
ing the deeds of the state in the conflict, and to pose difficulties in the
postwar period and the peace process (Bourke 1996, p. 70; Cohen 2001,
p.  2; Hartley 2013, p.  182; David 2015, p.  103). Therefore, from the
state’s point of view, it has been for its benefit to keep veterans’ stories of
anger, suffering and resentment of the war subsumed within the broader
nationalist and militarist paradigm that seeks to attain peace, by instead
   
6  Media Representations of Disabled Veterans of the Kurdish...  133

representing disability in terms of its capacity for overcoming tribula-

tions and integration into ableist society. Mainstream media reports had
a significant role in this effort, just as they did in the past. Two major
strategies of subsuming stand out in the media representations, through
the symbolism of military service and of sports.
The first strategy of subsuming veteran disability within the militarist
paradigm can be observed in the example of news footage of a two-day
event specially organised for the disabled veterans by the Turkish Armed
Forces.1 The footage, dated 26 April 2014, and posted on the website of
Hürriyet, features a group of disabled veterans who were then under treat-
ment in the Turkish Armed Forces Rehabilitation Centre in Ankara. The
news report states that the disabled veterans have worked to ‘refresh their
commando training’ in a nearby command centre in Isparta. The video
footage, entitled ‘Disabled Veterans Became Commandos Again’, opens
with action drill scenes of soldiers with a shooting machine gun sound in
the background. It then continues with training scenes in which veterans
perform physically strenuous activities such as shooting and climbing.
According to the short text below the video, ‘disabled veterans with their
prosthetic legs, arms and with only one eye managed to climb a 78-metre
tower and hit the bull’s eye in the firing range’. The veterans indeed seem
quite capable of carrying out these military tasks. Some of their disabili-
ties and prosthetics are not evident at first glance until they explain their
conditions. This is except for the amputatee veteran without prosthetic
legs. Veterans feel that they are still ‘able’ when performing these military
activities, which help them overcome the anxieties of becoming less of
a man due to having restricted physical mobility. They also revive their
sense of belonging to the nation through these military tasks, which con-
solidate the powerful status of soldiering as a means to include men into
citizenship.
The video then shows veterans explaining their contentment and grati-
fication for the event: ‘We have refreshed our memories of the time we
were in the army’; ‘We have been reassured that we have not forgotten
to be soldiers’; ‘I felt like I was 20 years old [typical age of conscription
in Turkey] and like I was conscripted again’; ‘Even when we are disabled,

 Erçakır and Çevikbaş (2014).

1
134  N.Y. Sünbüloğlu

we are ready to sacrifice our lives for this country’. This emphasis on ‘still
being soldiers’ is noteworthy, as the army reinforces its image of strength
with the manpower at its disposal. This is manpower that includes ex-­
soldiers who think losing their limbs was not enough of a sacrifice. More
importantly, this emphasis reiterates the basic tenet of the nation-in-arms
ideology—‘every Turk is born a soldier’—and it becomes a reassuring
claim on the part of the disabled veterans that they are still part of the
national militaristic identity, despite their disabilities and suffering.
The significance of the rehabilitative organisation in terms of integrat-
ing disability into the military realm is most evident in the following
statement by a veteran participant of this special program: ‘Thanks to this
event, we have forgotten that we are actually disabled’. The same senti-
ment echoes in the words of an officer during his speech in the ceremony
where the disabled veterans are awarded their certificates and commando
berets. The officer congratulates the veterans by stating ‘Together with
your fellow soldiers, you have fulfilled the most challenging tasks with
great effort, excitement and success as though you had no health problems
and you had no missing arms, legs and eyes, indeed as though you had an
intact body. You have given us strength with your presence’ (my empha-
sis). The special training program thus becomes an opportunity to tran-
scend disability through carrying out physically demanding tasks in a
controlled military environment. Idealised masculinity is achieved only
by screening out disability, as its achievement depends on the ongoing
performance of certain attributes of masculinity.
The special training event for disabled veterans points out that soldier-
ing and, by extension, able-bodiedness constitute two main components
of normative masculinity in Turkey, as the program aims to give a sense
of completeness of the body in a military environment. As Sally Chivers
(2009, p. 332) suggests in her analysis of another special event for dis-
abled veterans—Soldier On Paralympic Sport Summit in Canada—‘the
conception of overcoming disability as the only valuable approach leaves
little room for those disabled people who do not get past the barriers in
their path, especially for those who choose not to overcome disability’.
The news footage ends with the scene of the command centre gate, the
inscription above which reads ‘We are honoured to be a commando’.
   
6  Media Representations of Disabled Veterans of the Kurdish...  135

The message conveyed to viewers is that disability can (and should) be

overcome.
The second strategy engaged by the media to incorporate disabled
veterans into the hegemonic discourse of nationalism and militarism is
through the use of sports. Sports is perhaps the most commonly used
means of presenting the disabled as achieving individuals. Media images
depicting disabled veterans in sportive action aim to clear away the anxi-
ety about veterans’ maladaptation into society. Stories of successful indi-
vidual athletes, as well as groups such as the Turkish amputee football
team, draw media attention. However, the example I will analyse differs
from this common use of sports. The interview that appeared in Hürriyet
on 14 March 2010 has a twist in its use of sports on a symbolic level.
Entitled ‘From the Uniform of Honour to the Uniform of Courage’, the
interview brings together stories of 11 disabled veterans. While the ‘uni-
form of honour’ is an allusion to the soldier’s uniform, the latter refers to
the sports gear of a popular football club, Galatasaray. The club has been
using the lion as its symbol, accounting for the association of courage
with the football uniform.
The single photograph used to accompany the feature article is a group
of disabled veterans in the Galatasaray football strips posing as a team.2
The photograph is black in the background and also at the bottom, hiding
the front-sitting veterans’ legs below knee level. The effect of this colour-
ing technique is to make physical impairment practically disappear. This
neat arrangement of the veterans in the red football uniforms, which
seem to have replaced their military uniforms, follows a similar approach
as described by Joanna Bourke in relation to the visual representation of
disabled veterans in the First World War. According to Bourke (1996,
p.  58), ‘photographers used the traditions of portraiture to stun their
viewers: lined up, tidily dressed as civil servants, with calm smiles, the
photograph represented the height of pathos and denial’. Bourke points
out that this kind of representation allows the impaired male body to sig-
nify patriotism. What is striking about the use of sporting references both
in the photograph of the disabled Turkish veterans, and the title of the
article, is that sports is not at all related to the content. The ­interviewer

 Terzi (2010).
2
136  N.Y. Sünbüloğlu

acknowledges this herself in the beginning by saying ‘Attention! This is

not a piece of sports news. Nor are these people looking at you [in the
photograph] in Galatasaray uniforms footballers’. Why then was this
irrelevant theme used to contextualise the interview?
The answer lies in the content of the interview material. This is a rare
media article in that it details various difficulties that disabled veterans
have experienced in everyday life. Their complaints include not being
able to fully enjoy their rights, such as being exempt from private col-
lege tuition fees for their children or free bus passes, as they are accused
of ‘sharking’. The discourse of heroism is surely incongruent with the
socioeconomic conditions of veterans. The article also provides examples
of how veterans relate to their bodies. ‘I always feel incomplete’ one vet-
eran regrets. ‘I sometimes cannot hold my intestinal gas because of the
damage to my bowels. When this happens on a bus, I feel greatly embar-
rassed by people’s looks. How can I tell them what had happened to me?’
another questions resentfully. The uncommon realism of the accounts, in
my view, explains the irrelevant framing of the interview around sports.
The effectiveness of aligning the story with sports was highlighted by the
journalist’s comment that, ‘they feel proud despite the difficulties,’ as well
as by the story’s headline bridging the huge gap between the promise
of heroism and the struggles of daily life experiences. The framing thus
serves as a conventional strategy to contain the unconventional veteran
accounts, which are potentially disruptive of the legitimacy of militarist
state practices.

( Not) Confronting the Consequences

of the Conflict: Who Is Recognised
as a Disabled Veteran?
The peace process initiated by the government in 2009 was a turning
point in the 30-year conflict, and had implications for the veterans who
returned disabled from the conflict zone. The post-2009 period has been
the time when contestations about the official definition of the disabled
veteran began to appear in the media. Currently in Turkey, for an injured
   
6  Media Representations of Disabled Veterans of the Kurdish...  137

soldier to be entitled to certain economic and social benefits, he must

officially be granted the disabled veteran status (malul gazi). According
to a law enacted in 1999, this official status is restricted to soldiers who
became physically injured during combat or a military operation or while
carrying out a duty related to either of those. Besides, the status applies
only to those who became permanently impaired. As the official defi-
nition implies, combat-related psychological or psychiatric conditions
such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or the so-called ‘Southeast
Anatolia Syndrome’ inspired by the Vietnam Syndrome are not recog-
nised as valid reasons for being granted disabled veteran status. With the
peace process, a new space was opened up for public discussion about var-
ious consequences of the conflict, including the welfare of PTSD sufferers
and the welfare of injured soldiers with less than 30 % disability rates,
who are not entitled to disability support. Stories of ex-conscripts started
to appear in the media. The general approach of the mainstream media to
this issue has been to not specifically relate it to the armed conflict or to
criticise conscription. Rather, their approach seems to be to expand the
definition of disability. Illustrative of this is a news report in another
mainstream newspaper, Milliyet, featuring 26-year-old Rıza Gül from the
small Anatolian city of Iğdır.3 The news report published on 9 July 2012
states that during his mandatory military service, Rıza Gül was trauma-
tised when he witnessed the death of eight fellow soldiers in a PKK attack
in 2007. He was then admitted to the local psychiatric hospital and was
discharged with a certificate of 80 % disability. As he was not officially
regarded as a disabled veteran, he only became entitled to a small disabil-
ity pension (about one fifth of the average disabled veteran pension). The
news item reports two expert opinions from a lawyer and the president of
the local veterans’ association, the latter arguing, ‘Losing one’s mind is not
any different from losing a limb. He must be granted the official status.’
A second example of the media’s tendency to argue for an extension
of the definition of disability concerns another conscript, Mehmet Emin
Ekelik, who was wounded in a PKK attack in 2008.4 In the news report
that appeared in Habertürk on 30 October 2012, the injured ex-­conscript

 2012, ‘Aklını kaybetti, gazi sayılmadı’, Milliyet.

3

 2012, ‘Çatışmada yaralanan Mehmetçik’e şok üstüne şok’, Habertürk.

4
138  N.Y. Sünbüloğlu

states that he cannot use two fingers on his right hand, an impairment
which does not officially merit a disabled veteran status. Yet, this seem-
ingly insignificant impairment prevents him from employment in his pre-
vious job as a construction worker. In this case, the news report appeals to
normative masculinity to point out the ex-conscript’s loss, and hence the
need for compensation from the state: ‘I used to provide for my family,
but now depend on my father for a living. Mehmet who could earn an
honest penny is now dead. I want my hand back’.
Three points common to both news reports should be underlined. The
first is the time gap, five and four years respectively, between the incidents
and the reporting. This suggests that it has been the peace process that
has allowed the public appearance of the real scope of the damage result-
ing from the conflict to be acknowledged. The second point is that due
to the homogeneous categorisation of a singular ‘disabled veteran’ slowly
fading away it is now possible to see the diversity of disabilities that have
affected Turkish soldiers involved in the conflict. The final point to be
noted is the choice of visual material, which is once more what works
against this emerging trend of individualisation. Neither news report
provides photographs of the ex-conscripts concerned. Instead, they both
include generic military images—the former report has a photograph of
a group of fully equipped soldiers marching in a hilly field, seemingly on
reconnaissance, and the latter has the photograph of a soldier’s silhouette.
Woodward et  al. (2009, p.  218) point out the homogenising function
of generic images and suggest that ‘they smooth out the complexities
of the conflicts which they purport to present, and the ambiguities and
problematics within the moral frameworks that the stories they illustrate
purport to engage with’. The conflict in the above examples is between
the combat-injured individuals trying to broaden the limits of an official
definition and the state trying to keep the official number of the injured
to a minimum for economic and political reasons.
The final example I will analyse has the potential to subvert the close
link between masculinity and disabled veterans in Turkey as it is con-
cerned with the emergence of a new disabled veteran category, involv-
ing women. As I have mentioned earlier, veterans occupy a problematic
position in the peace process as it inevitably leads them to question the
­meaning of their sacrifice, so they need to be somehow convinced by
   
6  Media Representations of Disabled Veterans of the Kurdish...  139

the state of the value and legitimacy of the resolution of the conflict.
However, as the pursuit of a political resolution came to the fore in
the Kurdish conflict, the ruling party—Justice and Development Party
(AKP)—implemented a different strategy, which was the introduction of
a new official category of conflict victims in 2012. The by-law regulating
this new category (No. 284945) grants some welfare benefits to civilians
who have sustained injury and to those whose relatives have lost their
lives due to the conflict.
In late March 2012, in his address to party members, the then
Prime Minister Erdoğan introduced the new regulation by stating that
they were broadening the category of martyrs (and disabled veterans)
to include civilians who lost their lives (or became disabled) in ‘ter-
rorist incidents’. He said, ‘For instance, Mizgin martyred in Batman
and Hatice martyred in Bingöl will from now on be officially denoted
martyrs, too’. These two examples are quite telling in clarifying the
strategy of the government, as Mizgin is a Kurdish female name and
Hatice is an Arabic-origin Turkish female name. The choice of names
clearly indicates a shift in the martyr status, from what used to be a
male privilege with Turkish nationalist resonances to a broader, and
perhaps more ambiguous category in terms of gender and ethnicity.
The situation is even more obscure when it comes to the status of dis-
abled veterans. Although the by-law specifically uses the word ‘mar-
tyr’, it does not at all refer to the notion of ‘disabled veteran [ghazi]’.
Instead, potential beneficiaries with permanent injuries are described as
‘disabled’ [malul]. However, media reports do not generally differenti-
ate between the two. A good example of this is an interview entitled
‘The Youngest Ghazi’ published 23 April 2012 in Sabah, known for its
pro-government stance.6 In this news report, a young woman of 17 is
introduced as one of the first beneficiaries of the by-law in question.
Thus, almost six months before it was legalised, the phrase ‘civil mar-
tyr’ and by extension ‘civil ghazi’ gained currency due to such media
reports. Apart from its significance in terms of gender and ethnicity, a
crucial point about this regulation and its media coverage is that they

 2012, Resmi Gazete.

5

 Kireklo (2012).
6
140  N.Y. Sünbüloğlu

decouple both identities from conscription, hence from their military

nature. Another significant implication is that, by granting civilians the
titles of ghazi and martyr, the regulation imposes a certain level of com-
monality on both. Opening up the category to non-soldiers, especially
to women, creates heterogeneity within the group of disabled veterans
and, to a lesser extent, within the group of deceased soldiers’ families.
These have serious implications for the group identity. Therefore, it
could be argued that the by-law reverses the situation for ‘disabled vet-
erans’ of the conflict, who were conferred the title in 1999 as a sign of
exclusivity.

Conclusion
This chapter has explored media representations of disabled veterans of
the Kurdish conflict from different time periods corresponding to the dif-
ferent stages in the conflict. The analysis of the examples in the 1990s has
suggested that a range of contradictory meanings were associated with
soldiers’ disabilities. Indeed, the body of the disabled veteran stood at the
centre of the discussions about whether the war against the PKK should
be brought to an end or continued until the annihilation of the PKK. As
the armed conflict took a less violent form and the possibility of the reso-
lution arose in the early 2000s, the image of a vengeful warrior lost its
currency. Peace processes require forgetting the war experience to a cer-
tain extent, yet the disabled bodies of the veterans are a constant reminder
of the war. To overcome this contradiction in the case of Kurdish con-
flict, the veterans started to be reintegrated into the hegemonic discourse
either through conventions of sports imagery or through an emphasis
on their physical ability still to perform military tasks—in both cases, by
hiding away their impairments. With the government initiative of peace
talks in 2009, a different strategy was enacted. The government changed
the law to broaden the official disabled veteran category by including
civilian (men and women) casualties.
This chapter points to the dynamism as well as the durability of
meanings related to veteran soldiers’ disabilities. While the media
imagery shows variation depending on the social and political
 6  Media Representations of Disabled Veterans of the Kurdish... 
   141

requirements pertaining to the conflict, the strategy of screening out

physical impairment remains the same. There is a remarkable simi-
larity between the strategies of subsuming disability under the more
ambiguous reference to ‘the wound’ in the early 1990s, and the recent
attempt to broaden the category of disabled veterans with the inclu-
sion of civilians. The latter example especially suggests that the heroic
glorification of the disabled veteran, which is the promise of the mili-
tarist nation-state, is fading away. This means that the promise itself
is left unquestioned and so is the close relationship between masculin-
ity, disability and militarism.

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 7
Formatting Disability in Contemporary
Variety TV: Experiments
with Masculinity in The Last Leg
Gerard Goggin

Introduction
Media is of signal importance in contemporary formations, discourses
and conversations on disability and masculinities (Anderson 2011;
Bourke 1996; Brown 2016; Houston 2012; Karioris 2015; Loeser 2015).
Media play a heightened role in how people imagine, construct and nego-
tiate masculinities across most domains of social life, especially everyday
life (Cherney & Lindemann 2014; Goodley & Runswick-Cole 2013;
Manderson and Peake 2005; McRuer and Mollow 2012). In particular,
media is deeply implicated in what Timothy Laurie sees as a key issue
in the politics of masculinity, the ‘acquisition of social power in relation
to shifting social identities’ (Laurie 2015, p.  17). In the present con-
juncture,  transformations in media participation, especially associated
with digital technologies––uneven, unequal and problematic as these

G. Goggin (*)
University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

© The Author(s) 2017 145

C. Loeser et al. (eds.), Disability and Masculinities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53477-4_7
146  G. Goggin

c­onditions are––have generated new possibilities to consume, ‘speak

back to’, make, share and spread media (Carpentier 2011; Jenkins 2013).
Notably, media have been very much involved in the groundswell
of  alternative conceptions, identities and representations of mascu-
linities and disability (Miller 2015; Valentine 1999; Wilde 2004). One
important site for exploration of these new developments is popular
­culture (Watson & Shaw 2011), especially in the flowering of represen-
tations of disability in contemporary television. There are many obvi-
ous and important examples of the rich, contradictory representations of
masculinity in television, in which disability is key, especially in the high
profile, high production values, US and UK ‘cult TV’ box-set series such
as Glee, Downton Abbey, Breaking Bad, Orange is the New Black and Game
of Thrones (Ellis 2015; Ellis and Goggin 2015). One can imagine reasons
why research has focused on these genres, often positioned as successors
to highly valued cultural forms, namely novels and cinema (as well as
television) where canons of critical and cultural analysis, and research,
and key concerns have emerged. Until recently, disability has been minor
concern in this critical and scholarly landscape—something that is now
being redressed (Cumberbatch and Negrine 1992; Mojk 2013).
While much more progress is needed, there is an important body of
work emerging that studies disability in these new forms of television,
as there is research developing on disability in popular culture gener-
ally. Some of this work, most notably Katie Ellis’s Disability and Popular
Culture (2015), explores disability across a range of genres, including
reality and participation television. These new genres have different con-
ventions and expectations compared to television drama or even popular
sitcoms. Given the popularity of these media cultural forms, we need to
attend to the more mundane, less spectacularised forms of masculinities
and disability widely found in other television formats.
One of the understudied formats that presents a very flexible and rich
site for exploring masculinities and disabilities is the television talk show.
Talk shows are part of a rich tradition and take various forms, with differ-
ent mixes of talk, interviews, performance, skits and comedy, quizzes and
so on. From the 1980s onwards, television talk shows have also engaged
in very interesting ways with gender, race, sexuality and now disability.
The case I will explore is the popular UK talk, comedy and variety show
 7  Formatting Disability in Contemporary Variety TV... 
   147

The Last Leg. The show is highly popular in its own right, completing its
seventh season in 2016. The Last Leg is also highly regarded, especially
across disability communities and publics, as a resource for showing how
to ‘do disability differently’. That is, how to approach disability in a non-­
patronising, ‘normal’ way, presenting, discussing and laughing at its spec-
ificities and peculiarities––and, all in all, show how we might incorporate
disability into the warp and weave of a diverse contemporary society.
In a more far-reaching way, we could see The Last Leg as registering a
shift in deeper cultural dynamics of disability and, indeed, itself making
an important contribution to such a change. This can be appreciated
when we consider the research and debates on disability, representa-
tion and culture, especially disability humour and comedy (inter alia,
see: the special 1999a issue of Body & Society, especially Corker 1999,
and Shakespeare 1999b; the special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly,
outlined by Haller 2003; and special 2013 issue of Journal of Literary
& Cultural Disability Studies, introduced by Coogan and Mallett 2013).
Specifically addressing ‘the mechanisms by which British comedy is
allowed to be funny’, in a ground-breaking 2010 paper Rebecca Mallett
argues that the ‘current discursive capacities of British disability-criticism
do not offer the bases for an effective critical engagement’ (Mallett 2010,
p. 5). Instead, via a discussion of disability-related comedy in the televi-
sion programs The Office and Little Britain, she aims to widen ‘the net in
an attempt to seek alternative possibilities to the cultural theorisation of
disability and British comedy’ (Mallett 2010, p. 11). In the wake of The
Last Leg, such an expansion of the vocabularies and bearings of theory
and public criticism is all the more necessary.

Placing The Last Leg

Originating as a comic talk show format providing a daily ‘round-up’ for
the London Summer Paralympics in 2012, The Last Leg is compered by
Australian comedian Adam Hills, and co-hosted with two English col-
leagues, Alex Brooker (journalist and presenter) and Josh Widdicombe
(comedian and radio broadcaster; the only ‘non-disabled’ member of the
trio). Framed for a British audience, it is broadcast on Channel 4. It also
148  G. Goggin

screens to Australian audiences, carried by the Australian Broadcasting

Corporation (ABC), marketed as ‘Adam Hills: The Last Leg’, due to Hills’s
status as a well-known comedian and broadcast host in his own country.
This is a salutary reminder that, as Mallett puts it, ‘how we read represen-
tations of disability is contingent on where we are’ (Mallett 2009, p. 9;
cf. Meekosha 2004).
The Last Leg was conceived as a way to ‘crack’ the difficult issue of how
to provide coverage of the London Paralympics, without buying into and
breathing life into patronising and stale categories, such as ‘brave’. As
Katie Ellis notes:

Channel 4 adopted a comprehensive PR strategy in their attempt to move

the Paralympics from the margins of media attention to the mainstream.
Perhaps the more significant move was simply treating the Paralympic
games as a significant sporting event. (Ellis 2015, p. 130)

While other parts of Paralympics coverage were––and remain––widely

criticised, The Last Leg was a critical and popular success; although, given
it was covering the Paralympics, and shown on Channel 4, its audiences
remained relatively small. The genius of the show lay in its adaption of
a successful format, established around the world––the comic, satiric
yet highly knowing and expert ‘alternative’ coverage of a major sporting
event. While Adam Hills and Josh Widdicombe had careers as comedi-
ans and broadcasters, Alex Brooker had been a journalist. Here again we
can see an established trend of journalists needing to move outside their
comfort zone to engage with the emergence of entertainment formats as
an important mode for new consumption.
Since the Paralympics, The Last Leg continued as a popular late night
show, most recently with its successful 2016 series. While disability and
sport has been its hook, The Last Leg has established itself as an edgy, fun
show, discussing a wide range of topics. As Widdicombe notes:

It’s a bit like if Football Focus became one of the most popular comedy
shows in Britain. It was meant to be a sports show and it’s morphed into
this uncontrollable beast, where we’ve ended up on Friday nights on
Channel 4. (quoted in Nissim 2013)
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Initially, The Last Leg provided a way to mediate and translate the
Paralympics, and disability, for a wider ‘non-disabled’ audience. It has
developed into an important format for using disability as a springboard
for discussion of general societal issues, following the well-established
role for comedy to serve as a cultural zone of audience engagement in
disability.
The dynamics of The Last Leg in the 2012 Paralympics, and the con-
tribution in particular of compere Adam Hills, are the subject of an
important study by Lis Giuffre. Giuffre argues that Hills’s work has com-
monalities with disability studies, because it ‘engages an apparent bound-
ary between disabled and non-disabled people’ (Guiffre 2015, p.  72).
Giuffre also makes a telling point about the implications of his style,
namely:

Hills’s negotiation of a variety of identities and experiences of disability

marks a change in the way comedy and disability are handled, and provides
scope for audience engagement of these beyond the initial context of the
show. (Giuffre 2015, 72)

Building on Giuffre’s work, I wish to explore something else, especially

salient as the show has progressed through multiple seasons: the striking
way in which masculinity serves as a ground for edgy experimentation in
disability.
As The Last Leg has developed, it could be argued that masculinity and
disability are woven into the hybrid format of the show––a kind of ‘new
disability masculinity’, if you will. If so, this new disability masculinity
could significantly account for its appeal, engagement, creativity, reach
and influence, as well as its notable failures and limitations. Central to
the conception, success and textual and audience pleasures of The Last
Leg, I argue, is the way the show’s format binds together the represen-
tation, enactment and performance of masculinities, veering from the
transgressive to the conservative, and establishing a new disposition.
Before I discuss The Last Leg, however, it is important to set the scene for
understanding media’s role in disability and masculinities.
150  G. Goggin

 he Complex Salience of Media

T
in Contemporary Disability and Masculinities
The dialectics of disability and ability are a key dynamic in contempo-
rary masculinities as they play out in social life. There has been consider-
able research on the ways in which masculinities across various domains,
especially dominant masculinities, are shaped by disavowal and negative
framing of disability (Shuttleworth 2004; Shuttleworth et  al. 2012).
This has been an important motif, especially in disability research, prac-
tice, activism and art since at least the 1970s. Debate continues on this
topic, and with the significant transformations in media in recent years,
research has focused on the precise ways that the dynamics of disability
and masculinity occur. The role of media in disability and masculinity is
all the more pronounced because in the wake of the internet, social and
mobile media, audiences consume and engage with images, texts and
representations of disability globally, while still doing so in specific local,
regional and national contexts (Ellcessor 2016; Ellis and Goggin 2015;
Ellis and Kent 2011; Haller 2010). Further, digital technologies, cultures
and networks have been absorbed into early media forms to create hybrid
contemporary media––as in the case of the new ecologies of television,
for instance.
Media do many things when it comes to disability and masculinities,
but first I will highlight representations. It is obvious that the field of
disability media studies is only now emerging––and with it an overdue
exploration of the specific dynamic and nature of media representation
of disability. What the implications of such representations are for social
life, groups and individuals are the subject of longstanding debate, nota-
bly in the area of media effects research (Roessler et al. 2016). Such theo-
retical debates (as unproductive as they often are) are a reminder of the
need to investigate, rather than assume, the influence, role and uses of
media in contemporary masculinity.
In disability studies, exploration of the media representations of dis-
abled masculinities formed part of pioneering work on disabling imagery,
especially in the work on cinema (Longmore 1987). Martin Norden’s
pathbreaking studies, in particular, offered important readings of the
 7  Formatting Disability in Contemporary Variety TV... 
   151

1978 US films Coming Home and The Deer Hunter, which presented
portrayals of disabled Vietnam war veterans (Norden 1985). Another
important and prominent area of disability and masculinity in media
has been sport. Again, the reflex starting point was once––and still too
often is––that the acquirement of impairment in the highly valued arena
of elite sport is seen as a tragic loss of athletic prowess and a fundamen-
tal challenge to manhood. Disability still very much signifies depen-
dency, often coded as feminine and holding an uneasy relationship with
masculinity—as can also be seen in the sphere of paid work, with its inte-
gral, deeply felt links to masculine identities. With the rise of disability
sport, new kinds masculinities have emerged that offer powerful options
for subjectivity and identity. There are various examples of this complex
process, in which media has played a constitutive role.
A celebrated instance is the sport of wheelchair rugby, which developed
a reputation for being tougher than any able-bodied equivalent, espe-
cially through the widely watched documentary Murderball, the subject
of significant research. Rosemary Garland-Thomson succinctly observes:
‘Being a hot jock is not something we imagine life with a disability can get
you. This is the cultural work of Murderball’ (Garland-Thomson 2007,
p. 116). Cherney and Lindemann observed that this phenomenon had
much deeper and broader societal implications––namely, to do with the
‘rehabilitation of masculine identity’ (Cherney and Lindemann 2009).
For her part, Ellis suggest that Murderball ‘repositions the wheelchair
away from a loss of masculinity, towards the means of access to a hyper-­
masculine world—you must be disabled to play murderball’ (Ellis 2015,
p.  136). Another widely discussed case is that of elite sporting events,
and the emergence of sportsmen and sportswomen with disabilities as
celebrities.
The premier vehicle here is the Paralympics, which along with its
counterpart, the Olympics, is an integral part of the symbiotic sport-­
media complex (Goggin and Hutchins 2016; Howe 2008; Hutchins and
Rowe 2012). Many Paralympians, men and women alike, have achieved
recognition for their sporting achievement. For a significant number, this
has also provided a platform for building their career, across other areas.
We now see a growing number of athletes parlaying their profile in sport
into wider endorsement, branding, celebrity and authority, something
152  G. Goggin

that is deeply underpinned by media, their systems, and contemporary

social functions (Turner 2014, 2015). Perhaps the best known such fig-
ure is South African athlete Oscar Pistorius, who achieved celebrity and
notoriety in equal parts for his use of carbon fibre prostheses. Pistorius
endured a dramatic fall from celebrity grace, after he killed his lover,
Reeva Steenkamp––and after lengthy court proceedings, was found guilty
of her murder and imprisoned. The issues of disability and masculinity
in the case of Pistorius have been explored by various disability scholars
(Ellis and Goggin 2017; Hickey-Moody 2015; Swarts and Watermeyer
2008; Swarts 2013). While there are specific, spectacular and egregious
features in the Pistorius case, my point here is that it highlights a set of
things that have come together––an assemblage, if you will––to create
new kinds of masculinities, what Anna Hickey-Moody encapsulates as
‘carbon fibre masculinities’ (Hickey-Moody 2015).
This new cultural formation is very much premised on a dialectic with
femininities. Recall the slogan of the 2012 London Paralympic advertis-
ing campaign, ‘Meet the Superhumans’. The campaign built on trends
for ‘bold’ portrayals of people with disabilities in advertising (Haller and
Ralph 2006), and Ellis argues that in doing so it ‘embraces the “pure”
entertainment aspect of the Paralympics’ (Ellis 2015, p. 134). As ‘tough’,
determined and capable as their male counterparts, the valorised female
athletes partake in the reshaping of gender identities and relations. Of
course, just as the Paralympics, and disability sports in general, involves
taxonomies of impairment types to construct ‘fair playing fields’ (Jespersen
and McNamee 2011) so too does gender need to be fixed in sport, as
the case of the controversial South African athlete Caster Semenya illus-
trates (Watson et al. 2014). In the case of Semenya, like with Pistorius,
the powerful principle of normalcy not only had to be enforced (Davis
1995)––in her case, gender boundaries underpinning ‘fair competition’
(separating ‘men’ and ‘women’ competitions)––but indeed normativity
had to be reconfigured (Hall 2011, pp. 2–3).
The mediation of sport is only one of social domains in which dynam-
ics of disability and masculinities are central, but it is key for approaching
The Last Leg. It is also a privileged area in terms of ideological formation
due to its centrality to social conceptions of masculinity (McKay et al.
2000). Yet, as we know from recent masculinities studies, the operation
 7  Formatting Disability in Contemporary Variety TV... 
   153

of power is much complex that previously theorised (Karioris and Loeser

2015). As Laurie puts it, the things we would say about masculinity (such
as its taxonomies) amount ‘to more than a motley assortment of shaved
heads, cyborgs and dicks’ (Laurie 2015, p. 13). The debate on how mas-
culinity is constituted, and accompanying revision of foundational con-
cepts such as ‘hegemonic’ and ‘dominant’ masculinities (Connell and
Messerschmidt 2005; Demetrakis 2001), have opened up the way for
attention to be paid to ‘new’ or ‘alternative’ forms of masculinity that, in
turn, in their own ways involve systems of power. Highly relevant here is
Hickey-Moody’s work on Pistorius, which provides us with a framework
to understanding the continuing place of relations among men—homo-
sociality––in producing disabled masculinities. Hickey-Moody argues
that ‘disability is not always synonymous with a crisis in masculinity;
indeed, it can be an agent for the development of an extremely hege-
monic, homosocial masculinity’ (2015, p. 149). In particular, she sug-
gests: ‘Homosociality, then, can be seen as way of inscribing power on
and across bodies, a practice … which produces bodies in certain ways’
(Hickey-Moody 2015, p.  145). This deep, embodied inscription is a
recursive, everyday learning process:

We all learn to live while being watched and learning that we are also all
watchers. Masculinity is taught and learnt as a performance and an art of
critical, competitive spectatorship and performance. (Hickey-Moody
2015, p. 145)

It is precisely at the juncture of these emergent masculinities, generated

by performance, play and spectatorship concerning disability, that The
Last Leg offers a rich case study.

‘The Last Leg Lads Are Here’

As soon as it launched, The Last Leg attracted praise and favourable criti-
cal notices (Ryan 2012; James 2012). The show’s mode of address to its
audience is characterised by an encompassing ethos of taking risks within
a sympathetic if, early on at least, curious interpretative community:
154  G. Goggin

But Hills’ success can by no means be attributed to just his disability. It’s
also that he’s as open to the potential awkwardness of the subject matter as
anyone else. There is no one-legged elephant in the room––it’s slap-bang in
the middle of the table. (Ryan 2012)

This clearly takes a while to establish itself, as The Guardian’s Ryan

remarks on the awkwardness and quietness among audience and guests.
The central question of the show is also encapsulated in a hashtag, #isi-
tok, ‘to allow viewers to tweet questions about the Paralympics that they
aren’t sure are acceptable’ (Ryan 2012).
The first major challenge of the next, post-Paralympics stage of The Last
Leg was to expand its concept from being the daily round-up show of the
Paralympics to a fully-fledged talk and variety show in its own right. The
first series started with the three anchors, interacting with an expanded
range of topics, guests and engagements. For The Last Leg, the central
challenge, then as now, was how to move from its core preoccupation
with demystifying disability to tackling other topics––and, in the pro-
cess, becoming appreciated for doing this with aplomb. Thus in series one
of its new format, The Last Leg rebadged itself as comedy and talk show
with a wide-ranging remit. This brought plaudits from disabled viewers
and commentators, including this endorsement from disability journal-
ist Sarah Islam in ‘disability lifestyle publication’ Disability Horizons (an
online publication in the disability press, written by disabled people for
disabled people):

With this new series, Channel 4 have allowed Adam Hills and Alex Brooker
to be themselves; two talented and hilarious TV presenters who are fully
qualified to discuss anything they like without making any secret of the fact
that they each wear a prosthetic leg. This program, readers, is the Paralympic
legacy in action. (Ismail 2013)

If we fast-forward to the 2015–2016 period, and series six and seven,

we find a show with a wide engagement across topics and personalities
of interest in British society. In many ways, it styles itself as a progres-
sive alternative voice, using its disability credentials and ‘brand’ to offer
a distinctive take on a number of issues. A nice example of its signature
 7  Formatting Disability in Contemporary Variety TV... 
   155

brand is its #legup campaign. Simply phrased––‘If you can help someone
or need help’––this campaign calls for an ethos of care and support. The
way it is articulated as addressed to both helper and recipient of help
makes sense from a disability perspective, where ‘interdependence’ is a
common way to reframe the structural privilege or power often attaching
to the ‘helper’ or ‘carer’ position. The #legup campaign was designed as
an intervention into the politics of austerity in the UK, as ‘an attempt to
counteract the lack of support for the weak and poor that might ensue
from the UK budget’. The #legup hashtag was used also to highlight the
terrible situation of UK and European immigration, as a practical and
symbolic way to support refugees and argue publicly for a compassionate
approach.
As the series gathers momentum, The Last Leg has moved beyond
its studio banter, guests, acts and audiences, to conduct forays into the
wider world, especially to satirise, challenge and play pranks on politi-
cians. We also find, in keeping with the times, The Last Leg systematically
expressing itself and engaging with its audiences via social media plat-
forms. The Last Leg also deliberately presents itself as internet-savvy and
reflexive, a marker of its sophistication and modern sensibility. The Last
Leg’s internet savoir faire should not distract from the fact that the show
draws from and adapts the tried-and-tested, as well as new repertoire
from the genre of ‘late-night entertainment talk show’ (Timberg 2002,
p. 7). In this sense, it can be placed in a historical tradition of television
talk shows described in this way by distinguished US television scholar
Horace Newcomb: ‘the talk show emerges as a product that relies on
viewer knowledge of the similarities and differences, recombined in yet
another attempt to offer the “perfect” specific mix that will draw and
hold attention’ (Newcomb 2002, p. xii; cf. Shattuc 1997; Livingstone
and Lunt 1994; Gamson 1998; Wood 2009). The Last Leg might also be
described in terms akin to those that Wayne Munson, in his history of
talk shows, uses to analyse the achievement of the show Geraldo in bring-
ing together a diverse audience:

despite audience differences in gender, race, class, education, lifestyle …

Affective communities of otherwise social differentiated subjects can
momentarily coalesce. (Munson 1993, p. 84)
156  G. Goggin

In relation to The Last Leg, this kind of fantasy of creating ‘affective com-
munities’ is very much what the show wishes to represent itself as doing.
Of course, we know little about the actual composition of the audiences
of the The Last Leg, or much detail about their response to the show––
especially given the highly constructed (indeed recruited) nature of stu-
dio audiences, but also the patterns and formats of the new structures and
affordances of participation in social media platforms. Returning to the
presentation of the show itself, what is very striking is the prominence of
performances of masculinity in terms of the kinds of things it attempts
to do. This is especially notable in the way The Last Leg essays a ‘kinder’
representation of society, as well as its transgressions of what is consid-
ered ‘normal’, when it comes to bodies and their dispositions and man-
ners––especially male bodies. Through the antics and strategies of the
shows, especially as scripted and improvised by the ‘lads’, we see disability
often pressed into the service of disrupting and reframing masculinities
and femininities, reminiscent of what Robert McRuer calls ‘crip eye for
the normate guy’ (in a twist on the show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy)
(McRuer 2006).
In particular, I would draw attention to the ‘transgressive moments’ of
the show, in mind of the terms of Graeme Turner in discussing the poli-
tics of an earlier and different kind of variety television. Picking up on
film scholar Adrian Martin’s idea of ‘stretch TV’ (Martin 1985), Turner
is interested in variety television programs, arguing that these programs
involve a dynamic where:

a complicated relationship is set up between a formula that is, on the one

hand, familiar, predictable and largely observed and, on the other hand,
that formula’s deliberate subversion, the suggestion of a real multiplication
of possibilities. (Turner 1989, p. 27)

Turner suggests that the ‘distinctiveness of these transgressive, ambiguous,

television texts lies in the degree to which they transgress their own con-
ventions and thus invite a range of possibly contradictory response from
their audiences’ (Turner 1989, p. 29). Nearly three decades on, we could
see The Last Leg as doing something broadly similar in r­ elation to d
­ isability
and masculinity. Within the particular mode  of  ­ popular  television, 
 7  Formatting Disability in Contemporary Variety TV... 
   157

The  Last  Leg does offer a particular (re)formatting of masculinity,

rethought via the materialities and subtleties of impairments. To invoke
Mallett’s terms, the program raises the question of the ‘“tolerable subject
position”’ as a way of exploring disability humour within neoliberal cul-
tural contexts’ (Coogan and Mallett 2013, p. 250). As I shall argue, in
the case of The Last Leg, these transgressions, subversions and ambiguities
prove a rich trove of material, but they can be limited as, more often than
not, they rest on heteronormative premises.

 eframing Masculinity: Three Guys with Four

R
Legs Talking About the Week
From the start, The Last Leg has been structured around three men. The
gender and sexual politics of talk show hosts is a long and fascinating
topic. The main rule in radio and television talk shows, across many
places, would seem to be that there need to be more men than women
in a team. Single anchors can be women; but not too often is there an
all-women team, or a team with two women and one man. From the
inception, The Last Leg has involved three guys, with the gambit being
that two of them are identified as disabled, and one as (temporarily) non-­
disabled. Each of the men take on a different persona and position within
the available options of masculinity: Adam Hills, as the urbane host; Josh
Widdicombe, as posh but naughty; and Alex Brooker, as the tough lad
and football fan. Part of the interest and friction of the show is how the
three different personalities interact and react to jokes, debates on issues
of the day and guests. So this introduces a disability variant, and ratio,
that especially underpinned the play as well as risk in the Paralympics
version of The Last Leg.
This structure remains, but has now evolved significantly, as the dif-
ferences among the team have consolidated into a threesome—with the
imagery, advertising and branding emphasising ‘three blokes in conver-
sation’. Or three blokes in different poses, most recently, as bored with
each other to the point of taking out their smartphones to liven things
up and dressed in dinner shirts and jackets as opposed to the casual attire
158  G. Goggin

in which their publicity shots previously presented. Often the three are
supplemented by guests, frequently women––which provides an oppor-
tunity to break up the homosocial mould. Female guests have included
current personalities, such as Joanna Lumley on selfies in Russia (lead-
ing one YouTube viewer to ask: ‘What on earth is the splendid Joanna
doing on there with those unfunny clowns?’), comedian and actress Amy
Poehler (who observed, in jest, that ‘this is a very white panel’) and Jenna
Coleman (the actress who plays Doctor Who’s assistant in the long-­
running cult TV series). Much more edgy than these mainstream celeb-
rities have been occasional guests with more trenchant perspectives on
disability, such as Canadian comedian Tanyalee Davis. Davis was invited
onto The Last Leg in 2013, in the wake of a controversy generated by the
‘comedian’ Jim Davidson.
Davidson has had a long history of focusing his humour on highly con-
tested gags and routines concerning disability. He has also been engaged
in many well-publicised incidents of responding and reacting to criti-
cisms and protests about perceived offensiveness of his disability-themed
comedy. In 2003, for instance, it was reported that Davidson cancelled a
show in Plymouth when the theatre manager refused to move wheelchair
users out of the front show:

Davidson explained that he ‘took the mick’ out of everyone in the front
row of his shows. ‘As all the people in the front row were in wheelchairs I
feared it would appear I was specifically targeting disabled people. I asked
if just some would mind moving.’ (Guardian 2003)

In August 2013, Davidson did a show in Torquay, in a return to stand-up

comedy, after being cleared of allegations of sex abuse. In the show he
made jokes about two British Paralympic gold-medallists, cyclist Sarah
Storey and Ellie Simmonds. Targeting Simmonds, he reportedly said:

I was watching Sports Personality of the Year and I said to my missus,

‘There’s a midget’. ‘She said, “For f***‘s sake don’t call her that.”’ She’s a
swimmer. Apparently we had a little girl, formerly known as midget, wins
the medals. (quoted in Smith 2013)
 7  Formatting Disability in Contemporary Variety TV... 
   159

Davidson continued:

All I said to my missus, see what you think of this, ‘Did she race against
other midgets then did she?’ I said someone’s got to work out what is the
value of one midget. I’m not taking the p*** out of the disabled person or
the small girl, it’s the way they put these things together. (quoted in Smith
2013)

Other choice epithets in Davidson’s broadside against the Paralympics

and athletes with disability included:

I didn’t watch the disabled games because I laugh … Wheelchair rugby – to

you it’s inspiring. To me – f**** robot wars.

I f**** hate midgets, f**** midgets, they are horrible. I haven’t got anything
against … well, yes I have.

I don’t like anyone who can s*** their c*** in their sock. (Smith 2013)

Striking back, in series two, episode five, Adam Hills launched into one
of his trademark ‘rants’, leading with the following remark: ‘getting angry
at Jim Davidson for not knowing how to talk about disability is like
getting angry at a dog for not knowing how to use the Internet’ (Last
Leg, 2013). Tanyalee Davis was invited on the show to have a ‘right of
reply’ to Davidson. Addressing the audience, Lee introduced herself: ‘I’m
a stand-up comedian. It’s pretty obvious I’m from Canada. Cheers.’ She
followed up by addressing the elephant in the room, namely perceptions
of her as a small person: ‘Some of you were pretty stressed out. Hey, check
out the tits on the 5 year old.’ Davis’s response to Davidson aimed at his
greatest vulnerability:

As a woman, as a minority I can be offended. But as a comedian … free

speech [is important]. The main thing is as a comedian is be funny and he’s
lacking in that department.

For good measure, Davis also threw in a traditional insult: ‘When it

comes to Dwarf women, not even our hands will make his dick look big’.
160  G. Goggin

Responding to which Adam Hills summarised: ‘I think what Tanyalee

Davis is saying it that, Jim Davidson, you are being a bit of a dick.’
The Tanyalee Davis versus Jim Davidson segment is a vintage instance
of the clever, tough and funny way in which The Last Leg, and its guests,
intervene in the cultural politics of disability. With dispatch, Davis
mocks and belittles (so to speak) the inherent ableism and misogyny of
Davidson’s performance and what it represents, cheered on by compere
Hills. Without detracting from its élan and achievement in this case, I
want to pick up on the perils and pitfalls, as well as productiveness of its
‘dick’ diction, as a way to present and brand the show.
With the trademark use of the term ‘dick’ being the show’s leitmotif,
the casual viewer might be forgiven for imagining that the The Last Leg
runs the risk of simply being blokey in a relatively conventional sense.
The ‘d’ word underpins many of the program’s gags and social media
campaigns. Online publication Buzzfeed’s listicle on ‘13 Adam Hills rants
… that nailed it’ also added the afterthought: ‘It’s essentially him saying
“you’re a dick” over and over’ (Bryan 2015). Since 2013, for instance, the
show has conferred an annual ‘Dick of the Year’ award, with voting via
the #dickoftheyear hashtag. In 2015 the winner was UK Health Secretary
Jeremy Hunt, beating another of the show’s favoured objects of derision,
Donald Trump.
The #dickoftheyear award, and the accompanying golden member
statuette, would seem to signify a traditional masculine affair. However,
if we consider the show’s Twitter feed, we find women viewers are well
represented, if not predominant, in the nomination, discussion and ban-
ter around the award. This was especially the case in 2015, doubtless due
to the campaign The Last Leg had ran against Hunt, trenchantly criticis-
ing his poor treatment of young doctors in the National Health Service.
To a certain extent also, ‘dick’ crosses genders as a term of disdain and
condemnation, while still having a particular resonance in conveying the
sense in which powerful male figures are especially worth lampooning.
What is also interesting is the way The Last Leg plays around with dif-
ferent aspects of what could easily fall back into a very blokey line-up
and gags. An old chestnut of male-helmed television talk shows is men
dressing up, especially cross-dressing. Hills especially is at ease dressing
up, or stripping down––as with his celebrated pose, naked, with nipples
 7  Formatting Disability in Contemporary Variety TV... 
   161

and privates obscured by the emblazoned slogan ‘Jeremy Hunt, don’t be

a dick’, in the #dicksfordocs campaign. Alex Brooker also often gets into
the act. For instance, the final flourish of a show in August 2015 was a
tweet that pictured him in a pink bra, leather jacket open, in front of a
red curtain.
Perhaps the most celebrated exposure of Brooker is when he hammed
it up, in a parody of Miley Cyrus’s ‘Wrecking Ball’ music video, stripped
down to his underpants. The week’s show opened with an image of
Brooker perched on the wrecking ball, licking the chain, as the gags fol-
lowed. Hills introduced the show as ‘having massive balls’, then read a
couple of tweets: ‘#isitOK that I picture this to prolong sex?’ and ‘#isi-
tOK that it has the opposite effect?’ (Widdicombe chimed in to claim he
is the author of the second tweet). After all the joshing, Brooker turned to
camera, on cue, to capitalise on his notoriety: ‘any women watching this,
you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram … and Bebo’. Bebo, of
course, being the social media platform that was especially popular with
school-age children.
At this point, the viewer might be forgiven for feeling fatigued by the
cavalcade of fairly traditional masculine jokes, tropes and images. Rather
like a female viewer who remarked in a tweet: ‘I think I’ve seen Adam Hills
naked almost as many times as I’ve seen my other half naked’. However,
as I have already suggested, the show consistently aims to differentiate
itself from traditional forms of masculinity, at many of the points that
it appropriates and relies upon them. With this kind of playing with
the ‘unfixedness’ of masculinity as a series of images, characteristics and
aesthetics that can be (re)assembled, masculinity might be a fair distance
from ‘cripping’ or ‘queering’, but there is some measure of transgression
involved.
An instance of this can be found in a gag involving a recurrent figure
in the show, runner and Paralympian Richard Whitehead. In one show,
Hills describes how ‘Richard Whitehead sent this picture of himself and
2 other Paralympians in training last year’––showing a photo of three
Caucasian-appearing men, naked on a beach, near the waterline, with
their hands covering their genitals. The men are shot from behind: two
taller men, one with a prosthesis, flanking a much shorter man. Brooker
quips that this looks like a ‘very different sort of marathon they were
162  G. Goggin

going to run’, while Widdicombe jokes that ‘when the tide comes in one
of the them is going to be fucked before the other’. The novelty of this
image is that we rarely see an image of one naked man with a disability
(visible, or rather legible, or otherwise), let alone three men. It is similarly
rare to hear banter about sexual activity by or among such men.
When it comes to three men helming a show, the comparison that
comes to mind is the most famous contemporary bloke three-hander,
motoring show Top Gear. Top Gear was the media juggernaut skit-
tled in 2015 by the aggressive antics of its lead, alpha male Jeremy
Clarkson. The comparison between the otherwise two very different
shows also occurred to The Last Leg itself. The show ‘mocked’ Top
Gear in its Stand Up 2 Cancer special in October 2015, via a parody
which included re-­enactment of Clarkson’s assault on his producer
(The Last Leg 2015).
If we are interested in tracing the dynamics and implications of The
Last Leg’s claim to present a new disability masculinity, a useful final
example can be found in a special show––the two part The Last Leg Goes
Downunder, screened in early 2016. The premise here is that the three
lads, plus their blind Glaswegian travel guide, Amar Latif, take a trip
‘downunder’, travelling from Darwin to Sydney, in time for Adam Hills’s
grandfather’s ninetieth birthday celebration. As Hills puts it: ‘I have taken
the piss out of anyone who has deserved; along the way these two have
taken the piss out of me, and my country Australia, and now I’m going
to get my own back.’ Hills promises his two co-hosts the ‘worst the out-
back has to throw at them’, asking: ‘will two soft Poms survive Australia’?
Acknowledging that his mates think of him as ‘a soft cock from Sydney’s
suburbs’, he insists: ‘I want them to see the real Australia’. This kind of
travel format is a veritable obstacle course of clichés, enough to sink any
attempt to reconstruct masculinity, as the trailer reveals. The boys travel
in their own ‘Dick Mobile’, come up close to the crocodiles, visit a pub
run by bikies, fly a plane, re-enact famous scenes from the film Priscilla
Queen of the Desert; what’s not cringeworthy in all this?
Certainly the tour downunder moves across televisual landscapes of
Australia familiar to British audiences, but with some differences also.
One of the interesting moments is when the intrepid travellers get to
watch the Australian comedian Kevin ‘Bloody’ Wilson, renowned for his
 7  Formatting Disability in Contemporary Variety TV... 
   163

red neck, sexist, ‘ocker’ act. Widdicombe is depicted as not being at all
impressed by the routine, Hills makes a comment about misogyny, and
they pointedly move on. The three seem much more at home in the
milieu of the Aboriginal community, sitting down with one of the metal
rock band musicians, who, when his dog barks, chides it ‘don’t be rac-
ist’. Thus the ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig 1995) of The Last Leg, usually
anchored in the coordinates of a British studio audience, shifts into a
clearly postcolonial Australian landscape. So, the tour downunder show
retraces the typical itinerary of the late modern television travel odyssey,
with a subtle difference, captured not so much in the image of Hills in
drag, hair streaming on the top of the bus, as in that of the group racing
each other across the red desert in motorised scooters.
In The Last Leg, then, to summarise my argument, there is ample
evidence of a reframing of masculinity. There are many instances of an
expansion of the variety, range and differences around impairment and
disability being creatively marshalled to meld a new kind of television
format and mode of address. Yet there is a pervasive sense in which
the show struggles with the persuasive, power aspects of masculinity
that make many of its transgressions rather conservative. The show’s
centring on the phallus (in various senses of the concept), including
in its signature slogan and critique (‘don’t be a dick!’), highlights the
pervasiveness of masculine authority, the interrelationships between
power, sexual prowess and signifiers of male genitalia. The jokes about
men dressing in women’s clothes, and the images of three men at the
beach exposing their bare bottoms, also function as comedic because
they are represented as prefabricated and sedimented heterosexual
masculinities.

Conclusion
The Last Leg is a rich vein for exploring contemporary masculinity and
disabilities. It often seems a very ‘blokey show, akin to a ‘new fogey’, in
terms of recourse to the most obvious signifiers, tropes and comic rou-
tines associated with masculinity. It draws heavily upon heteronormative
discourses, offering very interesting experiments in masculinity, often at
164  G. Goggin

the same time as it participates in the economies that ‘articulate the het-
erosexual matrix’ (Hickey-Moody 2015, p.  151). As the examples dis-
cussed show, these moments in the show, its pedagogy and engagement
with its publics, are often contradictory and ambiguous, as well as being
invariably offensive.
Overall, there is much evidence to suggest the show has been suc-
cessful in forging a new format that offers an expanded vision and a
compassionate ethos for engagement in contemporary society. Often,
The Last Leg follows a well-trodden—or well-wheeled—path of demon-
strating support for good causes, including health and disability charities
such as those dedicated to cancer and intellectual disabilities. Given the
oppressive histories of charity and television when it comes to disabil-
ity (Longmore 2016), this is a fraught path that The Last Leg tries to
acknowledge and balance––but how it does so could be the subject of
legitimate critique. On other fronts, however, The Last Leg has proven
a handy platform and ally for amplifying and supporting critiques of
austerity policies of the Conservative UK government, especially pro-
viding a chance for Hills to add his weight, and that of the show, to the
fierce resistance against disability welfare cuts. In March 2016, it was
able celebrate a great victory in which it played a part, the resignation of
UK Chancellor George Osborne, abandoning his plan to cut disability
benefits. These activist engagements aside, more than, The Last Leg offers
worthwhile critiques and concrete support for worthy causes, and it also
provides the pleasures of hilarious comedy and satire.
Less well acknowledged, as I have explored here, is the way The Last
Leg experiments with masculinity through fashioning a fresh disability
politics (and aesthetics) of television (cf. Chambers 2009). This is con-
stitutive of the show’s rationale for its expansion of the grounds and pos-
sibilities of disability and general cultures, as I have suggested. However,
there can be many other critiques, not least, in the context of this vol-
ume, that its presentation of disability and masculinities can look quite
straitened: all too narrow and stereotypical and, despite its ambitions,
not going far enough in terms of opening up alternative masculinities.
Its attempt to widen the representation of disability in its diversity is not
really complemented by a representation of diverse sexualities. There is a
sense in which the versions of disability and masculinity offered by The
 7  Formatting Disability in Contemporary Variety TV... 
   165

Last Leg are generated from a homosocial scene, and often stay within
the (re)drawn bounds of what is acceptable. Still, in cultural landscapes
where we see very few such popular attempts to grapple with the chal-
lenges as well as the joys of rethinking masculinities via disability, it is a
very valuable cultural resource despite its evident limits.

Acknowledgements  My thanks to Cassandra Loeser and Katie Ellis for their

helpful comments on an early version of this chapter. I gratefully acknowledge
the Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship (FT130100097),
which supported the research.

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 Part IV
and Critical Self-Stylisation
 8
Men, Chronic Illness
and the Negotiation of Masculinity
Kim Pearson and Barbara Pini

Introduction
This chapter explores the embodied experiences of a group of Australian
men with chronic illness, that is, Lyme disease (LD). As Parr and Butler
(1999, p. 7) have asserted, using a term such as ‘illness’ alongside that of
disability is ‘not unproblematic’ but like them our interest is in broaden-
ing ‘the scope of a “geography of disability” to consider all sorts of people
with all sorts of mind and body characteristics’.
LD occurs after a person has been bitten by a tick carrying Borrelia
­burgdorferi bacteria or strains thereof and produces viral-like initial symp-
toms such as, fatigue, fever and arthritic pain (Donta 2012). The vague
and numerous symptoms render diagnosis problematic particularly as
only half of patients have a distinctive bull’s eye rash (erythema migrans)
near the site of the bite (Donta 2012). Further, there is no ­testing proce-

K. Pearson (*) • B. Pini

Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia

© The Author(s) 2017 173

C. Loeser et al. (eds.), Disability and Masculinities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53477-4_8
174  K. Pearson and B. Pini

dure to detect the presence of spirochetes in the body or bacterial activity

during the later stages of LD. Thus, despite its recognition as a legitimate
illness outside of Australia, diagnosis and treatment of LD can still be
problematic given that it is reliant on the clinician’s interpretation of the
patient’s subjective symptoms (Halperin 2000).
To date, two small-scale qualitative studies by Drew and Hewitt
(2006) and Ali et al. (2014) have been undertaken on the lived experi-
ences of those with LD. Both draw on participants in the United States
of America and are published in medical journals. Drew and Hewitt’s
(2006) seven women and three men express frustration at being sub-
jected to a financially burdensome ongoing range of tests and misdiag-
nosis over long periods while their symptoms worsened. Sharing these
views is a group of 11 participants interviewed by Ali et al. (2014) who
report multiple experiences of being dismissed and patronised by main-
stream health workers as they seek to treatment for LD. While detailing
the power of mainstream medical discourse in the lives of those with
LD and its associated conditions, Drew and Hewitt (2006) and Ali et al.
(2014) also emphasise resistance strategies of participants. Those inter-
viewed as part of the former study have become effective and empowered
self-­advocates, accessing online medical libraries and attending support
groups. In the latter study research participants mediate their negative
experience with mainstream medicine by turning to complementary and
alternative medicine (CAM). While participants reported positive expe-
riences with CAM they also expressed concern regarding expense and
effectiveness.
This chapter builds on the work undertaken in the above studies
while departing from them in two key respects. Firstly, the focus is on
Australian LD sufferers. This is a key distinction, given that while LD
is recognised by the medical establishment as a disease in the Northern
Hemisphere this is not the case in Australia (Rollins 2014). This is criti-
cal, as Western medical knowledge occupies a privileged position in
society. As Lorentzen (2008) has enumerated, medical discourses act as
normalising discourses mediating social and cultural understandings of
the body, health and illness. Thus, under a medical gazes, ‘other’ bodies,
such as impaired bodies or the bodies of those with contested illnesses
(such as LD), are potentially labelled as deviant, abnormal and invalid,
 8  Men, Chronic Illness and the Negotiation of Masculinity 
   175

resulting in marginalisation, exclusion and stigma (Loja et al. 2013; Moss

and Dyck 1999).
The second way this chapter departs from previous sociological work
on LD is in its focus on masculinity. While chronic disease and illness
have often been overlooked by academics (Castrodale and Crooks 2010),
a small group of committed feminist geographers has now produced a
critical body of scholarship on the subject (e.g. Chouinard and Crooks
2006; Moss and Dyck 1999). To date, however, the majority of work
has focused on women. What is yet to attract equivalent attention are
the intersections between masculinity and chronic illness (Thien and Del
Casino 2012). It is this gap in the literature we address as we detail the
experiences of six Australian men living with LD.
Our particular concern in this chapter is how participants negotiate
discourses of impairment and masculinity which, as Shuttleworth et al.
(2012, p. 175) posits, are ‘in conflict with one another’. Many men with
disabilities struggle to fit the social and cultural ideals of hegemonic mas-
culinity. The multiple ways that disabled men negotiate their identities as
masculine has been investigated by a range of authors (e.g. Gerschick and
Miller 1995; Valentine 1999; Lipenga 2014; Loeser 2015). Alongside
this research, other writers have turned their attention to examining how
chronic illness can challenge men’s ability to perform heteronormative
definitions of masculinity, disrupting their position in the patriarchal
gender order. Charmas (1995) reported that men were less adaptable
and resilient to illness than women and more likely to give up when
unable to retain or reform their past identity. In short, they had an ‘all-or-­
nothing approach to identity goals’ (Charmas 1995, p. 674). Taking up
this subject, Gibbs (2005) detailed how men with chronic illness avoided
perceived feminine care practices in order to maintain their sense of them-
selves as masculine. In contrast, men in research undertaken by England
and Dyck (2013) engage in a regime of bodily care practices as a means
of asserting a sense of control (over an unreliable body) and through this
a sense of being masculine. In further work on masculinity and chronic
illness, Thien and Del Casino (2012) focus on the affective dimensions
of men with HIV/AIDS. Men engaged in traditionally feminised prac-
tices such as caring and emotional disclosure, enabling them to express
emotions associated with their illness. The authors suggest that this is a
176  K. Pearson and B. Pini

­ ositive reconstruction of masculinity. At the same time, they note that

p
this reconstruction is invested in neoliberal notions of individual respon-
sibility. Overall, like other authors, they report that renegotiations of
masculinity by men with chronic illness are embodied and affective and
shaped by the ‘socio-spatial practices of hegemonic masculinity’ (Thien
and Del Casino 2012, p. 1146).
In this chapter we continue to map the tensions between discourses
of hegemonic masculinity and disability and men’s agency in negotiating
such tensions by drawing on six semi-structured interviews with men liv-
ing with LD. Participant characteristics are outlined in Table 8.1. All had
tested positive for LD. One participant sent his test to Germany, another
participant utilised testing facilities in Germany and America while the
other participants were tested at Australian facilities. The sample was all
Anglo-Saxon Australians with ages ranging between the mid-twenties to
late fifties.
Interviews commenced with a question about when the participant
first became ill and the nature of their symptoms. Interviewees were also
asked about initial reactions to their illness. Following this, participants
were invited to talk about their experience of an LD diagnosis. The com-
plexity of an LD diagnosis is such that this question led to long and
detailed discussions on a wide range of issues, such as interactions with
mainstream medicine, use of CAM and involvement in online support
groups. As an addendum to this conversation, interviewees were asked
about their lives pre- and post-LD with particular attention given to
shifts in normative masculine identities, practices and beliefs. Data were
subjected to thematic analysis, a systematic method of organising and
exploring data that ‘allows a sensitive, insightful and rich exploration of
a text’s overt structures and underlying patterns’ (Attride-Stirling 2001,
p. 386) (See Table 8.1).

Life Before and After LD

Participants talked about a life before and after Lyme disease that were
vastly different. The gulf between the two was summed up by an inter-
viewee who stated, ‘You can’t compare your current life to what you used
 8  Men, Chronic Illness and the Negotiation of Masculinity 
   177

Table 8.1  Description of interview sample

Name Occupation Partner Age Symptoms Treatment
John Unemployed Single mid 20sInsomnia, Vitamins,
fatigue, heart acupuncture,
issues, muscle Hypothermia,
pain, blurred naturopathy
vision, brain
fog
Joshua Sickness Married Late 40s Insomnia, Silver colloidal,
benefits fatigue, brain vitamins, herbal
fog, seizures, products, spices,
depression, detox program,
tingling salt wash, organic
diet, naturopathy,
valium
Dave Sickness Single Mid 40s Fatigue, Vitamins, Cowden
benefits anxiety, brain herbal protocol,
fog, muscle diet, naturopathy,
pain kinesiology,
conventional
medicine, home
professionally
treated for mould
Peter Disability Single Late 50s Fatigue, brain Vitamins, herbal
support fog, muscle products, Yasco
pension and arthritic Protocol, diet,
pain, antibiotics, home
depression, professionally
headaches treated for mould
Garry Employed Married Late 50s Fatigue, brain Vitamins, fish oil,
full-time fog, stress, Paleo-style
heart issues organic diet, heart
tablets
Shane Unemployed Single Late 20s Insomnia, Silver colloidal,
fatigue, vitamins, herbal
anxiety, products, diet,
depression, naturopathy,
joint pain regime of
antibiotics

to have because it’s just not going to happen.’ Masculinity was central to
this narrative of a changed self. The first part of the analysis in this chap-
ter explores this theme. Here we explain that a range of masculine prac-
tices participants had once undertaken, and through which they defined
178  K. Pearson and B. Pini

themselves as men, could no longer be enacted as a result of LD.  The

second part of the chapter continues this analysis focusing on the body
which Shilling (1993, p. 3) writes is central to ‘the modern person’s sense
of self-identity in high modernity’. In this section we examine partici-
pants’ descriptions of the corporeal changes experienced as a result of LD
and the implications of these changes for the masculine self.

 asculine Identity: Practices of Work, Leisure

M
and Heterosexuality
Whitehead’s (2002) claim that hegemonic masculinity is imbued with
notions of paid work was highlighted as interviewees spoke of their
changed employment status as a result of LD.  Of the six participants,
just one was in full-time work. Three relied on welfare and two were
unemployed. Dave explained that after 13 years in employment he had
to resign a year ago due to debilitating fatigue and anxiety. After being an
independent, self-reliant man he expressed ‘guilt’ that he now depends on
sickness benefits and his mother for housing and money. In his view, an
adult male should not be dependent on a parent:

recently I’ve just had to borrow some money off my mum who’s 72 and
working part-time. So to me that’s just totally embarrassing that I’m bor-
rowing money off my mum who’s nearly double my age. Therefore, if I go
try and do something fun I feel guilty because everything costs money.

Importantly, Dave spent a considerable period of the interview ensuring

we were cognisant of the fact that he had once worked in sales and mar-
keting for a large hotel chain with businesses across the state. He empha-
sised the prestige and high-stakes nature of the role, telling us that he
oversaw the managers of nine hotels while brokering ‘million dollar deals’
with ‘big suppliers’ and working ‘60, 70 hours weeks every week’. He
repeatedly mentioned his strong work ethic, multiple promotions and
leadership capacity, signalling that he—his former self—was masculine
as normatively defined in a Western capitalist context.
Peter had been in full-time employment prior to LD, but had not been
able to work and become financially impoverished due to his illness. He
 8  Men, Chronic Illness and the Negotiation of Masculinity 
   179

contended, ‘I went from owning a thriving business and two houses …

where I’ve lost the lot … I’m basically homeless, that’s why I live aboard
that little old yacht.’ Joshua had also been in full-time employment prior
to his illness. He became visibly upset as he recalled his despair at no
longer being able to enact the masculine identity of breadwinner and the
implications of this for performing a mode of heterosexual masculinity:

being the income earner – it’s not a case of a lack of humility, but it’s what
you’ve done all your life. You’ve provided the bread and butter … couldn’t
even mow the lawn, take the rubbish out. So your self-esteem as a man,
that was just gone. Sex drive was gone. Our intimacy was gone. As a man,
you’re then looking and watching your wife go to work every day and I was
just crying every day. It was just – it was the worst probably period of my
life.

According to Kenway and Hickey-Moody (2009, p. 838), it is not just

paid work, however, that gives men the opportunity to enact normative
masculinity associated with a physically active body, but ‘folding together
leisure and pleasure in place’. Again, as with employment, LD circum-
scribes the men’s abilities to pursue masculinised leisure practices, which
then results in a fracturing of the masculine self. Before the onset of ill-
ness, many of the participants had relatively established friendships and
active social lives forged by shared masculinised interests. This included
Dave, who spent his time surfing, and Shane, who referred to his previ-
ous self as ‘a big beer lover’. Similarly, John catalogued a range of mascu-
line sporting pastimes he had once enjoyed with male friends including
cricket, football and golf. In reflecting on when he first became ill and
was seriously incapacitated, he stated:

It was difficult. Well I obviously didn’t go out. Like I still can’t go to the
clubs or anything like that. I don’t do anything like that anyway. A lot of
my mates – when you get to 16 or 17 they kind of start getting, you know,
you start being more social and you start meeting people.

John laments the fact that LD has meant he has been unable to partici-
pate in what he sees as the traditional rites of passage of youth, which
include possibilities for meeting a partner. This latter issue is one that
emerged on the edges of each of the interviews.
180  K. Pearson and B. Pini

Of the six participants, two had female partners. One was married and
had been prior to diagnosis, while another was in a de facto relationship.
The remaining four participants included John, who had never been mar-
ried, Dave, whose most recent relationship with a woman ended prior
to his diagnosis, and Peter, who commented, ‘I’m not in a relationship
because it’s bad enough I’ve got to suffer without being a wet blanket on
someone else’s life.’ The final participant, Shane, had been married but
said he had put this ‘on hold’ as a result of dealing with the challenges
of his illness. He explained that when you are in the midst of an illness
such as LD ‘you really don’t care about not having a job or a girlfriend or
not seeing friends or anything’. What Shane explains is that important
markers of masculine identity—such as employment, heterosexuality and
male friendships—are overshadowed in the face of LD.
While expressing degrees of sorrow and frustration at no longer having
access to the types of signifiers of masculinity that once defined them, the
participants also talked positively about negotiating a new male identity
tethered to a different set of practices, values and beliefs. Across the sam-
ple this theme was illustrated potently in Joshua’s observation that there
was no point ‘looking back at what you used to be able to do’. In his case
this meant embodying a new masculine subject position quite distinct
from traditional breadwinner discourses of masculinity. In talking about
his partner he said:

She’s got a really good job now and she’s blossoming from it. So she’s actu-
ally enjoying getting back – she’s brought up kids most of her life. She’s
now running an education camp, so she’s going great. So to see her self-­
esteem – I accept now that the world we were brought up in where the man
caveman mentality, the man goes out, he provides, the woman stays at
home and cleans the toilets and lives in the kitchen, those days are long
gone. That’s not reality of life. Not with true love anyhow. So the support –
Sam’s fulfilling her role at the moment. I do what I can around here. And
it’s accepting that.

In echoes of Joshua, Peter also reflected critically on the ‘core values’ that
drove him prior to LD, which were tied to his identity as a successful
businessman. He contrasted the values he now holds as important with
 8  Men, Chronic Illness and the Negotiation of Masculinity 
   181

those of the past, and a new vocational subjectivity he is contemplating,

that of life coach. In doing so, he talked about becoming more emotion-
ally literate as a result of his illness and explained that he now defined
himself through this acquired affective capacity:

Yeah and that’s how I redefine myself now. I might go against the typical
male role model who are in this false macho thing. No, I demonstrate real
stuff. I’m not scared to shed a tear in front of someone and demonstrate
that and have the courage to show the emotion. That makes me feel more
like a man, to have the courage to show … vulnerability.

Across the sample, interviewees expressed similar sentiments to Joshua

and Peter as they detailed different practices and values which had sup-
planted those of more traditional masculine practices and values of their
pre-LD selves. For example, one spoke of having made new friendships
through an LD group, including friendships with women. He had not
enjoyed such platonic relationships with women in the past. Another
was developing his aesthetic and creative potential through the pursuit of
photography, while a further interviewee spoke of the meditative poten-
tial of solo paddling.

Masculine Identity and Embodiment

According to Loeser (2015), the erosion of traditional identities such as
‘breadwinner’ has meant that the body has become a site where men
are increasingly defining their masculinity. Further, as Gill et al. (2005)
assert, the masculine body is today ‘hypervisible’ with men not just the
‘bearer of the look’ but the ‘object of the gaze’. What is valued in the
gaze in terms of masculine embodiment is physicality, strength, fitness
and agility (Whitehead 2002). These are the types of bodies the men
interviewed said they had prior to LD. Notably, all had a limited rela-
tionship with mainstream medicine, recalling their bodies as dependably
healthy and robust. Dave exemplified this relationship with mainstream
medicine remarking, ‘I had never been sick until this time. I’d been to
the doctor twice. Once when I was born and once when I broke my arm.’
182  K. Pearson and B. Pini

Similarly, Garry reported taking no medication prior to LD and Shane

used the descriptor ‘rare’ to talk about his visits to doctors.
The idealised masculine body the men previously inhabited is vastly
removed from the body of someone with LD requiring complex and
multiple interactions with the healthcare space. For instance, Joshua
spent over six years visiting a series of doctors and specialists which
entailed lengthy hospital stays, tests and treatments. Peter voiced frustra-
tion recalling that he had first experienced the ‘malaria type illness’ of LD
13 years ago. He estimated that over this period he has seen up to sixty
doctors.
As participants stated throughout interviews, the body of the LD
sufferer is unstable, unruly, unreliable and potentially unattractive. For
example, Garry, John and Dave remain unsure as to whether they can
pass LD onto others and consequently expressed feelings of undesir-
ability about their unruly body. The onset of unpredictable seizures left
Joshua without a driving licence, leaving him dependent on others and
spatially entrapped at home. He stated, ‘My whole life just stopped, fell
apart … I’d put on about 25 kilo at that stage, because I’m just sitting
around doing nothing. It was just shocking.’
While all participants reported bodily changes occurring as a result of
LD, the most dramatic was perhaps that of John who was the youngest
of the sample and the most physically active prior to diagnosis. Across
the interview he repeatedly referred to his love of sport and his sporting
ability and the high esteem in which he had been held by family and
peers for embodying such a physically active and able self. He explained
that LD robbed him of this corporeal capacity and left him weak and
frail. For eighteen months his body was no longer able to undertake the
most mundane of physical tasks without considerable effort and hard
labour:

I had periods where rolling over in bed was a task. Physically sitting up was
difficult. Breathing was hard. Just things you don’t even think about
become like you’re doing a high intensity work out. Still to this day like
lifting a glass up to your face, like having a drink, drying your hair when
you’re getting out of the shower, brushing your teeth, tying your shoes up.
Writing something down.
 8  Men, Chronic Illness and the Negotiation of Masculinity 
   183

John lamented that the material body is physically unable to engage in

previous bodily practices to regain a ‘hard’, muscular body.

As much as you want to, like I really, really wanted to just do what I wanted
to do but if your body is not coming to the party it’s very difficult … I want
to be fit and healthy so I obviously want to put muscle on and be bigger
and stronger … I physically can’t be as fit as I want to … my body is not
working properly.

John does not want the body he has as a result of LD. He says that is
not only an unfit and unhealthy body but also one that will not be dis-
ciplined or regulated. This causes him considerable frustration and grief.
In the past his body was one that he could coordinate, control and order
through training programs and dietary regimes but this is no longer the
case. Unlike other participants, John talked about restoring the embod-
ied masculine self of the past, lamenting, ‘Still to this day I just want to
get back into sports so bad.’
Like John, other research participants also reflected on embodied pro-
cesses and practices of masculinity they previously took for granted to
regulate and discipline their masculine bodies. For instance, Dave talked
about surfing, John attended the gym regularly and Peter spent time sail-
ing. Attempting to undertake these pursuits post-LD revealed a changed
corporeality that had occurred over time and was difficult to comprehend.
As Peter observed, ‘It was only when I tried to sail up here that I went, I’m
unhealthier than I realized. It’s insidious. It just sneaks up on you.’
Bodily change experienced by the men as a result of LD was not only
physical but emotional and mental. As Jutel (2010) reports in review-
ing the literature on the sociocultural dimensions of diagnosis, medical
practitioners frequently diagnose psychiatric conditions in the absence
of biomedical evidence. This was the case for all the men interviewed.
They expressed feelings of self-doubt and confusion about their bodies
as a result of having symptoms misdiagnosed as depression. For instance,
Joshua recalls,

Maybe you’re a mental retard and you look in the mirror and go, ‘Is this
actually not real or real?’ So your self-doubt just goes through the roof and
your self-esteem goes through the floor.
184  K. Pearson and B. Pini

While the men had to contend with their illness being misdiagnosed as
depression, they became depressed as a result of their illness. Over half
of the men have experienced suicidal thoughts, while two had attempted
suicide.
While only John spoke intensely about wanting to reclaim his pre-LD
body other participants talked more of caring for the LD body they now
occupied. For Garry there was still an emphasis on physicality via a daily
regime of kayaking, as he commented, ‘All through winter out there at
five o’clock in the morning pounding up and down. I love it.’ At the
moment Garry’s LD symptoms are not severe. He works full time while
supporting his wife who is also debilitated by the illness. Understandably,
he has considerable anxiety about how his body may be disrupted further
by the disease in the future and it is this which drives his daily commit-
ment to kayaking. He explained, ‘That’s what I’m really afraid of is end-
ing up … as bad as Kath. How do we support each other if were both in
the same boat, unable to get up?’
What has perhaps been the most significant and common embodied
change in the men interviewed has occurred as they have become experts
in LD and experts of their own bodies. In this process of reclaiming their
bodies, the internet has featured prominently. It is online that they have
located information about LD and talked to others with the illness. As
an embodied discourse, lay knowledge has provided them with some
sense of control and self-direction to calibrate a new masculine self. As
Peter asserted, ‘I’m the one who has to manage this illness and the treat-
ment every day.’ The men have embodied a variety of bodily techniques
such as CAM products and practices, which have been instrumental to
reinscribing masculinity on to their bodies. John, for example, outlined
the positive changes CAM had brought to his discursive and material
body:

From reading and learning, I got onto probably the product that saved my
life at this stage and it started me down the track to recovery … I’ve lost so
much weight. My energy has improved.

Prior to their illness, none of the participants had ever been treated via
CAM. Indeed, even Dave whose partner was a naturopath said he was
 8  Men, Chronic Illness and the Negotiation of Masculinity 
   185

circumspect and cynical about the benefits of non-medical approaches.

Similarly, Garry recalled that ‘I used to think that all that sort of holistic
was a bit mumbo-jumbo.’ John too had previously aligned himself with
masculine discourses of traditional medicine and science, stating that he
‘had always viewed myself as scientifically minded’. The experience of LD
has however de-established the men’s faith in the discourses of medicine
and opened them up to what may be viewed as more feminised discourses
of CAM. In explaining this John stated:

It [LD] is changing my whole perspective on everything though like all the

things I thought were important and the things I thought I believed in
have sort of been brought into question … especially with that mainstream
versus alternative, there is no black and white.

At the same time as participants took up feminised discourses of CAM,

they often qualified the shift through reference to masculine reasoning
of rationality and pragmatics. One argued, for example, that he used
CAM because his view was ‘whatever works’, while another said his deci-
sion to turn to CAM was about either remaining disabled or making a
decision to ‘take control myself ’. The discursive scripts of individualism
and control, along with logic and expediency, which participants used
to legitimate their use of CAM are embedded in notions of masculinity,
highlighting the messiness of gender identity formation for men con-
fronted with chronic illness.

 esistance and the Negotiation of Masculinity

R
by Men with Chronic Illness
LD had disrupted participants’ collective performance of hegemonic
masculinity and in its place they were shaping new selves. This process of
reinvention, however, was marked by moments of conflict and resistance,
not least by other male friends. Dave’s attempts to talk to his friends about
his illness and open up emotional conversations had been thwarted. He
observed, ‘Some of my other mates are real blokey blokes, they don’t want
to talk about it.’ As men have sought to negotiate the disruption to their
186  K. Pearson and B. Pini

embodied selves wrought by their illness they have faced conflict and ten-
sion. While they claimed that most people are sympathetic to LD, they
are aware of its invisibility and contestability medically. As Garry com-
mented, ‘There’s no proof for people to buy into’. Without a diagnosis
the men experience ongoing economic and social pressure to normalise
their bodies because, as Nettleton (2006, p.  1167) observes, ‘society
does not readily grant permission to be ill in the absence of disease’. All
interviewees said they are regularly subjected to a normative discourse
from family and friends, mobilising around statements such as: ‘well you
look good’, or ‘just go do some exercise’ or ‘think positive thoughts’. In
response, interviewees said they are more likely to embody spaces where
their newly emerging masculine subjectivities are not exposed. For exam-
ple, Dave stated, ‘Due to my anxiety, I tend to just go take photos and
hang out by myself because hanging by myself doesn’t really create too
much anxiety for me.’ Similarly, Peter reflected on the need to live alone.

I couldn’t live with people because I’m so up and down. My tolerance levels
are so low to people on some days. People mean well but they don’t realise
you’re actually inflating the background stress levels. They’re going ‘Oh
come on!’ You know, doing their best to encourage you when you really
you just need to be left alone.

Moving aboard his yacht has enabled Peter to embody a masculinity of

independence and control, but this was at the expense of social isola-
tion. This was a theme common across the interviews. That is, embody-
ing a different mode of masculinity was a risky endeavour in the public
realm. Configuring a ‘new’ masculine identity is thus not straightforward
or simple for men with chronic illness—it is an ongoing process of hard
labour.

Conclusion
Courtenay (2000, p.  1393) cautions that masculinity is not static or
singular but is instead, ‘renegotiated in each context that a man encoun-
ters’. This chapter has demonstrated how this has occurred in relation
 8  Men, Chronic Illness and the Negotiation of Masculinity 
   187

to a group of men with LD.  As a result of LD the men’s previously

strong, reliable, fit, ‘hard’ bodies transformed into frail unreliable bodies.
The material body became a source of frustration and grief because this
body lacks the corporeal capacity to undertake past practices of mascu-
linity—such as employment, leisure activities, heterosexual relationships
and masculine friendships. Unable to take up the traditional scripts of
hegemonic masculinity they had engaged in in the past, the participants
looked to new ways of performing and embodying masculinity. Their
recalibration of masculinity differs from that of men with an acquired
disability described by Valentine (1999), who relied on a renewed physi-
cality and the social bonds of sport to construct new masculine identi-
ties. Their masculine identity work can also be distinguished from that
undertaken by the South African men interviewed by Lipenga (2014),
who embed new masculine subjectivities in work, driving and Zulu cul-
ture. It is also the case that participants constitute themselves as mascu-
line in ways unlike the young hearing-impaired men studied by Loeser
(2015), who construct masculinity through knowledge of motorcycling
and bodily performance, risk and control over riding. Similarly, it is dis-
tinct from the bodily investments men with disabilities make in relation
to prowess on the sporting field as described by Seymour (1998).
The options for reconstituting masculinity through bodily perfor-
mances tied to physical activities such as work and sport are limited for
men with LD because of the nature of the illness. Rather, reforming a
new masculinity was tethered to a different set of bodily practices and
discourses, consisting of CAM, online communities and lay discourses,
giving the men a sense of control and self-direction. Importantly, men
reflected that their definitions of masculinity were more fluid and capri-
cious then they were prior to their illness. For some this meant that being
‘a man’ encompassed the capacity and willingness to demonstrate emo-
tional intelligence and intimacy, and to have relationships of equality and
mutual respect with women. This identity work is notable, given that it
does not reproduce hegemonic notions of masculinity tied to physicality,
domination and power.
Men’s gendered identity work was beneficial, but also challenging
and fraught. What emerged was that the men experience frustration,
conflict and resistance as they come to terms with the disruption of
188  K. Pearson and B. Pini

their embodied selves. Their attempts to embody a new masculinity are

sometimes compromised in social spaces where they are frequently sub-
jected to normative discourses of masculinity, which circumscribe what
the male body should be and what it should do. Consequently, the men
were more likely to occupy other spaces to perform their masculine
selves without the objective gaze of others, yet these spaces can also be
experienced as places of social isolation. Notably, participants used the
internet as a primary strategy for locating information about LD and
for connecting with others diagnosed with the illness. Further scholar-
ship could provide a more nuanced understanding of the internet as a
social space for men with chronic illness, mapping participation and
factors that support or hinder a sense of an online community. Equally
important is additional research on men’s engagement in the spaces and
practices of CAM. While this chapter has elicited important informa-
tion about how men’s utilisation of CAM has been integral to how men
with LD reshape their masculine subjectivities, it has not explored how
and why men distinguish between different types of CAM, their afford-
ability, or whether certain products or practices have been experienced
as effective or harmful.
This chapter has continued the task of bringing the body back into
disability studies. As others have asserted, too often the body has been
marginalised by proponents of the social model of disability who have
argued that illness is physical and disability is social (Hall 2000; Crooks
and Chouinard 2006; Dyck 2002). What the chapter has demonstrated
is that an embodied perspective is critical to understanding disability,
for disability is not just the result of social or physical factors but is
experienced through and on the body.

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 9
Hearing (Dis)abled Masculinities
in Australian Rules Football: Possibilities
for Pleasure
Cassandra Loeser and Vicki Crowley

Introduction
Australian Rules football (AF)—a football code of Indigenous origins—
has been argued as emblematic of sport in the Australian psyche. The
elite competition, the Australian Football League (AFL), draws the
greatest television audience and public support of any sport in the country
(Coutts et al. 2010). At an amateur level, Australian Rules football (also
known as ‘footy’) plays an important part in the lives of many p ­ eople that
live in Australia, particularly the young men with hearing d ­ isabilities that
­participated in this research project.1 Their stories will show that Australian

1
 For the men who participated in this study, their hearing impairment did not simply ‘fit’ into
the predetermined categories of hearing impairment. However, it is useful to identify some of the
effects of living with a severe hearing impairment. For both Shane and Bradley, it resulted in
ongoing difficulties hearing high frequency sounds, and, in particular, women’s voices. They both
mention that they use a hearing aid in each ear, otherwise they are unable to hear spoken conver-

C. Loeser (*) • V. Crowley

University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

© The Author(s) 2017 191

C. Loeser et al. (eds.), Disability and Masculinities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53477-4_9
192  C. Loeser and V. Crowley

Rules football can provide opportunities for the creation of new friendships
with players, non-playing participants and spectators, and help construct
and maintain a sense of identity and strong attachment to the locality,
district, club or school in which the team is based (Tonts 2005).
Wedgewood (2008) and Burgess et al. (2003) attest that few sports
construct dualisms of gender and desire, and maintain the dominance of
the able-bodied male, more vigorously than the institution of Australian
Rules football (see also Moroney 1998).2 As a body contact sport
requiring discipline and training, Australian (‘Aussie’) Rules football
works to reaffirm masculine identifications based on characteristics of
male bonding and performances of physical prowess, force, skill and
violence (Walker 1988; Moroney 1998, pp.  68–69; Brooks 2000;
Connell 2000; Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli 2003). Connell writes
that it is ‘the Australian Rules footballer who is the best known model
… of hegemonic masculinity’ (2000, p. 65). These studies of Australian
football also infer disability is a category of identity that is paradoxical
to the determinate gendered norms and the associated desires it
represents.
Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli, for instance, maintain that football
‘plays a major role in reinforcing the dominance of certain ­masculinities
and the manipulation of Other masculinities, such as those regarding
disabilities’ (2003, p. 249). They write that the competitive character of
football is often deployed as a form of ‘status and hierarchy, which in turn
is reflected in the internal competition and hierarchies formed among
boys’ (Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli 2003, p. 248). The ideologies and
sations. They both state that they rely primarily on lip-reading in spoken interactions, which is
made difficult when people turn away from them when they are speaking, when they have a
moustache covering their lips or when they have an accent. Both Shane and Bradley state that
communications in spoken word require intense concentration. They both have great difficulty
following conversations in groups or in environments with poor lighting where they cannot
clearly see the lips and facial expressions of the speaker.
2
 The Australian Football League website describes the object of the game of Australian Rules foot-
ball as ‘to outscore the opposition’ (Australian Football League 2013, p. 1). Unlike American foot-
ball, the game is conducted with minimum stoppage and at a fast pace (Australian Football League
2013, p. 2). Each team consists of 18 players who must be on the oval-shaped ground at all times.
To commence the game, the ball is bounced in the centre of the ground where players attempt to
move the ball towards their goal by handpassing the ball or kicking it. When a team has the ball
within reach of a goal, they then try to kick a goal that is worth six points. Each game is made up
of four 20-minute quarters.
 9  Hearing (Dis)abled Masculinities in Australian Rules Football... 
   193

practices of AF prioritise ‘competition and perpetuation of aggressive

and rebellious masculinist traits … where emotional expression and
­enjoyment of body and participation [is] detrimental’ (Martino and
Pallotta-­Chiarolli 2003, p.  252). A conception of masculine desire
emerges that yearns for the internalisation and obliteration of that which
it seeks to displace.
Australian scholars Gilbert and Gilbert further the argument of
Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli when they write:

Disabled boys are subject to the same cultural images of masculinity as oth-
ers … [and] often value sport as much as those who are not disabled and
seek the same success and reward. Yet disabled boys are often stigmatized as
weak, pitiful, passive and dependent. (1998, p. 145)

The attribution of ‘weakness’ and ‘passivity’ to the disabled body

gives precedence to AF culture as a way to contain and annihilate
disabled identities and reinforce the divisive boundaries of hegemonic
masculine desiring practice. To be a disabled male is to be subjugated
to the realm of the abnormal, as the disabled body is rendered the
antithesis of sporting masculinity as possessing physical strength and
control.
Yet for the two young men in this research, there is a propensity
to locate amateur district football as a panorama of representations
and significations of masculinity that are unavailable in their
respective workplaces. In opposition to dominant conceptions of
football culture that conventionally constrain men with disabilities
to the space of masculinity’s Other, football emerges as a major
site of intensity in which a multiplicity of identities and masculine
positionings proliferate. A critical examination of the relations of the
two young men with hearing disabilities in football culture shows the
pleasures of sociability derived through shared bodily performances.
Aussie Rules football will be shown to provide another significant site
for the renegotiation and reconstruction of masculinity. This will be
demonstrated through the stories of ‘Shane’ and ‘Bradley’ that play
AF at an amateur district level.
194  C. Loeser and V. Crowley

 ustralian Rules Football and Heterosexual

A
Desire
Feminist philosopher and cultural theorist Elspeth Probyn argues that
football’s historical prominence in Australian culture maintains a model
of masculinity that celebrates ‘a bravura of sporting pride … in … “lar-
rikinism”’ (2000, p.  15). Referencing the popular Australian television
program The Footy Show (screened on Channel Nine) as a prime exemplar
of ‘Australian masculinity … as “real men” acting badly’ (2000, p. 15),
Probyn argues that elite and amateur football are key sites for the regen-
eration of masculinist mythologies that homogenise sporting pride with
shaming activities. These shaming activities ‘fundamentally connect with
matters’ of winning, achievement and club pride (2000, p. 14).
Probyn proposes that in The Footy Show, the key values of football are
entangled with the wider contemporary Australian economic imperative
structured around achievement ideologies and competition. Littered
with performances of comic sketches in drag, the ridiculing of women
through humour and sexual innuendo and the derision of working class,
disabled and non-English speaking individuals,4 The Footy Show reveres
a conception of athletic camaraderie often founded on the denigration
and shaming of bodies that do not fit these masculinist characteristics.
For Probyn, the process of becoming male and conforming to the role in
the gender template of football culture is marked by a disavowal of the
‘feminine’ through the sanctioning of verbal brutalisation. The normative
in football is heteronormative—it refuses any body that does not reflect
the hardness of masculinity, such as the ‘feminine’ or ‘queer’. Probyn
maintains that the camaraderie performed on The Footy Show is illustrative
of the broader tendency of football teams to shame ‘Other’ bodies as a
way to demonstrate wider masculinist ideologies of achievement as team
loyalty and club pride.
In order to apprehend sport more fully as a site of conflicted and con-
trasting pleasures for male bodies with disabilities, there is need to con-
sider the notion of desire away from its ontological underpinnings as
‘lack’. In his analysis of sporting and leisure activities, Stratton argues that
to understand sport as ‘something that really exists – which has presence
 9  Hearing (Dis)abled Masculinities in Australian Rules Football... 
   195

even if only as an absence (a space to be filled) – opens the way … for

the articulation of prescriptive fantasy’ (1990, p. 248). Representations of
desire in psychoanalysis, a discipline renowned for its expansive theorisa-
tion of desire and desiring practices, implicitly presume the notion of a
masculine or sexually neutral subject and the ontology of lack and depth
(Fuss 1991). From Plato to Freud and Lacan, desire has been understood
as a negativity functioning by way of the substitution of one unsatisfying
object for another (Grosz 1994, p. 179).
In their discussion of desire as gendered, Williams and Bendelow fur-
ther note that masculine desire is a ‘possessive desire’ (1998, p. 121) that
is produced through repeated acts of ‘repulsion/exclusion’ (1998, p. 120).
As part of their discussion, they draw on the work of Cixous to problema-
tise the lack inherent in Freudian conceptions of masculine desire, where
bodies assumed to be ‘different’ from the masculine ‘become represented
as the “other”, simultaneously signifying both the completion of (male)
subjectivity and a threat to it’ (1998, p. 120). In the context of this chap-
ter, to propose that disabled identities are derivative, ‘abnormal’ inver-
sions that are, in part, defined in terms of an active masculine desire from
which they are differentiated, means that disabled bodies in sport serve
as the intermediary or possibility from which normative male desire can
become ‘active’ and thus ‘dominant’. The notion of masculine desire as
‘active’ origin cannot exist without the identity of disability in order to
demarcate and satisfy itself.
Butler writes that normative masculine desire is, implicitly, a hetero-
sexual desire that ‘is always in the act of elaborating itself ’ (1991, p. 23).
This elaboration ‘is evidence that it is perpetually at risk, that is, that it
“knows” its own possibility of becoming undone: hence, its compulsion
to repeat which is at once a foreclosure of that which threatens its coher-
ence’ (Butler 1991, p. 23). What this means in terms of received universal
notions of an active masculine desire in sports is that masculine desire
can never eradicate that risk of ‘becoming undone’ (Butler 1991, p. 25).
Masculine desire is perpetually subject to a logic of inversion whereby
it finds itself in ‘a situation of radical need … precisely what [masculine
desire] sought to locate, find and fulfil’ (Butler 1991, p. 25) through the
body of the disabled. Viewed in this framework, the active masculine can
be seen to invert into the presumed dependency and lack of the disabled
196  C. Loeser and V. Crowley

identity, an identity from which it derives its own incontrovertible power

through the licence it is accorded.
Butler’s understanding of gendered desire coheres with Morgan’s argu-
ment where he writes, ‘there are relationships, often covert, between the
two manifestations of bodily power’ (1993, p. 83) and desiring practice.
To think masculine desire as a pleasure and satisfaction solely attained
through the obliteration of other bodies is inadequate. To develop an
understanding of the possibilities of rearticulation and inversion that
desiring practices produce for disabled male bodies and identities, there
is a necessity to think of desire and pleasure, in Grosz’s terms, as ‘the force
of positive production, the action that creates things and makes alliances
and forges interactions’ (1994, p. 179). Insofar as Butler invokes a concep-
tion of desire as the unknown potential of all bodies to do things actively
and productively, desires of disabled bodies should not be thought of in
absolute terms of absence, disempowerment and lack.
The idea of competitive sporting cultures as sites of active desire and
productive pleasure for young men with hearing disabilities is barely con-
sidered in most sociological and cultural literature. The stories of Shane
and Bradley draw attention to sport and physical activity as site of trans-
gressive and excessive pleasure. Sport and physical activity as bodily per-
formance deconstruct the authenticity of gender and desire as fixed, linear
and innate. It is this corporeal practice of deconstruction that serves as
a site of pleasure—the corporeal performance of sport articulates mul-
tiple opportunities for Shane and Bradley to inhabit both an active and
ambiguous gendered subjectivity.3

Shane’s Story
A refusal to acknowledge desire as a productive and constructive process
can and will result in assumptions that pleasure is a rarity or impossibil-
ity for many men with disabilities in mainstream sports cultures—par-
ticularly cultures that idealise a masculine able-bodied ideal. For Shane,

3
 For details regarding the methods used to collect and analyse the data for this research study, see
Loeser (2014) p. 199.
   
9  Hearing (Dis)abled Masculinities in Australian Rules Football...  197

involvement in the male-dominated and highly competitive sport of

football is not an ‘unrealistic alternative’ but a site in which he is invited
to experience a diversity of gendered identities. Performances of prowess
affirm him a gendered status amongst the team collectivity. This effects a
renegotiation of fixed categories of disability that have been theoretically
claimed to exclude, denigrate and disempower disabled bodies in com-
petitive sports cultures.
Shane is 21 years old, white, identifies as heterosexual and was born
and raised in a working-class suburb in South Australia. He has a mild
speech impairment and wears two hearing aids in everyday life. He has a
bilateral severe hearing impairment.4 Shane says that he has had a hearing
disability since he was born and that his hearing has ‘gradually got worse’
as he has got older. He says, ‘when I was younger, in primary school,
speech was simpler then and so it’s easier to hear, but when you get older,
speech gets more complex, harder to hear’.
Initiated into AF at competition level at age 13 in secondary school,
Shane identifies his attraction to football as stemming from the close alli-
ances and friendships between boys that teamwork can create. Due to the
body contact involved in the sport, Shane had to remove his hearing aids
so ‘that they wouldn’t get smashed out of my ears’. While this resulted in
him being largely unable to ‘hear’ with his ears on the field, Shane main-
tains that participation in football was still possible because he was aware
of the rules and could watch what was going on: ‘My [Shane’s] eyes acted
as my ears. I could watch the game, the players and the umpires and fol-
low what was going on.’
To be accepted as a teammate, recognition of Shane’s capacity to per-
form what he calls ‘a no-fear-type of play’ is essential to proving ‘you
aren’t a limp dick because you were deaf ’. The message here is that the
assumed passivity of disability must be overcome. Disability is no asset to
individual athletic excellence and team success. This placed a demand on
him to gain his place on the team through the enactment of the highly
visible skills of running, tackling and ‘hard play’. It also required Shane’s
participation in the denigration and shaming of others:

4
 In Australia, government-operated technical and further education institutions (TAFE) provide a
variety of vocational tertiary educational courses under the Australian Qualifications Framework.
198  C. Loeser and V. Crowley

When I first started footy at school there was this kid on the team who was
the star player and I remember at the first proper training session he came
up to me and said in front of everyone: Shane’s a deafhead, and everyone
laughed at that. Like I had a lot of problems in primary school with people
laughing at me because I couldn’t hear so I thought: I can’t put up with this
again. So I said back to him in front of everyone: your dad is deaf and
dumb he can’t even speak properly, like a retard. No one knew that and
everyone stopped laughing and stared at him. But I put an end to it there
and then or I would never have had a chance of making friends and it
worked.

Shane’s attempt to mitigate the potentially negative consequences per-

petrated by the star player’s verbal assaults emphasises the importance he
attaches to team acceptance through the creation of friendship. Friendship
is core to his navigations of masculinity as a young man with a hearing
disability in football. To earn the respect of the other players, Shane feels
compelled to counteract the ridicule he was subjected to by mocking
the deafness of the star player’s father. Yet it is ironic that this technique
involves the displacement of the negative connotations of hearing dis-
ability from the surfaces of his body to that of another.
This irony can be examined through Shane’s utilisation of the rules of
shaming to sever himself from the homogenous alignment of disability
with physical and mental inferiority. Shane’s mobilisation of injurious
speech transfers the objectifying gaze of the team to the star player, ren-
dering him momentarily a passive object who no longer does the looking,
examining and assessing of Shane’s physical capacities. ‘I put an end to
it there and then … and it worked’ illustrates that it is Shane’s knowl-
edge of the inversive potential of masculine power through injurious
speech that offers him a transferral, and momentary closure, of a disabled
identification.
By inverting the strategies of masculinity as fixation and conquest,
Shane employs his teammate’s desire to identify bodily difference
amongst team members as a technique that detaches himself from the
category of disability (which he already ‘has’) and becomes transferred to
a viable masculine positioning (the identity he ‘takes on’) (Ahmed 1999,
p.  98). The ability to displace identity, to shift it from one corporeal
 9  Hearing (Dis)abled Masculinities in Australian Rules Football... 
   199

substance to another, illustrates the transience and temporality of dis-

abled and gendered identifications. It highlights the lack of fixity, render-
ing both disability and masculinity as hard labour. The labour intensive,
emotional, physical and psychic intensities are what Shane’s interview
shows. Disability becomes inscribed as a removable signifier, positioning
Shane as the legitimate object of the team’s gaze.
Shane’s verbal shaming of disability works to reopen the histories of
identification that violate and fix him in relations of social antagonism.
Shaming, which enables Shane access to the privilege of masculinity, is
an event that constitutes not simply the impossibility of disability being
secured through the visual coding of difference, but illustrates the irony
of masculinity as authoritative property of the able body. It is briefly
worth comparing football as team culture with those occupational
enclaves where the performance of masculinity enshrines the bifurca-
tion of ‘emotion’ with insecurity, and reason with ‘aggression’. Claire
William’s research into highly masculinised, male-dominated professions
in Australia suggests how some men often use verbal harassment and
shaming to police other men. Williams writes that, ‘each man has to pres-
ent a persona of emotional self-containment, and … seek the compan-
ionship of other men to be a “real man”, [so] he seeks relationships with
members of his own sex’ (2002, p. 295). At the same time, however, ‘it
is these very men who constantly scrutinise his masculinity, so these rela-
tionships with other men are fraught and produce high anxiety’ (2002,
p. 295). The harassment and abuse that Williams identifies as ubiquitous
in masculinised Australian workplaces are similarly prevalent in the mas-
culinised team sport of Australian Rules football. In subscribing to the
divide of the reason/emotion binary, Shane can be read to subscribe to a
chimera of the way men are ‘supposed’ to be.
The overt irony of masculinity within the competitive world of foot-
ball culture is further dramatised by Shane’s insistence on the physical
work he must undertake to perform this gender identity. In order to per-
sist with the comprehension of his body as a credible masculine entity
within the team dynamics, Shane says that a transformation of gendered
meaning must also take place through the visible movements and actions
of his body on the football field. These performances are necessary in
order to accord his body the masculine status of ‘brutal machine’:
200  C. Loeser and V. Crowley

I still had to overcome my deafness more by showing I wasn’t weak in the

mind or body. You have to be able to put up with a bodily hammering …
because its showing you are as good as everyone else or better than them
through physical skill and co-ordination. I had to learn to go in for the
ball and not care if I got annihilated or annihilated others otherwise I
might as well have left the team. You had to work like a brutal machine
and plough through the opposition and that’s what got me the reputation
of hard.

In team sports, a series of corporeal images coalesce around military met-

aphors of weaponry and armoury. The militaristic idiom of the body as a
weapon of attack is prominent within Shane’s description of his use of the
body on the field. Peppered with terms such as ‘bodily hammering’, ‘skill
and co-ordination’, ‘annihilated’ and ‘plough through’ the opposition, the
football vernacular invokes a vocabulary of war. Having established the
military terms common to categories of body idiom in football, Shane
conceives the reiteration of these norms as a compulsory act or ‘show’.
Statements such as ‘showing I wasn’t weak in the mind or body’, ‘show-
ing you are as good as everyone else’, ‘I had to learn to go in for the ball’
and ‘[y]ou had to work like a brutal machine’ converge to solidify a con-
ception of football masculinity as a forcible and learnt materialisation.
It is thus performative. The materialisation and consequent emergence
of identity involves an apparatus of knowledge that Shane deploys to
affirm his credibility within the team. Yet, this instrumentalisation of
knowledge differs from received understandings that suggest the devel-
opment and deployment of the strong body in competitive sports is a
deterrent to women and ‘Other’ men. The significance Shane ascribes
to the athletic body is ironic in that the masculine appearance is suppos-
edly meant to inhibit men’s desires for interconnection and exchange.
This emerges as an invitation to sociability. Physical dominance and self-­
mastery are replaced with a conception of pleasure through friendship
and camaraderie that exists between collective bodies. This bodily plea-
sure of creating the masculine values of strength, toughness and courage
through performance leads to the construction of new peer relationships.
Simultaneously it energises a rearticulation and reinvention of collective
masculine status.
 9  Hearing (Dis)abled Masculinities in Australian Rules Football... 
   201

Thus far, football enables Shane to restage the fractured history of iden-
tifications that appropriate the limits to gendered mobility. Guaranteed
for Shane in this space is a form of social assimilation through friendship
relations that are based on the legitimation of a desirable masculinity.
Shane’s gendered identity is achieved through the techniques of verbal
and physical performance that constitute the socially privileged reputa-
tion of ‘hard’. The possibilities of football stand in stark contrast to Shane’s
experience of the workplace. The frustration he experiences in paid work
contrasts with his experience of sport as a site of freedom and the prolif-
eration of desire. Work is a site of immense frustration and despair. Shane
claims that after numerous failed attempts to secure employment in the
army, air force and police force, ‘I gave up … and let dad pretty much
set me up and put me into TAFE4 at the end of school doing a fitter and
turner sort of pre-vocational course.’ On completion, Shane is offered an
apprenticeship with an engineering company in which he says:

They didn’t know whether they were going to employ me or not because
they found out my hearing was bad … and they had no idea about what
sort of hearing loss I had and what I could hear and couldn’t hear. And they
were just making conclusions and saying I couldn’t do it.

Shane details the assumptions and stereotypes used by employers concern-

ing his capacity for certain types of jobs. He illustrates the ways in which
prejudicial attitudes curtail both his desire and his potential to enter the
traditional male bastions of defence careers. The available options in the
labour economy that reinforce and strengthen his masculine status are
limited. It is at this point in the interview that Shane refers to football as
a site that offers a potentially broader and more differentiated range of
masculine identities than those discourses and practices produced around
work and career:

Yeah, at work my hearing has always been a hindrance to my happiness and

showing my real abilities. That’s why I couldn’t imagine life without foot-
ball because it’s like paradise. When you’re out on the field that’s all that
matters. Your hearing problems aren’t a focus anymore. They might cause
you some difficulties but if you do your best and play your best, look your
202  C. Loeser and V. Crowley

best and stand out, then the hearing impairment is nothing compared to
what you can do for the team and yourself. People can look past it and
realise what you can do and focus on that. Your hearing … [is] no longer a
weakness, just something that comes with the package … so that’s why I
reckon footy is more important than anything. I don’t want to be at work
when I can be out playing footy. I don’t care about money I could earn. I
guess that’s where the hearing comes in because they make fun of me at
work … That doesn’t happen on the field.

Shane feels compelled to devote his energies to a sport that offers not
so much an opportunity for economic betterment as the promise of
exchange from categories of disability that appropriate, exclude and deni-
grate his body in his respective work culture. He says he does not ‘care
about the money he could earn’ at work when he is out playing football
where ‘hearing problems aren’t a focus anymore’. Football allows Shane
to remove himself temporarily from his everyday working world to create
a space that affords an embodied social experience more intense and plea-
surable than that to which he is consigned by his mundane work circum-
stances. This explanation is reinforced in the following interview excerpt:

Football has developed my confidence and lets me show my competitive

macho side. Like when I go in for a tackle and send someone flying it’s a
big adrenaline rush … and it makes my body strong, like you can feel the
muscles in your guts and legs working, pumping hard, and that’s when you
know you’re alive. And pretty much because I never had any real choice in
what employment I was going to do. There, [at work] you’ve got to just go
for what you can get really because of the prejudices they [employers] hold.
You know, and even on the factory floor, no matter how hard worker you
are, they [fellow workers] will still not help you or be friends with you. You
just have to put up with it or get out.

Here Shane elucidates the ‘corporeal recognition’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962

[1945], p. 93) he has of his sporting praxis that helps render intelligible
the profit of action for football. Football offers a meaningful world
through the ongoing pleasures offered by the instrumentality of his
body that contrasts with the minimal notion of security and regularity
that plagues his working life. The body practices of doing, playing and
 9  Hearing (Dis)abled Masculinities in Australian Rules Football... 
   203

looking your best on the field open a space in which Shane becomes
‘unfixed’ from disability by ‘fitting’ the visual prompts that trigger mas-
culine recognition. Through performances of physical prowess on the
football field, Shane can render masculinity a mask that can be put on
and taken off. Such an exchange allows Shane’s body to become some-
thing to be valued, glorified and socially acclaimed. Masculinity is a
detachable social signifier in football, drawing attention to the practices
and contexts where disability can become disconnected from Shane’s
subjectivity.
The possibilities for exchange of the identity category of disability are
limited in Shane’s workplace. He points to the ways that both his employ-
ers and work colleagues mobilise a discourse of power through verbal
attacks on his hearing status. The inclusion of his hearing disability in
the discourse of work peer relations produces hierarchies that distinguish
acceptable masculinity and exclude Shane’s gendered subject as undesir-
able. The employer’s and work colleagues’ melding of Shane’s intellectual,
social and physical capacities with preconceived characteristics associated
with hearing disability function as a coercive technique. This technique
establishes and maintains power over Shane’s marginalised masculine sta-
tus. Their prejudicial practices are deeply marginalising and oppressive,
intensifying the significance of football as an option for the articulation
of masculine identities that exceed the category of disability. For Shane,
football is constructed not as an absence articulating a lack of work but as
presence—a positive and excessive Other that is not limited by the gen-
dered constraints that articulate work. Football is experienced not simply
as an imagining, but as a lived masculine sensibility more ‘real’ than that
experienced through work.
Shane’s experience of football attests to the significance of sport
as site for the articulation of fantasies of mobile masculinities. His
body and its capacities are experienced and interpreted through the
shared bodily practices of a team culture. These performances create
the opportunity to reconstruct his gendered subject as an ambiguous
configuration, at once hearing disabled, yet privileged as visibly mas-
culine and able-bodied. Importantly, it is Shane’s highly sophisticated
capacity for analysing the peer group dynamics of the young men in
the team that enables him to align himself with the group. Such ways
204  C. Loeser and V. Crowley

of relating are dependent on a system of verbal abuse as well as displays

of bodily skill and strength in which a hierarchy of masculinities is
established.
The technique of stylising a desirable masculinity within the team is
informed by Shane’s access and commitment to the materialisation of a
discourse of football masculinity that privileges displays of sporting prow-
ess that are not available in his workplace. His story offers a significant
example of how occupying a hearing disabled and masculine identity in
sporting and workplace cultures brings into play contingent, complex
and antagonistic identifications.

Bradley’s Story
A striking feature of many of the stories about football in this research
is that they reveal a preoccupation with, and parody of, the figure
inside/outside that supposedly ‘encapsulates the structure of … exclu-
sion … and repudiation … power … authority and cultural legitimacy’
(Fuss 1991, p. 2). An interview with Bradley demonstrates how he con-
structs a ‘desirable’ football masculine identity through a disruption of
the seemingly fundamental distinctions and characteristics accorded to
this identity. Bradley’s engagement with football as a way to attain a
bodily inscription of ‘masculine strength’ through ‘mental toughness’
illustrates the argument that young men with hearing disabilities can
experience possibilities for exchange and pleasure through the perfor-
mance of masculinities in competitive sports. Bradley accesses a desired
form of masculine subjectivity that idealises cognition over aesthetic
appearance.
The idea of masculinity as mental capacity is not new, but the differing
emphasis placed on intellectualism as strength contrasts with literatures
that suggest culturally privileged sporting masculinities are always already
visibly able-bodied. This contrast is shown when Bradley deploys the aes-
thetic practice of football as a means to disrupt and invert the binary
frames of containment that equate normative constructions of hearing
disability with limited intellectual capacities. Bradley’s understanding of
masculinity as strength of the mind emerges from his experiences in work
 9  Hearing (Dis)abled Masculinities in Australian Rules Football... 
   205

and at school. Difficulties with theory, writing and thinking lead to the
labour-oriented job of gardening.

I can do anything in theory but I can’t do any writing, but I can do all the
hard  – go out and do the practical but I can’t do any theory, I’m not a
thinker in theory … I was never going to do Year 12 because to me, Year
12 is when you go to uni and I wasn’t ever going to uni. Well there was
always going to be gardening and … I can go out and physically turn a
garden over … Footy, that’s contributed, that’s a bit of a reason why I defi-
nitely play footy … Every guy likes to feel strong and that. There’s always,
the way I look at it, there’s always going to be someone stronger out there,
but it comes down to mental toughness and it’s what you believe in your
head. Nothing hurts when you get hit at a hundred miles an hour so you
just believe in it … Mental toughness is what I say it is and just what you
think in the mind is how your body’s going to think and react and … it’s
your mind that controls your body and everything. You’ve got to control
your mind to control your body … just confidence and belief in yourself.

If demonstrations of masculinity as intellectualism are lacking in

school and employment, Bradley’s statement makes clear that the world
of football provides opportunities for performances of mental strength.
Control of the mind through physical toil in the adverse and dangerous
conditions of the football field serve to distance Bradley from the strong
associations of limited mental competence he accords with his experiences
of school and non-laborious work. He believes that football provides an
expanded understanding of the place of cognitive control in sporting
forms of masculinity. The social identity of ‘disability as inferiority’ is
disrupted through the corporeal capacities of cognitive planning offered
by football. The identity of disability is not intrinsic, linear or fixed, but
exchangeable through practices of cognitive and corporeal control on
the field.
Bradley’s experience of cognitive control through the sensual world of
football praxis marks a shift in Kantian conceptions of rational reason
that suggest ‘the medium for absolute control … [is] over one’s own body
and those of others’ (Cashmore 1998, p. 84). This is because participation
in football as technique to define his body as mentally ‘strong’ takes
place through the conversational exchange and interconnection with
206  C. Loeser and V. Crowley

other male bodies in the team. Importantly, it is through the sentient

world of football, and the affective engagements that it brings, that
Bradley ­experiences the masculine values of strength and control. This
explanation is reinforced in the following excerpt, where Bradley describes
conversational exchange as verification of his capacity for interactive
competence and hearing ability:

Before football I protected myself a fair bit … I’d been kept in my little
hidden box and I had to start opening the flaps out and get out into the real
world and make challenges, otherwise I’d be hidden for too long. Football
… it builds up confidence. Get out there, have a kick of a footy. You enjoy
yourself on the field, go to the club and you’ve got something to talk about
and relate with other people and it builds up confidence … That’s my big-
gest problem I find is lack of conversations because just my knowledge and
my hearing. I just – I know things but I know I don’t find it easy to start
conversations … That’s the biggest part. You’ve got to believe in yourself …
you’ve got to want the ball, so you push yourself to the limit and when
you’ve got the ball you do something good with it. Your team mates com-
pliment you and you glow, you glow inside and feel proud … It’s not just
a single mental thing and that. You’ve got team mates to help you and you
help them. Now I look at it as everyone’s got a disability and you can’t see
it on some people, other people you can see it obviously and everyone’s got
to learn to accept their problem and get on with it, strive to be the best …
you just got to, you got to be strong.

The conversational exchange football facilitates is likened to the break-

ing out of a box of silence, absence and invisibility. Bradley describes his
previous history of social isolation as consequence of a ‘lack of conversa-
tions because just my knowledge and hearing’. This lack of conversation,
however, does not amount to a lack of knowledge. Bradley draws atten-
tion to this when he says ‘I know things but I … don’t find it easy to
start conversations’. Bradley’s excerpt illustrates that football provides a
vocabulary by which he can articulate his desire for interconnection and
exchange with other male bodies. This vocabulary also allows him to con-
front the physical hurt generated in football with personal and collective
valorisation. In speaking and conversing with others, Bradley can resist
the silencing and erasure of his disabled subject and ‘make challenges’
 9  Hearing (Dis)abled Masculinities in Australian Rules Football... 
   207

to the social constraints that historically fix him in relations of isolation and
absence. The limits of disability as minimised vocabulary are ­reconstituted
through the conversational exchanges facilitated through performances
on the field. The pleasures of these conversations are heightened by the
interconnection to the masculine values of strength, competence and
mental ability that participation in football brings.
The importance of Bradley’s interview excerpt lies in its capacity to
demonstrate the knowledge and labour involved in the assumption of
a masculine identity. Learning to relate to other boys within the peer
context of the football team involves the deployment of specific techniques
of ‘good’ play where one is seen to ‘push’ their self ‘to the limit’. These
techniques, crucial in the facilitation and establishment of conversational
exchange and social belonging, are also the practices by which Bradley
defines himself as mentally tough. Illustrated in his comment ‘football
builds up confidence’ because ‘you’ve got your team mates to help you
and you help them’, Bradley’s understanding of control of the mind is
conceptualised as a reflection on the individual pleasures of the thinking
body as experienced in collective interaction. This explanation is further
reinforced in Bradley’s comment that his newfound confidence and pride
in performance are ‘not just a single mental thing’.
A central feature of Bradley’s experience of football involves the
projection of a shared bodily experience that connects to an order of
sensations that he interprets as ‘mental strength’ and ‘confidence’. His
interview can be seen to demonstrate further the way disability and
masculinity are conceived of and reconstructed within the exigency
of interacting and socially connecting with others. This explanation is
illustrated in Bradley’s point that he now understands that everyone has
a ‘disability’ that they must strive to overcome. Bradley transforms his
understanding of disability from an individuated problem to a collective
problem. The embodied experience of football points to a possible
new ordering of identity categories in which disability is no longer an
individuated experience. It becomes a collective experience that Bradley
says ‘everyone’s got to learn to accept’.
The concepts and classificatory schemes that inform an understanding
of masculine embodiment are based in Bradley’s experience of
bodily sensation as imagination and perception. This process arouses
208  C. Loeser and V. Crowley

his interconnection with and dissolving into other masculine embodied

selves within the communal collectivity of football masculinities. This
is an experience in which masculinity gets reconstructed as a politics of
exchange to the identity of hearing disability. The supposed ‘naturalness’
of masculinity as individual bodily property is disrupted as it is reduced
to a series of momentary bodily experiences and sensibilities that
emerge through an interconnection with other embodied masculine
subjectivities.
What emerges from Bradley’s interview is an ethic of connection
and disconnection to the identities of masculinity and disability that he
inhabits in and across the sites of football and the workplace. Football is
the occasion for reopening and negotiating the affective and relational
possibilities by which his masculinity becomes established. The stylisation
of masculinity as ‘mental toughness’ through embodied engagement
with others emerges as a contrast to the limited opportunities for
intellectualism that plague his experience of working life. It is in the
embodied experiences of slippage between disability and masculinity that
the contingency and instability of identity are revealed.

Reflections
To understand why Shane and Bradley are drawn to the physical and
mental challenges of football, attention must be drawn to the circuits of
exchange and connection that exist in dominant classifications of hearing
disability that, in turn, subordinate and exclude their masculine identities
in work culture. The circuits involved in the construction of the young
men’s masculinities can be read as instances of what Connell has termed
‘body-reflexive practices’ (1995, p. 64). Body-reflexive practices can be
identified where bodies are ‘both objects and agents of practice’ (1995,
p.  61) and ‘bodily arousal and action [are] woven into social action’
(1995, p.  60). The body-reflexive practices that construct masculinity
are constituted in social and discursive ‘circuits as meaningful bodies and
embodied meanings’ (1995, p. 64) that form the ‘structures within which
bodies are appropriated and defined’ (1995, p. 61).
 9  Hearing (Dis)abled Masculinities in Australian Rules Football... 
   209

The circuit in Shane’s case goes from his experience of both prejudicial
attitudes towards hearing disability and difficulties securing paid employ-
ment that place him on the ‘outside’ of public forms of workplace mascu-
linities to an imagining of new sociabilities with football team members
based on the mobilisation of desire as friendship and camaraderie. The
verbal practices of shaming and the performance of highly valuable skills
on the field allow him to achieve the masculine status of ‘hard’. This
identification renders the identity of disability a social signifier that can
be exchanged through interconnection with the bodily status of mascu-
line ‘strength’ and social acceptability. For Bradley, the bodily pleasure of
perceptive sensation (mental strength) that he experiences on the field
leads directly to the self-creation of new configurations of masculinity
that are divorced from the identity of disability. This creation initiates
the construction of new social relationships devoid of the limited oppor-
tunities for intellectual control and conversation that are manifest in his
working life.
Involvement in the male-dominated and highly competitive sport of
football is not an ‘unrealistic alternative’ for Shane and Bradley. Rather,
it is a site in which they are invited to experience a diversity of gendered
identities. Football is a mechanism by which the young men transform
the limits of their social and gendered mobility. The analysis works to
show that by inserting themselves into the normative structures of sport-
ing masculinities that idealise the strong, violent and able-bodied, the
men refuse to accept powerlessness as it is realised in the labour culture
they experience. In constructing their bodies as an invitation of socia-
bility for other men, they contest dominant configurations of sporting
masculinities that accord pleasure as the desire to always obliterate and
inhibit the advances of other men.
The young men demonstrate a knowledge about the appropriative
workings of masculinity within football culture. They show that the emer-
gence of a desirable masculinity is dependent on the choreography and
enactment of this identity category. Performances of prowess affirm gen-
dered status amongst the team collectivity. This renders football a perfor-
mance that can effect a renegotiation of fixed categories of disability that
210  C. Loeser and V. Crowley

have been theoretically claimed to exclude, denigrate and disempower

disabled bodies in competitive sports cultures. Crucial to this process
of renegotiation is the irony involved in the men’s rearticulation of their
masculine positioning through the performances, movements and sensual
experiences of their bodies. Part of this irony is that, while performance
of prowess and skill on the football field acts as an invitation of sociability
to other members of the team, violence is central to the labour of build-
ing this desired and desirable masculine body as a means of power and
domination. The cost of maintaining a hyper-masculine body is that it
must be reinforced perpetually through ongoing performances of violence
on the football field. While the heterosexuality in football is pervasive and
taken for granted, it is the benchmark by which the young men and their
teammates measure what counts as ‘successful’ and thus ‘acceptable’ mas-
culinity. Yet these heterosexual masculinities do not emerge ‘naturally’,
but are rather strategically cultivated through the aesthetic appearance and
performance of a body that actively refuses and refutes any association
with the ‘feminine’ or ‘queer’. This is in itself a form of violence, because
the body in this context does not be and become.
In this way, the young men’s corporeal capacities manipulate the
incompatibility of visual appearance as the absolute truth of iden-
tity. Being hearing disabled in football is consequently rendered an
ambivalent and fluid corporeal experience. The young men are able to
imagine and materialise the regulatory norms of heterosexual mascu-
linity that accord credibility through enactments of strength and ‘hard
play’. Yet heterosexual masculinities in football remain fragile because
they can be unmade through association with anything less than the
‘hard’.5

5
 A version of this chapter was presented at the ‘Doing the Body in the 21st Century’ conference
hosted by the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program that took place 31 March to 2 April
2016, University of Pittsburgh, Pennysylvania, United States of America.
 9  Hearing (Dis)abled Masculinities in Australian Rules Football... 
   211

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 10
Disidentification and Ingenuity
in the Sex Lives of Disabled Men
Sarah Smith Rainey

Introduction
When I talk with college students in the USA about sexuality and dis-
ability, there is typically at least one young non-disabled male who openly
announces that if he became disabled, he would kill himself. His male
and female peers usually nod understandingly. For many young men,
becoming disabled means losing their sexual prowess so they ‘might as
well be dead’. When these attitudes are voiced in the classroom, I usu-
ally try to acknowledge the young man’s fears, and then proceed with
evidence—both anecdotal and empirical—that highlights the masculine
efficacy of disabled men.1 I note that some women (and men) have found

1
 In this chapter I will primarily use identity-first language (e.g. disabled person) rather than person-
first language (e.g. person with a disability). This choice signals allegiance to disability rights activ-
ists who argue that disability shapes identity and matches the language choices of my research
participants (Dunn and Andrews 2015).

S.S. Rainey (*)

Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio,
United States of America

© The Author(s) 2017 213

C. Loeser et al. (eds.), Disability and Masculinities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53477-4_10
214  S.S. Rainey

that disabled men make better lovers, and that many disabled men are
able to have erections, orgasms and sometimes even learn to eroticise new
areas of their bodies, learning to climax by having their ears or nape of the
neck stroked. This information interests them. They want to learn more.
Although I consider such classroom work important to the project
of dismantling ableism,2 I am conflicted about how a willingness to see
a disabled man’s life as worthy hinges on the degree to which it con-
forms to some of the more limiting ideals of hegemonic masculinity,
such as toughness, competitiveness, aggression and penis-focused sexual-
ity (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). As long as he can still fulfil his
phallic authority, maybe even better than non-disabled men, then he is
still a man. Try as I might to suggest that some of our patriarchal ide-
als about masculinity are problematic, the only information that consis-
tently brings disabled men back to the realm of the worthy is that which
suggests they can still be ‘real’ men in their relationships with women.
In my research, disabled men were acutely aware of the ways in which
patriarchy constrained and enabled their own performances of masculin-
ity. Prior to becoming disabled, many held the same disability-equals-­
sexual-death popular logic as my students. My research also reveals that,
despite the appearance of incongruity, there are many ways in which
masculinity and disability work together in a patriarchal context. In this
chapter, I argue that disabled men’s awareness and active interrogation of
masculinity—even as they perform many aspects of hegemonic mascu-
linity—enacts what José Esteban Muñoz calls ‘disidentification’, a mode
of identity expression that simultaneously works with and against domi-
nant ideology. Muñoz (1999) explains:

Disidentification is the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one

that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes
it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant
ideology … [attempting to] transform a cultural logic from within, always
laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valu-
ing the importance of local and everyday struggles of resistance (pp. 11–12).

2
 Ableism is discrimination and prejudice against people with disabilities, typically based upon
stereotypes of people with disabilities.
 10  Disidentification and Ingenuity in the Sex Lives of Disabled... 
   215

Disidentification is a survival mechanism that disabled men can use

within patriarchal, ablest dominant culture that frames their lives as
­‘better off dead’. To be read as ‘worthy’ of life and love, many disabled
men feel compelled to enact aspects of dominant hegemonic masculinity,
but many disabled men are also actively interrogating hegemonic mascu-
linity in their everyday lives. This chapter focuses on the ways in which
some disabled men work with and against dominant ideologies of mas-
culinity as they form and maintain intimate heterosexual relationships.
In the first part of the chapter, I explore two ways disabled men are able
to tap into Western hegemonic understandings of masculinity, refashion-
ing them for their own intimate relationships. First, managing disability
can be constructed as a badge of courage, completely aligned with hege-
monic masculinity that emphasises toughness, strength and perseverance.
Second, receiving care from a partner is not necessarily a violation of
patriarchal norms. Disabled men in my study disidentify with masculine
gender roles in intimate relationships, critiquing and mobilising useful
aspects of hegemonic masculinity, scrapping others.
When it comes to the act of sex, however, there are fewer available sex-
ual scripts to repurpose. Western ideologies of masculinity purport that a
man is supposed to be the aggressive, confident, penetrative partner, able
to easily orgasm with his always ready, always reliable penis. While few (if
any) men are able to attain this mythical norm, disabled men fall farther
from the ideal. Yet my research shows that a sense of creativity and play
were the most important sexual qualities of men in fulfilling intimate
relationships.
In the second part of the chapter, I explore disabled men’s sexual inge-
nuity, arguing that disabled men create new understandings of pleasure
for themselves and their partners when available options are too nar-
row. Disabled men, in my research, often actively disidentify with modes
of sexual identity that focus on the penis, creating a masculine sexual
expression that highlights their adeptness at giving sexual pleasure.
This chapter draws on several different data sources. First, I draw
on focus group interviews I conducted in 2007 and 2014. In 2007 I
recruited 12 couples into four focus groups in Ohio (USA). Each couple
self-identified as a cohabitating disabled/non-disabled heterosexual pair,
including two couples in which the male partner identified as disabled.
216  S.S. Rainey

Except for one African-American man, all participants in this set of focus
groups were white. Pseudonyms are used for participants from the 2007
focus groups.
In 2014, nine participants enrolled into three focus groups conducted
via Google Hangouts. The groups included individuals from across the
USA and Canada. In these focus groups, participants had the choice to
participate with or without their partner (only one couple participated
together), but all participants were cohabitating in a disabled/disabled
(three participants) or disabled/non-disabled (six participants) intimate
relationship. Participants included three disabled men, five disabled
women and one non-disabled male partner. One disabled man also
identified as trans* and one disabled woman had a trans male partner.
Participants in this latter set of focus groups were all Caucasian, and each
had the option to use their real name or a pseudonym as they desired.3
In both sets of focus groups, participants with disabilities primarily
identified as having physical disabilities, such as multiple sclerosis, spinal
cord injury and cerebral palsy. Regardless of the specifics of their disabil-
ity, all participants engaged in a conversation about disability and sexual
relationships, focusing on the mediating role (both positive and nega-
tive) caregiving plays in their intimate lives. This chapter also includes
data from two individual interviews conducted in 2015 with physically
disabled white men (both with spinal cord injuries) from Canada. These
interviews were conducted via Skype and both men selected to use pseud-
onyms. Like the focus groups, the men were cohabitating with female
partners, and we discussed caregiving, sexuality and masculinity.
I also draw on autobiographies written by disabled men in this chapter,
as well as my own experiences with my late partner, Max, who had mul-
tiple sclerosis and used a wheelchair. During our time together, Max and
I talked frequently about disability, masculinity and sexuality, so much of
this chapter is framed by those conversations. Although I no longer get
to have those conversations, our history mediates how I read disability
autobiographies written by men and listen to the voices of disabled men
in interviews and focus groups. My own autoethnographic experiences

3
 Participant age ranges for the 2007 focus groups were 23–64; participants in 2014 were younger,
ranging from mid-twenties to mid-fifties.
 10  Disidentification and Ingenuity in the Sex Lives of Disabled... 
   217

are an important ‘voice’ in this chapter as well. This diversity of sources—

focus groups, interviews, autobiographies and autoethnography—helps
provide a rich context for understanding the very complex negotiations
disabled men navigate in intimate heterosexual relationships. Although
not all disabled men deal with hegemonic masculinity through disiden-
tification, many do. It is their complicated disidentifications that I focus
on in this chapter.

Patriarchy and Possibility
Scholarly literature has long recognised that men and women experi-
ence disability differently in Western patriarchal contexts (Schur 2004).
Shakespeare (1999, p. 56) notes that for disabled women ‘there is a syn-
ergy—a reinforcement—between traditional notions of women and the
traditional notion of disability’. Stereotypically, women are viewed as pas-
sive and dependent, as are people with disabilities. Thus, disability seems
to reinforce a woman’s inferior status in patriarchy, leading some scholars
to explore disabled women’s ‘double disadvantage’ in patriarchal contexts
(see Schur 2004).
Disabled men, however, seem to embody contradiction. As Shakespeare
succinctly observes, whereas ‘femininity and disability reinforce each
other, masculinity and disability conflict with each other’ (1999, p. 57).
Men are supposed to be strong, independent and sexually dominant.
Ideologies of heteronormative masculinity place pre-eminent importance
on the penis and its pleasures. These qualities are at odds with the stereo-
typical notions of disability as weakness and dependency. Thus, impair-
ment in men is often represented as a fall from masculine authority in
popular culture (Smith Rainey 2011). The contradictions between dis-
ability and masculinity have led researchers, such as Gerschick (2000,
p. 1265), to claim that the ‘status inconsistency’ disabled men experience
‘erodes much, but not all, masculine privilege’.
Research on disabled masculinity typically analyses the ways in
which disabled men engage with the scripts of hegemonic masculin-
ity (Gerschick and Miller 1995; Shuttleworth 2004). These studies all
acknowledge that few, if any, men ever fully embody hegemonic mas-
218  S.S. Rainey

culinity, but the concept’s pervasiveness in the lives of most men makes
hegemonic ­masculinity a useful measuring stick. In their oft-cited work,
Gerschick and Miller (1995) found that men with physical disabilities
often fell into one of three frameworks, which they labelled ‘reformula-
tion,’ ‘reliance’ and ‘rejection’ of hegemonic masculinity.
Other studies that look specifically at disabled men’s sexuality have
created similar typologies to categorise disabled men’s masculine pre-
sentations. For example, Bender (2012) developed four categories to
characterise the sexual trajectories of men with physical disabilities from
traumatic injury: adapters, performers, conformers and relinquishers.
Adapters exercised high levels of personal agency in sexual relationships
and relied little on hegemonic masculinity to create their own expressions
of masculinity. Performers also had a high level of agency in their sexual
lives; however, unlike adapters, they were more likely to hide physical
accommodations (such as erection enhancing medications) they make to
engage in sexual intercourse from their female sexual partners.
Both conformers and relinquishers relied heavily on traditional
notions of masculinity and therefore neither group felt like they had any
sexual power or agency. Because of this perceived inability to ever be a
viable sexual candidate, conformers were deeply dissatisfied with their
sexual relationships, and relinquishers often gave up on having a sex life
altogether. Like Gershick and Miller, hegemonic masculinity is opera-
tionalised in Bender’s work as the yardstick against which to measure
men’s expressions of masculinity and sexuality. In these studies, hege-
monic masculinity is primarily enacted as a wholly negative constellation
of traits that, when adhered to, make disabled men less satisfied with
their lives, especially in terms of sexual relationships.4
Considering its power and pervasiveness, reading the lives of disabled
men through the lens of hegemonic masculinity seems warranted. I do
not dispute that impairment makes the ideals of hegemonic masculinity

4
 To be fair, Gerschick and Miller (1995) do discuss the ways in which perseverance and resiliency
(traits associated with hegemonic masculinity) help some disabled men ‘overcome’ aspects of their
physical impairments (see pp. 194–199). However, they do not theorise the complicated relation-
ship between hegemonic masculinity, patriarchal power and able-bodied norms. Instead, the case
of a ‘positive’ outcome is treated as an outlier amongst men classified as ‘reliers’, who typically ‘do
not seem as comfortable with their manhood’ (p. 191).
 10  Disidentification and Ingenuity in the Sex Lives of Disabled... 
   219

difficult to perform. However, particularly in the context of heterosexual

intimate relationships and their accompanying scripts of normative gen-
dered behaviour, such frameworks can all too easily mask the patriarchal
authority that many disabled men are able to access. In other words,
examining the degree to which disabled men do or do not meet or
attempt to enact hegemonic standards of masculinity does not tease out
the ways in which disabled men engage with patriarchy as a hierarchical
system of male privilege (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). Focusing
instead on the contested, conflicted and ambivalent identifications with
hegemonic masculinity allows us to see ways in which men may embody
aspects of hegemonic masculinity in ways that work toward undermining
the system of patriarchy. It may also help us see ways in which disabled
men contest and interrogate patriarchy.
In my own research, I found that many men were hyperaware of
their role in patriarchy and were engaged in a process of interrogation
of masculine privilege—their own and that of others—seeking new ways
to understand masculinity and femininity in heterosexual relationships.
These men did not necessarily reject hegemonic masculinity, rather they
were disidentifying with hegemonic masculinity, engaging in an ongoing
meta-conversation about masculinity even while embodying masculinity.
For many, their impairment facilitated their critical awareness about mas-
culinity and male privilege, making them almost grateful for the insights
about gender that their disability permitted. For example, at the end of
my interview with Matt, a 33-year-old man with a spinal cord injury, he
says, ‘the number one thing that I’ve found with my disability is that it
has given me a great imagination and a very great openness with myself
and the ability to explore new avenues, and I think that is pretty excit-
ing’. Likewise, in the interview with Thomas (29 years old), he frequently
referred to ‘old Thomas’ and ‘new Thomas’, using the old/new binary
to denote a new and improved version of himself post-disability (spinal
cord injury). For both Matt and Thomas, disability forced them to criti-
cally engage with aspects of hegemonic masculinity that they passively
accepted prior to their disability.
Similarly, my late partner Max insisted that I would have never been
interested in him before his disability. He was a ‘player’, a suave ‘ladies’
man’ who had an incredible sense of privilege and power and he was not
220  S.S. Rainey

modest about it. According to Max, I would have labelled him a ‘sexist
pig’. Disability forced a reckoning with patriarchy for Max. Stripped of
his previous power based on his physicality, Max had to learn how to
express masculinity in a new way. In our particular relationship, which
was characterised by a BDSM dynamic,5 Max forged a disidentity as a
‘loving dominant’. He was the ‘dominant’ and ‘sadist’ in our relation-
ship; however, he was also the emotional caregiver, tending to my needs
and fostering closeness and interdependence. By caring and nurturing
me, I continued to submit to him, which interpellated his dominance,
reaffirming for him his masculine identity and worth within dominant
ideology. His disidentity as masculine and dominant, then, were always
in process and negotiated in relation to other people (Connell and
Messerschmidt 2005). It should be stressed here that Thomas, Matt
and Max all identified as masculine and in many ways continued to
embody characteristics of hegemonic masculinity. All three continued
to desire to be read as masculine, and to be seen as ‘worthy’ within the
‘conditions of (im)possibility that dominant culture generates’ (Muñoz
1999, p. 6). However, for all three, disability had enabled a process of
consciousness-raising that made them critical of hegemonic masculin-
ity and the constraints of patriarchy. Thus, as Muñoz (1999) would
put it, they desired hegemonic masculinity, but ‘desire[d] it with a dif-
ference’ (p.  15). To look more closely at the way disidentification is
expressed in my research participant’s narratives, I examine two cases
in this section: the expression of perseverance and independence within
sexual relationships and the gendered politics of disabled men receiving
care from non-disabled women.

Perseverance and Independence
In his analysis of autobiographies written by male polio survivors,
Wilson (2004) argues that ‘because of the characteristics of their dis-
ability, displacing the values of hegemonic masculinity on to their proj-
ect of physical rehabilitation fostered physical recovery’ (p. 126). Polio

 BDSM stands for bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism and masochism.
5
   
10  Disidentification and Ingenuity in the Sex Lives of Disabled...  221

recovery requires long, painful hours of rehabilitation. Drawing on val-

ues such as courage, stoicism and toughness helped the men manage
impairment, at times overcoming or eliminating it, and at other times
mitigating the impairment’s impact on their lives. However, Wilson
also found that fighting polio ‘like a man’ often came at a cost for these
men.6 He (2004) writes that the ‘later consequences of denying their
disability, of repressing the powerful emotions involving loss, depen-
dence, and sense of masculinity included self-destructive behavior and
serious episodes of depression’ (pp. 126–127). In other words, battling
polio ‘like a man’ often meant that the men failed to accept and adapt
to their new, post-polio physiques, to grieve their former bodies and to
learn to rely on others for help.
Wilson’s research shows that, when utilised in moderation, aspects
of hegemonic masculinity can be useful to men facing physical impair-
ments. The tropes of hegemonic masculinity can help men with disabil-
ities find strength and develop new expressions of masculine identity.
Men who ‘fight’ disability ‘like a man’ may be able to access patriarchal
privileges, gaining respect from friends and family; however, their lives
can become so devoted to the project of staving off impairment that they
cannot enjoy those very privileges.
In my research on sexuality and caregiving in intimate relationships,
this tension between masculine strength and perseverance as positive
attributes on the one hand, or as a barrier to adapting to disability on the
other, was often expressed in discussions about independence. For many
men, needing help with activities of daily living or with traditionally
‘masculine’ household chores is experienced as emasculating. Discussing
the fact that his wife has to do a lot of the household chores and child-
care, on top of providing some amount of care for him, Dan (age 46),
who is quadriplegic, says, ‘I do try to be there for her, but I know that
she’s got a lot more on her plate than I do, and I’m, I’m on the plate.
I’m part of what is on the plate.’ For Dan, dependence on his partner is
difficult to reconcile with his masculinity and sense of self, and he notes,
‘As a male with a disability and not able to perform as an able body, it is

6
 Wilson’s trope of ‘fighting like a man’ is based on the language used in the autobiographies he
analyses, particularly Leonard Kriegel’s Falling Into Life (1991).
222  S.S. Rainey

mentally difficult to have sex. There are many things I wish I could do,
but am limited in my mobility … My wife says I haven’t adjusted to my
disability and she is right. I see so many things I wish I could do. Also, it
keeps getting harder as I get older and my body changes.’ For Dan, the
ideals of hegemonic masculinity function as a barrier to acceptance and a
satisfying sexual relationship with his wife.
All the men I talked with discussed how the ideals of hegemonic mas-
culinity make it difficult to receive help and care, most also described
a process of moving from (over)valuing independence toward valuing
interdependence.7 Importantly, the masculine trait of responsibility, of
commitment to the self and other, is what helps these men embrace
interdependence. Permitting others to provide care and assistance is
operationalised as the responsible, logical and expedient thing to do.
Matt explains:

I can’t really carry in the groceries efficiently or shovel the snow or what-
ever. I do take it on as a challenge sometimes and attempt to do those
things. Rake the leaves once a year and shovel the landing once, but it is
something that, you know, it is just not efficient.

For Matt, insisting on full independence ceases to make sense, especially

when receiving help can mean more quality time with loved ones. He still
considers himself masculine, noting that he is ‘very strong’ and ‘protec-
tive’, but then jokes that ‘if the zombies came or someone broke into the
house, you know, I’m not going to be much good!’ Matt is mindful of
reciprocity and does what he can in his relationship with his partner, but
permitting help when it is more efficient is also the responsible reaction
to needing help with some activities of daily living.
When Max and I were first a couple, Max insisted on doing all of
his personal care, such as showering and shaving, independently. It was
important to him to be independent, as this level of self-control was
tied to his sense of masculinity. However, the routine of showering and
shaving often caused extreme fatigue. The particularities of Max’s dis-

7
 In the focus groups for 2007, one of the men was struggling with reconciling his masculinity with
his impairment.
   
10  Disidentification and Ingenuity in the Sex Lives of Disabled...  223

ability made ‘fighting like a man’ to retain total independence counter-

productive. Just as he was ready for a date-night out, his body was ready
for bed. After much discussion and self-reflection, Max decided letting
me help with showering and shaving was the more responsible, more
masculine thing to do as it allowed us to have quality time together.
Being cared for, in this context, was a way to care for himself, me and
our relationship.
Interdependent caring is also a source of togetherness for couples. I
know that Max and I enjoyed our time together during his shower and
shave routine. It was a source of closeness and intimacy unparalleled in
non-disabled relationships.8 In a more mundane way, Matt notes that
his disability forces him and his partner to work together on household
tasks, to be an interdependent unit. He explains that his partner is not
very skilled at fix-it jobs, and he often has to walk her through tasks.
Matt says, ‘this weekend our dryer connections to our dryer came off so
I had to show her how to put the dryer hose back on, and we had our
iPhones and we were face-timing behind the dryer and I was explaining
how to put the dryer connection back on. And that was a little bit frus-
trating for me because I could have done that in five minutes … but at
the same time, we figured out how to navigate around it.’ Although he
was moderately frustrated that he could not fix the dryer hose himself,
Matt was clearly proud and even amused by their technology-inspired,
interdependent solution.
For all the men I talked with, the desire to ‘fight disability’ and be totally
independent was strong, at least at some point in their lives. However, the
constant struggle against the realities of their bodies was exhausting and
depressing. Scrapping the idealised trait of independence in favour of the
more realistic, but also masculine, quality of responsibility was a produc-
tive way for the disabled men in my study to disidentify with hegemonic
masculinity. Rather than rejecting masculinity altogether, they critiqued
the trope of ‘fighting’ against disability and total independence as inef-
ficient and silly, choosing other, more positive aspects of hegemonic mas-
culinity to express.

8
 In the 2007 focus groups, participants frequently remarked that they felt their relationships were
‘closer’ or ‘more intimate’ than those of their non-disabled peers.
224  S.S. Rainey

Gendered Politics of Receiving Care

As the previous section makes clear, needing physical care is typically
considered emasculating. Hegemonic masculinity is associated with
independence and separation, bodily integrity and privacy. Receiving
assistance with activities of daily living, such as bathing, dressing and
toileting, seems to violate all the ‘core values’ of hegemonic masculin-
ity. Many men were able to critique the ideal of independence and
embrace interdependence based on the masculine value of responsibility.
However, it should be stressed that the men’s willingness to receive care
from female partners is also bound up within normative heterosexual,
patriarchal gender relations. In other words, the gendered politics of care
and intimate labour within heterosexual relationships makes receiving
care from female partners normal. Wives provide physical and emotional
nurturance to husbands and children, handling most household chores,
including meal preparation, laundry and other routine tasks. Thus, the
context of patriarchy permits disabled heterosexual men a way to access
care without completely violating normative gender relations.
In his ethnographic study with disabled quad rugby players, Lindemann
(2010) found that most of his research participants sexualised the norma-
tive prescribed gender roles of their female, caregiving, sexual partners.
Lindemann reports that the men frequently discussed the benefits of live-
­in able-bodied girlfriends, using the framework and language of patriar-
chal privilege and authority. For example, one participant shares, ‘She’s
taken care of the leak in my roof, presses my slacks, and when I need
razors, they appear the next day’ (p.  444). Female, able-bodied live-in
partners are prized for their ability to serve the disabled man, mirroring
traditional gender relations’ (p. 444). Although Lindemann’s participants
do not seem to critique normative relations, my participants were more
critical and conflicted about the ways in which physical impairment in
male-disabled/female-non-disabled intimate relationships seemed to
engender patriarchal gender norms. Many of the men in my research
were highly aware of this irony. For example, Matt reflects:

I’ve had talks with friends who are female and disabled and as far as rela-
tionships go, we’ve come to the consensus … that women are a lot more in
 10  Disidentification and Ingenuity in the Sex Lives of Disabled... 
   225

the caregiving role and willing to accept someone with a disability and so,
for men it is a lot easier to find companionship, whereas my girlfriends, or
my female friends, have it a lot more difficult to find a boyfriend.

As Matt notes, stereotypical gender norms, in which women are caregiv-

ers, can make it easier for men to find partners willing to provide some,
if not all, of the personal care they may need. Those same gender norms,
however, make it more difficult for heterosexual disabled women to find
male partners. For Matt, and many other disabled men, their discomfort
with this reality facilitates disidentification. Although they participate
and even benefit from such patriarchal norms, they critique those very
norms, attempting to shake them up in their own relationships.
One common way that male-disabled/female-non-disabled couples
critiqued the gendered politics of care was to put gender and disability
into play, adding new dimensions to masculinity, femininity and disabil-
ity. In some arrangements, the non-disabled female partner may perform
in stereotypically female ways, and the disabled male partner in stereo-
typically male ways. Yet, since disability is perceived to render a man ‘less
masculine’, performing in traditionally gendered ways is a way to dismiss
ablest assumptions about disability and gender. It also can have the effect
of making obvious the constructed nature of gender roles. The play in
these relationships is analogous to the gay/lesbian, queer and drag perfor-
mances that Muñoz argues embody disidentification. In playing out and
playing with normative heterosexual gender relationships, the couples
consciously attempt to critique disability stereotypes, expose problematic
gender norms and explore and try-on news ways of being heterosexual
men and women.
For Max and me, the relationship between disability stereotypes and
gender norms fuelled our erotic practices. My submission to Max was a
way for me to identify with and explore heterosexual feminine desire.
I desired a rather stereotypical masculine partner (e.g. assertive, aggres-
sive, phallic), but Max’s disability allowed me to push on my own per-
sonal understandings of masculinity. Growing up in an ableist world, I
had primarily associated disability with weakness, frailty and passivity.
Permitting myself to be tied-up and flogged by a person with a disabil-
ity helped me see disability differently, exposing disability stereotypes.
226  S.S. Rainey

Likewise, Max talked with me about the pleasure of playing with mas-
culinity and disability, repurposing disability as a tool in our dominant/
submissive dynamic. Requesting care from me, in the form of household
chores or assistance with bathing, was a way to assert masculine authority,
but also met the needs of his disability. Highly aware that our relationship
both typified and disturbed normative gender and disability relations, we
constantly discussed and played with gender and disability.
In a less prurient example, John and Alison Hockenberry’s relationship
seems to exemplify the disidentification I am discussing, as they simul-
taneously express and undermine gender and disability stereotypes. John
Hockenberry is a famous paraplegic newscaster. He and his wife, Alison,
have five children. Before she had the children she was a successful televi-
sion producer, but now she is a full-time homemaker and mother, and
he works full-time away from the house. In one sense this arrangement
conforms to gender expectations, but their arrangement resists such easy
labelling because the person with the disability works full-time.
In these types of disabled/non-disabled couplings, there is usually
a sense of subversive joy in defying ablest beliefs. For example, Alison
Hockenberry, says:

There is absolutely no question … that he is more involved and more of an

equal partner in parenting than any of my friends’ husbands. He changes
diapers and gets up in the middle of the night. He potty-trained the girls.
People tell me, ‘oh, wow, it must be tough on you.’ There’s an implication
that [I have it tough] not only because I have four kids but also because my
husband uses a wheelchair. They have no idea how good I have it. (Samuels
2002)

What appears to conform to expected gender norms (stay-at-home

mother, working father) flies in the face of gender and disability stereo-
types, as John is a very active partner. In my research, the non-disabled
female partners often echoed Alison’s sentiments. It may be that disabled
men in  heterosexual relationships work ‘harder’ at providing for their
families in an effort to dispel disability. In doing so, these men are also
disidentifying with the cultural norm that men do very little childcare or
housework, rewriting what it means to be a man in heterosexual families.
 10  Disidentification and Ingenuity in the Sex Lives of Disabled... 
   227

For couples in female-non-disabled/male-disabled relationships, gen-

der roles may look stereotypical as women care for men. However, as I
have argued in this section, disability and gender can play against each
other, exposing the way gender roles and beliefs about disability are
socially constructed. The disabled/non-disabled couples discussed in this
section, then, are also part of a ‘queer’ sexual culture in that they expose
gender as a performance, as something that is not so neatly tied to the
biological positions of male and female.

Sexual Ingenuity
The penis is the ultimate marker of masculine sexuality. A penis that fails
this role reveals a failed man—or so the story goes. While there are cer-
tainly disabled men who identify with this cultural imperative, I found
many more who disidentify, critiquing the (over)valorisation of male
pleasure and penetrative sex. Unable to perform in typical ways, some
disabled men develop an insightful critique of central importance of male
sexual pleasure in heterosexual gender relations. They become mindful of
the ways in which women’s sexual pleasures are marginalised in norma-
tive heterosex, and work hard at learning how to please a woman through
oral sex, foreplay and using fingers and other objects for penetration.
They also consciously open themselves up to more communication and
less orgasm-oriented encounters. As they move toward embracing female
pleasure and the pleasures of giving (rather than only receiving), they
disidentify with hegemonic masculinity.
Discussing ways in which he expresses his sexuality, Matt talks about
disidentifying with the ‘selfish’, penis-focused sexuality he associates with
hegemonic masculinity. In doing so, he has chosen to be more open,
more communicative and more adventurous. Matt notes:

I find, being more, um, I don’t want to say feminine, but more compas-
sionate and more caring and more of a listening and a better communica-
tor—these are not typically masculine traits … but I have seen their value
a long time ago just out of necessity for, you know, being more open and
being more eligible … the stereotypical man is a lot more focused on their
228  S.S. Rainey

own genitals than their partners’ … I’m more communicative, I’m more
adventurous in going off the beaten path as far as sex goes. That has been,
you know, to my partner’s benefit to the large part.

Shifting focus away from his own genitals helped Matt be a better part-
ner, emotionally and sexually, and he was highly aware of how this shift
benefits all involved.
Similarly, Thomas discusses how his outlook on sex and pleasure has
shifted dramatically since his injury in his late teens:

‘Old Thomas’ just completely thought about his penis! … I look at sex and
I look at pleasure completely different than how I did before because it was
all about me finding pleasure, me enjoying myself, and then ignoring my
partner. And, I’ve realized that ‘new Thomas’ is more, I’m way more excited
about my partner enjoying themselves and my partner either climaxing or
having orgasm way before I actually deal with that stuff, and that is com-
pletely night and day from ‘old Thomas.’

Thomas experienced a rather radical shift in sexual focus and expression,

so much so that he now provides labels to denote his consciousness.
Writing about his own shift in consciousness about masculine sexuality,
wheelchair rugby player Mark Zupan (2006) writes in his autobiography:

I realized that I was a different kind of lover now. I used to worry only
about pleasing myself. Now I was constantly thinking about my partner. I
didn’t rush the foreplay. I didn’t want to … Here’s the deal; when you are a
quad, you’re often a little more appreciative of attention from the females
than most other guys. I like to express my gratitude by pleasuring the ladies
orally whenever I get the chance. And, yes, the chicks dig it. (p. 223)

Like Thomas, Zupan discusses becoming comfortable with a ‘new’ way of

being a sexual man, one less focused on the penis and more open to other
pleasures. Significantly, he claims that ‘chicks dig it’, suggesting that such
qualities not only make him a different kind of lover, but a better lover.
In his research with disabled men, Shuttleworth (2004) also found
that atypical bodies ‘spurred [disabled men] on to become innovative in
their sexual techniques and to also focus more on their partner’s pleasure
 10  Disidentification and Ingenuity in the Sex Lives of Disabled... 
   229

than they thought non-disabled men did’ (p. 173). One of the female
sexual partners in Shuttleworth’s study claimed that ‘men with disabilities
make much more sensitive lovers than non-disabled men’ (p. 173). My
participants made similar claims about their new sexual prowess. Once
they moved away from the more selfish, penis-focused sexuality, they
became better lovers, increasing their desirability to heterosexual women.
Sexual openness, communication and concern for the partner’s plea-
sure did not mean, however, that disabled men were always submissive.
Discussing the ways in which taking time to self-catheterise can some-
times destroy ‘the mood’ because it takes him away from his partner
for ten minutes, Matt casually notes, ‘but, sometimes, just saying “Stay
right there. Don’t touch yourself. I’ll be back,” you know, can work won-
ders.’ Here, Matt turns the demands of his body into an opportunity to
heighten sexual arousal through anticipation and dominance.
In addition to shifting toward a less ‘male-centric’ expression of sexual-
ity, disabled men also expand upon the phallus through creative uses of
what I call ‘technologies of care’, tools used in the care and maintenance
of disability. Wheelchairs, canes, crutches and Hoyer Lifts can also be
repurposed as tools to give pleasure. For example, discussing different
ways ‘technologies of care’ may or may not be used in sexual play, Tim
proclaimed:

My wheelchair is a fantastic sex toy! … it’s very comfortable for me and it’s
comfortable for someone, i.e. my partner, to get on top. We’ve learned to
kind of use the chair creatively. I’m extremely lucky in that I am married to
an occupational therapist, which means that she knows how to use my
chair, both to use it for non-sex toy and for sex toy purposes, which is kind
of nice. So for me, it’s a positive, and it can be a really kind of fun piece of
equipment.

Rather than seeing his wheelchair as a barrier to good sex, Tim is able to
incorporate it into his sexual repertoire.
Although a sexuality that does not focus on the penis is considered
‘unthinkable by the dominant culture’ (Muñoz 1999, p.  31), I found
that disabled men were able to not only make it thinkable, but desir-
able. Expanding sexual pleasures beyond the genitals, learning to love
230  S.S. Rainey

giving pleasure (and not just receiving) and finding new, ingenious uses
of ‘technologies of care’ were all ways in which disabled men disidentified
with normative masculine sexuality. In doing so, disabled men embodied
a sexual identity that women may prefer and from which non-disabled
men can learn.

Conclusion
As a strategy of survival, disidentification can help men with physical dis-
abilities be read (by others and themselves) as men worthy of patriarchal
privilege, while simultaneously permitting a critique of, and play with,
normative hegemonic masculinity. Cultivating disidentification can help
men make positive aspects of hegemonic masculinity, such as responsi-
bility, more salient in their lives, rather than the more limiting construc-
tions of independence or stoicism. Disidentification can also help them
critique the interplay of disability, care and gender in heterosexual sexual
relationships. Finally, disidentification can also help men explore aspects
of masculine sexuality that do not rely solely on the penis, unlocking a
range of polymorphous pleasures.
Disidentification makes obvious the many ways in which disabled men
are doing more than reacting to or against hegemonic masculinity, they
are also making it anew. The real radical potential of disabled masculine
sexuality is when it becomes a method to reframe the hegemonic in ways
much more open to diverse bodies and experiences.

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 About the Contributors

Clare Bartholomaeus  is an Adjunct Research Associate in the School of Social

and Policy Studies at Flinders University, South Australia. Her research interests
include gender, diversity, and childhood/youth. She is currently working on a
number of projects on trans and gender-diverse issues in education. She has
previously published in a number of areas, including masculinities theorising in
relation to young age.
Vicki Crowley  is an Independent Creative Producer, Writer and Editor cur-
rently involved in radio documentary, theatre, queer politics and the contempo-
rary archive of Indigenous story-telling. Among her recent publications is has
co-authored edited collection with Anna Hickey-Moody, Disability Matters,
Pedagogy Media & Affect (2012) and ‘Disability and Sexuality: Desires and
Pleasures’, a special edition of Sexualities co-edited with Cassandra Loeser and
Barbara Pini (forthcoming). Her current research and creative interests lie in the
cultural and creative politics of narrative, especially as it relates to affect, racism,
the body, place and sexualities.
Sam Eldridge  is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council award-
winning MA student working with Professor Leslie G. Roman in Educational
Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC), located on the ancestral,
unceded territory of the Musqueam people. Her research articulates connections
among feminist Disability Studies, critical race theory, postcolonialism, and

© The Author(s) 2017 233

C. Loeser et al. (eds.), Disability and Masculinities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53477-4
234  About the Contributors

cultural studies in public pedagogy. Her MA thesis will investigate relationships

between notions of fitness and neoliberal capitalism through specific provincial
policy contexts. She is currently working as a research assistant with an Educational
Administration and Leadership working group with the goal of redesigning their
Master’s program to meaningfully include Aboriginal content.
Gerard Goggin  is Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor of
Media and Communications, the University of Sydney. He is widely published
on digital technology, including Routledge Companion to Global Internet Histories
(2015), Global Mobile Media (2011), and Cell Phone Culture (2006). Gerard has
a longstanding interest in disability and media, authoring, with Katie Ellis, the
Routledge Companion to Disability and Media (2016) as well as Disability and the
Media (2015), and, with the late Christopher Newell, Disability in Australia
(2005), and Digital Disability (2003).
Dylan Holdsworth  is a PhD student at Deakin University in Melbourne,
Australia. His teaching and research interests include literary studies, children’s
and young adult literature, representations of disability, and dystopian fiction.
His PhD project explores representations of disability in dystopian children’s
literature across history, with a specific focus on how disability is constituted in
relation to power. He has a chapter on disability, monstrosity, freakishness and
affect in Edward Scissorhands and Frozen in the forthcoming publication
Emotional Control: Affect and Children’s Texts.
Stephen Kerry  is a sociology lecturer at Charles Darwin University, Darwin,
Australia. Dr Kerry is a queer activist and uses hir academic career to bring about
social change, especially for those who live on the gender margins of society. In
2005, Dr Kerry completed a PhD in which xie researched the social lives of
intersex Australians and  in 2014 xie completed a project on the role of religion
in intersex Australians’ path to health and wellbeing. Xie is currently conducting
research into the health needs of transgender and sex/gender diverse people liv-
ing in Australia’s Northern Territory.
Cassandra Loeser  is a Lecturer in Research Education and Director of the Research
Centre for Gender Studies, Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia.
She has presented and published widely in the fields of disability, masculinities and
sexualities. Recent publications include Loeser, C. Pini, B. and Crowley, V.
(forthcoming 2017) ‘Disability and sexuality: Desires and pleasures’, Sexualities
special edition, Karioris, F.G. and Loeser, C.(eds) (2015) Reimagining Masculinities:
Beyond Masculinist Epistemology (Inter-Disciplinary Press), ‘The rapture of the ride:
Hearing (dis)Abled masculinities in motorcycling’, Journal of Sociology (March 2013)
   About the Contributors 
   235

and ‘Muscularity, mateship and malevolent masculinities: Experiences of young men

with hearing disabilities in secondary schools’, in Hickey-Moody, A. and Crowley, V.
(eds) (2011) Disability Matters: Pedagogy, Media and Affect (Routledge). Cassandra
also has a long history teaching in gender studies, sociology, communication and
cultural studies, and social inquiry methods.
Kim Pearson  has a first class Honours degree in Human Geography from
Griffith University in Queensland Australia. Prior to this she gained a BA in
Sociology from the University of Tasmania in 2014, where her main areas of
interest lay in Sociology of the body and Sociology of health and illness. Since
studying at Griffith University Kim’s main research interests are in Human
Geography, Gender and Disability studies. Kim has a strong commitment to
social justice in access to healthcare, and in the practice of policy formation and
this underpins future research interests.
Barbara Pini  is Professor of Sociology in the School of Humanities, Arts,
Education and Law at Griffith University, Queensland. She has published exten-
sively in the fields of gender, sexualities, youth, class, rurality, and more recently,
disability. She has co-edited numerous books including Feminisms and Ruralities
(Lexington Books, 2014), Sexuality, Rurality and Geography (Lexington Books,
2013) Men, Masculinities and Methodologies (Palgrave, 2013) and Transforming
Gender and Class in Rural Spaces (Ashgate, 2011). She has co-edited six special
issues of journals and is chief investigator of the 2011 – 2015 ARC Discovery
Project ‘Disability in Rural Australia’. Her most recent publication with Martin
Mills is ‘Punishing kids: the rise of the “boot camp.” International Journal of
Inclusive Education, 19(3), pp. 270–284.
Sarah Smith Rainey  is an Assistant Professor in the School of Cultural and
Critical Studies and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at
Bowling Green State University. Her work focuses on people who are sexually
marginalized, including people with disabilities, BDSM practitioners, people
with HIV/AIDS, and LGBT people. She has published in the Journal of Literary
and Cultural Disability Studies, Lesbian and Gay Psychology Review, and AIDS
Education and Prevention. Dr. Smith Rainey’s first book, Love, Sex, and Disability:
The Pleasures of Care, was published in 2011 and she is currently working on a
second book Extended Family Values.
Sarah Reddington  is a Lecturer in the School of Education at Acadia University
and in the Faculty of Education at Mount Saint Vincent University in Nova
Scotia, Canada. Sarah’s work in the field of critical disability studies and critical
autism studies is concerned with theorising and engaging in poststructuralist
236  About the Contributors

and post-human approaches to find different ways to think about student dis-
ability experience. Key theorists include Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Michel
Foucault and Donna Haraway.
Damien Riggs  is an Associate Professor in social work at Flinders University,
and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. He is the author of over 150
publications in the areas of gender, family, and mental health, and he also works
in private practice as a psychotherapist specialising in working with young trans-
gender people. He is currently the President of the Australian Critical Race and
Whiteness Studies Association and the National Convenor of the Australian
Psychological Society’s interest group on gay and lesbian issues and the editor of
its journal, the Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review. His most recent
book is Pink Herrings: Fantasy, Object Choice, and Sexuation (2015).
Leslie Roman  is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of
British Columbia and Killam Fellow. She is a leading educational and social
theorist in the sociology of education, whose work influences internationally
cultural studies, disability studies, feminist theory, and qualitative research. She
has co-edited, Becoming Feminine: The Politics of Popular Culture; Views Beyond
‘The Border Country’: Raymond Williams and Cultural Politics; and, Dangerous
Territories: Struggles for Difference and Equality in Education. She created and
co-directed with Geoff McMurchy, the Unruly Salon, uniquely combining the
voices of artists and scholars with disabilities in artistic experiences engaging
university students, faculty, and the wider community to query, provoke and
unsettle the lack of inclusion of people with disabilities on university campuses
and in the wider society. This led to special issues in the International Review of
Disability Studies, the International Journal of Inclusive Education and the
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. She is the editor of and
contributor to Hallmarks: The Cultural Politics and Public Pedagogies of Stuart
Hall, Routledge, 2016.
Nurseli Yeşim Sünbüloğlu  is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University
of Sussex, UK. She is currently carrying out her research project, provisionally
entitled Politics of the Rehabilitation of Disabled Veterans: Masculinity, Embodiment
and Militarism in Turkey. Her most recent publications include a chapter in
Rethinking Transnational Men: Beyond, Between and Within Nation, Routledge
(2013) and another chapter in Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender,
Macmillan (forthcoming). Her research interests include sociology of gender,
masculinities, sociology of the body, disability, nationalism and gender, early
modernisation period in Turkey, and militarism.
 Index

NUMBERS & SYMBOLS agency, xxxvi, xl, 36, 108, 176, 218
16 x 9, 25, 27 aggression, 51, 132, 199, 214
all-weather road, xviii, 4, 5, 8, 12,
18, 31, 32, 34
A Amnesty International, 14, 16, 29,
able-bodiedness, 111, 114, 134 30, 34
able body, xxix, lxii, 114, 199, 221 Anatolia, 126, 137
ableist culture, xxviii, lii, 225 anti-essentialism, xxvi, xxxv–xlvi, li,
ableist society, 70, 133 liv
aboriginal human rights, 15 anxiety, 73, 75, 77, 131, 135, 177,
the absent road, 8 178, 184, 186, 199
achievement ideology, 194 aqueduct, 5, 12, 14, 37n4
activism, xlvii, 6, 7, 26, 33, 150 art, 37n4, 38n5, 52, 55, 150, 153
aesthetic, xlii, xlvi, liii, 48, 161, 164, ASD. See Autism Spectrum Disorder
181, 204, 210 (ASD)
affect, xxxi, xxxiv, xxxviii, li, liv, lvii, assemblages, 72, 152
45–61, 132 Australia, xlii, lvi, lx, lxi, lxii, 47, 78,
affective movements, 45–7, 50 109, 111, 162, 174, 191,
Agamben, G., 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 25, 35 197, 197n4, 199

 Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote notes.

© The Author(s) 2017 237

C. Loeser et al. (eds.), Disability and Masculinities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53477-4
238  Index
Australian literature, 106, 106n3,
107
Australian-Rules football, 191–210
Australian sports culture, 196, 197,
210
autism spectrum, 45–61, 74, 80
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD),
73, 74
autobiography, 106
auto-ethnography, 217
B Rights, 14, 18–20, 23
bare life, 6, 9–13, 25, 35
Bartholomaeus, C., 67–81
BDSM, 220, 220n5
becoming, xxvi, xlv, liii, liv, 48,
49, 61, 131, 133, 154,
181, 194, 195, 213,
214, 228
Bell, S., 10, 12, 16
bodily performance, xxix, xxxviii,
187, 193, 196
body, xxvi–xxxvi, xxxix, xlii–xlvii,
xlix, l–liv, lix, lxii, 27,
38n5, 45, 47, 49–61, 69,
80, 88, 90–2, 95, 98,
113–17, 120–2, 125–32,
134, 135, 140, 146,
173–5, 178, 179, 181–4,
187, 188, 192–5, 197–200,
202, 203, 205, 207, 208,
210, 221–3, 229
body-reflexive practices, 208
boil-water, 4, 5, 13, 17, 18, 37n2
boys in schools, 59
Butler, J., xlvi, lxii, 90, 109n6,
111n7, 114, 125, 195,
196
C
Canadian government, 9, 30
Canadian government, Nova Scotia,
45, 49, 50
Canadian government, Ontario, 3,
12, 17
Canadian government, Shoal Lake
40, lxiii, 3–38
Canadian government, Winnipeg,
4–5, 8, 11–14, 16–18, 22,
24, 25, 29, 32, 36
Canadian Museum of Human
care, liii, liv, lx, lxiii, 5, 8, 9, 21, 34,
36, 37n1, 51, 67–81, 120,
155, 175, 180, 200, 202,
215, 220–7, 229, 230
caregivers, 220, 225
care practice, 175
categorical analysis, 35
Charleson, A., 28
chronic illness, 173–88
chronic mental health, 68, 71, 81
cisgender, lxi, 67, 70, 71, 73, 74, 85
citizenship, 133
clean drinking water, 4, 5, 7, 13, 18,
20, 30, 34
clean drinking water, as human
rights, 3, 5, 9, 13–25
clinicians, 68, 69, 71, 72, 76–81,
174
colonial history, 25
colonialism, lx, 3–6, 9–13, 19, 27,
34
colonial practices, 26
colonial rule, 11
communication, xxxi, xxxv, lx, 13,
37n2, 46n1, 192n1, 227,
229

community, lx, lxiii, 4, 6, 7, 11–18,
23–34, 37n4, 87, 91, 153,
163, 188
compounding differences, 5–9, 32,
35
conflict, 10, 79, 125–41, 175,
185–7, 217
conformity, 58
Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, 88
Connell, R., xxviii, xxxvii–xliii, 4,
46, 47, 59, 89, 90, 109,
111, 153, 192, 208, 214,
219, 220
contemplation pools, 16
control (mind), 205, 207
conversation, 24, 27, 29, 57, 145,
157, 176, 185, 192n1, 206,
207, 209, 216, 219
Corker, M., xxviii, xxxiii, xxxiv,
xlviii, li, liii, lv, 147
corporeality, xxv–lxiv, 183
Cotton, C., 11, 13, 14, 34, 37n2
cricket, 127, 179
critical disability studies, 6, 70
Crowley, V., xxv–lxiv, 48, 191–210
D 132–6, 140, 145, 163,
Davis, L., xxviii, xxix, lii, liii, 152
De facto relationship, 180
default disability, lviii–lxi
Deleuze, G., 45, 47–51, 55–7, 60,
61
dependence, 109, 221
depression, 73, 75, 77, 78, 177, 183,
184, 221
desire, xxxi, xxxv, xlvi, xlix, l, lix, lxi,
51, 52, 55–7, 71, 110,
 Index 
   239
114–17, 130, 192–6, 198,
200, 201, 206, 209, 220,
223, 225
deterritorialization, 51, 55
diagnosis, 67–81, 173, 174, 176,
180, 182, 183, 186
difference, xxvi, xxviii, xxix, xxxii,
xxxiii, xxxvii, xliii, xlviii, li–
liii, 5–9, 28, 32, 35, 71, 73,
74, 117, 155, 157, 162,
163, 198, 199, 220
disability theory, xxxvii, 5, 24
disabled men, 46, 47, 107, 108, 111,
112, 175, 213–30
disabled penis, 85–99
disabled subject, xxxvi, xxxvii, 109,
111, 111n7, 118, 119, 122,
206
disabled veterans, 125–41
disablement, liii, 27, 32, 34
disadvantage, xxxiii, 217
discourse, xxvi, xxix, xxxi–xxxv,
xxxvii, xxxviii, xliii, xlvi,
xlix, l–lii, lv, lviii, lxi, lxii,
7, 28, 48–50, 56, 60, 87,
98, 109–11, 111n7, 117,
118, 121, 122, 127,
174–6, 180, 184–8, 201,
203, 204
discrimination, lvii, 70, 73, 77, 79,
106, 106n2, 214n2
disidentification, xxii, 213–30
disruption, xxxi, xl, 10, 131, 185,
187, 204
dog dream, 120, 121
double disadvantage, 217
Duncan, J., 15, 27, 28
240  Index
E feminine desire, 225
education, lvii, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13, 37n4,
47–9, 60, 61, 155, 180,
197n4
Eldridge, S., xviii, xxviii, lx, lxiii,
3–38
embodied knowledge, 61
embodied self (and selves), xlii, lii,
186, 188, 208
embodiment, xlii, xliii, xlv, l–lii, lv–
lvii, 47, 70, 181–5, 207
emotion, 175, 181, 199, 221
emotional intelligence, 187
employment, xxvii, lvi, lvii, lxi, 5, 8,
9, 12, 138, 178–80, 187,
201, 202, 205, 209
essentialism, xxvi, xxviii–xxxii, xxxv,
xxxvii, xl, xliii, xliv
ethnicity, xli, xlv, lv, 139
exchange, xxxiv, xlv, xlviii, liii, lv, 45,
47, 200, 202–8
experience, xxvi–xxviii, xxx–xxxiv,
xl–xliv, xlvii, xlix, li–lv, lvii,
iviii, lix, lxi, 7, 28, 36,
38n5, 46–8, 50, 55, 68–71,
73, 74, 76, 78, 86, 93, 94,
96, 97, 105, 107, 108, 113,
120, 131, 140, 174, 176,
185–7, 197, 201–5,
207–10, 217
F Global Northern Disability Studies,
Failler, A., 22, 31, 36
family, xxvii, lix, lxii, 15, 23, 24,
138, 182, 186, 221
feminine, xxvii, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, 51,
111, 151, 175, 194, 210,
227
femininity, xxx, xxxviii, xlii, 72, 107,
217, 219, 225
feminist disability studies, 6, 8, 9,
27, 108
First Nations, lx, lxiii, lxiv, 3–5, 7, 9,
10, 12, 14, 17, 25–7,
29–32, 38n5
football, xxi, xxii, 135, 157, 179,
191–210
footy, 191, 198, 202, 205
Foucauldian thesis, 10
Foucault, M., xxix, xlvi, xlvii, lxii
‘Freedom Road,’ 3–38
friendship, lix, lxiv, 59, 179–81, 187,
192, 197, 198, 200, 201,
209
G
Garland-Thomson, R., xxix, xxx,
xxxi, xxxvi, li, 46, 105n1,
108, 151
gay, xxxviii, xlv, xlix, 87, 92, 94, 225
gaze, xxix, 26, 34, 181, 188, 198,
199
gender ambiguity, 93
gendered politics, xlix, 220, 224–7
gender hierarchy, 46
genderqueer, 85
gender transition(ing), 72, 86, 98
Gershick, T., 111–13, 218
3–38
Global North perspectives, 34, 36
Global Southern Disability Studies,
6
Global South perspectives, 3, 4
Goggin, G., xx–xxi, xxix, 145–65

Greene, R., 18
Guattari, F., 45, 47–51, 55–7, 60, 61
H 179
Hage, G., 109, 109n6, 110, 111,
111n7, 112, 117, 119, 122
Harper, S. (Canadian Prime
Minister), 9, 12, 15, 29
health, lvii, lx, lxii, 4, 5, 7–9, 14, 15,
25, 27, 34, 37n4, 67–81,
91, 97, 110, 111n7, 160,
164, 174
healthcare, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13, 34, 37n4,
67–81, 182
health effects, 7
hearing disability, xxxiv, li, lix, 191,
193, 196–8, 203, 204, 208,
209
hearing impairment, lix, lx, 191n1,
197, 202
hegemonic masculinity, xxxviii,
xxxix, xl, 89, 90, 108–18,
120, 122, 175, 176, 178,
185, 187, 192, 214, 215,
217, 218, 218n4, 219–24,
227, 230
hegemony of the penis, 90, 91, 94,
99
hero, 127
heroism, 132, 136
heteronormative, xxxix, l, lxi, 157,
163, 175, 194, 217
heterosex, 227
heterosexual, xxvi, xxxiv, xliv, xlvii,
xlix, l, 47, 56, 89, 111, 132,
163, 164, 179, 187, 194–7,
210, 215, 217, 219, 224–7,
229, 230
 Index 
   241
heterosexual desire, 194–7
heterosexuality, 178–81, 210
Hickey-Moody, A., xxix, xxxvii, lii,
48–50, 67, 152, 153, 164,
hierarchical order, 56
Holdsworth, D., 105–22
hormone therapy, 92
hyper-masculine, 51, 61, 151, 210
I
I Can Jump Puddles (Marshall, Alan),
105–22
ideal, xl, xlv, liv, 114, 196, 215, 224
idealised masculine body, 182
identity, xxvi–xxxvi, xlii–xliv, xlvii–
lii, lv, lxi, 46, 67, 74, 75,
86, 87, 93–5, 99, 106–9,
113–14, 122, 131, 134,
140, 151, 175, 178–87,
192, 195, 196, 198–201,
203–5, 207–10, 213n1,
214, 215, 220, 221, 230
ideology, xxx, 28, 70, 114, 116, 117,
120, 128, 134, 214, 220
illness, xxx, 38n5, 91, 173–88
complementary and alternative
medicine (CAM), 174, 176,
184, 185, 187, 188
impairment, xxix–xxxi, xxxiii–xxxvi,
xlii–xliv, li, lix, lx, 4, 18, 24,
70, 72, 76, 79, 80, 126,
129, 131, 135, 138, 141,
151, 152, 163, 175, 191n1,
197, 202, 217–19, 221,
222n7, 224
independence, xxxi, 108, 186,
220–4, 230, l
242  Index
Indigeneity, 34, 35
Indigenous, xli, xlii, lx, lxiii, lxiv,
5–7, 12, 19, 27–8, 30,
37n1, 191, 336
Indigenous relationships, 10
injurious speech, 198
institutionalisation of silence, 87,
95
intelligibility, l
intensities, 52, 54, 57, 60, 199
interconnection, 200, 205–9
internalisation, 115, 116, 122, 193
interpellation, 109–11, 111n7, 117,
118, 120–2
intersectionality, 5–9, 35, 72
intersectional theory, 5, 35
intersex, 85–99
intimacy, 132, 179, 187, 223
intimate relationships, 94, 215, 216,
219, 221, 224
isolation (enforced; social), 13, 18,
20, 186, 188, 206
K 60, 61, 204
Kerry, S., 85–99
Kurdish conflict, 125–41
L 67–9, 72, 75, 81, 85–99,
labour, xxvi, xxxix, xlix, liv, lvi, lvii,
182, 186, 199, 201, 205,
207, 209, 210, 224
larrikinism, 194
The Last Leg, 145–65
leisure, 178–81, 187, 194
lines of flight, 49
living museum, 18, 20, 22
Loeser, C., xvii, xxi, xxv–lxiv, 47, 58,
67, 145, 153, 175, 181,
187, 191–210
Lyme disease (LD), 173–88
M
machine (body), lxi, 52, 133, 199,
200
male bonding, 192
male dominance, 107, 197, 199, 207
male friendship, 180
marginalised communities, 33
marginalization, 15, 60, 109, 121,
175
Marshall, A., 105–22
martyr, 139, 140
masculine embodiment, lv–lvii, 181,
207
masculine identity, 113, 114, 151,
178–87, 204, 207, 220, 221
masculine order, 45, 57
masculine privilege, 217, 219
masculine subjectivity, 45, 48, 50,
masculinist human rights abuses, 3
masculinist policy, 9
masculinities, xxv–lxiii, 3, 26, 27,
46, 47, 54, 55, 58–61,
105–22, 125–8, 134, 138,
141, 145–65, 173–88,
191–210, 214–18, 218n4,
219–27, 230
masculinity studies, 47, 108
materiality, xxvi, xliii, li, lv, 90, 115
materialization, 90, 99, 200, 204
McRuer, R., xlix, 145, 156

media, liv, lx, lxiv, 13, 18, 29, 31, 52,
125–41, 145, 146, 148,
150–3, 155, 156, 160–2
media reports, 133, 139
media representations, 125–41, 150
medical criteria, 46
medical gaze, 174
medicalisation, 87, 88, 90, 91, 95,
96
medicalisation of intersex, 87, 88,
90, 91, 95, 96
medicalized colonialism (Roman,
Leslie), xxviii, xli, lx, 3, 4, 6,
9–13, 27
medical model, xxxiii, xxxv
medicine, xxxi, 174, 176, 177, 181,
185
Meekosha, H., xxviii, xxxvi, xli, 4, 6,
148
mental health, xix, 34, 67–81
mental health as disability, 69
mental health care services, 67–81
mental health professional, 75, 77,
79
metaphor, 6–8, 19, 32, 34, 35,
106n3, 200
metaphorization, 6–13
methodology, xvii, xix
militarism, 127, 128, 135
militaristic identity, 134
militarist paradigm, 132, 133
military, 127–31, 133–5, 137, 138,
140, 200
military nation, 128
Miller, A., xxx, xxxvi, 111–13, 175,
217, 218, 218n4
mis-interpellation, 109, 110,
112–18, 121, 122
 Index 
   243
mobility, xlii, 133, 201, 209, 222
molar lines, 49
movement, xxxii, xlviii, lxiii, 7, 20,
34, 36, 45–61, 86–8, 91,
92, 97, 99, 106, 107, 116,
121, 199, 210
Murphy, R., xxxvi
Museum of Canadian Human Rights
Violations, 18–21, 25, 36
N
nationalism, 127, 128, 135, 163
nationalist aspirations, 128
nation-building, 3, 9, 24
nation-destruction, 9
neo-colonial, xli
neo-colonialism, xli, 6
neo-colonial state, 4
neoliberal, xli, lvii, 3, 13–25, 27, 28,
37n1, 157, 176
new accessibility, 6, 38n5
norm, xxx, xxxii, xxxviii, xl, xlix, l,
46, 70, 92, 128, 192, 210,
215, 218n4, 224–6
normalcy, 152
normalising surgery, 88, 95
normality, xxxi, 46, 132
normative, xxviii, xxix, xxxi, xxxii,
xxxiv, xxxviii, lxi, 46, 46n2,
55, 57, 61, 67, 72, 80, 90,
97, 117, 127, 134, 138,
176, 178, 179, 186, 188,
194, 195, 204, 209, 219,
224–7, 230
normative sexuality, 117
normative society, 127
normativity, xxxiii, 152
244  Index
O performative, liv, 48, 114, 116, 119,
object, xxxiv, xliv, 10, 46, 50, 120,
160, 181, 188, 192n2, 195,
199, 208
objectification, xxxv
objectifying gaze, 198
Ontario, Canada, 3, 12, 17
Other, 35, 86, 99, 106, 109, 159,
192–4, 200, 203, 218
otherness, xxv–lxiii, 115
P pleasure, xlvi, liv, 149, 164, 179,
paid work, lvi, 151, 178, 179, 201
Pallotta-Chiarolli, M., xxxvi, xxxix,
57, 58, 192, 193
Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (PKK),
126, 128–31, 137, 140
pathologization, xxix, xlix, 47, 51,
68, 69, 72, 74, 75, 80, 81
pathology, 74, 91
patriarchal gender relations, 224
patriarchal ideals, 214
patriarchal norms, 215, 225
patriarchy, xli, 109, 214, 217–20,
224
patriotism, 135
peace process, 126, 132–8, 140
Pearson, K., 173–88
peers, 46n2, 47, 53, 55, 56, 182,
213, 223n8
penis, 85–99, 214, 215, 217,
227–30
performance, xxx, xxxviii, xl, liv, 134,
146, 149, 153, 156, 160,
185, 187, 192–4, 196, 197,
199–201, 203–5, 207, 209,
210, 214, 225, 227
200
performativity, 114–16
phallic, 96, 214, 225
phallic authority, 214
phallic panic, 96
phallus, 89, 91, 96, 163, 229
physical ability, 140
Pini, B., xxv–lxiv, 173–88
Pitts, V., xlv–xlviii
PKK. See Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan
(PKK)
191–210, 215, 217, 226–30
policy, xxvii, xxxiii, liii, lxii, 9, 14,
28, 36, 49, 129, 164, 199,
201
poliomyelitis, 108, 114, 114n8
political order, 10, 13, 27, 34, 127
political realm, 10, 129
politics, xxvii, xlvi, xlviii, xlix, li–liii,
lv, lvi, 9, 24, 35, 107, 117,
145, 155–7, 160, 164, 208,
220, 224–7
politics of care, 224, 225
post-essentialism, xxvi, xlviii, liv
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
(PTSD), 137
poverty, xli, lvi, 6, 7, 19, 27–8, 38n5
power, xxviii, xxxii–xxxiv, xxxvii,
xli–xliii, xlvi–xlix, 10, 31,
34, 46, 48, 56–60, 90, 96,
111n7, 128, 133, 145,
151–3, 155, 160, 163, 174,
187, 196, 198, 203, 204,
210, 218, 218n4, 219–21
Probyn, E., lv, 194
psychiatric conditions, 137, 183

public pedagogy (pedagogies), xxv–
lxiv, 3–38, 45–61, 164
Q risk, xlv, 6, 14, 15, 18, 30, 114,
queer, xlv–liv, 85, 92, 106n2, 161,
194, 210, 225, 227
queer disability studies, 92
R
race, xxxvi, xli, xlv, xlix, lii, lv, lx, 4,
5, 7, 27, 35, 46, 90, 106,
109, 146, 155, 159
racialized subject, 110, 117, 119
Rainey, S., xlix, 213–30
Reddington, S., 45–61
Redsky, D., 24
Redsky, L., 24
refugee, lxi, lxiii, lxiiin3, 155
rehabilitation, 126, 133, 151, 220,
221
relational genealogy, 4, 33, 35
relationships, xxxiv, xxxvii, xxxix,
xliii, xliv, xlvi, li, liii, lv, lxiii,
10, 14, 15, 32, 35, 46, 60,
71, 72, 75, 94, 106, 108,
109, 111, 113, 114, 128,
132, 141, 151, 156, 163,
180, 181, 187, 196, 199,
200, 209, 214–27
renegotiation (of masculinity), 176,
193, 197, 209, 210
representation, xxvi, xxvii, xxix, xl,
xliii, xlvi, xlviii, xlix, liii, lv,
lvii, 106, 107, 111, 111n7,
120, 122, 125–41, 146–50,
156, 164, 193, 195
 Index 
   245
resistance, 12, 13, 33, 79, 111–12,
164, 174, 185–7, 214
rhizome, 48
Riggs, D. W., 67, 70, 71, 73, 74
114n8, 115, 116, 132, 153,
157, 160, 186, 187, 195
Roman, L.G., xxviii, xli, lxiii, 3–38
rural Australian masculinity, 106
S
schizophrenia, 70, 74
school, xxxix, lvi, lix, lxiv, 45, 46n2,
47–50, 52, 54–61, 121,
161, 192, 197, 198, 201,
205
sex assignment surgery, 91
sex/gender binary, 88, 93
sexual abuse, 97
sexual discourse, xxxiv, l, 56, 117
sexual identity, 94, 95, 215, 230
sexual ingenuity, 215, 227–30
sexuality(ies), xxviii, xlix, l, lv, lxi,
lxiv, 6, 35, 97, 106, 117,
146, 213, 214, 216, 218,
221, 227–30
sexual orientation, 94
sexual pleasure, 215, 227, 229
sexual power, 218
sexual prowess, 163, 213, 229
Shakespeare, T., xxviii, xxxiii, xxxiv,
xlviii, l, lv, 70, 107, 108,
120, 147, 217
shaming, 194, 197–9, 209
sharking, 136
Shildrick, M., xlix, liii
Shoal Lake 40, xviii, lxii, 3–38
246  Index
Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, 10–12,
14, 16
Shuttleworth, R., xxx, xxxi, xxxvi,
67, 107, 150, 175, 217,
228, 229
signifier, 7, 32, 163, 180, 199, 203,
209
Snyder, S. L, xxix, xxxii, 105, 105n1,
106, 106n2, 117
sociability, 193, 200, 209, 210
social body, 128
social connection, 57
social isolation, 186, 188, 206
social justice, lix, 23, 33
social model, xxxiii–xxxv, 188
social norms, 70
social relations, xxxvii, xlii, xliv, lv,
57, 209
soldiers, 125–35, 137, 138, 140
Spinoza, B., 47–50
sport(s), xxxix, xlii, lix, 127, 133–6,
140, 148, 151, 152, 158,
179, 182, 183, 187, 191–7,
199–205, 209
sporting pride, 194
stigma(s), 70, 72, 117, 175, 193
stigmatization, 70, 72
subject, xxv–xxvii, xxx, xxxi, xxxvi,
xxxvii, xl, xliv, xlvii, xlviii,
li, liii, lv, lvii, lxii, 10, 14,
46, 52, 80, 109–12,
117–20, 122, 125,
149–51, 154, 157, 164,
175, 180, 193, 195,
203, 206
subjectivities, xxvi, xxviii, xxxii,
xxxvi, xxxix, xliii, xlv, xlvii,
liv, 45–8, 50, 60, 61, 86,
121, 151, 181, 186–8, 195,
196, 203, 204, 208
Sünbüloğlu, 125–41
surgical reassignment, 89
symbolic order, 110, 112
symbolic violence, 9, 34
symbolism, 11, 133
T
team culture, 199, 203
team success, 134, 135, 197, 210
technologies of care, 229, 230
television (TV), 35, 50, 50n4, 96,
145–65, 191, 194, 226
transgender, lxi, 6, 68–74, 76, 77,
79–81, 85, 98
transgender men, 67–81, 98
transgender men mental health,
67–81
Trudeau, J. (Prime Minister), 11,
29–33
Turkey, 126, 128, 132–4, 136, 138
U
United Nations (UN), lxiiin3, 24,
30, 34
United States (US), lxii, 106, 146,
151, 155, 174, 213, 215,
216
V
vacillation, 110
verbal abuse, 204
violence, xxxviii, xli, 9, 10, 19, 34,
38n5, 58, 60, 132, 192, 210

visual coding, 130, 199
visual image, 52
W xxxvii, xxxix, xl, xli–xliii,
war, lxvi, 125, 127–32, 135, 140,
151, 200
warrior, 125, 131, 140
water, 4–9, 12–25, 29, 30, 34, 36,
37n2, 37n4, 69, 95, 152,
161
water as tourism, 13–25
water supply, 4, 17
water treatment, 13, 17, 20, 29, 30
Wedgewood, N., xxxi, xxxvi, 192
western culture, lxi
women, xxxiv, xxxvii, xlvii, lviii, lxii,
5–7, 9, 46, 73–5, 86, 87,
91, 93, 96, 99, 106n2, 107,
108, 138, 140, 151, 152,
157–61, 163, 174, 175,
 Index 
   247
181, 187, 191n1, 194, 200,
213, 214, 216, 217, 220,
224, 225, 227, 229, 230
work, xxvi–xxviii, xxx, xxxi, xxxiii,
xlvi, xlvii, l, liii–lvii, lxi,
lxiii, lxiv, 3, 6, 8, 24, 27, 28,
31, 32, 34, 35, 47, 48, 55,
67, 70, 80, 85, 88, 92, 98,
105n1, 107, 108, 109n6,
111, 128, 146, 149–51,
153, 159, 174, 175,
178–82, 187, 195,
199–205, 208, 214, 215,
218, 219, 223, 226, 227,
229
wound, liii, 125, 129–31, 137, 141
Z
zones of exception, 5