Changing the script: race and disability in Lynn Manning’s Weights

Abstract

In its unwavering adherence to a pathology‐based model of disability, special education has foreclosed other ways of constructing meaning about disability. To challenge special education’s reductionist understandings of disability, scholars in disability studies in education are drawing on a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, including humanities‐based analyses of disability. In this paper, I explore the ways that counter‐narratives, grounded in lived experience, can challenge oppressive ideologies of racism and ableism. In particular, I will examine Lynn Manning’s autobiographical solo performance, Weights (2005), to illustrate how dis/ability and race are socially constructed and maintained through relations of power.