"Troubled Walking: Storying the In-Between"

Abstract

"Troubled Walking:Storying the In-Between" Eliza Chandler (bio) I was walking home from school one night on a busy street in downtown Toronto. As I was crossing the street, my walking pace—perhaps slow and somewhat shaky—synched up with another's. Previously apart, we were now communicating with each other through our gaits, swinging arms, and sideways looks across the sidewalk. We began to walk together. During the block or two that we walked together, our paths often forked as we independently negotiated the objects and other bodies that prevented us from walking a straight line. But we always came back together. In the midst of all others, this coming back together was, to me, a clear indication that we desired to be together … if only for a couple of blocks. Soon after we began this sidewalk dance of departures from and arrivals to one another, the man made an observation, which came in the form of a question. He asked, "You have trouble walking?" Undeniably, I walk differently. I suspect this difference can be seen, heard, or felt by most people whom I walk with or amongst. And sometimes this different walk does give me trouble: the drag of my right toe can get caught up in sidewalk cracks causing me to fall down. But I do not necessarily experience walking as troubling. I could have interpreted his question in endlessly different ways. I could have, for example, met his interpretation of my walk as different with indignation or hostility, signaling that I interpreted his question as an indication that he was measuring my walk against a normative standard of walking and asking me to explain my deviation. Perhaps this was what he was asking. But I felt that he was kind and respectfully curious in his question, and, after all, I wanted us to stay together. So I answered, with a smile, "No, this is how I walk." [End Page 317] To which he replied, "Then why are you wearing high heeled boots?!" At this, we both erupted with laughter. Together the laughter continued down the block. It was true; I was wearing high-heeled boots. And although their heels weren't even that high, they caused my already dragging feet to drag a little more, increasing the possibility of dangerously tripping up in the cracks. After we laughed together for a few moments, he turned down a different street … and then we were apart. As what Eli Clare calls a noticeably disabled 'walkie' (Exile and Pride 128) frequently traversing the streets of my city, Toronto, I have a strong sense of how ableist logic dominates and circulates. This sense comes from being, or the ever-present possibility of being, stared at, avoided, or commented on when I am in almost every crevice of public culture. This sense also comes from my knowledge that nearly every noticeably disabled person whom I know shares similar experiences. My sense that ableism floods dominant culture is further secured every time that I notice stairs to a building without an accompanying ramp or elevator, with every heavy door that I struggle to open, and every time that I hear words like 'crazy' or 'lame' appear lazily in our nomenclature. As someone working in the discipline of disability studies, I also have a strong sense of how ableist logic discursively produces disability in such a fashion that discrimination against disabled people makes "sense"; it is collectively tolerated and collectively responded to with apathy, if acknowledged at all (Titchkosky, Reading and Writing Disability Differently 9–11). Ableism constructs the "sensibility" of my culture within which ableist gestures toward, enactments of, and responses to disability seem benign. In so many ways, I sense how our world neither values nor desires the "difference that disability makes" (Michalko 56). As a disabled person who embodies disability with a mixture of pride and shame,1 and who experiences disability as communally binding, culturally important, and a desired way of living, I know that there are other ways of storying disability. Lives of disabled people are not only made up of stories flecked with discrimination, violence, and fear, in which disability is culturally produced as nothing more...