Visible Disability in the College Classroom

Abstract

am disabled, and my disability is a visible one: in addition to being a kidney transplant patient, I am a single-leg amputee and, as a result, I walk with a distinct limp. I am also an assistant professor of English. In this essay I want to explore the significance of my body in one aspect of my profession. Specifically, I want to investigate how disability is discovered, constructed, and performed in a certain type of cultural practice, that is, in a postmodern, undergraduate college classroom. The theoretical basis of this investigation and discussion is formed by the enactment of what is now being identified as the most characteristic rhetorical strategy of texts written by disabled writers: as a disabled person I plan to write this essay through the prism of personal experience and autobiographical example. I intend to tell several here, and I do so with several assumptions in mind. First, I work within the larger contextual basis of the theory of disability narrative. Writing on disability narrative, Madonne Miner has argued that [s]triving to create ourselves in stories, we simultaneously are created by stories: this curious tension speaks to and of the postmodern human condition-and reminds us of the importance of attending to stories (283). The critical assumption here is that narratives of disability often constitute the groundwork through which disabled persons attempt to make