What Misfitting Makes

Abstract

Weaving together personal experience, disability studies scholarship, and art criticism, this paper explores the relationship between embodied experience of the world and the demands placed on us to conform to it. Misfitting forces us to recognize the fundamental distinction between flesh and world, and with it both the limits and possibilities of the human capacity to act and to be. The fundamental misfit all humans share is that we emerge from the sheltering womb into a material world that is indifferent to our individual existence. That is to say, mortality is the fundamental misfit of the human condition. It is in this sense that flesh emplaced in world is always a relationship of misfitting. The existential and social repair that misfitting calls for is attentive care and love, an attitude of welcome and openness to all body-minds, whether expected or unexpected, whether fit or misfit.