What Can a Body Do?

How We Meet the Built World

Author
Sara Hendren
Publisher
Riverhead
Year
2020
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Among the core premises of this provocative and deeply humane book is this: disability is in part a product of the intersection of a body and the built world, where the latter often presumes there is only one way a body can be. Borrowing from scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Hendren describes the condition where a body encounters a world that didn’t anticipate it as a “misfit”—a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. In this view, disability can be framed as a design problem, one that demands a thoughtful, radical, and ongoing response. In her illustrations of those challenges, Hendren also makes present the ways in which true independence is a myth—we all depend on many people and institutions for survival—and posits instead that we should set our sights on flexible cultures, systems, and technologies that enable interdependence. It’s difficult to read a book and loudly applaud at the same time, but perhaps that too is a design problem worth interrogating.

Reading notes

Misfits

In reference to a 2011 WHO report that estimates that fifteen percent of the world—or one billion people—are disabled, Hendren writes:

<p>The report expresses a long-held insight articulated in the scholarly field of disability studies: that ability and disability may be in part about the physical state of the body, but they are also <em>produced</em> by the relative flexibility or rigidity of the built world, its capacity to bend or adapt in a dance with bodies in a range of states and stages. Disability in part <em>results</em> when the shape of the world—buildings and streets but also institutions, cultural organizations, centers of power—operates rigidly, with a brittle and scripted sense of what a body does or does not do, how it moves and organizes its world.</p>
<cite><a href="https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/what-can-a-body-do">Hendren, <em>What Can a Body Do?</em>, page 14</a></cite>

We have a habit of using the term disabled to mean a person, as if they alone are the locus of disability. But what if disability (and, by comparison, ability) isn’t singular but a conjunction? Hendren continues:

<p>The condition of disability is present whenever a body finds itself in what scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has called a pointed “misfit” relationship with the world—not the melodrama of a tragedy to overcome, not merely a “defect” of the flesh, but a misfit: a disharmony that runs both ways, body to world and back.</p>
<cite><a href="https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/what-can-a-body-do">Hendren, <em>What Can a Body Do?</em>, page 15</a></cite>

I love this use of the word “misfit,” not least because it makes plain that it is the intersection of a body and the world where disability is produced. But also because it rescues a word that has, on occasion, been used to refer to malcontents or eccentrics but also to mavericks, dissenters, resisters. It is often the misfits who point out where a society has gone wrong, and often their wisdom that lights up the path to doing better.