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.