Danielle Peers

(Dis)empowering Paralympic histories: absent athletes and disabling discourses

The reputation and publicity campaigns of the Paralympic Movement revolve largely around its role of empowering those with disabilities. This reputation is secured and reproduced by stories about what predated the Movement, how it began, how it progressed and whom this progress has served. In this paper I look critically at the more implicit discourses about Paralympic pasts that sustain the explicit contemporary discourse of Paralympic empowerment. I begin by analyzing the discursive effects of my own stories about becoming a Paralympian. I then turn my analysis to two histories of the Paralympic Movement: Steadward and Peterson’s Paralympics: Where heroes come and Bailey’s Athlete first: A history of the Paralympic Movement.I argue that these histories represent Paralympians as passive and that they marginalize Paralympians’ stories, undermine their resistances and reproduce the tragedy of disability.

Patients, Athletes, Freaks Paralympism and the Reproduction of Disability

In this article, the author analyzes the discursive shifts, continuities, and convergences from which Paralympic discourses, practices, subjects, and institutions have emerged. The author utilizes Foucauldian discourse analysis to interpret 14 texts about Paralympic history and to trace how dominant discourses of disability and physical activity have (in)formed Paralympism at four specific stages of its institutionalization. Contrary to popular assumptions about Paralympism’s progressive empowerment of those with disabilities, the author demonstrates how, in each of these historical stages, discourses from rehabilitation, mainstream sport, and the freak show have colluded in ways that serve to perpetuate, justify, and conceal the unequal relationships of power in and through which disability is enacted and experienced.

Interrogating disability: the (de)composition of a recovering Paralympian.

In this autoethnography, I weave personal narrative with Foucauldian and critical disability theory in order to interrogate the role of parasport in the formation, disciplining and internalising of my own (in)coherent disabled, Paralympian identity. The paper begins with an interrogation scene: a composite of the many times that I have had my body and my disability questioned. I then move through ideas of truth, storytelling, disability, power and subjectivity, borrowing strongly from the theories of Michel Foucault and to a lesser extent, the works of literary authors, disability scholars and scholars of disability sport. The body of this paper continues weaving these earlier influences throughout autobiographical stories of diagnosis, classification, basketball games, media interviews, conversations, internal struggles and attempts at resistance: stories of how I have been composed, and have composed myself, as a disabled Paralympian. In particular, these two sections draw heavily from Foucault’s conceptualisation of the confessional, the examination and the Panopticon. The paper then moves towards ideas of de-composition. That is, it explores the critical and political possibilities of deconstructing and reimagining dominant narratives of disability, and of disability sport. Finally, I end with a return to the same interrogation scene with which I began this paper. In so doing, I attempt to de-naturalise and to de-compose the dominant stories and practices of disability; I attempt to open up new possibilities of imagining, narrating and doing disability otherwise.

Say What You Mean: Rethinking Disability Language in Adapted Physical Activity Quarterly

Adapted Physical Activity Quarterly (APAQ) currently mandates that authors use person-first language in their publications. In this viewpoint article, we argue that although this policy is well intentioned, it betrays a very particular cultural and disciplinary approach to disability: one that is inappropriate given the international and multidisciplinary mandate of the journal. Further, we contend that APAQs current language policy may serve to delimit the range of high-quality articles submitted and to encourage both theoretical inconsistency and the erasure of the ways in which research participants self-identify. The article begins with narrative accounts of each of our negotiations with disability terminology in adapted physical activity research and practice. We then provide historical and theoretical contexts for person-first language, as well as various other widely circulated alternative English-language disability terminology. We close with four suggested revisions to APAQs language policy.

Governing bodies: a Foucaultian critique of Paralympic power relations

In this thesis, I use Foucault’s methods of discourse analysis and genealogy, and my own experiences as a Paralympic athlete, to analyze and critique the power relations of the Paralympic Movement. In Chapter 1, I contextualize my study by discussing relevant literature in Critical Disability Studies, Sociology of Sport and Adapted Physical Activity, and by introducing my methodological and epistemological frameworks. In Chapter 2, I analyze two historical accounts of the Paralympic Movement to demonstrate how they discursively represent, reproduce and justify Paralympic power relations. In Chapters 3 through 5, I use genealogy to critique Paralympic power relations: analyzing their systems of differentiation, types of objectives, instrumental modes, forms of institutionalization and degrees of rationalization. This analysis brings to the forefront how discourses of empowerment reproduce, justify and conceal the increasingly rationalized structures that enable Paralympic experts to act upon the actions, bodies and identities of those experiencing disabilities.

Moving Adapted Physical Activity: The Possibilities of Arts-Based Research

ABSTRACT Where is the moving body in our written bodies of work? How might we articulate truly unspeakable and deeply moving moments of understanding? In what ways can we reflect and honor the knowledge of those who do not use academic words, English words, or any words at all? How might art move us to answer these questions differently—and more importantly, to ask different questions? These lines of inquiry have driven arts-based research movements within many fields including nursing, medicine, and education. In this article, we explore existing and potential uses of arts in adapted physical activity research and practice. We weave theoretical exploration, artistic engagement, and our personal experiences as researchers, practitioners and disabled movers. We do so in order to demonstrate how artistic epistemologies can enrich and expand our inquiry, understanding, and engagement in adapted physical activity.

Sport and Social Movements by and for Disability and Deaf Communities: Important Differences in Self-Determination, Politicisation, and Activism

The Paralympic Movement is widely constructed as part of the global movement for empowering people with disabilities. This chapter critiques this claim by offering an historical overview of the relationships amongst disability and Deaf movements, disability sports movements, and the Paralympic Movement—across a range of global contexts—from the late nineteenth century until contemporary times. I argue that the Paralympic Movement has often acted in contradiction to the three basic principles shared by most disability and Deaf movements worldwide. These principles are centring disabled and Deaf people in decisions that most affect them (i.e., self-determination); reframing disability/Deafness as a social or political, rather than a biological, problem (i.e., politicisation); and actively challenging social structures that perpetuate inequality and oppression (i.e., activism).

Moving Materiality: People, Tools, and this Thing Called Disability

This body is wheelchair-bound. Not in the sense of the ableist idiom, but literally: bound to a nine-pound titanium frame through Velcro and ratchet straps ripped from snowboards. This wheelchair is body-bound, bound to the flick of a hip against strapping, pulling through plastic and metal and rubber and gravity and wood, into a tilt onto one wheel. This metal, this flesh, this materiality is bound, too, by rhythm and soundscape: chairs crashing; prodding questions; polite onlookers, silent; the percussive thud of wheels on uneven terrain. It is bound to the gaze of audience and reader and performer and lover. It is bound with the discourses of (dis)ability, in(ter)dependence, materiality and boundedness. This essay too, is wheelchair-body-bound. It is bound to explorations of previous works on the practices, discourses, and materialities of the wheelchair. It is bound by the authors’ personal narratives of living, playing, moving and thinking with, in and through various wheelchairs and other technologies of (im)mobility. It is bound through critical artistic engagement: bound with thinking and, literally, dancing through the ways that flesh-chair-discourse-power bind in the form of a subject, or an articulation, or an assemblage. Finally, this essay is bound through an unabashed and unbounded passion for the exploration of the local, specific, strategic, accidental, and creative ways that one may remake or even re-imagine the bonding of their tools, communities, ideas, bodies, and mobilities.