UB Discusion I wish I had know about

Michael Rembis talk: “Athlete First”: A Note on Passing, Disability and Sport

Friday December 3, 2010; 4:00 – 6:00 Park Hall 280

We all pass. Some people have been engaging in various forms of passing for centuries: Jew as gentile, Black as white, gay as straight, woman as man, man as woman, disabled as nondisabled. In this paper, Professor Rembis will use modern sport to take a fresh look at the ways in which disabled people have learned to pass in the nondisabled world. He argues that passing need not always involve the act of physically concealing one’s impairment, but rather depends upon how well one can approximate the gendered, white, heterosexual, nondisabled norm and meet societal expectations for conduct, competition, appearance, and performance. Exploring the experiences of elite disabled athletes and the history of the rise of modern disabled sport offers an opportunity to further enrich our understanding of passing, because it forces us to think about blurring the lines between disabled and nondisabled, and think critically about the fluidity and contingency of social constructions of normality. Original website: http://www.history.buffalo.edu/index.shtml