Race, Disability and Denial

The “I AM A MAN” sign represents a protest of how labor, disability and masculinity had come to define my own conception of manhood. It was borrowed from signs held by AFSCME workers at a 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike. Orthodoxy teaches us that muscles are the currency of masculinity, a constant reproduced through labor, production and provision. Manhood is tightly rolled in wads beneath the skin, casually inspected by others to estimate worth and value. Men work. And for those flimsy and flaccid males who cannot, who cannot pronounce manhood loudly, highly and in concert, but are instead forced to be mute, low and isolated, how are they to define their manhood? Cracked and splintered male bodies cannot perform the masculine ethic, and this inability to perform an identity that is inculcated illegitimately and relentlessly, can place a disabled male at the perilous risk of being emasculated at best and feminized at worst. And for a man, or for a male who wants to be one, convention dictates that the only thing worse than being a eunuch is being a woman because to be a woman is to be an expletive.

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