"Becoming Narratives: The Entanglement of Ability, Gender, Sexuality, and Time in 'Special Needs' Memoirs"

Jeremy and the Not-Queer Hat

On the cover of Beth Kephart's memoir A Slant of Sun is a black-and-white photograph of a tiny child sitting on a wooden-slat porch. The child, presumably Kephart's son Jeremy, looks out towards an empty suburban street, back turned to the camera. There is a stuffed animal to his left, and on his head is a large hat that has been tinted bright green, the color of key lime pie. It is a "ladies' hat" (Kephart 37): soft, with velvet trim around the wide brim. Early in Kephart's memoir, we learn that shortly before his second birthday, Jeremy becomes obsessed with this hat. He refuses to take it off, even wearing it to bed and in the bath. Kephart's husband demands that she return it to the store, or at the very least forbid Jeremy from wearing it outside the house. Both Kephart and her husband are alarmed, and she laments, "the writing [was] on the wall" (38). What the wall says, however, is not immediately clear. Kephart elaborates over the next few pages, beginning with how Jeremy's obsession thrusts both the mother and child into a new, conspicuous cultural space. Walking around town, Jeremy is mistaken for a girl. Neighbors tell Kephart "not to worry"; that the child is "definitely in a phase" and that "worse cases have been solved" (39). She interprets the stares from "muscular men in sleeveless ribbed shirts" as a mark of her failure to "raise a man's man" (40). Fretting that people in her community will think her little knowledgeable of fashion or gender, she tries to coax Jeremy into foregoing the hat. Nonetheless, when boys at the playground exclude Jeremy on account of his "sissy hat," she leads him gently away and rallies around his passion (41). "Set your kite high," she tells him, "and hold on" (42).

Jeremy eventually lets go. He loses interest in the green hat, which, after this brief passage, Kephart never again mentions in the memoir. The hat remains pivotal to the narrative regardless, functioning as a sign of Jeremy's yet-to-be diagnosed disability, suspected due to his compulsive behaviors and intense fear of change. Surmounting his obsession with the hat, and the myriad obsessions that precede and follow it, is part of Jeremy's narrative of "overcoming" disability. As G. Thomas Couser writes in Signifying Bodies, the preferred story of disability is one of triumph over adversity, figuring disability as inherently compromising to the quality of life (33). Disability thus becomes a "personal defect that must be compensated for" by disabled people themselves (Garland Thomson 1568), who are made responsible for managing and transcending disabling obstacles.² Our cultural preference for that story of overcoming disability (of performing what the impairment would itself seem to foreclose) does little to humanize disabled people, instead perpetuating ableist ideals about what counts as a meaningful life. Indeed, particularly instructive about the hat episode is how it catapults Jeremy towards normalcy: by the memoir's end, he has moved past many compulsions and fears that previously controlled him and is doing well in a mainstream classroom, alongside neurotypical children in the process of becoming his friends. Soon after the hat brings Jeremy and his mother precariously close to gender transgression, a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) makes "the writing … on the wall" legible (38). Jeremy may be abnormal in some ways, his mother wants us to know, but from her perspective, he is not queer. The not-queer hat remains a marker of Jeremy's difference—albeit of his atypical neurology, not atypical gender—a symbolic and material obstacle that he must overcome. It emblemizes the denial of queerness that sets Jeremy up for a heteronormative and disability-free future—that is, according to his mother's narrative anyway. After all, by the memoir's conclusion, Jeremy is only seven years old.

The final page of the book features a short dialogue between Kephart and Jeremy. He tells her...