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1 Introduction JEFFREY A. BRUNE AND DANIEL J. WILSON D ISABILITY PASSING is a complex and wide-ranging topic. Most often, the term refers to the way people conceal social markers of impairment to avoid the stigma of disability and pass as “normal.”1 However, it also applies to other ways people manage their identities, which can include exaggerating a condition to get some type of benefit or care. Going further, disability passing encompasses the ways that others impose, intentionally or not, a specific disability or nondisability identity on a person. It even provides a framework for understanding how the topic of disability is ignored in texts and conversations. The topic of disability passing reveals the dynamic nature of disability and identity and provides insight into what is at stake when it comes to disability and nondisability identification. Nearly all disabled people confront, often routinely, the choice of hiding their disability or drawing attention to it and the question of what to do when others overlook it. Going to the root of a disability identity, their decisions weigh issues of stigma, pride, prejudice, discrimination, and privilege but rarely put the matter to rest. Even those who choose not to pass still must decide what to do when others fail to recognize or intentionally overlook their disability. Furthermore, the importance of passing extends well beyond the individual and has larger social, cultural, and political implications. Quite simply, it is hard to understand disability and identity in modern America without examining issues of passing. 2 Î Jeffrey A. Brune and Daniel J. Wilson Passing is an act that blurs the lines between disability and normality , but those lines were not always sharp to begin with. As the field of disability studies has shown, minds and bodies are better understood in terms of variance than as deviation from a fixed norm. This in part accounts for many disabled people’s ability to pass so often and so easily . Rather than assume a dichotomy between disability and normality, an examination of passing from a disability perspective reveals how the social construction of disability remains fluid. It also informs our understanding of what constitutes “normal,” since passing expresses, reifies, and helps create concepts of normality. Despite its importance, disability passing has received inadequate attention from scholars until now. Almost all studies of passing focus on race, gender, or sexuality and fail to account for disability as a fundamental , destabilizing component of a person’s identity.2 This reflects a more widespread reluctance among mainstream scholars to consider disability as an analytic category alongside the others. By the same token, within disability studies passing has received relatively little attention , despite acknowledgment of its importance.3 This book is an effort to address that neglect. In addition to exploring the topic of disability passing, this interdisciplinary anthology aims to avoid the trap of sequestering disability, race, class, gender, and sexuality from one another. Intersectionality, which considers how all those categories interact and affect one another, provides a more nuanced and accurate understanding of identity. Passing as a disabled or nondisabled person will have a different meaning depending on specific contexts of race, gender, class, and sexuality. What disability passing meant for an enslaved African American woman in the antebellum South is far different from what it meant for an educated white man in the post–World War II era. Disability can destabilize gender and race, and vice versa. The focus on intersectionality that many of these chapters share should also make this book useful to people interested primarily in identity issues other than disability. However , readers will notice a more thorough treatment of gender and sexuality than of race. This unfortunate circumstance is one we had hoped to avoid but in the end could not. We will note that this shortcoming still reflects a general tendency within disability studies to focus more on gender and sexuality than on race. The act of passing occurs on an intimate, interpersonal level and often relates to issues of stigma. Our discussion of passing builds on, but Introduction D 3 also differs significantly from, a classic work that remains seminal and is often cited in disability studies: Erving Goffman’s Stigma.4 Given that the work was written fifty years ago, before disability studies existed as a recognized field of study, it is remarkable that it still holds such sway. This anthology, serendipitously published during the year of Stigma’s fiftieth anniversary, offers an ideal opportunity to reexamine one of the most...

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