Disability and Passing: Blurring the Lines of Identity ed. by Jeffrey A. Brune and Daniel J. Wilson (review)

In Disability and Passing: Blurring the Lines of Identity, Jeffrey Brune and Daniel Wilson present a fascinating and eclectic collection of essays concerned with the social and cultural significance of passing within disability studies. While passing is most commonly associated with race—particularly concealing or imitating Caucasian or African American ethnicity—the authors of Disability and Passing apply the term to subjects as varied as visual impairment, the Deaf community, and narratives of polio survivors, menstruation, mental health, and cognitive disability. As may be surmised, the collection does not purely approach passing with regard to disability; illness, disease, mental ill-health, and female biology are all included in the discussion.

The collection focuses on the United States, from the late eighteenth century through to the twenty-first. The exception to this geographic focus is Peta Cox’s chapter, “Passing as Sane, or How to Get People to Sit Next to You on the Bus,” which is written from within an Australian context—although Cox utilizes the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in her discussion of the classification of mental illness. Given that one of the most striking features of this text is the broad scope of environments in which disability and passing are found, it would have been useful to see increased international diversity. For example, Vicky Long’s research on injured coal miners passing as nondisabled for fear of social stigma, and concerns about people taking advantage of the emerging benefits system in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain would be a valuable foil to this collection, and would introduce issues of class and work to the discussion. Equally, as Brune and Wilson state in their introduction, eight chapters on disability and passing cannot provide a comprehensive study—but they do encourage further scholarly exploration.

Possibly as a result of this breadth of subject matter, the essays included in the collection do not appear to follow a particular order—they are not laid out chronologically or by common theme. The collection starts with Daniel Wilson’s discussion of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s position as a “super-crip” (14), as a successful and powerful individual fully recovered from polio, in what Hugh Gallagher described as Roosevelt’s “splendid deception”—his concealment of the long-term, disabling impact of the disease. Wilson offers a damning—if not unsympathetic—assessment of the results of this story of overcoming and concealment for people with polio, and links it directly to the emergence of post-polio syndrome, brought on by overstressing bodies through years of passing as nondisabled (particularly for those who, unlike Roosevelt, lacked the means to arrange assistive technology and companionship). This is followed by Jeffrey Brune’s chapter on the prevalence of disability passing in literature and public discourse, a discussion centred around the controversial Black Like Me (1961), a text detailing John Howard Griffin’s experiences passing as an African American in the American South in 1959. Brune details how Griffin became first partially sighted, and then completely blind, following an injury in the Second World War—and attempted to pass as sighted while his eyesight deteriorated, refusing an injured veteran’s pension and concealing his increasingly poor vision. Griffin later became a disability rights campaigner, lecturing and writing for the National Federation for the Blind—until he unexpectedly recovered his sight, and moved his focus from blindness to racial passing. Yet despite this experience, no mention of Griffin’s personal experience with concealment or discrimination is mentioned in Black Like Me—an omission that Brune identifies as a fundamentally paradoxical act of passing. Brune’s analysis of the social stigma associated with accepting benefits for disability is relevant reading to anyone working on the history of the early emergence of disability benefits, as well as to scholars of racial passing.

Chapter Three features David Linton...