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Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 22.2 (2001) 154-173



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Disability and Identity
Overcoming Perfectionism

Susan S. Stocker


Freedom from fantasy is the beginning of human liberation.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Reinventing Womanhood

Some of our best moral learning comes through sharing and listening to narrative accounts of how people learn to live well. Narratives convey the constitutive moves that either enable or disable us from thriving in our relationships with others, but ethics are what claim to inform our aspirations with respect to others. In this article, I will draw from my own experience with multiple disabilities while inflecting this narrative with three very different relational stories that are told - and recommended to us - via ethical theories. Relational stories are those that ethicists use to convey what we are capable of within interpersonal relationships. In particular, I will explore the relational stories told in Emmanuel Levinas's notion of a one-sided obligation in the "face of the Other," John Rawls's Kantian construction of the conditions of reciprocity behind the "veil of ignorance," and Aristotle's disclosure of genuine mutuality between "noble" friends. Finally, I conclude with the implications of the narrative I tell for living well both as an academic and as a teacher.

Disability As Formative Of Identity

As a twelve-year-old girl, I loved to ride my bicycle. I rode for miles, often spending the whole day riding between my grandparents', cousin's, and friends' houses. When day was done, I had to ride up a very long, tough hill to get back home. I fantasized that I was in a competition, that the event's announcer was wondering aloud if I had it in me to best my competitors. I was just ahead of the pack, and so I didn't dare allow myself to let up, even for a moment. [End Page 154]

Because both of my parents were avid golfers, I was encouraged to work on my game, and I did. In fact, I tried to perfect it. Carrying a full set of clubs, I often played the entire course by myself. I had insanely high standards for myself. Whenever I hit a bad ball, I chastised myself, furiously reviewing techniques on how to do better with the next shot. This dedication had to do with more than simply my desire to play golf with my parents and be a part of their world; I had something else to prove because I am congenitally hearing-impaired.

When I misheard crucial clues in the drift of a conversation, my contributions were non sequiturs, so I often felt left out of what was going on. This created a lot of pent-up desires and needs socially, emotionally, and intellectually, which fostered a fierce determination on my part to compensate for a keen sense of inadequacy. In the domain of physical activities, where listening was not necessary, I excelled. In school and in certain social settings, though, I felt clearly out of my league. Unable to fully participate, I experienced a despairing acquiescence in what I doubted would ever truly involve or include me.Feeling stifled was in turn translated into an elaborate fantasy life, an imagined form of perfectionism concerning exactly how things ought to be. Together with Walter Mitty, I created a fantastical interior arena in which to enjoy my own agency, always imagining an heroic level of performance.

This mental imaging of "how it oughta be" was also formative of my need for theory. I identify with bell hooks when she writes:

I came to theory because I was hurting - the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend - to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing. 1

But the options for expressing this need were at that time rather narrow for me. As a teenager I became a radical fundamentalist Christian. This commitment lasted until my early...

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