Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

In Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, disability is framed as an identity akin to race, gender, sexuality, class, and other identifiers. However, disability is not seen as an identity to the wider world, creating exclusion and lack of understanding. Rebekah Taussig refers to disability as an identity throughout the book. She uses other identities to connect with her students when teaching them about disability, asking them whether or not disability can exist as an identity, rather than a defect: “At the very least, it’s worth thinking about the possibility of disability as a neutral category, an experience with highs and lows not unlike those of nondisabled folks” (64). To her, even if her students saw disability as existing outside of marginalized identities, they might still have been able to understand it as an identity in its own right. However, Taussig’s students failed to see disability as similar to the identity of gay people because, as one student says, “There’s still nothing inherently wrong with being gay. Like, a gay person isn’t defective. They’re literally just attracted to the same sex. Being disabled is just something in your body not working right” (63).