What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World

That’s why the term assistive technology is easy shorthand but ultimately both redundant and misleading—because assistance is universal whenever we talk about tools. The way the body and machine work together is much more aptly expressed by another name for prosthetics: adaptive technology. Tools don’t run the show; they work together with bodies i

A body—any body—will take its cues, bend the available resources, and invent its being with the matter around it.

What Cindy needs is not a single miraculous replacement limb but a whole panoply of these extensions, where the work is distributed among multiple objects chosen for the fine-motor calibrations needed to get the job done.

Families of kids with STXBP1 post updates about their children’s “‘inchstones’ rather than milestones,” she told me. It’s a way to signal the different steps in the trajectory they celebrate—and they do celebrate every one.

Amanda was enacting a question and teaching us to ask it also: Who is the world designed for?

Never mind the noise of popular culture, with its stories of personal “victory” over disability, all the spotlight on individuals who bravely go on “despite” their body’s shortcomings. Crip time is something else entirely. It suggests that the clock may be every bit as much the culprit in the mismatch between a life like Graham’s and the world, not

The pursuit of exceptional normalcy belies the quick and unquestioned work of two distinct ideas, now conflated: that being robustly average—just “ahead of the curve”—also means having the best shot at a good life.*

Quetelet’s legacy was to make the average, what started as unremarkable by definition, into a paradoxical ideal. When the average is laden with cultural worth, everything changes: what was common began to be seen as what was “natural,” and what was “natural” came to be seen as right.

They maintained that the need for physical care would always be present in their lives, but they insisted on a way to live with chosen forms of help while keeping decision-making power. Instead of defining independence as “self-sufficiency,” the standard for independence in the clinical settings where they’d been treated as patients, they claimed t