Natural, infinite, artistic : demythologizing athletic superability in contemporary American literature

Natural, Infinite, Artistic centers a disability studies approach to demythologize contemporary American sports narratives about athletic superability and analyze how particular elite skills are falsely and strategically distanced from disability in line with what disability theorist Tobin Siebers calls the “ideology of ability.” The ideology of ability flattens the complex, contextual, and fluctuating nature of ability into a hierarchy that casts some bodies as superior and “superabled,” like those of elite, nondisabled athletes, in contrast to bodies rendered “disabled” by their conditions and settings. Natural, Infinite, Artistic identifies three myths of athletic superability—that it is natural, infinite, and artistic—and locates the myths in representative texts to analyze how each marginalizes and dehumanizes disability in support of this ideology. In examining the myths, each chapter considers the racialized, gendered, and ableist dimensions of which particular athletes’ abilities have been mythologized. In addition, each chapter identifies a concept—“freakery,” metis, and the cyborg—and shows that, while each concept could unite disability and superability to destabilize the ideology of ability, it is actually used to sever the two and celebrate superability. Demythologizing narratives that glorify superabled athletes upends the way ability is mythologized in particular bodies and undermines ideas about what makes ability (and whose ability) supposedly desirable and superior. While Natural, Infinite, Artistic centers narratives of athletic superability, it does so in service of what disability activist Mia Mingus calls “disability justice.” Disability justice work undermines the ideological system that privileges able-bodiedness and stigmatizes disability while respecting the differences between them. Natural, Infinite, Artistic works toward this conception of disability justice by complicating and combating sports narratives in which the ideology of ability is not only operative, but heightened, with depictions of superabled white, male athletes as unequivocally superlative. Narratives about superability are places where ideas of ability as normal, ideal, and impressive are generated and sustained against ideas of disability as something that is limiting, lamentable, and needing to be overcome. In order to destigmatize disability and upend the ideology of ability, Natural, Infinite, Artistic subverts the belief that possessing natural, infinite, and artistic superabilities is possible and preferable