(Dis)empowering Paralympic histories: absent athletes and disabling discourses

The reputation and publicity campaigns of the Paralympic Movement revolve largely around its role of empowering those with disabilities. This reputation is secured and reproduced by stories about what predated the Movement, how it began, how it progressed and whom this progress has served. In this paper I look critically at the more implicit discourses about Paralympic pasts that sustain the explicit contemporary discourse of Paralympic empowerment. I begin by analyzing the discursive effects of my own stories about becoming a Paralympian. I then turn my analysis to two histories of the Paralympic Movement: Steadward and Peterson’s Paralympics: Where heroes come and Bailey’s Athlete first: A history of the Paralympic Movement.I argue that these histories represent Paralympians as passive and that they marginalize Paralympians’ stories, undermine their resistances and reproduce the tragedy of disability.