## Metadata - Author: [[Sara Hendren]] - Full Title: What Can a Body Do? - Category: #books ## Highlights - Disability in part results when the shape of the world—buildings and streets but also institutions, cultural organizations, centers of power—operates rigidly, with a brittle and scripted sense of what a body does or does not do, how it moves and organizes its world. ([Location 264](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082H35TV9&location=264)) - Disability scholar Simi Linton writes that “the cultural narrative [of disability] incorporates a fair share of adversity and struggle, but it is also, significantly, an account of a world negotiated from the vantage point of the atypical.” Perhaps that statement seems obvious at first hearing, but many nondisabled people have never really considered that disability as an experience might indeed be such a generative and restless vantage—a view on the world, a perch for surveying, a lens for encountering the status quo from outside its normative, taken-for-granted landscape, and an active, lively form of negotiation. Even fewer nondisabled people have considered that the vantage of disability experience is also on offer to everyone as a form of shared knowledge, a wealth of understanding that has formed and re-formed the very shapes of the contemporary world. ([Location 504](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082H35TV9&location=504)) - Amanda arrived in my classroom and called herself disabled. Perhaps you would or would not describe yourself as such. But disability is not a fixed or permanent label that belongs only to some people; it arrives for each of us. Short-term injury and long-term illness, changes in our perception and mobility (and the perceptions of others about us), the chronic misfires that happen in our emotional makeup—if it’s not a reality in your life now, it’s sure to be so in some form, in your own body or among those who share your intimate life. Disability gathers a dimensional we like nothing else, because disability is no more and no less than human needfulness, both personal and political. That’s why the we that ties together this book is as tenuous as it is important: the collective that arises in the form of shared bodily vulnerability, the ways our physicality and our thriving are tied. ([Location 516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082H35TV9&location=516)) - It’s not that all our bodies are the same. It’s that the stakes for life together are universally shared by the misfit states that come for every body. ([Location 524](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082H35TV9&location=524))