ABSTRACT
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson articulates the way in which individuals become positioned as misfits when she writes: “A misfit occurs when world fails flesh in the environment one encounters—whether it is a flight of stairs, a boardroom full of misogynists, an illness or injury, a whites-only country club, subzero temperatures, or a natural disaster”. The “misfit” is caught between the attributed identity that dominant social structure imposes on him/her and the individual identity that he/she projects. The chapter explores Bill Shannon’s life as an artist straddles a boundary between a person with a disability navigating the streets and a performance artist. Within conventional understandings, equality is an objective to be achieved through political means. Once social inequality is recognized as a product of language rather than a preordained “truth” confirmed by language, then a “poetic” reconfiguration of written language has the capacity to alter the sense and the sensible experience of inequality.
