ABSTRACT
This chapter challenges the notion that disabled bodies are bodies of failure. All too often disability is thought of as a misfortune: one’s productivity, one’s participation in public life, and one’s private and intimate life all seem to be curtailed by disability. Rather than interpreting disability through this lens of able-bodiedness, this chapter makes a case for learning and knowing through disability. In other words, it proposes a revisionist assessment of what constitutes a “successful” body by relying on the concept of cripistemology, the theory of not knowing or failing to know. It does so by drawing on selected texts and images about mastectomies that center modes of knowing, feeling, and being which resist normative discourses and expectations of how a body should look, feel, and behave. Disability, this contribution shows, is always a relation between bodies, minds, and the expectations placed upon them by their environments. It need not necessarily signify tragedy and impending death; it may very well be a sign of hope and life.
