ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 asks again, what normality is, by looking closer at the play of disabled people.
Disability has become an increasingly important field for modern welfare policy under aspects of social solidarity, but it implies also some challenges. Play and games – of, for, and with disabled people – make these challenges bodily. The norms of equality and categorization, normalization, and deviance in relation to disability imply paradoxes, where ableism, a negative view on disability, not so far. The Paralympic sport for disabled people assorts and divides by medical impairments, but play with disabled people shows other ways of togetherness. We know very little about how disabled people play. In the perspective of existential phenomenology, sport and play show how the representations of “handicap” are a cultural construct. All human beings are born disabled, and finally die disabled, in-between creating artificial hindrances, handicaps, to make life dis-eased, for the pleasure of competition, game, and play. Dis-ease is a human condition. However, disablement and dis-eased life are not just one, nor are the classifications used in epidemiological statistics sufficient. The differential phenomenology of disabled people in play contributes to a critique of normality, which is often seen as represented by the healthy middle-class individual. But play leads rather to normalities in plural – and to the normal un-normality of the human being.
