ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the autoethnographic stories of two physically disabled professors who almost pass for able-bodied. The chapter shows how our bodies facilitate our pedagogy of social justice and note the vulnerability and frustrations that can emerge through these ongoing encounters. It provides the commitment to 'critical communication pedagogy' that promotes knowledge production, meaning-making, and opportunities to pursue inclusion, empathy, and social justice for disabled bodies. Autoethnography links 'the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political'. Methodologically, autoethnography combines autobiography and ethnography, calling for the 'turning of the ethnographic gaze inward on the self, while maintaining the outward gaze of ethnography, looking at the larger context wherein self experiences occur'. Unlike other social identities that have a set of observable, predictable traits such as gender or race, disability is defined as the absence of “normal” embodiment. “Not normal” embodiments include a wide range of phenomenological experiences that intersect with the complexities of cultural locations and personal identity categories.
