NPR recently featured a story on Kevin Michael Connolly. Connolly is an athlete, adventurer, author, and photographer who was born without legs.
In his memoir, Double Take, he talks about travel. People around the world, he explains, tend to stare. And, with his camera, he stared back.
Curiosity, it appears, is very human. But people in different places tend to speculate differently as to the source of his lost legs and that, he discovered, is quite culturally specific.
In Sarajevo, people tended to think that he’d lost his legs in mines during the Balkan conflicts. In New Zealand he overheard a child asking his mother if he’d been attacked by a shark. In Montana, he was asked if he still wore his dog tags from Iraq.
I broke my leg five weeks ago and, for what it’s worth (not much really), my experience, also, is that people speculate based on their own experiences and their relationship to you. An avid lindy hopper (12 years now… well, not now exactly, but again real soon), many of my dance friends immediately inquire as to whether I broke my leg dancing. My raunchy friend, Fancy, asked if I broke it “doin’ it.” The second most common guess is that I broke it stepping off a curb. It turns out lots of people do that. Who knew!
For more, see Connolly’s website or listen to the NPR Radio Story.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 9
fairyhedgehog — July 31, 2010
And how did you do it?
Anonymous — August 1, 2010
People either think I can actually walk (I am in a power chair) or that I am mentally challenged. They prefer to look away, than stare, God forbid I might ask them for help...you see, I can get in any major city's hospitals, sky scrapers, and am ignored; always wonder why terrorists don't hop in wheel chairs. You become invisible.
Alex — August 1, 2010
Cool! I've requested his book from my local library.
At his website, Connolly talks about a prosthetic device he's working on developing that will allow him to more easily move independently on terrain that isn't workable for a wheelchair or skateboard. What's sociologically cool about the device is that, like the now-famous cheetah legs but turned up to eleven, it isn't even remotely based on the appearance or physics of conventional human legs, but instead is designed around what will make it possible for him to do what he wants to do. Here's a direct link to a sketch of what he has in mind: http://kevinmichaelconnolly.com/2010/03/i-am-or-want-to-become-iron-man/
Camila — August 2, 2010
Very interesting, I wonder if this somehow ties into the Kuleshov effect?
Anonymous — August 3, 2010
When I broke my arm in college, my roomate and I decided that we would run a count of how many different made-up causation stories I could tell (to strangers at bars, stores, etc.) It was just a little party trick we were doing. We never actually expected people to believe certain lies, and I never really tried to put on an earnest tone - the game was more an excercise in fiction than in acting, I guess - but I was amazed by what some people actually believed. In one of my less creative moments, I told someone I saved a baby from a burning building - biggest cliché in the book, right? I wasn't even trying to actually convince him, I was just kidding around. He was earnestly astonished and asked me to tell him all about it. And only turned to disbelief when I told him I leapt seven stories.
So, my point is that maybe, when some people see broken bones and wheelchairs and other signs of physical disability (temporary or permanent), they aren't just curious; maybe they're craving a humorous, quirky, or sensationalist story. They see a guy in a wheelchair and they want to believe he's a war hero, or they see their clumsy friend with a broken leg and they want to believe she stepped off a curb the wrong way, because that would just be so "like her" and it's silly and funny and embarrassing.
Not that I am insinuating that Lisa is clumsy, of course. :)