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Questioning Continuum

Carol J. Gill, Ph.D.
Carol J. Gill is a clinical psychologist
specializing in identity, disability and gender issues.
She's President
of the Chicago Institute of Disability Research
and is proudly Disabled.

AN ABRIDGEMENT FROM
The Ragged Edge:
The Disability Experience from the Pages
of The Disability Rag
Edited by Barrett Shaw

... Many people are distressed by the unusual. They want it normalized, brought to the middle where they are. In fact, it’s the rare person who feels perfectly comfortable with anything discrepant from her/his realm of familiarity ….

… They need someone to tell them it’s all a bad dream, that there are no discrete differences between people or their experiences in life. They like hearing that what’s important is that we’re all part of the same human family. That takes away the confusion, loss of control and untidiness of genuine diversity. It eliminates both the tension of admitting you may be unable to completely understand someone different and the "stretch" of accepting their culture as valid anyway.

True confessions: I am an ex-homogeneity-junkie, myself. In college I rhapsodized over constructs like brotherhood and fellowship (not yet seeing any gender considerations there!). It served me twice to idealize unity. First, it seemed like the path out of my own marginalization, i.e., disability would be insignificant in the universal family. Second, it made it so much easier for me to accept poor people and gays and cultural/racial minorities if I could simply imagine they were all like me under the skin. I wanted to believe differences were illusory. Along with many other pubescent idealists, I longed to dump the melting pot into the Cuisinart and make a pabulum smooth enough for me to swallow.

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