Overcoming the overcoming story : critical disability studies informed geneologies of compulsory heroism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The “overcomer”—the person who succeeds against all odds—has become a persistent cultural trope for persons with disability. Although it has been critiqued by the disability community for over twenty years, its employment in the media continues apace. This dissertation explores the changing and ongoing work of the overcoming narrative through a series of critical disability studies informed genealogies. Employing three analytical approaches (Genealogy as Analysis of Lines of Descent [GALD], Genealogy as Lines of Emergence [GALE], and Genealogy as Analysis of Counter-Memory [GACoM]) and three idiosyncratic styles of genealogy (Snapshot, Shifts in Historical Word Usage [SHWU], and Hotspot genealogies), I trace the course of overcoming narrative from its employment: as religious rhetoric in institutions for the blind and the deaf, as morality tales in the social reform of the Progressive Era, as propaganda in the reeducation of returning World War One soldiers, as success stories in the legitimization of rehabilitation as the third phase of medicine, and, in its most recent manifestation, as compulsory heroism in the context of the rise of the celebrity hero and large scale fundraising. I argue, extending Adrienne Rich’s compulsory heterosexuality (1994) and Rob McRuer’s compulsory able-bodiedness (2006), that, as an effect and strategy of normalization, compulsory heroism has become the only acceptable subject position made available to marginalized persons facing adversity of all kinds. Across genealogies, the wide reach of the overcoming narrative and the subject positions and subjectivities produced through three binaries become evident: the able-bodied/the-variously-other-classified, the helper/the needy, and the productive/the dependent citizen. Further, the work of overcoming narratives as tools of persuasion, devices of disavowal, techniques of depoliticization, and instruments of homogenization becomes clearer. I maintain that overcoming stories are not uniquely or even fundamentally disability stories—they are redemption stories. As such, compulsory heroism has cultural purchase in the lives of all North Americans.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".