Natural, infinite, artistic : demythologizing athletic superability in contemporary American literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Natural, Infinite, Artistic centers a disability studies approach to demythologize contemporary American sports narratives about athletic superability and analyze how particular elite skills are falsely and strategically distanced from disability in line with what disability theorist Tobin Siebers calls the “ideology of ability.” The ideology of ability flattens the complex, contextual, and fluctuating nature of ability into a hierarchy that casts some bodies as superior and “superabled,” like those of elite, nondisabled athletes, in contrast to bodies rendered “disabled” by their conditions and settings. Natural, Infinite, Artistic identifies three myths of athletic superability—that it is natural, infinite, and artistic—and locates the myths in representative texts to analyze how each marginalizes and dehumanizes disability in support of this ideology. In examining the myths, each chapter considers the racialized, gendered, and ableist dimensions of which particular athletes’ abilities have been mythologized. In addition, each chapter identifies a concept—“freakery,” metis, and the cyborg—and shows that, while each concept could unite disability and superability to destabilize the ideology of ability, it is actually used to sever the two and celebrate superability. Demythologizing narratives that glorify superabled athletes upends the way ability is mythologized in particular bodies and undermines ideas about what makes ability (and whose ability) supposedly desirable and superior. While Natural, Infinite, Artistic centers narratives of athletic superability, it does so in service of what disability activist Mia Mingus calls “disability justice.” Disability justice work undermines the ideological system that privileges able-bodiedness and stigmatizes disability while respecting the differences between them. Natural, Infinite, Artistic works toward this conception of disability justice by complicating and combating sports narratives in which the ideology of ability is not only operative, but heightened, with depictions of superabled white, male athletes as unequivocally superlative. Narratives about superability are places where ideas of ability as normal, ideal, and impressive are generated and sustained against ideas of disability as something that is limiting, lamentable, and needing to be overcome. In order to destigmatize disability and upend the ideology of ability, Natural, Infinite, Artistic subverts the belief that possessing natural, infinite, and artistic superabilities is possible and preferable
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".