Not "legless": Ten pairs of legs!

There's been a discussion making the rounds on feminist blogs about a recent Sports Illustrated story on Aimee Mullins, double-amputee athlete, actor, model, most current President of the Women's Sports Foundation and apparently also one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World. The SI story uses the "supercrip" stereotype to hype Mullins considerable accomplishments with a lede that first lists her successes and then sets her up on that unreachable pedestal:

Her accomplishments are each impressive enough on their own, but when you take into account that she's done it all on silicone and titanium legs, she's just making the rest of us look bad.

Accompanying the text are several photos -- one, thankfully, showing her actually competing athletically -- with the most prominent pic being the topic of bloggy discussion. Here it is, at left. It's a full body black-and-white shot of Mullins in profile, positioned on all fours as if at the starting blocks for a foot race. She's wearing high-tech, below-the-knee prosthetics, a black bra and string bikini bottoms, with a wind machine swirling her hair in the air. She's not on a race track. This is a posed publicity shot.

Now, I do hesitate to just post this photo, but as it happens, Mullins is already the number one Google image search leading to my site, for a magazine cover photo she modeled years ago and which I never did actually post here -- only linked to prior to now. But, what the hell, this is that photo too:

Photo description: It's a magazine cover with the bold capitalized words "DAZED" across the top and a background of all white. Mullins wears form-fitting athletic pants and studio lighting accentuates the curve of her buttocks. She's got the high-tech prosthetics that look much like wide flat metal hooks, and she's not wearing anything else. She's turned away from the camera enough that her upraised left arm allows her to peek over her bicep at the camera and her left breast is in provocative profile. At knee height, down by her prosthetics, runs the capitalized text "Fashionable?" though the word is split on either side of her body so it could also read "Fashion Able?"

This is the photo The Gimp Parade routinely gets 100 hits/day for. Well, it competes for most hits with this photo of Marine Lance Corporal James Blake Miller, taken about a year ago in Fallujah (make of that what you will):

Visual description: Taken by Luis Sinco for The LA Times, it's a head shot of Miller, wearing a desert camouflage-colored helmet, face smudged with camouflage war paint, eyes staring tiredly, and a cigarette hanging from his lips. Smoke swirls around his face. The news story, linked just above, explains why this photo has been dubbed "Marlboro Man."

I posted a link to it for Memorial Day, 2006, when I was noting that the war continues to disable people and leave them, both here and in Iraq, with less than they had before. This pic is a sort of porn too really, you know.

Anyway, here are links to discussion at IBTP, Bastante Already, Fetch Me My Axe, and Trinity at The Strangest Alchemy, here and again here. To skip the PhD version, just read Trin's first link, and maybe the one at FMMA. The feminist tension throughout these posts seems to be basically one of radical feminist privileging of a strictly feminist media analysis over one that would be more of a disability-feminist analysis.

Sara of Moving Right Along comments at IBTP:

It is my fond wish that amputees be seen as just another flavor of ordinary, not extraordinary or freakish just because we don’t have all our original body parts, so ordinary that people don’t even blink when they see us coming. If we could achieve this, it would make our lives easier and richer because we could spend less of our precious, irreplaceable lives fending off other people’s projections and could instead just get on with it all. And getting images of us out there in mainstream publications showing various among us doing ordinary or extraordinary mainstream things that would be just as ordinary or extraordinary for anyone else, things like competing in sporting events like ordinary folk, even being extremely successful at it as some people are, is definitely one very good way to go about this. It is!

However, pornification does not equal normalization.

Even more to the point, in a later comment, Sara adds:

... I have to say that I pay as little attention to acrotomophiliacs (the fetishists you mention) as I possibly can. My introduction to them was via a year-2000 article on apotemnophilia (no longer available online without a subscription) which I found at the Atlantic Monthly website in 2003. This article was the first thing listed in response to an AltaVista search I’d run as my first step doing research to determine whether I’d rather have my leg off or die of cancer that year, which doctors had concluded by then were my only two immediate choices.

Fortunately, my second result sent me to a prosthetics site showing a young woman who’d just climbed a mountain in her prosthetic leg. The blurb about her didn’t focus on her ass and say whether she’d ever modeled.

Living as a woman, sexual objectification and obligatory attempted submission to fuckability/worth standards are implied, no matter what. The objectification I experience as an amputee is distinct from the objectification I experience as a woman in that it is not always sexual. For clarification of what I’m talking about, please see these posts:
Talking Points: An Object Lesson at my site

and these posts and their comments from the last Disability Carnival:
Disabled Performing Pioneers by Marcy at Dirty Laundry
and
Disability and Media by Daniel at Medical Humanities Blog

Whether we are talking objectifying amputees and other putatively or definitely disabled folks, women or men or children, sexually or otherwise, the problem is the same: people not seeing other people as people first but as objects and symbols they then have to be re-taught are human. I expect Twisty would say it all happens because of the dominance engine that fuels the patriarchy, though I also expect she’d put it better.

You might think it’s only bad when you’re being sexually pornographied. However, there are lots of ways to demean people by objectifying them. Consider this: Yesterday, in walking from my car to the post office, maybe half a block, I had two perfect strangers come up to me and basically tell me I was a brave woman for leaving my house. One came up from behind asking “How’s the leg working out for you?” (And I was wearing really cute shoes!) The other one told me right to my face, with tears in her eyes — you know, instead of “Hi, how are you?” — “You’re a brave woman!”

This kind of thing happens to me everywhere I walk. I would find it inhibiting if I weren’t already so shopworn.

When I was young, I couldn’t leave the house without being pestered by some man about my tits and my ass. Now I can’t leave my house without being congratulated for my [projected] courage by complete strangers.

The objectification escalates. And it’s all the same dynamic, even when it’s not strictly sexual.

Mainly, I wanted to put Sara's remarks in gimp context, so they wouldn't surrender to the archival oblivion at Twisty's. Trin takes issue with other IBTP commenters who suggest photos of Mullins in SI would be better if she were au naturel, that is sans prosthetics:

Heaven forbid your assistive technology make you hot. It's supposed to look all klunky and weird and alien so we can pity you. Didn't you get the rulebook?

Personally, I'd love to see Sara and Trin hash this out as two disabled women (though I know Sara cringes a bit with that identification) who seem to disagree. My guess is that they don't so much disagree as they see different aspects of the radical feminist analysis that need to be emphasized from a disability perspective.

My perspective: Mullins appears to be the amputee soft-porn that causes most people to show up at this blog, and I suspect they're not hanging around to read the latest on Kevorkian or the anniversary of the Olmstead decision. And blogging ego aside, I do have a problem with that.

On the content of the SI article itself, this is what really caught my eye:

[Mullins] owns 10 different sets of prosthetic legs, from her titanium sprinting legs ("my brother calls them my 'robo-cop legs,'" she laughs) to the intricately carved ashwood museum pieces she once modeled in a fashion show for designer Alexander McQueen.

Share the irony with me: I recently commented on something written by a woman temporarily using crutches and wheelchair who repeatedly referred to her "life without legs." And here's Mullins, a double-amputee who talks about her ten different pair.

I also want to know how she accumulated her legs. Do they all work? Are some spares or gifts because of her relative fame? How many, on any given day, might be useful enough that she decide between them? At one point I owned as many as four wheelchairs and scooters. I think there are three around here just now, but I'm sitting in the only one that is suitable for anything but an emergency. The one in the garage (bought around 1990) may not work at all, and the one in the basement (Quickie manual, circa 1985) would cause me great pain and discomfort if an emergency arose and I found I needed to use it, though it would get me from here to the can.

Are Mullin's ten pair extravagance or simply spare parts, like mine? And is there anyone in the world who can claim more pairs of legs than her? I mean, there are lifetime amputees who've never had a single prosthesis or wheeled chair. Does Mullins have crutches and chairs, as well? That would be the story here for me. Well, unless we can just talk about an impressive woman with many accomplishments, without the supercrip theme.