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Matkins 1
Nathan Matkins
Karin Spirin
English 7 V02
February 28, 2018
Every Breathing Body
Syndrome, a fictional super villain in the movie Incredibles, snarled to Mr. Incredible, “If
everyone is super, no one will be.” Part of his evil ploy was to later go on and take over the
entire world, supplying everyone with ultra-powered weapons and super suits that would give
each person astounding abilities. With every single person being super, nobody would be. Have
you ever reflected on his plan and wondered if it was actually that bad of an idea of him, to grant
everybody in his fictional world with the same potential for super human abilities? We tend to
take the whole ideology of ability casually, as something that everyone just possesses, without
actually digging into the idea of what it actually means to our society as a whole. An ideology, is
the belief system that shapes how one views the world and all of its concepts that revolve around
its societies. The ideology of ability, is how we as a society prefer what we know as able-bodied.
The problem with this ideology is that each and every human being encompasses their own
specific and special characteristics of ability which is what makes people stand out from the rest
of the world. Syndromes’ ideology of was equality among all citizens, making nobody an
individual, stripping everybody of their own particular sets of abilities and taking away the
diversity of capabilities amongst them. The ideology of ability is a very skewed concept, in the
sense that every person has different potential in terms of abilities and disabilities, and not one
single set of abilities should be considered normal.
Matkins 2
In Tobin Siebers’ book Disability Theory, he states that “The ideology of ability is at its
simplest, the preference for able-bodiedness. At its most radical, it defines the baseline by which
humanness is determined, setting the measure of body and mind that gives or denies human
status to individual persons. It affects nearly all of our judgments, definitions, and values about
human beings, but because it is discriminatory and exclusionary, it creates social locations
outside of and critical of its purview, most notably in this case, the perspective of ability.” (8).
Often times, we as human beings can quickly point out a “disability”, simply because it does not
adhere to our definition of normal which does not make much sense since there is no real
definition of the word “normal”. A person without the ability to use his or her legs will tell you
that using a wheel chair is normal. Someone who is blind will tell you that using a cane to get
around and reading brail is perfectly normal. The ideology of ability is simply what we as
