The keynote speakers at this event were Sarai Demers, a ski instructor, skier, and a disability rights advocate and Courage Bacchus, an athlete and actor. These two females have expressed that being disabled wasn’t the only thing that impacted their experience but also the fact that they were disabled and a female, and how these two factors should not be viewed separately.
Demers and Bacchus continuously expressed the hardship of receiving coverage in the media. Courage Bacchus, an Olympian, stated that being disabled made it hard, but being female made it even harder. In 2011, it was difficult for people to tune into female disabled sports or even googleGoogle these disabled athletes. There wasn’t any coverage in comparison to disabled men.
In addition these two females faced the hardship of having their disability accepted. Bacchus, wasas a deaf female in the theatrical world and Demers, as an athlete. EveryoneEach viewed her disability as a disadvantage and ‘something’ that would hinder her capabilities. Her disabilityDisability was framed as being undesirable. Her disability wasand used to legitimize reasons for inequality. Demers was a skier and ski instructor with an amputated leg. The world often viewed her disability as a condition to be avoided. One timeOnce, after swimming, she cleared a pool because she took off her leg. Sarai challenges society’s mainstream discourse surrounding the disabled. Every day that she competes or does her best in teachingto teach people how to ski, she challenges the ideologies of capitalism that believe in the maximization of the body to maximize on labour. She’s also proving that her disability doesn’t make her more prone to injuries but rather counterfeitscounters the ideology of eugenics and societal norms.