Artist’s Voice: Paul Kahn — The Disabled Sensibility

Something remarkable is going on in the world. Disability arts festivals seem to be springing up all over. In the recent past there have been ones in Chicago, London, and Toronto. And in the near future others are scheduled for Australia, Philadelphia, Edinburgh, and Versailles. And then there are a slew of disability film festivals happening in places such as Austin, Berkeley, Calgary, and Moscow. Add to that the emergence of several new disability literary journals and we have what it is tempting to speak of as a worldwide flowering of disability culture. Except then we are faced with the question of whether there is, in fact, anything distinctive that is common to the creative expression of the world’s 650 million people with disabilities. More narrowly, since I am a writer with a disability, I think about whether or not there is a distinctive disabled literary sensibility. And, if so, how can we define that sensibility?