Disability and the Playing Field: Jane Addams, Sports, and the Possibility of Inclusion

Abstract

Abstract:Jane Addams analyzes recreation, and particularly sports, as a domain in which people are “revealed” to one another, affording sympathetic knowledge of the other. This function is integral to a democratic way of life; thus, she maintains that cities have an obligation to provide recreational opportunity. Some disability theorists challenge whether athletics can serve this revelatory function in contexts of disability, since esteem for an athletic performance supposedly takes place against a backdrop of “normal” functioning. On this view, disabled people might be subjects of “social inclusion,” the recognition of someone as an abstract bearer of rights, but not “community inclusion,” recognized as a subject of love or esteem by virtue of some contribution to a publicly acknowledged good. In this article I contend that Addams’s comments on confronting disability’s isolating barriers in the context of education disclose the malleability of this background and afford an avenue for understanding the potential for athletics to serve as a locus of community inclusion for disabled people.