On feet and feminism

Lacking originality today, I point you toward the excellent writing of Sara at Moving Right Along, who uses the meme "Five things feminism has given me" to explore being a woman with a transfemoral amputation in these modern times. (I've got that right, don't I, Sara? Transfemoral?)

Here's a teaser:

Human bodies sometimes experience catastrophic changes. When a woman's body changes irrevocably so that she can no longer don the appropriate costume, for example, when she has to give up a foot, she is expected to fight this with every fiber of her being. She is not expected to fight losing the foot nearly as much as she is expected to fight appearing to have lost a foot. And usually she wants to. No one wants to be discounted.

A woman patient of my prosthetist's former employer was a bilateral trans-tibial amputee who couldn't imagine wearing anything but high heeled shoes, and so her only prosthetics bore feet and ankles made to accommodate heels with "life-like" foam covers. She was considered "marvelous" for not giving in to disfigurement. Without knowing her, I considered her story insane. Yet I understand why she would want to hold onto this. Those heels are her signature, her identity. I can see how that can come to be in our culture, and how devastating it would be for most women to give that up.

Also check out Sara's thoughtful comment to my post on Tammy Duckworth and a discussion on hairy legs over at Toad in the Hole.