Prosthetic Power
(Page 2 of 3)
July-August 2009
by Aimee Mullins, from TED 2009
Immediately a voice shouted, “Kangaroo!” “Should be a frog!” “It should be Go Go Gadget!” “It should be the Incredibles.” And then one 8-year-old said, “Hey, why wouldn’t you want to fly too?” And the whole room, including me, was like, “Yeah.” Just like that, I went from being a woman these kids would have been trained to see as disabled to somebody who had potential that their bodies didn’t have yet. Somebody who might even be super-abled. Interesting.
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Some of you actually saw me at TED 11 years ago. TED was the launchpad to the next decade of my life’s exploration. At the time, the legs I presented were groundbreaking in prosthetics. I had woven carbon fiber sprinting legs modeled after the hind leg of a cheetah, and also these very lifelike, intrinsically painted, silicone legs.
It was my opportunity to put a call out to innovators outside the traditional medical prosthetic community to bring their talent to the science and to the art of building legs—so we can stop compartmentalizing form, function, and aesthetic and assigning them different values.
This started an incredible journey. Curious encounters were happening to me; I’d been accepting invitations to speak on the design of the cheetah legs around the world. People would come up to me after my talk, and the conversation would go something like this: “You know, Aimee, you’re very attractive. You don’t look disabled.” I thought, “Well, that’s amazing, because I don’t feel disabled.” It opened my eyes to this conversation that could be explored about beauty. What does a beautiful woman have to look like? What is a sexy body? And interestingly, from an identity standpoint, what does it mean to have a disability? I mean, Pamela Anderson has more prosthetic in her body than I do. Nobody calls her disabled.
Today, I have over a dozen pairs of prosthetic legs, and with them I have different negotiations of the terrain under my feet. And I can change my height—I have a variable of five different heights. Today, I’m six foot one. I had these legs made in England, and when I brought them home to Manhattan, a girl who has known me for years at my normal five foot eight went, “But you’re so tall!” I said, “I know. Isn’t it fun?” And she looked at me and she said, “But Aimee, that’s not fair.”