In its short existence as an academic discipline, disability studies has devoted significant attention to the representation of disabled persons in the visual arts, literature, theater, and public life. Disability scholars have studied the ways that cultural forms depend on a putatively normal body to reinforce regimes of national, racial, and sexual normalcy while using the person with a cognitive or physical impairment as a metaphor for the queer, subaltern, or marginal. A common recent criticism among disability scholars is that metaphoric treatments of impairment seldom confront the material conditions of actual disabled persons, permitting dominant social structures to be written on the body of a person who is politely asked to step offstage once the metaphoric exchange is made. Disabled artists and activists have attempted to reverse this pattern, turning their cameo appearances in such theaters back on the audience, refusing the crippling gaze of an ableist society and reassigning the meanings of disability in their own terms. As Carrie Sandahl says, people with disabilities are “not only staring back, but also talking back, insisting that ‘this body has a mouth‘” (13).