Most people hear the word disability and what immediately comes to mind is, mobility, visual or hearing impairments. Even so, disabilities may be physical, mental or unseen; disabilities can result from various causes. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 defines disability as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities of such individual; a record of such impairment; or being regarded as having an impairment. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, disability is the condition of being disabled. However, disability is a highly misused title in todays society. Everyone has some sort of disability; something that makes them stand out; a way of not being able. Essentially, when one thinks of the word disability, he or she thinks of a physical condition pertaining to the body. People that are labeled as having a physical disability are believed to have a deformity of limbs, paralysis or other physical abnormalities. Douglas Bayton states in his article, Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History, By the mid-nineteenth century, non-white
races were routinely connected to people with disabilities, both of whom were depicted as evolutionary laggards or throwbacks. As a consequence, the concept of disability, intertwined with the concept of race (Bayton 35). In Octavia Butlers novel Kindred, the story of Dana, a middle-aged African American woman, living in the 1970s, who travels back in time to the nineteenth century, is told. Butler, not only uses the color of her skin, but also the neglecting of the woman’s body, to narrate the story of antebellum slavery in the south. Kindred illustrates the misuse of the body through disabilities and how slavery supports types of disabilities importance on the body Dana, the main character in the novel, is abled, yet disabled from her experiences of the past. Dana is the narrator and the heroine of the novel. She is young, African American, and just moved to San Francisco with her husband Kevin. Dana repeatedly finds herself brought back to the antebellum South of the nineteenth century, where she finds it difficult to establish a new identity and battles with her conscience, all while trying to maintain her freedom.