Terry Fox Was an Activist

Terry Fox and Disabled Celebrity . In 1977, at the age of nineteen years, a young man named Terry Fox was diagnosed with osteosarcoma and underwent the amputation of his right leg. In partnership with the Canadian Cancer Society, he began a run across the country, a “Marathon of Hope,” in 1980 to raise money for cancer research.

After 143 days and 5,373 kilometres, Terry stopped because his cancer had spread to his lungs (“Facts”). He died just ten months later. He was twenty-three.Terry Fox holds an honoured place in Canada’s recent history. The images and texts of Terry Fox that circulate in Canadian culture render him in mythic proportions, but, if he has become a myth of sorts,it is a myth based on stereotypes of illness, disability, strength, and courage that have been shaped by an ableist culture and a Canadian nationalist narrative. The endurance and unassailability of this myth are troubling to me and, I expect, to some other Canadians who are ill and disabled.

It is troubling because Fox’s posthumous celebrity consolidates features of disabled experience that are privileged within the economy of disability discourse. Moreover, the perpetuation of Terry Fox’s disabled celebrity and all that it signifies confirms, reproduces, and sustains able-bodiedness in the able-bodied/dis-able-bodied binary. The unremarked, normative body needs the disabled body in order to conceal itself.

This myth of Terry Fox does not engage with the reality of our lives; therefore, it must be defamiliarized from a critical, disability-centred point of view.Other Canadians have written interesting, factual, and emotional pieces about Terry Fox. Sally Chivers, in “Ordinary People: Reading the Trans- Canadian Terry Fox,” works within a Canadian Studies and disability studies framework to argue, among other things, that while illness has been the main focus of most stories told about Fox, more attention should be directed to the role of his highly visible prosthesis in refiguring current cultural

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