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This paper aims to foster a discussion about the social construction of disability within adapted physical activity. Social construction of disability refers to the social history of disability and the social contexts that both enable and disable individuals who negotiate these contexts. Statistics and technology are introduced in this paper to illustrate that “the normal,” “the abnormal,” “the natural,” “the unnatural,” “ability,” and “disability” have emerged historically and to demonstrate that these concepts are implicated in social contexts. Work in the history of statistics is drawn upon to establish that the normal is a fairly recent notion in the English language. It is argued that statistics, as a normalization discourse, sustain artificial demarcations between ability and disability and the normal and abnormal when used by researchers and practitioners. To expose assumptions about natural ability, technological-assisted performance for participants with or without disabilities in physical activity and sport are addressed.

In an earlier issue of the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Eugen König argued that doping exposes sport as an enterprise which is inherently exploitative (1995). Doping is consistent with other practices and technologies which push human limits of performance but which are arbitrarily included as part of `pure', `natural', and `authentic' sport only because they are not against the rules. By circumscribing what is to count as ethical inquiry in sport within a discussion of obligations in relation to proscriptive rules, sport ethicists cannot avoid being complicit in supporting a sport culture that is often harmful to athletes. König charges that a sport ethics that concerns itself only with questions that emanate from rule breakage `does not deserve the name of ethical criticism' and is `a powerless protest against sport' and `actually prevents what it pretends to intend' (1995: 256). We take König's critique of sport ethics seriously and, through this commentary, we aim to initiate a discussion about a new sport ethics that would have quite different pedagogical, political and scholarly tasks. The discussion is situated in the ethics of French intellectual, Michel Foucault, and contextualized in the proliferation of ethical concerns and debates within contemporary Canadian sports discourse.

In this article, the authors suggest that within the confines of conventional sporting contexts (including the Gay Games), politicized gender parody is difficult to achieve. They ruminate on the possibilities of queering sport and gender within a new, hypothetical sporting event for the Gay Games: drag Debra Shogan