"Body in Trouble" by Nancy Mairs is an essay written from the viewpoint of a handicapped woman, but more specifically one in a wheelchair and other physical disabilities. She begins her essay by paraphrasing the bible and how illness and handicaps were related to demon possession.
   Nancy elaborates on that by relating it to the modern time and how now that would be considered silly due to modern medicine. Even with this she lists many phrases that would entail a healthy body being the analogy for positive characteristics and then showing the negative analogies to those who are not able bodied. Such as "take it laying down" and "without a leg to stand on" and even the lists ones such as "confined to a wheelchair".
    She takes these analogies and then not only relates them to her handicap, but also to that of a witch by being "bent" and "crooked". She then says not only is that of a woman who if ill-body, but instead even women in general with "All witchcraft come from carnal Lust which is in Women insatiable" elaborating on how language and analogies it is harmful just being an able bodied woman, but to be a woman in a wheelchair even that much harder.
    Taking all that in she explains from personal experience that feeling of not even existing to crowds when she was going to a luncheon to honor the Dali Lama. That crowd was large enough she has to take her chair to the wall.
    Mairs then takes this personal experience and relates it to postmodern criticism and feminism and how they use the metaphor for anyone of the non dominate societal standard of being pushed against a wall
   She relates all of this to her experience with the Catholic church and the idea of a good woman. She describes her handicaps and then relates them to her inability for "doing" as the Catholic church wants her to do. Not even so much as to "hold the ladle" for soup. She then establishes herself in that she does what she can and that is closest she can do to "conceptualize not merely a habitable body but a habitable world: a world that wants me in it"