You have watched their inspirational stories on TV. Supercrips are people who are considered to have overcome their disabilities because they do something extraordinary (like wheel across Canada) or ordinary (like paint pictures or have a baby). The supercrip is also called the “abled-disabled”.

Tanya Titchkosky has defined it as:

those people who can exclude attending to disability by attending fully to their ability to participate in society, as normally as is possible, and they ultimately and inevitably signify having a “positive effect on others,” “contributing fully to the community,” and “maximizing their potential”…The stories of the abled-disabled demonstrate that even disabled people are able to fit in and take up an appearance which shows that their conduct is undoubtedly oriented to an unquestioned normalcy. Through this way of conceptualizing disability, disability becomes the space in which the value of normal shines forth without ever having to be directly spoken of, and disabled people are held to be asserting their individual ability (value) when they can be seen as oriented to serving this normal order.

The way that disabled people are constructed through this approach (largely by the charity model positions disabled people as either the objects of pity or inspirational overachievers. Those are the only identities that we can occupy.