Aimee Mullins was born without fibular bones, and had both of her
legs amputated below the knee when she was an infant. She learned to
walk on prosthetics, then to run — competing at the national and
international level as a champion sprinter, and setting world records
at the 1996 Paralympics in Atlanta. At Georgetown, where she
double-majored in history and diplomacy, she became the first double
amputee to compete in NCAA Division 1 track and field.
After
school, Mullins did some modeling — including a legendary runway show
for Alexander McQueen — and then turned to acting, appearing as the
Leopard Queen in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle. In 2008 she was the official Ambassador for the Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival.
She’s a passionate advocate for a new kind of thinking about prosthetics, and recently mentioned to an interviewer that she’s been looking closely at MIT’s in-development powered robotic ankle, “which I fully plan on having.”
Notes from the speech: “What does a beautiful woman have to look like? What is a sexy body? What does it mean to have a disability? Pamela anderson has more prothetic in her body than I do and nobody calls her disabled. Fashion designer Alexander McQueen and Nick Knight …doing a fashion shoot and first runway show. Hand carved wooden legs solid ash..everyone thought they were boots. Poetry matters. Poetry is what elevates the banal to a piece of art…In my next adventure…a film by Matthew Barney called “the creamaster cycle”…My legs can be wearable sculpture.”
“…Even at this point I started to move away from the necessity to emulate
humanness as the only aesthetic…we made what people lovingly call
glass legs even though they are made from…the same materials that
bowling balls are made of. Then we made these legs that are cast in
soil…with potato root system…with a little grass toe…cheetah
legs…jellyfish legs…today I have over a dozen legs…I can change
my height (I have a variation of hights)…what is exciting to me so
much, is that combining cutting edge technology robotics bionics with
the age old poetry we are moving closer to understanding our modern
humanity…it is our humanity and all the potential within us that
makes us beautiful.”
