“What happened to you?” The question from strangers to people with visible impairments suggests a popular fixation on _accident_ as a cause of disability. It is as though the most important thing to know about disability is its genesis (Linton 2005)—perhaps due to anxiety about whether or not “it could happen to me.” This narrow meaning of accident as unforeseen bodily trauma (as compared with illness, congenital trait, or aging) highlights one axis of diversity that both enriches and complicates disability studies. In a broader and more abstract sense, disability is often relegated to the category of _accident_: unintentional, undesirable, marginal deviations from idealized norms of fitness. It was not always so. Early conceptions of disability imbued certain bodily differences with religious meaning, as coded signs of divine intent or judgment. In step with the values of industrialization, nonconforming bodies later came to be equated with accident, much like assembly-line cast-offs. The spectacle of the mid-nineteenth-century to twentieth-century carnival freak show as a refuge for extraordinary bodies exemplified such marginalization, with its sharp boundary between the onlooker and the “freak of nature” (_lusus naturae_) on display. In spite of the freak show’s demise, disability is still often associated with defect...