Disability Visibility
First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Alice Wong
Having read it
★★★★★
Tough to read but life-affirming and well worth it for its thought-provoking views and perspectives on life as a person classified by our society as disabled.
Without voices like those that have written the essays featured in the book disability will seemingly always be seen as some kind of difficulty society doesn’t really know how to properly assist, legitimately cater for and truly understand. People are people and diversity and different opinions count, especially when they empower individuals and empower society to better understand the minutiae of life.
If we start from a more grounded, diverse and collaborative place many, many things can be better understood, appreciated and developed across society; our current system(s) and attitudes don’t really help and mostly make the problem(s) they’re trying to solve (and even profit from) the individuals’ (disabled in this book’s case) problem/difficulty/inability to conform and fit in with wider, mainstream (which is itself actually quite conforming and restrictive), society.
Working and living can be better (for all) when conscious appreciation, consideration and thought can direct and inform worthwhile approaches to how things work and operate, whatever they are, rather than an endless making of things that then get a sticking plaster addition to ‘help’ another market as it looks helpful and thoughtful.
Sometimes it is well worth kicking up a fuss – certainly against institutional and seemingly inbuilt ways of operating state machinations – like these essay writers explain in their own, brilliant, diverse and human ways.
A good passage
[By the book’s editor:] Disabled people have always existed, whether the word disability is used or not. To me, disability is not a monolith, nor is it a clear-cut binary of disabled and nondisabled. Disability is mutable and ever-evolving. Disability is both apparent and nonapparent. Disability is pain, struggle, brilliance, abundance, and joy. Disability is sociopolitical, cultural, and biological. Being visible and claiming a disabled identity brings risks as much as it brings pride.
As a marginalised person, I [Alice Wong] don’t feel it’s enough to just keep saying, ‘Hey, pay attention to us. We’re here! We exist! We’re just as human as you!’ I want things to improve even while grappling with this impulse, with the tension between ‘subject’ and ‘audience’. I want to centre the wisdom of disabled people and welcome others in, rather than ask for permission or acknowledgment.
A second good passage
What I’ve [essay writer Elsa Sjunneson] learned is that it is more comfortable for able-bodied people to call a disabled person’s valid concern and fear a tantrum or a petty fit, because to agree with or to acknowledge the rage would require abled people to introspectively recognize their privilege. It would require them to understand that a disabled person has a right to be angry, not just at the specific blockade in their way but at a society that creates those blockades.