11:55pm December 20, 2011

“

Removing ableism isn’t about changing lots and lots of words around. It’s not about creating the ultimate ideology and shoving it down people’s throats until your “anti-ableist” crap starts twisting around to result in damage or death to actual disabled people. It’s not about creating new “models” of disability, even if those are sometimes helpful on a really simplistic level.

It’s about really and truly and fully valuing us as equals within the human race, and going from there. And believe me truly getting what that entails is a lifelong process. Because if people saw us as equals already then most of what we believe and do, not just about disabled people but about all people, would be changed on levels that few of us can even begin to imagine.

And it can’t just be segmented off into doing this for one group of people, because how societies treat disabled people are tangled up in knots with how we treat all other people, oppressed or not, and because disabled people also face oppression in other areas. Most people seem to veer off from this part into memorizing a bunch of “social justice” ideologies and jargon for each oppressed group. Please don’t. Ideologies will never solve oppression, they just twist it into new forms.

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(lots of stuff deleted, see archived stuff for details, this was just getting really long)

Okay, I’m feeling a little less emotional about it now. To be clear - my initial reply is kind of blurred into thetendergravityofkindness; their reply begins with “Truth.”

I was reading this series of posts in the context of several conversations that have happened on Tumblr recently, in which I and several other people expressed sentiments such as feeling like online disability politics have emphasized disabilities that are more easily re-framed as difference and strength to the exclusion of those that either can’t as easily or perhaps shouldn’t be, that anti-ableism can take away our physical pain and other impairments, etc. The post seemed to touch on too many of those things to not be, in part, a response to those conversations. I apologize for jumping on this angrily. 

Yes we don’t know each other but I’ve been familiar with your writing for years and have really appreciated it, and have a lot of respect for you. It’s just that… in the wider dominant culture, people with certain mobility or sensory limitations come to be a disproportionate image of PWD of course, but I feel that in the Internet “social justice” sphere, it’s swung toward trying to apply neurodiversity culture to everything - so for example, those of us disabled due to physical illness/disease are pressured to act like we don’t suffer or want cures (“internalized ableism”), and for people with mental illness the fuzzy but important line between “accomodating” and “enabling” (the bad, irresponsible sense of “enabling” as used in the recovery community) is completely ignored. And so I feel that when we talk about “disability” and “PWD,” there needs to be a real commitment to honoring just how broad of a category we’re dealing with (maybe sometimes too broad to be useful), and how our conceptual framework of disability and ableism is totally dependent on our own disabilities and experiences of ableism. Otherwise, the connections drawn between our struggles are sloppy and don’t serve many of us well. No, I can’t imagine how things would play out in a non-ableist society, but without major technological advancement I know it would still be a struggle to get out of bed and I’d still be at the mercy of difficult and uncertain treatments to retain control over my own body. That reality seems more pertinent for me than how people on the Internet talk about ableism in really abstract ways. 

OMG I can totally see how that would be… infuriating, to put it, like… incredibly ridiculously mildly, and reading it through that lens I can see where you’re coming from. I actually don’t know what neurodiversity is supposed to be, to begin with, so I’m not trying to shove that on anyone, or trying to make them actually appreciate being in ridiculous levels of physical pain or something. (Right now I’m “only” at 6 on the pain scale and just want it gone.) The roots of a lot of my ideas about disability mostly come from that family experience I talked about when I was writing that – I swear my family has every broad category and a lot of the smaller categories of disability heavily represented, and while we’ve got a lot of ableist bullshit going on, it’s still left me with a different default set of assumptions about life as a disabled person than most people get. Sometimes that’s dovetailed well with whatever ‘neurodiversity’ is supposed to mean, and sometimes it veers off at completely right angles and confuses the hell out of people.

What sparked the “imagination” thing was actually conversations with people who’d only ever encountered British male-dominated stable-phys-dis-dominated social model stuff, applied in the most simplistic of ways, across the board, to all disabled people. And who then basically concluded that like… a non-ableist world would be one where we had access for, for instance, blind people and wheelchair users but wouldn’t have shit for the rest of us, whose experiences would be totally the same. (I think that’s even a common feminist critique of that particular male phys-dis British crowd, but don’t quote me on that. I’ve just heard it from time to time over the years from people who do more reading than me.) And then we’d talk about like “Well have you really imagined what it would be like if other forms of ableism weren’t going on, and how that would shape our experiences from day one, and render them unrecognizable to who we are now?”

(And gah… I also remember talking with other psych ex-patients about how in trying to get rid of the kind of abuse we went through in institutions… if we ever succeeded within our lifetimes (which we probably wouldn’t), later generations of disabled people wouldn’t grasp our experiences very well or be able to relate to them, and how alienating that could be even as this is what we really wanted. But that’s an entirely different discussion and just popped into my head when I talked about people’s experiences being unrecognizable.)

But yeah – I was just trying to speculate on exactly how far it’s possible to take removing ableism from a society, and stretch my imagination to its limits in that regard. Not at all trying to diminish the experiences of people who deal with stuff that just plain feels cruddy or doesn’t fit within neat sets of labels. I still think I’d feel less cruddy about my own physical pain, chronic illness, psychiatric stuff, etc., if it’d been dealt with differently my whole life, but there’s obviously some kind of limit to that. I just personally suspect the limit’s further off than most people assume it is at first glance, and trying to guess how far off is what I was doing when I wrote it.

Anyway, ironically (or is that the wrong use of the word), right now I’m in too much pain to write coherently (or more like, to think coherently enough to write) any more. But I did want you to know that I can see where you got your response now and am yet again really really sorry to have even close to given such an icky impression. I can’t imagine any amount of ableism-reduction that would make me feel other than really fucking uncomfortable right now, I was just speculating that the psychological differences without ableism might make it a few notches less so.

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