Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century may be over 300 pages, but is among the faster-paced books you will read this year. Opening with an introduction by the collection’s editor Alice Wong, Disability Visibility features the writing of 34 artists, scientists, devout worshippers, authors, critics—sharing their insights on disabled life, activism, and community. Each chapter falls between two and ten pages of light autobiographical prose, and although each is unique in its own aspect, the variety of perspectives come together as a vibrant mural to prove that disabled never equals defective, and that wellness is both personal and relative.
Examining the four subheadings of the text— Being, Becoming, Doing, and Connecting— gives a fuller picture of the aim of Disability Visibility, a narrative documentation of each author’s journey from invisibility to proud self-embodiment. Each writer begins from the circumstances of their life, and choose a true personal story which best illustrates the complex intersections of their disability to their social life, relationships, employment, and aspects of identity (sex, gender, orientation, race, class, etc.). The way that the world reacts to disability is centralized among these, because issues of accessibility begin with the design of our society. Reyma McCoy McDeid, an autistic treasurer and author, shares on page 220 (a chapter entitled “Lost Cause”) that once she disclosed her neurodivergence at the disability advocacy center where she worked, the atmosphere changed drastically. “My coworkers, all passionate about serving people with disabilities, did not appreciate having a disabled coworker.” She was repeatedly discouraged from running for office after disclosing her neurodivergence at work, but this did not stop her.
So, it’s not just stigma and self-confidence; ableist rhetoric leeches into the public mind and informs our definitions of health, beauty, and even life itself. These perceptions can be positively and negatively biased, but almost always come from a place of assuming nondisability in society. Ariel Henley, the author of “There’s a Mathematical Equation That Proves I’m Ugly—Or So I Learned in My Seventh-Grade Art Class”, provides an unusual example: using the Golden Ratio to determine objective beauty on a ten-point scale. She writes on page 61 that “Never had an individual been ranked a perfect ten, but still we lived in a society that found the need to measure and rate and rank and score.” These measurements of the face and body belie measurements of self-worth, incredibly damaging for a young disabled girl who already feels too noticeable. On the converse, though equally bizarre, page 24 of Disability Visibility’s first chapter, “Unspeakable Conversations” by Harriet Mcbryde Johnson, describes the way that positive biases can be equally confusing and degrading. “There is also the bizarre fact that, where I live, Charleston, South Carolina, some people call me Good Luck Lady: they consider it propitious to cross my path when a hurricane is coming and to kiss my head just before voting day.” Can you imagine being kissed by a stranger on the street, and being told that the assault counts as a favor towards their preferred candidate? This is the power of Disability Visibility; it puts you in someone else’s shoes, and for a few pages, you experience life in tandem with the speaker. The benefits in perspective are enormous.
So, this book is for you if disability is present in your life, and this book is for you especially if it is not. The great advantage of Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century is that it is an ethnography which reads like a diary. In other words, this book is for graduate-level reference, and this book is for high school libraries. It’s not necessarily scientific, and the writing style rarely strays from personal narrative, but this holds a power of its own because each piece has its own voice. In short, if you’ve ever wondered how to discuss, describe, and include disability in your conversations with compassion, please read this book.