Disability Rhetoric

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from The Twenty-First Century, edited by Alice Wong, Vintage, June30th, 2020. (pp. 117-120)

Summary:

Brown starts by explaining her relationship with joy and how society expects her relationship to joy to be. She explains that disabled people are expected to not feel positive emotion, making anytime she experience joy much more profound. Brown is a disabled woman of color, a person often excluded from representations of disability. She discusses how she aims to decentralize the notions of heterosexuality and whiteness that are often associated with the disabled community. Sometimes her efforts such as the viral hashtag, #DisabledandCute, have been criticized as inspiration porn. Brown maintains that her efforts good outweighs the harm as they make POC and LGBTQ+ members of the disability community more visible. Basically, she is validating her and others’ existences in a society that had been actively erasing tor ignoring them. She concludes by acknowledging that she has not always being able to feel joy, but she has had to fight to feel her current joy.

Quotes:

“So my joy –the joy of professional and personal wins, of pop culture and books, of expressing platonic love out loud — is revolutionary in a body like mine.” Pp.117

“Instead, they think of cis white male wheelchair users who hate themselves, because that is so often the pop culture depicts us.” Pp.118

“I championed the act of effort and patience with myself by forcing myself to reroute negative thoughts with positive ones. Instead of saying what I hated about myself, I spoke aloud what I liked about myself.” Pp.119

Reflection:

Brown efforts are very admirable. I think finding joy is something a lot of people are struggling with. I really like that she chose to continue pushing forward with her projects despite criticism. This sounds very basic, but it takes a strong person to do this, even without the added social and cultural pressures of being part of multiple minorities. Brown is focusing mostly on the positives which I consider a smart move, when rallying for change. It keeps those involved in the movement engaged and energized. She does not promote ignorance of any negative aspects of the disabled community and disabled rights movement which allow a healthy movement to flourish. It is important to be reflective but hopeful when advocating for social change.