I’ve been thinking a lot about disability of late, which won’t surprise those of you who have been sharing a particular corner of the blogosphere, in which awesome and fail appear to coexist in some kind of proportion in which the latter sadly sometimes seems to be winning out. In this analysis of the “Harmonisation of Disability Parking Permit Schemes in Australia”, I argue that the shift that is being proposed is from the social model of disability, to the medical model.
The medical model suggests that there is a way that the body ought to be, and any permanent ‘loss’ of such ‘normal’ capacities constitutes disability (and that this is a natural, neutral state of affairs that is no one’s fault—except the individual body, of course). This approach is the most mainstream, and it’s constitutive of much of the discrimination that disabled people (or people with disabilities, both terminologies having a different but important political point to make) experience.
The social model, which is offered as a counter to the medical model, suggests instead that the ‘loss’ of capacity occurs not because of the impairment itself, but because of the impairment in combination with a world built for the temporarily able-bodied. (And this doesn’t only refer to the built environment, of course: models of sociality, for example, are very strongly ableist).
There’s actually another step in this little spectrum, one which doesn’t get much screen time in activism (understandably, because it’s so far from the medical model, and such a challenge to it as to appear incomprehensible or nonsensical to those committed to the medical model). This suggests that even understanding particular bodies as impaired is the result of a presumption about the body. That is, it argues that disability begins at the moment when you understand some bodies as naturally unimpaired, and others as naturally impaired: the drawing of that line is not a neutral, naturally-given one, as we like to pretend. It is a political distinction that is, in itself, is invested with the ability system, which, as Lennard Davis argues, is what constitutes particular bodies as disabled, and thus as the problem. Davis recommends that whenever we see such a problem, we ought to ask how it is that this ‘problem’ is constituted as a problem, and be careful to observe the privilege that attends that which is not considered a problem. What makes disabled bodies into ‘those bodies with problems’? The presumption, essentially, that they ought to be otherwise: normal. And this in turn maintains the privilege of the able body.
The group who potentially loses out most dramatically in the proposed parking permit scheme is those with invisible disabilities, as Lauredhel demonstrates so clearly here. In response, I began thinking about what it meant to have an invisible disability. On the one hand, it might be that we could think of those with invisible disabilities as those who can ‘pass’ as able-bodied. And sometimes this is true, at least some of the time, and there’s little doubt that this ability to pass can lead to privilege as well as the problems associate with invisibility. For example, people approaching someone in a wheelchair will often talk to their assistant pushing the chair, as if the person with a disability is incapable of thought, conversation etc, and this kind of discrimination is something those who can walk are unlikely to confront. On the other hand, we can think more carefully, and see that those who have ‘invisible’ disabilities are those whose differences simply don’t fit into someone’s expectation of what disability ought to be. And this means that legislation is likely to discriminate against those with ‘invisible’ disabilities because it is employing the medical model of disability. What does this mean? Well, hopefully this little story of mine might help.
Years ago, now, I was stepping out (sorry, I find that phrase hilarious and had to use it) with a young man who had a visual impairment. As he was doing a PhD, this meant that he couldn’t read at quite the rate he might have liked, and sometimes working on the computer was too much. I encouraged him to make use of whatever assistance the disability office at uni could offer him, even though I understood his fairly intense ambivalence about it. They were singularly unhelpful. He felt that they treated him as if he was ‘faking it’, on the one hand, and expecting too much of them on the other. The extension of his scholarship that he was hoping to get was, they told him, simply not going to be possible. I suggested that perhaps he should look to Centrelink’s Disability Allowance to help him fund the completion of his PhD. He picked up the forms, still unhappy about this prospect, even as he knew it was probably necessary, and brought them home.
I looked over his shoulder at the forms he was trying to fill out. He had ticked the box marked ‘visual impairment’, and been sent to another section. In this section, the form asked him for some proof from an opthalmologist. He hesitated. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Well, I’ve seen opthalmologists,” he explained. “But the issue isn’t in my eyes. It’s in my brain.”
His visual impairment, you see, wasn’t a loss of vision due to some problem in the eye, as the form assumed. He had been prone to migraines as a kid, and at some point (I think the age of 11, but this was a while ago), he had had an incredibly severe migraine. He recounted looking downwards, and having his entire left leg disappear in his blindspot. The auras had hung around—a permanent fixture, as it turned out. He saw multiple copies of everything, more or less depending on how good a day it was. Sometimes things looked like a badly tuned TV set, sometimes there were lines, sometimes… you get the idea. But although this interfered with his vision, it didn’t fit the form’s idea of what a visual impairment was. It didn’t seem to fit into any of the other categories either, as far as either of us could tell, although he might have argued a case under ‘having suffered a stroke’ except that that category seemed to think that difficulty speaking and walking would be the primary problems he’d have then. Frustrated and embarrassed, he stepped away from the idea, away from the forms. His impairment wasn’t real, couldn’t be argued for, proven, justified. Everyone would think he was faking it. I couldn’t think of what to say.
This is part of the problem with the medical model. It has a particular image of disability, generally involving the assumption of some level of dependence on others (because of course the temporarily able-bodied are so independent – [snort!]), and it institutes this, medically, legislatively. And in so doing, it requires that people with disabilities be people with particular, recognisable kinds of disabilities. Instead of testing for how one is disabled by a particular thing—by inaccessible parking, by stairs, by having to stand to be served, by the university’s expectations of a student’s reading speed—that is, instead of testing for a real problem with the way the world works, it instead requires that you fit an existing imagining of disability. And this existing imagining of disability is very limited, and thoroughly bound up with able-bodied fantasies (nightmares) about disabled bodies: as people in wheelchairs, people who are blind, people who are deaf. And indeed, it assumes that it already knows the effects of each of these impairments, a point which the Deaf community knows and battles, arguing against the idea that Deafness is a lack, or a loss, or an impairment at all. The medical model homogenises disability unnecessarily, and more than this, it renders numerous disabilities invisible because they do not match up to this fantasy of what constitutes disability.
When we legislate according to the medical model, we legislate what disability ought to be, what disability ought to look like. We legislate the visibility of disability, and we do it by rendering a whole mass of heterogeneous bodies imperceptible, invisible, ignore their capacity to be disabled by an able-bodied world. We imagine visual impairments after a singular model where vision is only located in the eye. We imagine mobility restrictions only through difficulty with walking. We imagine that the solution to PWD (and it is a solution to, not a solution for) is compensating for their recalcitrant body, a body we assume to know all about. We reject the idea that the world might need to be reworked, rethought, rebuilt, and instead maintain disability by maintaining the world as a place which expects certain ‘normal’ things of bodies, and which privileges those bodies which can live up to this ideal as a result. When we legislate according to the medial model of disability, we maintain the disabilities of those who don’t adhere to our nightmare visions of disability, because we’re busy pretending they don’t exist, erasing them from our construction of the world. We ensure that some people remain disabled because we don’t have the imagination to allow the category of ‘disability’ to be shaped by the heterogeneity of real bodies, the heterogeneity of real needs, the heterogeneity of the real ways that people live their lives. We refuse to produce legislation which tests not for ‘the impairment itself’, but for disability, because that might implicate the able-bodied, our standards of normalcy, might trouble the extraordinary privilege maintained only at the disadvantage of those who don’t live up to our standards. We render bodies which might trouble our limited imagining of difference invisible, and then shrug, and raise our hands in the air, and ask how we could possibly have known that such people even existed, and how we could possibly be expected to ‘cater to’ such exorbitant, excessive difference. The perceptibility of bodies is a key stake in the politics of disability, because disabilities aren’t invisible. They’re invisibilised.
P.S We’ve done a whole lot of the work of being active for you! Beppie, Lauredhel and I have given you some quick and easy ways to respond to the supposed “Harmonisation Scheme”: a form letter, and a letter encouraging organisations to submit a response.
June 6, 2009 at 1:56 pm
I’ve been thinking a lot about this as well, lately, for the same reasons as you.
This in particular speaks to me:
The social model, which is offered as a counter to the medical model, suggests instead that the ‘loss’ of capacity occurs not because of the impairment itself, but because of the impairment in combination with a world built for the temporarily able-bodied.
I have severe myopia– without my contact lenses (or, more rarely, glasses), my vision is seriously impaired, and I have difficulty doing, well, anything really. I can’t read, I can’t cook, going for a walk would be extremely hazardous, etc. I believe the reason that this isn’t classed as a disability is because it affects enough middle and upper class white men that society compensates, and therefore– as long as you share some of that privilege (particularly, in this case, class privilege), it is effecitvely NOT a disability. Naturally, if one doesn’t share that privilege, myopia can be a severe impairment, which is then ignored as a disability because of the whole “if it isn’t a problem for middle class white men, then it shouldn’t be a problem for YOU” attitude.
June 6, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Yeah, the myopia example is really interesting. Here’s what George Canguilhem, author of The Normal and the Pathological has to say about myopia:
“Man [yes, sicsicsic, my friends, he's lousy with exclusivity and I never know whether to blame the translator], even physical man, is not limited to his organism. Having extended his organs by means of tools, man sees in his body only the means to all possible means of action. Thus, in order to discern what is normal or pathological for the body itself, one must look beyond the body. With a disability like astigmatism or myopia, one who would normal in an agricultural or a pastoral society but abnormal for sailing or flying… [T]o feel abnormal is to realize that certain activities, which have become a need and an ideal, are inaccessible.” (p. 200-201)
If a brief summary of this helps, he’s basically saying that particular kinds of bodies are made into problems because of the expectations of them given the context, where the context is understood as the physical world, the social world, and the cultural expectations of a ‘normal’ body.
Canguilhem, who is nicely quotable, also says elsewhere, in slightly more techie language,
“… The anomaly is ignored insofar as there is no manifestation of it in the order of vital values. Thus, even a scientist acknowledges that an anomaly is known to science only if it is first perceived in the consciousness, in the form of an obstacle to the perforamnce of functions, or discomfort, or harmfulness. But the sensation of obstacle, discomfort or harmfulness is a sensation which must be termed normative since it involves the even unconscious reference to a function and to an impulse to the completeness of their [I think that's meant to be 'its']exercise. As long as the anomaly has no functional repercussions experienced consciously by the individual, in the case of man [sic], or ascribed to life’s dynamic polarity in every living thing, the anomaly is either ignored (in the case of heterotaxies) or constitutes an indifferent variety, a variation on a specific theme; it is an irregularity like the negligible irregularities found in object cast in the same mold. It might form the subject of a special chapter in natural history, but not in pathology.” (pp. 135-136). What this vaguely technical talk is saying is basically that bodies can be different without being pathological; the only thing that constitutes a particular different body as pathological is the experience of the “sensation of obstacle, discomfort or harmfulness,” which arises not simply out of the body, but out of the body’s interaction with a very particular world, and a very particular set of expectations. In simple terms, I suppose, one could explain it this way: if we provided properly accessible parking, the issue of parking would never make anyone feel like their body and its capabilities were an obstacle to parking. Anomaly (simple difference) becomes abnormality because of the expectations a world makes of individual bodies.
Myopia’s a nice example, though, because it does show how ‘compensating’ for particular disabilities can become so matter-of-course as to not even be classed as a disability; so long, as you point out, as you’re sufficiently well-off. Nice one, Beppie. And thanks for reading!
June 7, 2009 at 7:54 am
Nice post. The example of myopia is a good one, I’m the same way (like if I stay in a hotel and accidentally knock my glasses of the night stand rolling over, it’s a major ordeal to find them again), I’d not thought much about it before.
I like the point a lot about reforming institutions and spaces, how the problem is not bodies but how practices exclude people.
cheers,
Nate
June 7, 2009 at 9:41 am
You’re fabulous.
June 7, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Nice explanation. If you could just organise for my thoughts to start out arranged as well as they are after I read stuff you write, it would save me some time.
Earlier today, my mind was wandering to options for making the world more accessible to all sorts of people, and I was thinking vaguely of such things as moving walkways. But I figured that it would be dismissed as contributing to the Obesity Epidemic. *sigh*
It seems kinda obvious that it requires an interaction between environment and bodily variation to create disability. Why is the obvious so incredibly difficult to comprehend?
June 7, 2009 at 11:57 pm
Aww, thanks Ariane, you’re very lovely. I always worry these posts are all over the place, so it’s nice to think they’re organised enough for people to grok!
And why hard to comprehend? Well, I’ve thought about ‘why’ a fair bit, because I teach this stuff, and for some classes it’s a cinch, and for others it requires long, repetitive labour. I think that people are very invested in the idea that ‘the biological’ is a substrate – an unchanging groundwork which never moves. And people like that, because whilst we might be forced to acknowledge that the goodness or badness of many things are culturally-based – I say ‘might’ because sometimes it’s hard work for people to understand that people in different contexts have very different ideas about morality etc, and different priorities – they feel like they can always fall back on ‘the biological’. This is the same kind of point that we were having that conversation about ‘the natural’ around, I think. People love those categories, because they seem to settle a debate, give us a nice solid piece of ground to stand on, a piece that never needs to be reconsidered. (And people think that religion is the only thing that ever does this…! Science, at least as it is assumed to work by the mainstream, is so problematic for this…) And besides, by pointing to disability as naturally given, they are not implicated themselves in the suffering of others. Which, agreed, is a complicated and hard thing to negotiate. But it’s unethical to pretend that because it’s hard, we don’t have the responsibility to do it.
As for making the world more accessible, well, I think that there are ways and ways of approaching this, and that our current models of thinking about accessibility tend to impede rather than enhance this process. That’s because we approach accessibility as an add-on to existing architecture. Yet we no longer think of curb cuts (those smoothy-out bits where you cross the street) as ‘for accessibility’, and nor do we think about elevators as solely or even primarily designed for people for whom stairs are disabling. This demonstrates, I think, that if we worked hard, for a while, at consulting with people disabled by the ways we currently lay out buildings and parking and internal decors etc, these ’special addons’ would also become a standard part of any architectural planning. And that, of course, would mean that we’d be better placed to continue to ensure accessibility of all kinds.
June 19, 2009 at 9:14 am
An excellent summary, thank you!
I was horrified by the parking scheme proposal. I’ve been both a slow fatigued walker and a powerchair user, and our needs are compatible and different. As the former, I want to be close to the door; as the latter I need room to deploy my ramp but it can be at the far end of the car park!
Your vision example is particularly acute here in the USA.
The ADA Amendments Act of 2008 was passed to undo the damage from 15 years of stubbornly disabling reasoning and decisions by our Supreme Court. The ADA generally avoids discussing specific impairments in any detail (there’s no disease list). It concerns itself principally with whether someone is “substantially limited” (or is believed to be so). Given that the Supreme Court had made the amazingly circular decision that someone who manages their diabetes is no longer “disabled” under the ADA, so her employer did not have to accommodate her need to take food breaks, the Amendments Act specifiies
and yet, there’s a catch for eyeglasses:
June 25, 2009 at 12:16 pm
That is an excellent post WP, thank you.
June 25, 2009 at 12:17 pm
[...] 25, 2009 Wildly Parenthetical’s post here on models of understanding disability, on society and shifting the focus onto the ways in which we [...]
June 25, 2009 at 2:19 pm
[...] Invisible Disabilities and How They Get That Way [...]
July 1, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Hey WP, there’s an award at my blog if you are inspired that way.
July 6, 2009 at 6:20 pm
This is a great post about pushing people into boxes based on their specific, easily recognisable “lack”. It’s particuarly apposite in this parking permits debate, because the system is changing from assessment of ability (based on how far you can comfortably walk, if at all) to the medical model you describe so clearly. It’s a reduction in personhood in favour of an increase in tickyboxes, and it serves no-one but bureaucracy.
July 31, 2009 at 8:37 am
It’s an interesting idea, how gray and undefinable disability can be in view of, “what is the norm?” I resently acquired a bad case of tinnitus, where one has a ringing in the ear. And it’s the damndest thing, because my doctor says two irreconcilable things to me about it. “Yeah, for some people, like yourself, it’s going to be a real distraction, better sometimes, worse others. And all you can really do is just live with it.” He then follows it with, “Hell, no big deal though, everyone gets it eventually. You may as well start young.” And yes, you’d never know I had anything the matter with me, unless you were extremely observational and could tell, by stress-lines on my face or something, that I was deeply concentrating on a sound that wasn’t really there.
It makes me wonder about all the people who don’t work so well in one way or another that you never really think about. I have a friend, Ryan, who’s just awful with money. He’s perfectly capable of working, of making money and, thereby supporting himself. But the poor guy just can’t seem to handle the adult things like bills and banks and credit. And though I wouldn’t compare this to, say, a visual problem brought on by young migranes, he suffers still, and has a hard time explaining it to anyone.
August 11, 2009 at 10:38 am
I am so late with commenting, but this is a fantastic post. This particularly resonated with me:
The perceptibility of bodies is a key stake in the politics of disability, because disabilities aren’t invisible. They’re invisibilised.
It’s very troubling how those of us with invisible conditions (I have very mild CP and moderate fibro, myself) get disappeared, and are in some cases discouraged from identifying AS having a disability (or several).
August 11, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Thanks Annaham. Coming from you, that counts for so much
Yeah, I think the other side of the ‘what counts as visible’ thing is the tendency for some forms of activism to simply take categories as they are defined by the mainstream, reinforcing the invisibilising of those who challenge the category – like you, for example! The accessible parking proposal which was discussed earlier this year is a great example, as there were some wheelchair users who may even have pushed for the proposal to be framed the way it was, simply in an attempt to delimit what could count as a disability for the benefits the state offered. Which of course is not a simple problem, as the state reproduces this form of activism by being so stingy in its ‘allowances’ that it creates a false starvation economy, where everyone has to fight over the scraps. Bleargh. That was cheery!! I guess the main thing I wanted to get across in this post was just that what is visible and invisible—and I do, literally mean, what can be seen and what cannot—is a political matter, and those of us involved in various forms of activism ought to remain critical not just of government policies, but what they are premised on. I think 
August 12, 2009 at 7:35 pm
Just wanted to drop by and say how informative and validating this post is for me. I’m only really just starting to engage with disability theory properly (which is pretty dodge since I’ve been doing safer spaces stuff for a while now) so it’s really good to have read a post like this. I also kinda needed to find stuff which validated me in beginning to identify as a person with a disability, and stuff about invisibility in particular.
Anyways, I’m gonna stop with the non-contributing rambling and just say thanks for the post.
August 14, 2009 at 7:16 pm
I’m glad it’s been useful to you, GOOMP! I actually think that paying attention to disability, in addition to sex, gender, sexuality, race, class etc (all the ‘usual suspects’) makes for some really confronting but interesting shifts in thinking. So go you, with your moving into thinking about this stuff!
August 14, 2009 at 7:08 pm
It seems that to at least some degree you are suggesting that the concept of disability needs to be rethought of in terms of differences as such between individuals and the communities that they live in.
“We refuse to produce legislation which tests not for ‘the impairment itself’, but for disability, because that might implicate the able-bodied, our standards of normalcy, might trouble the extraordinary privilege maintained only at the disadvantage of those who don’t live up to our standards. ”
I guess this leads me to the criticism that that is precisely what politics is about. Everyone is in some sense distinct from everyone else taken collectively and therefore ‘disabled’. If disability policy/legislation is to be relevant then in some degrees it must specify ‘an impairment itself’.
Being a person with a disability is not about being different but being different in such a way as to be unable to participate in a certain activity in a certain way that is deemed appropriate.
In this way it seems that the central concerns of disability are the activities that are deemed appropriate for all people to be engaged in.
in relation to invisibility I feel that this is something sort after. Sort after because the last thing that anybody wants is the vast state and private industry apparatuses focused upon the appropriateness of the activities in which you are engaged in. (Perhaps to be more precise – it is control of ones visibility/invisibility that is the issue.)
On these grounds I would then have to criticize the distinction that you make between medical and social models as being false. To me they correspond to the difference between the health professional and the social/welfare worker. A distinction that remains united by a compunction towards the alteration of bodies towards what is in effect indifference.
The other motivation is of course money. The provision of disability support is big business. Government, charities and commercial operators have many dollars invested in the need to pay attention to people.
I hope I have contributed constructively. All this may become increasingly pertinent -over and above parking permit harmonization – in the near future as it looks like there are moves for pretty substantial changes in the disability support industry on the horizon in Australia.
August 14, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Thanks for dropping by, Barkingcoins.
Your first criticism I don’t really understand. Yes, everyone is distinct from everyone else. Not everyone is ‘disabled’ as a result: disability is produced through hierarchisation, that is, through the presumption that all bodies ought to adhere to a particular standard, and that as a result, those that don’t, or can’t, adhere to that standard are somehow lesser. So for example, I am different to another white, cis, able-bodied woman in many ways, no doubt, but that doesn’t mean that one of us must be disabled. To approach it that way is to not pay attention to the specificity of the location of bodies, and the ways that hierarchies are produced and maintained within particular contexts. In addition, whilst I take the point that everyone is different, it seems to me that to pretend that all hierarchies are equivalent to the ability matrix is to falsely homogenise very real differences in privilege and power. In relation to the use of the social model in legislation, however, I still think the ‘impairment itself’ doesn’t actually need to be specified, where the impairment is understood as a lack in an individual body, usually as defined by medicine. There could be multiple reasons, for example, that an individual can’t walk the distance from regular parking into the shopping centre: they could have an amputation, they could have chronic fatigue, they could have an old injury to the leg, they could have a mental illness that means they can’t spend much time in open spaces like car parks, and so on. That’s what I mean by ‘testing for disability, not impairment’. Specifying impairment, according to the medical and social model, is about specifying a condition.
I’m not really sure why you think the central concerns of disability are the activities appropriate for all people to be engaged in. Perhaps you could explain what you mean by this?
I’m not sure that invisibility actually is always sought after; and if it is, it would seem to me that that is primarily because of the negative codings of disability. The acknowledgement of the difference that one’s disability makes can lead to the alteration of the environment in such a way as to make things possible for an individual: this would be a positive outcome of visibility. As far as I can tell, the reason for negative outcomes to visibility are basically ableism: the assumption that difference is always lack. Which I’m kinda arguing is the centre of the problem. Yes, the state ought not to be the one deciding whether or not someone can be involved in a particular activity; but the only reason that it’s the state making those decisions is because disability is seen as a ‘problem’, rather than the disabling environment… Otherwise, the lack of, say, ramps into a building would be treated the same way as, say, a log that’s fallen across a major road. It wouldn’t be about the individual’s incapacity, because it would be presumed they ought to have access…
I don’t see how these grounds lend themselves to a critique of the distinction between medical and social models, I’m afraid. Even if I agree that the medical and the social models are not quite as opposed as some disability theorists have thought, they are not equivalent, even if they share an investment in the idea of a ‘normal body’. I never denied that; in fact, I pointed it out in gesturing towards the third model, which is the one I work with, but which, as I pointed out, is much less comprehensible to the general public because of the massive investment in medical/scientific conceptions of the body. However, I do disagree that they are united by a compulsion (which I assume is the word you were looking for?) towards the alteration of bodies. The social model is quite specifically about leaving individual bodies alone, and reworking the social and physical environment so that it isn’t disabling.
Money is, of course, a motivation (though I’m not entirely clear on what you think it’s a motivation *for*). Disability (that is, the current conceptual framework for it) and capitalism pretty much arise together, and are, in my opinion, mutually sustaining. The shifts in disability support in Australia will be interesting and probably quite troubling to watch.
August 16, 2009 at 11:47 pm
So having actually tossed around the thoughts in my head for a few days, I figured I’d come back with something vaguely constructive. I don’t think I have the critical understanding of disability to look at disabilities other than my own, so clearly this is going to be quite specific.
For me, I think the invisibilising of disability can in some cases be part of the production of that disability. For instance (woahoh anecdotalism):
The structure of most public spaces is such that there is a ‘normal’ way to touch other people, and a ‘normal’ way to react to such touch. That is, it is normal to touch people without asking first, it is normal to reach out and grab people’s clothing, it is normal to put your hands around them as you walk past, it is normal to invade people’s personal space for reasons that have very little to do with it being crowded. It is normal then, for people to be ok with such touch. To react, at absolute worst, with very temporary grumpiness.
Any reaction outside of these norms is viewed as craziness, as a personal fault of those experiencing that reaction. It is not normal to react by having to immediately leave the space, or to be unable to perceive anything outside of the touch, or any other anxiety reaction. Anxiety is not normal.
Moreover, any request that the initial disabling behaviour be addressed or altered is itself viewed as craziness (when people tell me this, I generally remind them that that’s half my fucking point). Since there is a ‘normal’ way to behave, to not behave in that way, or to insist that other people don’t, is a result of personal fault or illness (my fave: “issues”). Often, people will still alter their behaviour towards me personally when I raise that it fucks me up/ that it’s a “rule of mine” (while still calling me crazy in one way or another).
On a tangent, there is an idea amongst some progressive people I know that since I view consent as politically important, my reaction to people nonconsentually touching me must be political and therefore I must react identically to all nonconsentual touching. This conception clearly ignores that fact that my anxiety, while linked to political questions, doesn’t generally follow some nice rule where all things are equally traumatic all the times, and I think functions to specifically invisibilise my anxiety.
What I’m getting at is that since people seem to understand that such spaces can be disabling for the theoretical crip or the individual crip (me, after I tell them), the continuation of such disabling behaviour en mass relies on the idea that there aren’t any such people in the space, because they can’t be seen. That is, that the invisibilising of disability is required in maintaining the production of some disabilities.
PS: So I maybe conflated invisibility and normativity a bit. Not sure. Guh. Also, clearly anxiety is not nearly the only issue around consent, touch and personal space. And consent, touch and personal space are not nearly the only issues around anxiety.
August 18, 2009 at 3:48 pm
That’s a fabulous response, GOOMP (may I call you GOOMP? It does make me smile!)
I think what I find particularly interesting in relation to this particular example about touch is how non-negotiable the privileging of TAB makes such things. That is, people get all tetchy if you request that things be done another way, and will even look past your initial negative reactions (flinching, or making a face, or suddenly going quiet or whatever) requiring that you articulate it, rather than being attentive enough to the other they’re engaging with, and their expressions of their different experience of the world. That is, assuming that your behaviour is always neutral makes it a lot harder for those who experience it otherwise to tackle the issue.
But this what I mean about invisibilising being an active part of how TAB privilege works: it might be clear to most people to get out of a doorway if a person in a wheelchair needs to get past, because it is made visible within the current paradigm. In contrast, the attentiveness required to actually engage with other people as other, to engage in a way that always leaves open the possibility of negotiation (and doesn’t leave the responsibility with them to raise the issue)… well, that’s a function of this invisibilising.
Thank you so much for your perspective, GOOMP. It’s such a great grounding of the theory I sketched, and it shows, again, how important the politics of what is perceptible is!
August 18, 2009 at 5:41 am
hey Wildly!
I just wanted to say that “disability is produced through hierarchisation” is a great succinct statement. I’m totally going to steal that.
Hope you’re well.
take care,
Nate
August 18, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Steal away, lovely Nate
If I manage to publish that line, I’ll let you know: d’you know how exciting it would be to be *quoted*? 
My vibes to you and your gorgeous wife are now *slippery* vibes. Good luck with everything over the coming weeks!
August 19, 2009 at 5:59 pm
[...] from their website. This is an example of doing it right. WildlyParenthetical delves into invisible disabilities and how they get that way. I picked up the phrase ‘invisible access for invisible disabilities’ from Lauredhel. [...]
October 5, 2009 at 5:50 pm
[...] I owe many thanks to Wildly Parenthetical’s post Invisible Disabilities and How They Get That Way for much of my thinking on the social model of disability, and Beppie from that comment thread for [...]