Keep The "I" in Accessibility: "AccessAbility" and other Wordplay is Ahistorical, Erasure and Undermines Our Struggle For Justice
And yes, this too, is relevant to discussions about MAiD.
Tweet by @KateMcWilli lol it is national euphemism for accessibility week and I didn't even know?
If you are disabled I probably don’t need to explain that “AccessAbility.” “All Abilities,” or “disABILITY” etc. are like an ice cream headache while listening to nails being dragged across a chalkboard sitting next to smelling a garbage bag filled with rotting broccoli.
But when I raise my objection to this nonsense among non-disabled people the most generous response I receive is questioning whether it’s really worth being bothered by. I think it is.
Usually these discussions occur in face to face meetings where people demand an on the spot 30 second explanation of why I “have a problem with it!” Or else on social media where the prospect of useful dialogue is even more unlikely. I try to explain that the underlying premise is that it misunderstands the historical origins of disability and ability and therefore misrepresents their meaning. And I mention that the wordplay is meant to suggest that “in spite of our deficiencies as ‘people with disabilities’ some ability remains.” In other words it immediately cedes to ableism. Sometimes I point out that the use of “all abilities” makes it sound like a competency level and give them scenarios - such as a hearing person who might have no ability to follow instructions being communicated via ASL. But what I want to say can’t fit into the restrictions of these interactions and a drawing by a cartoonist I admire about epistemic injustice always comes to mind.
But rather than laying out my argument here, I am going to point you to the words of one of the early disability activists Vic Finkelstein. I think it’s worth noting here that Finkelstein, a wheelchair user, was sentenced to prison in Apartheid South-Africa for his anti-Apartheid activism. For him, disabled people’s struggle was linked to larger struggle for justice. His analysis reflects this. This was written in 1987.
An excerpt from “Disabled People and Our Culture Developmemt:”
“Because there is lack of clarity about the cultural world that disabled people are encouraged to join this world is mostly the dominant cultural world of able bodied people. There are two sides to the coin that is being presented in order to buy our entry into the able bodied world. The first encourages disabled people to want to join the normal world by concentrating on our abilities and not our disabilities. The second tries to encourage disabled people to concentrate on what we have in common with able bodied people. Neither side of the coin, however, can buy our entry into the able bodied world. In the end all that we have bought is the able bodied role model and for this we have exchanged our identity!
(a) Emphasis on ‘ability’
The most notable example of recent attempts to foist ability not disability values on disabled people is the cancelled 1986 ARTABILITY Conference. The conference, as many disabled people now know, was arranged as a follow-up to the Attenborough Report which is largely concerned with access to able bodied arts. By concentrating on ability the organisers lost sight of disabled people and our view of the world. It was no accident, therefore, that the dominant cultural value not only determined the programme with its emphasis on able bodied people and how they can improve our access to the dominant culture, or how they can improve and promote art as therapy for disabled people, etc., but some important parts of the programme were not even accessible to wheelchair users! The conference was cancelled by the organisers when these ability values were collectively criticised by organisations of disabled people.
Clearly by focussing on ability it is easy to lose sight of disabled people and when this happens the dominant cultural values, whatever the original intentions, are the ones that get promoted. Far from buying access to the normal (able bodied) world the side of the coin that displays ability not disability, and is labelled something-ABILITY (such as ARTABILITY or WORKABILITY), discourages our involvement in, and contribution to, the multicultural world. It encourages us to aim at able bodied standards and values rather than to create our own standards and refer to our own abilities!
(b) The people first movement
Historically, the problems we face have been interpreted by able bodied people as resulting from our disabilities (meaning our impaired bodies). Since our experience is the opposite, i.e. that our problem is trying to live in a world designed for able bodied living, there is a natural tendency for disabled people to want to shift the focus of concern off the disability (meaning our impaired bodies). However, instead of shifting this focus onto our society, with its disabling dominant able bodied culture, some people have mistakenly tried to remove the focus of attention altogether by asserting that we are all people first. An example of instant integration!
In this country the term people with disabilities has been coined to try and buy our way into the world like everybody else, to be accepted as people first. But what does everybody else, or people, mean here? Since we do live in a multicultural society there is no way that people with disabilities can think of ourselves as people first and at the same time be clear about the culture with which we identify. Thinking of ourselves as people with disabilities, surely, encourages us to lose sight of ourselves and when this happens, as we saw with the emphasis that people with able bodies (to be consistent) put on ‘ability’, then the dominant cultural values, whatever the original intentions, are the ones that get promoted.
Perhaps this fortunate promotion of dominant culture values explains why it is that people with able bodies, who also happen to be social administrators and service providers, are particularly keen to encourage us to think of ourselves as people with disabilities, as people first. The side of the coin that is labelled people with disabilities is, in my view, incapable of buying instant integration but instead it confuses us into accepting the dominant able bodied values without realising that this is what is happening.
I have suggested that it is logical for us to end up supporting the dominant culture, rather than our own, if we promote our abilities and not our disabilities or if we promote ourselves as people with disabilities. Let us at least try and be conscious about what we want and what we are doing. If we want to focus on our abilities and present ourselves as people first then how can we at the same time organise separately and try to develop our own culture? This is surely the question behind the justification of the PHAB club movement. Idealistic approaches which confuse our identity, however, will fail because as long as we are different no amount of denial can help us assimilate into a world designed for people with able bodies. Real integration, on the other hand, can be achieved on the basis of a full recognition of our differences and this in turn will depend a great deal on us making the free choice to identify ourselves as a social group.
WE, DISABLED PEOPLE…”
I will also share an excerpt from the book “Keywords for Disability Studies.” This is from the chapter entitled “Ability” which is authored by Fiona Kumari Campbell. It provides the history which is negated and ignored when people alter spelling of disability or accessibility or use “all abilities” to mean disabled and non-disabled people.
“Disability studies scholars recognize that the term “ability” shapes our understanding of what it means to have a livable life. Although it is often treated as the antithesis of “disability,” ability has been used as a conceptual sledgehammer to determine and shape social status and caste on both an individual and a collective level. In effect, “ability” employs a judgment that establishes standards of body and mind that are actionable in the present or in projected futures.
Today ability and disability are conjoined as a simple binary. In the past, the relationship was more fluid. Aristotle viewed “monstrous” bodies as natural anomalia (Greek for “irregularities” or “unevenness”), that represented different types of “ability.” Since the late 1300s, “ability” has signified a quality in a person that makes an action possible; in turn, someone who can execute an expected range of actions is able-bodied, a person who can lead a potentially worthy life. “Ability” in the Anglo-Norman world was a legal term tied to capacity to enter into contracts or inherit property. Hence “ability” began to point to an exclusionary matrix in which it belonged only to propertied men. The rest of the population (nonpropertied men, women, people of color, beggars, and changelings) had an invalidated and disabled status to a greater or lesser extent.
Not all representations of the “abnormal” or disabled body are so infused with negativity. In “On the Refusal of a Pension to the Invalid” (402 BCE), Lysias, a speech-writer and Attic orator, argues that physical impairment did not in itself class an individual as ordunatous, or unable (Lysias 1957). It is not surprising, then, to read that Marcus Sergius, a Roman general during the Second Punic War (218 BC), returned to battle as a double amputee, fitted with iron hands. Throughout much of premodern Western history, ability and able-bodiedness referred to a person’s role in the community rather than to a fixed condition.
The term began to refer to a type of person in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, when “abled,” as an adjective, described a “capable, vigorous and thriving” person or object (the Oxford English Dictionary cites the example of an abled tree). Still, it had no coupling with an assumed opposite of a disabled subject. That coupling began to emerge during the age of enlightenment (ca. 1700–1800), which ushered in a new spirit of optimism about the rationality and autonomy of man and afforded the attributes of will, authority, and reason new prominence. Such sentiments held out promises of the perfectibility of the body. Mental or bodily ambiguity came to represent anomaly and aberrance, and the dis/abled person was identified with failure, hopelessness, and the necessity for surveillance, repair, and management.Science and philosophy during this period were concerned with working out which beings were “human” and which were not. Discussions like those of John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1955) were related to physical and intellectual capacity, animality, and species ranking (including a discussion of rankings according to notions of gendered characteristics associated with a hierarchy of abilities). In 1727, “able-bodiedness” referred to those who are “fit, and healthy, physically robust, free from physical disability” (OED) and thus fit for the army or work. It is not surprising, then, that there was a shift from able-bodiedness as an attribute of character to able-bodied people as an identifiable class capable of selling their labor. The next 200 years saw the expansion of global markets and colonization, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of manufacturing. Governments, medicine, and the sciences of population management and economic efficiency were concerned with harnessing labor and regulating idleness and capacity. The human body was marked and measured in terms of efficiency.”
There is a great deal of erasure of disability history even by the disability community. We don’t need to constantly re-invent analysis. We need to defend, refine and build on it.
Vic Finkelstein was right about “ability.” We need to fight against this wordplay which not only ignores history and meaning, not only cedes vital ground to ableism, but which ultimately is erasure of disability and therefore us.
We have insights that non-disabled people do not have. For the system and those within it that benefit from ableism and seek to maintain the oppression of disabled people, that knowledge is dangerous. For the greater humanity it is key to building a better world for our mutual survival. We talk a fair amount about internalized ableism but we need to talk more about how that is reflected in doubting and devaluing our own and other disabled culture and wisdom - including that left to us by our disabled ancestors.
We have to stop surrendering to their framing of us and we definitely need to stop going along with their bullshit. I will end with an excerpt from the book, “Disability Politics: Understanding Our Past, Changing Our Future,’ by Jane Campbell and Mike Oliver that published in 1996 that included a series of interviews with disabled people. Here are portions of two:
“There are a lot of things that are very worrying in society today. Some of these may be cyclical, to do with economic recessions, but there are other issues I find even more disturbing. The increasing openness of the debate around the quality of life I find extremely disturbing, and the fact that many academics are now quite happy to sit in open forums and talk about who has the right to live and the right to die. We shouldn't pretend it's any other discussion, it's not about resources. Genetic engineering, euthanasia; these are all very disturbing things that may be cyclical, but we can't work on the assumption that they are.” Richard Wood
“The right to take part in society as equals is meaningless whilst the levels of inequality between non-disabled people are so vast and growing. Capitalism is now world-wide and collapsing, its wealth becoming concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, whose owners are becoming more desperate with every 'crisis'. I am still longing for a forum in which disabled people take leadership over world-wide issues, where we can think, feel and learn together. I am bored with the victim role. I want to model a better way of relating to each other than that offered by the non-disabled world, and I want to have new kinds of organisational forms in place before the collapse of capitalism makes everyday survival too difficult and time-consuming to organise ourselves.” Micheline Mason
