ableism quotes

Contours of Ableism - The Production of Disability and Abledness


Central to regimes of ableism are two core elements that feature irre-
spective of its localised enactment, namely the notion of the normative
(and normate individual) and the enforcement of a constitutional divide
between perfected naturalised humanity and the aberrant, the unthink-
able, quasi-human hybrid and therefore non-human.

Inscribing certain bodies in terms of deficiency and essential inade-
quacy privileges a particular understanding of normalcy that is com-
mensurate with the interests of dominant groups (and the assumed
interests of subordinated groups). Indeed, the formation of ableist rela-
tions requires the normate individual to depend upon the self of
‘disabled’ bodies being rendered beyond the realm of civility, thus
becoming an unthinkable object of apprehension

The visibility of the ableist project is therefore only possible through the interrogation of the revealedness of disability/not-health and abled(ness), Marcel Detienne (1979) summarises this system of thought aptly:
[Such a] . . . system is founded on a series of acts of partition whose
ambiguity, here as elsewhere, is to open up the terrain of their
transgression at the very moment when they mark off a limit. To
discover the complete horizon of a society’s symbolic values, it is also
necessary to map out its transgressions, its deviants (p. ix).


I've always believed that within tragedy, there is incredible life and
emotion. So my condition is not something I think of as sad; I think
it’s something so beautifully human. It doesn’t make me less of a
human being. It makes me so rich . . . I see my life as an active exper-
iment; to grasp at greatness I must risk failure. I put instinct before
caution, ideals before reality and possibility before negativity. As a
result, my life is not easy but it’s not boring either.
(Byrnes, 2000)

Disability cannot be thought of/spoken about on any other basis than
the negative, to do so, to invoke oppositional discourses, is to run the
risk of further pathologisation.

Drawing on Butler’s work, McRuer
(2002) writes, Everyone is virtually disabled, both in the sense that able-bodied
norms are ‘intrinsically impossible to embody’ fully and in the sense
that able-bodied status is always temporary, disability being the
one identity category that all people will embody if they live long
enough. What we might call a critical disability position, however,
would differ from such a virtually disabled positions [to engagements
that have] resisted the demands of compulsory able-bodiedness
(pp. 95–96).

In this respect, we can speak in ontological terms of the history of
disability as a history of that which is unthought, to be put out of coun-
tenance; this figuring should not be confused with erasure that occurs
due to mere absence or exclusion. On the contrary, disability is always
present (despite its seeming absence) in the ableist talk of normalcy,
normalisation and humanness (cf. Overboe, 2007, on the idea of norma-
tive shadows). Disability’s truth-claims are dependent upon discourses of
ableism for their very legitimisation.

Instead of
wasting time on the violence of normalisation, theoretical and cultural
producers could more meaningfully concentrate on developing a semi-
otics of exchange, an ontological decoder to recover and apprehend
the lifeworlds of humans living peripherally.

Ontological differences,
be that on the basis of problematical signifiers of race, sex, sexuality
and dis/ability, need to be unhinged from evaluative ranking and beThe Project of Ableism
15
re-cognised in their various nuances and complexities without being re-
presented in fixed absolute terms. It is only then, in this release that we
can find possibilities in ambiguity and resistance in marginality.

Internalized oppression is not the cause of our mistreatment; it
is the result of our mistreatment. It would not exist without the
real external oppression that forms the social climate in which
we exist. Once oppression has been internalized, little force
is needed to keep us submissive. We harbour inside ourselves
the pain and the memories, the fears and the confusions, the
negative self-images and the low expectations, turning them
into weapons with which to re-injure ourselves, every day of
our lives.
(Marks, 1999, p. 25)

Hahn (1986) testified that there was a close link between the attitude
of paternalism, the subordination of disabled people and the ‘interests’
of ableism:
Paternalism enables the dominant elements of a society to express
profound and sincere sympathy for the members of a minority group
while, at the same time, keeping them in a position of social and
economic subordination. It has allowed the non-disabled to act as
the protectors, guides, leaders, role models, and intermediates for
disabled individuals who, like children, are often assumed to be
helpless, dependent, asexual, economically unproductive, physically
limited, emotional immature, and acceptable only when they are
unobtrusive.
(p. 130)

Internalised ableism can mean that the disabled person is caught
‘between a rock and a hard place’. In order to attain the benefit of a
‘disabled identity’ one must constantly participate in the processes of
disability disavowal, aspire towards the norm, reach a state of near-
ablebodiedness, or at the very least to effect a state of ‘passing’. As
Kimberlyn Leary (1999) described,
Passing occurs when there is perceived danger in disclosure. . . . It rep-
resents a form of self-protection that nevertheless usually disables,
and sometimes destroys, the self it means to safeguard.
(p. 85)
The workings of internalised ableism by way of ‘passing’ are only pos-
sible by moving the focus from the impaired individual to the arena
of relationships. Ableist passing is not just an individual hiding their
impairment or morphing their disability; ableism involves the failure
to ask about difference, that is disability/impairment. For internalised
ableism to occur there needs to be an existing a priori presumption
of compulsory ableness. Such passing is about not disturbing the peace,
containing the matter that is potentially out of place. 3 An example
of ‘passing’ under these circumstances would be experiencing trep-
idation about revealing one’s impairment status fearing stigma and
workplace discrimination, despite the fact that work colleagues would
benefit from disability focused mentoring and exposure (see Bishop,
1999; Monaghan, 1998).

Internalised ableism means that to emu-
late the norm, the disabled individual is required to embrace, indeed to
assume, an ‘identity’ other than one’s own.

Philosopher Linda Purdy (1996) contended that it is important to
resist conflating disability with the disabled person. She writes,
My disability is not me, no matter how much it may affect my
choices. With this point firmly in mind, it should be possible men-
tally to separate my existences from the existence of my disability.
(p. 68)

However, the
study of ableism, especially internalised ableism, moves outside the
narrow confines of individualised life-stories and squarely locates itself
within a collectivist history of ideas and the field of discursive practices.
For example, further research could explore the process of counter-story
telling about the so-called ‘disability success stories’. Normally these sto-
ries are often based on the notion of ‘success in spite of impairment’
which is profoundly different to stories that embrace impairment and
are based on the notion of ‘success because of disability’ or stories about
living with ableism.
The second image is of disabled people engaged in guerrilla activ-
ity – rejecting the promises of liberalism and looking elsewhere, daring
to think in alternative ways about impairment. For too long, marginal-
ity and liminality have been viewed as places of exile from which the
emarginated are to be ‘brought in from the cold’ and integrated so they
too can sit beside the ‘warm fires’ of liberalism (and all will be well).
However, as bell hooks (1990) reminded us, the margin can be ‘. . . more
than a site of deprivation . . . it is also the site of radical possibility, a space
of resistance’ (hooks, 1990, p. 149).