Disability and Attitude

Here's the thing about openly challenging narratives surrounding disability: it pisses people off. When you say, "thanks but it's really not that inspiring that I put my clothes on and left my apartment today," they get a little miffed. When you post an article on Facebook about inspo-porn and the damage it causes, they get a lot angry and tell you that they do indeed have every right to have cuddly feelings about disabled people being disabled and the fact that you want to lay claim to your own body and the semiotics of your body just means you have a very bad attitude and it is no wonder you are still disabled and you are not inspiring at all.

It's actually a little bit funny, you know, the whole performance of disability thing. I mean, I get it. I get that non-disabled people want to feel cuddly and cute about us. They want to have that "everything could be worse" and "if she can deal with that, I can deal with this" stuff going on. But that's not an attitude of caring. It's an attitude of condescension. The people who care about disability are the people who are fighting for healthcare and public transportation and housing--and for the most part, those people are disabled. And whenever I fight for that stuff, whenever I say that my neighbors and I shouldn't have to deal with infestations of cockroaches or bedbugs or whatever the hell is invading our building, whenever I say that people shouldn't have to carry their mother/sister/daughter/son/father/brother up concrete stairs in a wheelchair because the disability housing list is so long they're no longer accepting applications; I'm told I have a bad attitude. That's ok. I don't need to be reassured about my attitude. I know a good attitude doesn't create housing or healthcare. My fierce and unrelenting advocacy might do something, though. The photos I take to document abuses in public housing might do something. They won't make people feel warm and fuzzy, but they might inspire change. And change is what we need.

I know that if I did something like help make beauty pageants for disabled girls, I'd get a lot less of this "get your bad attitude of my lawn" stuff. I'd also be furthering the myth of disability exception. And non-disableds would feel ok about "benevolent" discrimination and exclusion because we've got our own pageants and our own places and we don't need to be included.

I see a quote passed around by a lot of mothers of disabled children: "A disabled child wants what every child wants: to be accepted." This disabled adult wants what everyone wants: to be herself; to be herself in a world where her body is deviant and often defiant; to be herself without conforming to the expectations of society or confirming those expectations; to be herself with love for that self, without shame or regret or excuses.