Why Disability Studies Matter
Lennard J. Davis writes on Why Disability Studies Matters:
Here's where disability studies comes in. If this film were obviously anti-gay, or anti-women, or anti-abortion, the university community would know what to do. That community has been well taught in the areas of race, gender, sexual orientation, and women's rights. Most academics would respect the rights of filmmakers to make any film they want, that is they would protect freedom of speech and creativity. But they would most certainly speak out against films, novels, plays or any artwork that demeaned people of color, gay people, or any oppressed group. Yet the average university student or faculty member still does not have even the most rudimentary understanding of disability as an identity category. In that sense, disability is where race or gender was in the 1950's or earlier.
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I find this appalling because this reinforces the peurile concept that people cannot think without being told what to think. Here are the most educated people in society being unable to extend their intellect beyond the boundaries what they have learnt. Why a bigoted red-neck has got a better handle on humanity than these university types have. For the former, the disabled are still human beings like them.
In that sense, most so-called "normal" people do not feel comfortable talking with a person using a wheelchair, a quadriplegic, a Deaf person, a blind person, a person with mental retardation or a person who has been treated for serious mental problems, someone who has cerebral palsy, who is spastic, and so on. That level of comfort one has with normals just isn't there. There will be the hesitancy about making eye contact, the desire to look with the simultaneous avoidance of looking. That behavior alone should tell anyone that the relations between people with disabilities and nondisabled is a problematic and fraught one. Indeed, for most people, it is a relationship based on ignorance and liberal notions of sympathy and pity. In other words, to put the matter bluntly, it is the relation between an oppressor group and an oppressed group.
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This is a bit over the top. The only economic exploitation occurs at the "sheltered workshop" and at fast-food restaurants where the intellecually disabled are employed. Then it is a matter of degree - the other workers are just as exploited. On the other hand, I find courageous that the firms like Hungry Jacks and KFC have taken this route of putting people with Down's Syndrome into the public arena. (OK! Not all Capitalists are cold heartless bastards.)
For a Communist, the analysis of oppression begins with the economic relationship. The only economic relationship between the "normals" and the rest of us is that the "normals" consider the economic cost of keeping us alive too alive. They would rather be spending money on cars, plasma TVs, and other consumer items.
Disability studies has the potential to make people see that the world has been designed to exclude many people with disabilities from the wheel chair user to the person with cognitive or affective disorders. People need to know the way that poverty is interwoven with disability so that even now more than 60 per cent of people with disabilities in the US are unemployed, and throughout the world two-thirds of the disabled live in poverty.
Oh great! Another fucking university course on how to be a decent human being or at least pretend to be.
The secret is EMPATHY.
We do not need symposia, lectures, magazines, etc. We just need people to open their fucking eyes and their hearts to see the world through our eyes (metaphorically speaking). You do not need a PhD to have humanity.
My previous rants on this subject are at:
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