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What’s wrong with me has more to do with exclusion, objectification, pity, and disdain than with honest muscle and bone.
Approaching disability through the lens of culture allows us to recognize disability as a dimension of human diversity. This perspective has often been overlooked in religious circles. Religious communities have more often tended to treat disability as a problem to be solved than a perspective to be embraced.
Disability is spiritual dissent. Disability politics are a provocative challenge to prevailing conceptions of human value, a refusal to swallow the lie that some bodies and minds deserve to be discarded or disdained.
Even when our sacred stories feature disabled characters, the texts themselves and the thinkers who interpret them almost always speak from a nondisabled perspective.
Disability communities have honed a critical body of knowledge about what it means to practice interdependence, mutuality, love, and care. We know something vital about how to live on the underside of power, how to fight for lives that are often disregarded and disdained. Disability has taught me much about the potent spiritual subversiveness of being radically comfortable in my own skin, of daring to find the presence of God in this fierce and fragile flesh.
I make a similar claim: that the experience of disability often results in powerful insight and expertise. I don’t just mean the raw physical fact of living with an unconventional body-mind. I mean the experience of living in a world not built to fit us. I mean the experience of contending with ableism, with the violent denial of disability as a source of value in this world.
The wheelchair is ubiquitous as a sign and signal of disability, so much so that it often crowds out other experiences of disability. Whether in popular media or in the international symbol of access that graces everything from barrier-free entrances to parking placards, contemporary culture has fashioned wheels into the standard marker of disability.
Requesting access puts the burden of disclosure on the disabled person.
The burden of disclosure also means
we carry the weight of other people’s doubts.
Definitions are a matter of power. The act of defining disability isn’t an academic exercise. It’s an act that’s played out on our bodies, our backs.
The answer to that question—are you disabled enough?—has the power to shape whether we get by or whether we get left behind.
Remember, you weren’t the one Who made you ashamed, But you are the one Who can make you proud … You get proud by practicing.
To think politically about disability is to recognize that ableism invests physical and mental difference with extraordinary consequences. It is to track the visceral impact of disability difference, to see how it contours a life.
Doing away with the category of disability makes it harder to recognize and resist ableism.
The exclusion of disabled people isn’t a natural, inevitable fact of the body. It’s a product of policy choices, of built environments, of cultural norms that have visceral, real-world impact.
Human beings developed mass incarceration, insane asylums, and the eugenics movement. We built this world, and we built it in ways that destroy people’s lives.
or who is a hunchback, or a dwarf,
Note how the hierarchies of the present are projected onto the heavens. Observe how neatly the biblical obsession with perfect bodies reinforces the notion of perfect service, how honor demands deference and obedience to authority.
Staring is part of the architecture of social exclusion and marginality. The stare is a crucial part of what makes disability a meaningful social category. It’s the stare that turns disability difference into deviance.
To speak of disability loss risks amplifying the one story most nondisabled people tell about my life. To acknowledge grief means stoking ableism’s fire, feeding fuel to the assumption that my disabled life is a tale of sorrow and sadness, grief and lament.
The basic rule is simple: never let them see you grieve.
It’s not precisely that I want to hide the fact of pain. It’s that I don’t trust what people will do with it. Any grief I show gets weaponized, turned back to cut me twice. Ableism has narrowed the range of emotions I can safely show you. It contours what I feel, and whether I will ever give it voice. I speak of loss only in my most intimate relationships, with the friends and kin who are my bedrock.
Angel Miles. “Rather than solely working towards wellness or cure,” Miles says, “a less ableist goal would be to work towards freedom. A world free of injustice and health inequalities caused by them.”3
A few of us get what all of us deserve, while most are left to live for years or for a lifetime off of scraps and leavings. We live in a world without equal access to the waters.
In many disability circles, the choice to embrace a disabled bodymind is bedrock: a stance that powers disability politics and drives disability culture.
“Defectiveness justifies cure and makes it essential.”
Because it mistakes what is broken, it leaves the architecture of ableism in place.
Saying no to cure isn’t saying no to care. It’s saying no to the way that dominant culture sidelines disabled folks by imagining us tidied up and made well, our bodies and minds no longer an impediment or a stumbling block.
how ableism and anti-Judaism interlock.
When Jesus heals? The Gospels’ writers almost always fashion “the Jews” as critics and naysayers.
Disability becomes shorthand for describing spiritual insufficiency.
The trope of the blind Jew has a long and difficult history.
All too often, the message of social change and radical solidarity with disabled people ends up casting Judaism as the oppressor. Jews and Jewish tradition get positioned as a bitter, repressive force—the “old order” that
must pass away so that Jesus can usher in a new age of kindness, compassion, and liberation. In affirming Jesus as the symbol of all that is good and just and right, Levine explains, Christian preachers and teachers have often cast “his Jewish background as the epitome of all that is wrong with the world.”
When Christians push those undesirable ideas away by scripting them solely onto Judaism, they disown a crucial part of the work.
Excellence became my shield, my protection against pity. But it makes a brittle armor, and the cost of carrying it is high.
We often have times in our lives where our bodies or minds change, where our old strategies prove insufficient, where we need to learn new tech, new tools, new modes of adaptation. At those moments, we’re acutely vulnerable to the undertow of ableism.
Elegance offered some thin protection from the weight of the world’s disdain.
This is one of the ways that ableism scours me: this relentless pressure to be competent, to give no credence to naysayers, to have it all together, always.
In popular culture, the link between disability and death is profound. Consider the fate of most characters who become disabled on screen or on the novelist’s page. More often than not? Before the final scene rolls, they’re either healed or dead. To keep a disabled character alive on stage, on screen, or in the world? To keep their disability intact, without neutralizing its power? It’s the rarest of choices, a thing we almost never get to see.
Advocates for physician-assisted suicide bank on the public assumption that disability is an unlivable life, an appropriate reason that people want to kill themselves.
Disability is the thing most people despise about aging, the thing that most of us fear. It’s not growing old that folks resent; it’s that age goes hand in hand with impairment.
Even if you aren’t born disabled, even if you haven’t become disabled over the course of your lives, you’ll likely acquire disability as you age.
Disability is often intertwined with trauma.
It reinforces the feeling that “we are set up to fail in a system that structurally disempowers us, despite our best efforts to do all of the right things.”
disability accentuates our vulnerability, and the world can’t wait to take advantage.
But framing vulnerability as an inherent property of disabled bodies overlooks crucial questions about the way that vulnerability gets baked into the social structures and systems we inherit, the way it gets intensified by society’s choices.
Disability can be bound up with transformation, with our own becoming. It can be a catalyst, a place of possibility. Those who wrestle with the angel will be changed. It’s a path most commentators decide not to pursue.
There’s a tendency in some quarters to imagine people with disabilities as spiritually gifted, as “blessed” with a particular closeness to God. In American popular culture, this notion burst into popularity with the 1953 publication of TV star Dale Evans Rogers’s Angel Unaware, told through the voice of her daughter Robin Elizabeth,
