Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

by Rebekah Taussig

this Full-Time Working Adult system punishes many more bodies than just mine—bodies

A system that measures our worth by an arbitrary amount of work that our bodies and minds are supposed to be able to produce within narrow parameters of time and space punishes all of us. We all eventually sag under its unsustainability.

Why are we so enamored with this vision of Hard Work before and above any other model?

I wonder, does my disability swallow my womanhood?

In order to assert that we do deserve education and work and the right to exist in public, women have felt the need to claim their strength and hide any perceived weaknesses. Because, in a very real way, they could be used as evidence to send us home.

how do we disrupt the great disparity between the powerful and powerless, and what are alternate ways to access power while caring for each other?

The medical model of disability—the default setting that sees individual broken bodies in need of individual solutions—misses so many opportunities to imagine a more flexible, accessible, inclusive, inviting world for all of us.

Access is more than the moment one disabled body bumps into one accommodating object. Access is a way of life, a relationship between you and the world around you;