Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

by Rebekah Taussig

For starters, there’s a contradiction between saying a workplace is inclusive even as it participates in the larger cultural values that celebrate everything a disabled body is not. There’s something unsettling about offering accommodations for an “exceptional” body when the entire system surrounding that body is built on the assumption that more and faster and harder and higher is fundamentally, inherently superior. When you applaud your employees only for arbitrary measurement of work—arriving early, leaving late, never taking sick days or time off, or showing up on the weekend—when you always push for more—production, happy hours, publications, softball teams, cases, meetings, tasks, involvement, spirit, extra—you do not demonstrate an appreciation for those who have a need, who say no, enforce boundaries, or require flexibility—the very stuff of accommodations masked under different names.