Disability Visibility : First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

by Alice Wong

Harriet McBryde Johnson wrote that storytelling is an activity, a shared experience, not an object.

I’ve never claimed to be free of prejudice, just struggling with it.

it is differential treatment—disability discrimination—to try to prevent most suicides while facilitating the suicides of ill and disabled people.

Choices are structured by oppression. We shouldn’t offer assistance with suicide until we all have the assistance we need to get out of bed in the morning and live a good life. Common causes of suicidality—dependence, institutional confinement, being a burden—are entirely curable.

we are free when we use our freedom to advance the rights of all members of our community;

no one expects you to do anything in the institution but survive.

Unfortunately, we live in a society that assumes joy is impossible for disabled people, associating disability with only sadness and shame.

I may not find joy every day. Some days will just be hard, and I will simply exist, and that’s okay, too.

It is hard to be a pro-choice disabled person who understands that believing in bodily autonomy means you have to support the idea that other people—your friends, your peers, your siblings—may

choose to abort a pregnancy because their child could be like you.

Buck v. Bell—the 1927 U.S. Supreme Court case in which the sterilization of people with disabilities was ruled constitutional—has never been overturned.

Except for so many artists, mental illness didn’t make them great. It made them ill. And if they weren’t careful, it made them gone.

“rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.”

Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get.

just knowing your rights (or your worth or value) will never be enough if you are powerless to force someone else to respect them.

Disability justice exists every place two disabled people meet—at a kitchen table, on heating pads in bed talking to our loves. Our power and our vulnerability are often in our revolutionary obscurity and the horizontal ways of organizing that can come from it.

a queered or cripped understanding of ancestorship holds that our deepest relationships are with people we choose to be connected to and honor day after day.

It is very rare, as a disabled person, that I have an intense sense of belonging, of being not just tolerated or included in a space but actively owning it;

Those in positions of power, evidently fearing that people are talking about them behind closed doors, persistently insist on barging into such spaces. They call these spaces divisive, and their organizers are told that they aren’t valuing the contributions of allies. These bursts of petty outrage at stumbling upon one of the few places in the world that is not open to them inadvertently highlight exactly why such places are needed.