"DISability"

"Examined" is a short video featuring Sunaura Taylor and Judith Butler going for a walk on the streets in San Francisco while having conversations  around accessibility, disability, and interdependency.  Sunaura is a person that was born with arthrogyposis and is now confined to a wheelchair.  She specifically moved to San Francisco because of the accessibility of the area.  Some aspects of every day life like curb cuts on sidewalks, businesses being accessible, and accessibility to public transportation make living much easier.  Even walking down the street where I live in Pawtucket it is obvious that the sidewalks are in need of desperate repair in order to serve this population.  Many sidewalks are not paved or are impassable because of a structural blockage like a telephone pole or tree.  These things are something that are necessary for people to be able to have physical access to the community.

This physical accessibility then turns into social acceptability.  Sunaura even said that since these things are in place to help it be physical assessable that "it also leads to a social acceptability, that somehow because - because there's physical access, there're simply more disabled people out and about in the world.  And so people have learned how to interact with them and are used to them in this certain way. And so the physical access actually lead to, um, a social access, an acceptance" (2:13). There isn't much education on people that are different from you until you encounter them in some portion of your life.  I think that this exposure and learning about other people, whether they are disabled or not, can help with the issue of interdependency addressed at the end of the video.  Too many people do not help simply because they do not know how to help or are fearful of making things worse despite good intentions.

Sunaura became aware of disability as a political issue in her early 20's through this, she learned that in disability studies they have a distinction between disability and impairment.  The CDC's definition of disability and impairment can be found here.  "So impairment would be my- my body, my embodiment right now. The fact that I was born with arthrogyposis, which affects- what the medical world has labeled as arthrogyposis ... and then there's disability which is basically the - the social repression of disabled people" (4:31).  And this repression could be in the form of limited housing availabilities, they do not have career opportunities, and being socially isolated.


If you break down the word "disability" the prefix 'dis' meaning not, opposite, or away and 'able' having the definition of having the power, skills, means, or opportunity to do something the word 'disability' really has a wider umbrella then just those that are physically or mentally handicapped.   This idea of disability is addressed in the beginning of another video I watched On Equality - Angela Davis and Judith Butler in Conversation. Judith Butler states

"Equality is a question of equal treatment and equal opportunity but also having lives that are regarded as being equal worth to all other lives and being able to exercise bodily freedoms that includes.  I mean for people that are in chairs or who have other kinds of disabilities, access, and movement, but also let's think about it, there are a lot of people who can't move on the street. I mean who has the freedom to move in safety without being shot, without being harassed, without finding an impediment with a curb stop.  These issues are linked and I just want to underscore that the ability to move and to have the technology and the infrastructure that lets people move and assemble and participate and enter into space and transverse the public sphere is part of our freedom and is also a place where we find radical inequality" (6:21)

To which Angela even replies " I totally appreciate the way in which you so eloquently allowed us to think about the degree to which issues of ability and disability are interwoven into all issues of inequality and injustice" (7:42).  This idea that a disability is not being able to do something, affects many citizens in the United States.  It reminds me of the video that we watched at the beginning of this course "In Sickness and in Wealth".  Simply being able to, or not being able to accomplish a task because of outside forces like the environment you live in and the resources available to you brings us back to this idea of interdependency.  "Do we or do we not live in a world where we assist each other? Do we or do we not help each other with basic needs?" 'Examined' (13:15) And aren't those two very good questions...