Disability is a social construct and and we must organise intersectionality against sysytems of oppression; We should be concerned not with disability rights but disability justice. New Radical Model
The problem has always been in the definition of an identity. Diversity is a fact but inclusion is a choice. Inclusion depends on who is doing the defining who. Understand the importance of defining disability. Inclusion depends on who does the defining. The Social Model comes closer to the truth by separating Disability from Impairment. Impairment defines the physical features of the body as opposed to the physical environmental impacts in creating exclusion, discrimination and oppression of a body as disability.
Christine Sun Kim and Khairani Barokka demonstrate the intelligence, beauty and power their work carries. Christine Sun Kim invites us to listen with our eyes as well as our ears. She shows how the feedback is an internal, visceral energy so far removed from the sign language which is spatial and external. Both her and Villisa Thompson highlight the need for an intersectional approach, Kim struggling with her parents learning English in the sign language. Villisa emphasises the need for dialogue and Ally.
It is important that I not only know my own positionality and unconscious bias, but am able to encourage the learner to situate themselves and find the confidence to assert their own identity in the creative environment. The individuals experience has to be taken into account for a social justice pedagogy. Freire asserts that education should increase an individual’s humanity not decrease it. Privileges as well as multiple marginalizations in the Non-Western and Western contexts need to be spoken about freely. The pandemic and its associated lockdown impacted the whole world but lets not forget that some lives have been in lockdown well before this one perpetuated by our ignorance.
According to both bell hooks and Paolo Freire education is an act of love, a place of solidarity, mutual respect and an act of resistance against the oppressor. I would argue that a body unable to feel love is both impaired and disabled. Here again, we need to situate ourselves and the structures and spaces we create through the lens of love. More often than not, the love and strength that has fought patriarchal violence in all its forms has come from the margins. Based on hooks, Lorde and Freire, I would argue that the most able human being, is one whose heart is able to give and receive love and the heart unable to receive or give love is disabled and impaired. If leadership was based on this ability, I wonder what our spaces would look like?
I hope to empower learners through pointing them towards resources available at the university and to value their lived experiences by providing a safe space for that expression and conversation to take place so that they can embody university’s motto that the Arts can change the world.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/confronting-the-whitewash_b_10574994?guccounter=1
Deaf-accessibility-for-spoonies-lessons-from-touring-Eve-and-Mary-Are-Having-Coffee-while-chronically-ill.pdf
2 responses to “Disability”
Dear Khaver,
Thank you for your insightful blog post on disability. I am really interested in your idea of education and arts as an act of love and would love to hear more about it. In my course (BA Performance: Design & Practice, CSM) we have students every year who do projects around the idea of ‘art as love’ or ‘performance as love’. I find this topic very powerful, but also challenging, as it is difficult to engage with such a loaded concept, which has countless ways of being understood, researched, interpreted and practiced. I often see students who have a passion for this theme but struggle to articulate it as substantial research material and as a subject of practice, as it intertwines the personal and the social. My speculation is that love sometimes exists in the realm of personal ‘belief’ or ‘faith’, which requires a certain set of skills to approach as a research subject. I wonder if you have any experience of delivering a session on love and how we can understand, revitalise and implement this history-long, complicated concept and act of humanity into creative practice. If you have, I would love to know more about your experience and thoughts on this. Thanks!
Dear Khaver,
I’d like to highlight the first part of this post that really impacted me as I read your words then link it to one of your later questions.
A new radical model is indeed needed and I was inspired by the concept of disability justice rather than rights. We have replaced this in so many areas of activism, I wonder why this term is not as familiar. Again, it comes down to power and who is doing the defining, as you say. The impairment can be is physical yet also invisible in many cases or non-physical and harder to define. As we know, humans love to define things, give them parameters and binary spaces. The oppression is on the body yet also the unseen, the misunderstood, the undefinable and the unknown.
I think of chronic illness or long covid and the grey space that is inhabited in society by those who suffer with these conditions.
Your last part is both beautiful and acerbic: “Based on hooks, Lorde and Freire, I would argue that the most able human being, is one whose heart is able to give and receive love and the heart unable to receive or give love is disabled and impaired. If leadership was based on this ability, I wonder what our spaces would look like?”
When we consider what leadership is, could be and should be, it is a harsh truth that it is not based on love at all. Can we have disability justice without it? Thank you for prompting many of these thoughts and more.