The extremes of disabled illustration that we often discover in mainstream media — superhuman disabled folks on the one hand, pitiful creatures in want of a treatment on the opposite — are created, nearly solely, by nondisabled folks for nondisabled folks. This maybe explains why they’re so redundant and out of contact with our expertise. It will be laughable if these photographs didn’t translate immediately into discrimination within the office, within the medical institution, in our artistic establishments. I and different blind writers expertise this in each apparent and delicate methods. As an illustration, we regularly hear from editors and different determination makers, “Oh, we like this work, however we simply revealed a blind creator.” Culturally talking, it reinforces the concept we will have just one blind particular person at a time within the room.
My fellow writers are these I do know finest, however there’s a rising neighborhood of disabled artists, thinkers, performers and creators, a few of whom Keller might have applauded, others maybe not. We don’t all should agree; the numbers and selection are what’s necessary as a way to crumble the monoliths that serve principally to maintain a majority of disabled folks from flourishing. We acquire energy in these numbers.
In my very own journey of turning into a broadcast creator, I’ve had a whole lot of assist from my fellow blind writers, comparable to Jim Knipfel, the primary modern blind voice I’d ever learn and whose New York Press column, “Slackjaw,” confirmed me that we could possibly be humorous and irreverent; and contemporaries like James Tate Hill, whose new memoir, “Blind Man’s Bluff,” tells the story of central imaginative and prescient loss much like my very own, dismantling the strict binary of sight and blindness. They’ve helped me negotiate the writing course of and publishing trade in ways in which sighted writers by no means might have.
Different writers are increasing incapacity tradition in new and thrilling methods. Elsa Sjunneson is a deaf-blind author and editor whose forthcoming guide, “Being Seen,” is a radical takedown of ableism, demanding that the nondisabled world adapt and alter across the disabled physique. John Lee Clark is a deaf-blind poet, essayist and Protactile educator with two books forthcoming. Protactile is a touch-based communication system developed by and for the deaf-blind neighborhood. Clark is essentially the most well-connected particular person I do know, with a deaf-blind community that isn’t simply nationwide but in addition international. He has helped me to consider the flip aspect of accessibility and inclusion — the hazards and frustrations inherent in at all times clamoring to be let into the mainstream and the significance of making our personal tradition primarily based on the senses we take pleasure in. If we actually need extra range within the tales we inform, then maybe we have to make room for various methods of telling them.
So sure, let’s take a second to have fun Helen Keller, after which let’s think about what it would imply to be like her, to do what she would do now — to work arduous to speak with every kind of individuals, to combat for the rights of others in addition to ourselves and to comprehend that acceptance and inclusion are ever-evolving issues made attainable by selection and willpower, not by miracles.
M. Leona Godin is a author, performer and educator and the creator of “There Plant Eyes: A Private and Cultural Historical past of Blindness.” She has taught literature and humanities programs at New York College and has lectured on artwork, accessibility, expertise and incapacity throughout the nation. Her on-line journal Aromatica Poetica explores the humanities and sciences of odor and style.
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