AGAINST TECHNOABLEISM

A powerful manifesto against ableist thinking.

Many nondisabled people think that disabled people just want to be “normal.” As this brief, outstanding text shows, that’s not only wrong, but cruel. Shew, a professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech, lost a leg to cancer at age 30 and suffered damaged hearing and “chemo brain” from the follow-up treatment. The first lie she heard was how wonderful new high-tech prosthetics were. In reality, the simplest, noncomputerized below-the-knee replacement costs $8,000 to $16,000, and all require a lifetime of return visits, adjustments, and replacements. Private insurance and Medicaid will cover some of the cost but never all, so the poor do without. Shew denounces the stereotypical story of a paraplegic “overcoming” a disability by moving around with the aid of new technology even as walking remains difficult. A wheelchair—“the universal icon of disability” that “requires the world to adjust to the disabled person”—is a much better way to get around. Although framed as a denunciation of technoableism, the belief that technical advances will “cure” disability, this book is a more inclusive, intensely squirm-inducing attack on the almost universal conviction that disabled people are broken and require fixing. The author makes a convincing case that their first priority is to get on with their lives and that their leading problem is not technical but social. “The world is set up to exclude disabled people,” writes Shew, and readers who insist they are an exception will crumble before her list of the disability clichés that saturate the media. There are the “pitiable freaks,” in which “disabled people are cast as either objects of curious medical interest or as objects of pity and charity”; the “shameful sinners,” a trope that “frames disability as a punishment or penance for some kind of sinful action”; and the “inspirational overcomers,” sometimes known as “inspiration porn” in the disability community.

Essential reading for the disabled and nondisabled alike.