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A review by storytold
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories From the Twenty-first Century by Alice Wong
3.25
This book did what it set out to do. It is an anthology of essays and speeches, many of them reprints from the internet at large, from people with a wide range of disabilities speaking about their lives, their values, their needs, and their communities. In the introduction, editor Alice Wong notes that she is always looking for more accounts from everyday people with disabilities rather than the usual inspiration-porn anecdotes, and what she has compiled is exactly that. These are parents, lawyers, prisoners, artists, patients, advocates; they're people of colour, queer, Indigenous, all writing or speaking to their experiences, successes, wants, needs, accommodations. It's a book that acknowledges community and calls to build it; it's a call to action on many fronts. It offers countless paradigm shifts to its reader, and imagines an accessible world in a dozen different ways from a dozen different perspectives.
On a writing and enjoyment level—as, in other words, a book rather than a text—it wasn't generally there for me. Because the essays were often reprints, they weren't operating in concert with each other; the usual anthology problem. I was riveted by the first essay, penned by the late great Harriet McBryde Johnson about going head-to-head with Peter Singer, known primarily as an animal rights philosopher and less prominently known as a eugenicist. The essay can still be read in the New York Times, and I heartily recommend it because it's an all-time banger. This essay did on its own for me what the entire anthology was meant to do, and because it started off so strong, I found myself turning the pages looking for essays of similar strength. While many pieces had me considering and reconsidering community in appropriately socialist ways—for this reason alone, the book was a worthy read—nothing felt quite as complex and messy as that first essay, and so I came away from the book feeling unfulfilled.
As we moved toward essays penned more recently than 2003, the Personal Essay Internet Era became the dominant style of the anthology. No shade against it; I've made a few bucks that way. But I felt like I was reading similar pieces with a similar "moral" quality in succession. Likely this effect would have been tempered if I'd taken longer than 24 hours to read the book, but for an anthology with a delightful and integral variety of perspectives, it didn't always feel as though the variety made its way to style. This isn't a fault of the authors, or the anthology. If anything, it's an annoying bug left over from 8 years of internet editors wanting those clicks; at least one title is overtly rendered in clickbaity style. But it did impact my enjoyment.
This book seemed primarily, as put by another reviewer, "consciousness raising." I do feel confused about how to respond to this. I can't identify who the target audience for this anthology was. It filled so many niches that it might be weakened for it. I was disposed to enjoy Harriet McBryde Johnson's essay as a former student of moral philosophy and former aspirant to a law career. (I found it odd that, as someone who was assigned Peter Singer several times between 2007 and 2010, I was never assigned her rebuttal to read!) But McBryde Johnson was, in many ways, an exceptional person. The other essays I particularly enjoyed were also from people who have achieved considerable professional success in their advocacy: Britney Wilson's on Access-A-Ride, which she relies on to get her to and from her law office each day, stood out; as did Reyma McCoy McDeid's "Lost Cause" on how she is now the Executive Director of a social housing organization despite being written off for most of her life (isn't sourced online).
This may be particularly illuminating of my flaws as a reader; it may be that I found greater enjoyment in writing from professional advocates who are accustomed to presenting nuanced views plainly and compellingly; it is likely both. Other essays and speeches highlighted the lives and needs of community—rather than professional—advocates, which were illuminating particularly when there were jocular disagreements between some of the essays. Intracommunity views are diverse and sometimes contradictory. Another essay that stood out was Rebecca Cokley's pro-choice essay that gently rebutted some of the hard lines Harriet McBryde Johnson drew while acknowledging advocacy's need for such lines. There are necessary essays in this anthology, too, about disabled joy and mutual aid. It's not a suffering endurance event, and thus well suited to offer rounded experiential accounts of people marginalized for their disabilities.
Was this book intended to raise consciousness among abled people, or was it intended, as Wong intimated in the introduction, to reflect real disabled people to real disabled communities? Was it both? Maybe it doesn't matter; it's Disabilities made Visible. There was a need for this book; now it exists; I'm glad it exists; I hope it blows minds the way McBryde Johnson's essay blew mine.
My sense of dissatisfaction, being my own fault more than the book's, had me coming away with a little project for myself. I read Amanda LeDuc's Disfigured earlier this year, and my views on it waver depending on the day. Last month I (re)read the first chapter of Rejected Bodies by Susan Wendell, a book I apparently read in full for grad school if my highlights are any indication but remember nothing about. I've also got Esme Wang's Collected Schizophrenias out from the library, a book I've been meaning to pick up for a long time.
I guess I don't know what I'm looking for, except that this book felt to me more like a textbook than anything else and that's not it. Maybe I'll have more to say when I've read more widely. I would recommend this as a broad, neatly compiled overview of disability rights, activism, and experience, largely as told on the internet, for better or worse.
On a writing and enjoyment level—as, in other words, a book rather than a text—it wasn't generally there for me. Because the essays were often reprints, they weren't operating in concert with each other; the usual anthology problem. I was riveted by the first essay, penned by the late great Harriet McBryde Johnson about going head-to-head with Peter Singer, known primarily as an animal rights philosopher and less prominently known as a eugenicist. The essay can still be read in the New York Times, and I heartily recommend it because it's an all-time banger. This essay did on its own for me what the entire anthology was meant to do, and because it started off so strong, I found myself turning the pages looking for essays of similar strength. While many pieces had me considering and reconsidering community in appropriately socialist ways—for this reason alone, the book was a worthy read—nothing felt quite as complex and messy as that first essay, and so I came away from the book feeling unfulfilled.
As we moved toward essays penned more recently than 2003, the Personal Essay Internet Era became the dominant style of the anthology. No shade against it; I've made a few bucks that way. But I felt like I was reading similar pieces with a similar "moral" quality in succession. Likely this effect would have been tempered if I'd taken longer than 24 hours to read the book, but for an anthology with a delightful and integral variety of perspectives, it didn't always feel as though the variety made its way to style. This isn't a fault of the authors, or the anthology. If anything, it's an annoying bug left over from 8 years of internet editors wanting those clicks; at least one title is overtly rendered in clickbaity style. But it did impact my enjoyment.
This book seemed primarily, as put by another reviewer, "consciousness raising." I do feel confused about how to respond to this. I can't identify who the target audience for this anthology was. It filled so many niches that it might be weakened for it. I was disposed to enjoy Harriet McBryde Johnson's essay as a former student of moral philosophy and former aspirant to a law career. (I found it odd that, as someone who was assigned Peter Singer several times between 2007 and 2010, I was never assigned her rebuttal to read!) But McBryde Johnson was, in many ways, an exceptional person. The other essays I particularly enjoyed were also from people who have achieved considerable professional success in their advocacy: Britney Wilson's on Access-A-Ride, which she relies on to get her to and from her law office each day, stood out; as did Reyma McCoy McDeid's "Lost Cause" on how she is now the Executive Director of a social housing organization despite being written off for most of her life (isn't sourced online).
This may be particularly illuminating of my flaws as a reader; it may be that I found greater enjoyment in writing from professional advocates who are accustomed to presenting nuanced views plainly and compellingly; it is likely both. Other essays and speeches highlighted the lives and needs of community—rather than professional—advocates, which were illuminating particularly when there were jocular disagreements between some of the essays. Intracommunity views are diverse and sometimes contradictory. Another essay that stood out was Rebecca Cokley's pro-choice essay that gently rebutted some of the hard lines Harriet McBryde Johnson drew while acknowledging advocacy's need for such lines. There are necessary essays in this anthology, too, about disabled joy and mutual aid. It's not a suffering endurance event, and thus well suited to offer rounded experiential accounts of people marginalized for their disabilities.
Was this book intended to raise consciousness among abled people, or was it intended, as Wong intimated in the introduction, to reflect real disabled people to real disabled communities? Was it both? Maybe it doesn't matter; it's Disabilities made Visible. There was a need for this book; now it exists; I'm glad it exists; I hope it blows minds the way McBryde Johnson's essay blew mine.
My sense of dissatisfaction, being my own fault more than the book's, had me coming away with a little project for myself. I read Amanda LeDuc's Disfigured earlier this year, and my views on it waver depending on the day. Last month I (re)read the first chapter of Rejected Bodies by Susan Wendell, a book I apparently read in full for grad school if my highlights are any indication but remember nothing about. I've also got Esme Wang's Collected Schizophrenias out from the library, a book I've been meaning to pick up for a long time.
I guess I don't know what I'm looking for, except that this book felt to me more like a textbook than anything else and that's not it. Maybe I'll have more to say when I've read more widely. I would recommend this as a broad, neatly compiled overview of disability rights, activism, and experience, largely as told on the internet, for better or worse.