Disability and Preoccupation

Some colleagues at Syracuse University recently characterized me as a bully—a nomination as false as it is offensive. Calling an outspoken or forceful disabled person a “bully” is like naming a person of color “uppity” or a woman the “b” word. But this is how discrimination works—first by lingo, then by the politics of spoiled identity. “He’s too hot to handle.” “She’s unreliable.” “He’s disruptive.” This should be clear enough. But what do I mean by “preoccupation”?

Preoccupation equals privilege and protection—the “P” words are practical. Able bodied people are diverse and range widely in their temperaments and capacities. But we don’t say able bodied people are “uppity” since they occupy their proper station in our nation’s embodied politics. Now they might need accommodations: beauty aids, Calvin Klein, or, as used to be the case, elocution lessons, but such things are reasonable. What is unreasonable, what’s tacitly enjoined, is imagining—conceiving of—the corrollary interplay between inaccessible environments and the embodied privilege of ableism. Thus preoccupation is both justification for inaccessibility and obfuscation.  It appears in various idiomatic expressions: “doesn’t someone else handle this?”; “I knew a crippled person once and she didn’t have these problems.”; “We put a Braille sign on the bathroom door—what more do you want?”.  The latter is so commonplace I wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard it. “What more do you want?” 

I remember a colleague, a professor of art, who once told a student he wanted a trip to Paris in response to the anticipated question about an assignment—“what do you want”—and yes, let’s throw Joni Mitchell in too—to be a free man in Paris, unfettered and alive. Preoccupation is all about the fetters. Idiomatically: “Let’s not think about this today.” “Look Mr. Wheelchair. We got you into the building. Now you want to use the bathroom?”

It takes a lot of muscle to be preoccupied in this way. Freud called it “reaction formation”—a psychological defense mechanism wherein anxiety is masked by compensatory exaggeration. The overly solicitous person is actually cruel; the fuddy duddy is really a sadist. Ableism takes energy. But it’s easy on the idioms.

One useful way to think of able bodied preoccupation is to understand it as a social lie. The poet Kenneth Rexroth put it this way:

“The masters, whether they be priests or kings or capitalists, when they want to exploit you, the first thing they have to do is demoralize you, and they demoralize you very simply by kicking you in the nuts. This is how it’s done.” 

There is something wrong with you my Dear. Since there’s nothing overtly classifiable about your defect we will sell you night repair cream; whitening toothpaste; lifts for your shoes; depilatories. 

Preoccupation depends on selling the transience of physical well being. Against this the cripples are arrayed. And in this way they’re frightening.

If my colleagues wanted they could call me outspoken; passionate; even tiresome. Bully means I’m predatory and defective, which is not the case, unless one thinks a blind man is terribly terribly scary.