I’m disabled, and Sitting Pretty is the first time I’ve ever seen my experience of the world reflected in a memoir. It was truly world-changing for me. If you’re interested in more intersectional disabled povs, I’d recommend Amy Kenny’s My Body is Not a Prayer Request, which explores disability justice in the Church.
Jan 18·edited Jan 18Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant
I'm so thankful for Taussig's work and have learned so much from her. Happy to see her featured here alongside these thoughts.
The documentary "Crip Camp" (on Netflix) was formative in my thinking and helped me understand disability rights and the disability community. Highly recommend. Like many things, we've come so far and have so very, very far to go.
In particular, Freddie muses on the dangers of reducing dependence on others’ accommodation to legal entitlement, and on the importance of kindness and normalcy in tolerating “weirdos”. An excerpt:
“The normalcy of others is not a straightjacket confining the weirdo but the necessary backdrop against which their essential nature can be better understood. To me, that’s a far more beautiful and mature thing than yet another tired story about the misunderstood outsider whose weirdness was the source of their brilliance. Eccentricity can be good or bad, some kinds should be accepted, some merely tolerated, it all depends. Sometimes weird is bad but we must accommodate it all the same.”
Besides the fact that it can, in fact, be quite difficult to secure something merely because you’re legally entitled to it, the persona granted or denied the entitlement is a flattened one — not really you, or at least it shouldn’t be. (Freddie worries about social pressures to become your flattened persona.)
Feminism also gets flattened by mass communication into “girlboss feminism”, which understandably might strike an involved feminist as a sick caricature of what feminism really is, but nonetheless might be the feminism your average American woman knows best. And yeah, all that sloganeering about women as powerhouses, not burdens, doesn’t answer the nagging question, “But what if I *am* a burden?”
Some people might rest secure in the thought that they’ve earned, one way or another, an entitlement to burden others. Certainly, there’s a sort that feels entitled to thoughtlessly burden others while continually thinking of itself as too successful to be “a burden” to anyone — the burden others bear for this sort is merely the price of permitting phenomenal success, dontchaknow. Even if that sort is odious to us, we may feel pressure to fit that mold — to narrate our burdensomeness as “earned”, even if we don’t believe it is.
“He ain’t heavy… he’s my brother” is meant to be inspiring,
and I suppose it is. But how many of us, if picturing ourselves as the carried one, could ignore the weight? The carrier may magnanimously ignore the weight, but can the carried afford to?
Not a direct answer to the questions, but I read this post while pumping at work and I FEEL SO SEEN.
"Pregnancy, labor, and parenthood are a blend of capacity and incapacity. A yes to the baby means a no to many other parts of your previously “normal” life, whether it’s nausea changing your ability to cook, an increasingly rotund belly changing what you can reach, or the interruptions of breastfeeding changing what kind of sustained work you can take on."
I love this! To your third question, I loved reading an absence advance of Jessica Slice's new book and she just came on my podcast (it'll be out Monday) to talk about, among other things, the idea that disabled folks get very good at accepting they have needs and learning how to get care from others. She talks in her book about how much this prepared her for motherhood - that she knew how to both tend to herself in it and understand that it wouldn't be something she could weather alone. Now I want to read Rebecca's book too!
This is an excellent post and I'm adding this book to my TBR, thank you.
I was diagnosed autistic at 37 and it was like my life finally made sense. I wasn't all the things I had been raised being told I was - lazy, evil, worthless - I was quite literally disabled.
It has been several years now of unlearning shame, especially regarding needing to rely on others and not being able to be productive in the way society tells us we should be. My slow journey to the Christian faith has actually been transformative in that regard, but it's something I'm still wrestling with.
I find the term Autonomy Feminism at best misleading at worst offensive especially when it is followed by insult which is true in this case. I'm one of those feminists who has for example defended Feminists for Life and spends a fair amount of time in dialogue with people who are prolife. It is my experience that the mainstream feminist movement and progressive feminists have been leaders in efforts to include differently abled women and to work hard towards inclusion., There are a number of organizations of feminists who are disabled (I've forwarded this piece to several) and that the policy advocacy of mainstream and progressive feminists in favor of support for disabilty is positive. No segment of any movement, including "other feminisms" is above reproach, but this slur is undeserved and unworthy of a dialogic feminist and feminism. I am deeply disappointed.
I've never heard feminists describe 'woman' too narrowly to include me - I have heard women speak about experiences I have not had or make arguments I don't agree with. And I've heard bad generalizations. But I've never heard any feminist make an argument that disabled women aren't women (though I have heard the right make that claim about women who can't or don't want to get pregnant due to their disability).
I can imagine a world full of ramps, wide sidewalks, cut curbs, elevators, excellent public transportation, audio and visual cues... a world that was fully and completely accessible both physically and socially. In that world the identity of 'disabled' might be worn differently than disability advocates wear it today. But I would never condemn today's advocates for speaking out for the changes that need to take place and incorporating that advocacy into their identity.
Same with feminists. The way we wear the identity 'woman' is contextual. Why condemn women for speaking out in our patriarchal world, calling for equity, justice, fairness, the basic freedom to walk down the street safely, receive medical care, be in relationships we feel good about? Is that really defining the self in a narrow and adversarial way? Or is it simply calling out injustice that needs to be corrected?
And just like people experience disability differently - so too do women experience patriarchy differently! That doesn't negate the speakers' or the listeners' experience of their bodies or our shared world.
Finally: I do wonder how you would draw lines around what is and isn't non-autonomous feminism. What wouldn't fall under that umbrella? What feminist thought (besides symbolic capital driven girlboss feminism) would you reject? A danger with 'other feminisms' is it can mean anything, including denying women life saving abortions, or the ability to freely travel from state to state, or a divorce, or a credit card, or the right to vote.
I’m disabled, and Sitting Pretty is the first time I’ve ever seen my experience of the world reflected in a memoir. It was truly world-changing for me. If you’re interested in more intersectional disabled povs, I’d recommend Amy Kenny’s My Body is Not a Prayer Request, which explores disability justice in the Church.
I'm so thankful for Taussig's work and have learned so much from her. Happy to see her featured here alongside these thoughts.
The documentary "Crip Camp" (on Netflix) was formative in my thinking and helped me understand disability rights and the disability community. Highly recommend. Like many things, we've come so far and have so very, very far to go.
“Where have you seen a good balance struck between highlighting the dangers of and necessity of dependence?”
Here:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/weird
In particular, Freddie muses on the dangers of reducing dependence on others’ accommodation to legal entitlement, and on the importance of kindness and normalcy in tolerating “weirdos”. An excerpt:
“The normalcy of others is not a straightjacket confining the weirdo but the necessary backdrop against which their essential nature can be better understood. To me, that’s a far more beautiful and mature thing than yet another tired story about the misunderstood outsider whose weirdness was the source of their brilliance. Eccentricity can be good or bad, some kinds should be accepted, some merely tolerated, it all depends. Sometimes weird is bad but we must accommodate it all the same.”
Besides the fact that it can, in fact, be quite difficult to secure something merely because you’re legally entitled to it, the persona granted or denied the entitlement is a flattened one — not really you, or at least it shouldn’t be. (Freddie worries about social pressures to become your flattened persona.)
Feminism also gets flattened by mass communication into “girlboss feminism”, which understandably might strike an involved feminist as a sick caricature of what feminism really is, but nonetheless might be the feminism your average American woman knows best. And yeah, all that sloganeering about women as powerhouses, not burdens, doesn’t answer the nagging question, “But what if I *am* a burden?”
Some people might rest secure in the thought that they’ve earned, one way or another, an entitlement to burden others. Certainly, there’s a sort that feels entitled to thoughtlessly burden others while continually thinking of itself as too successful to be “a burden” to anyone — the burden others bear for this sort is merely the price of permitting phenomenal success, dontchaknow. Even if that sort is odious to us, we may feel pressure to fit that mold — to narrate our burdensomeness as “earned”, even if we don’t believe it is.
“He ain’t heavy… he’s my brother” is meant to be inspiring,
https://www.boystown.org/blog/the-story-behind-he-aint-heavy
and I suppose it is. But how many of us, if picturing ourselves as the carried one, could ignore the weight? The carrier may magnanimously ignore the weight, but can the carried afford to?
Not a direct answer to the questions, but I read this post while pumping at work and I FEEL SO SEEN.
"Pregnancy, labor, and parenthood are a blend of capacity and incapacity. A yes to the baby means a no to many other parts of your previously “normal” life, whether it’s nausea changing your ability to cook, an increasingly rotund belly changing what you can reach, or the interruptions of breastfeeding changing what kind of sustained work you can take on."
I love this! To your third question, I loved reading an absence advance of Jessica Slice's new book and she just came on my podcast (it'll be out Monday) to talk about, among other things, the idea that disabled folks get very good at accepting they have needs and learning how to get care from others. She talks in her book about how much this prepared her for motherhood - that she knew how to both tend to herself in it and understand that it wouldn't be something she could weather alone. Now I want to read Rebecca's book too!
This is an excellent post and I'm adding this book to my TBR, thank you.
I was diagnosed autistic at 37 and it was like my life finally made sense. I wasn't all the things I had been raised being told I was - lazy, evil, worthless - I was quite literally disabled.
It has been several years now of unlearning shame, especially regarding needing to rely on others and not being able to be productive in the way society tells us we should be. My slow journey to the Christian faith has actually been transformative in that regard, but it's something I'm still wrestling with.
I find the term Autonomy Feminism at best misleading at worst offensive especially when it is followed by insult which is true in this case. I'm one of those feminists who has for example defended Feminists for Life and spends a fair amount of time in dialogue with people who are prolife. It is my experience that the mainstream feminist movement and progressive feminists have been leaders in efforts to include differently abled women and to work hard towards inclusion., There are a number of organizations of feminists who are disabled (I've forwarded this piece to several) and that the policy advocacy of mainstream and progressive feminists in favor of support for disabilty is positive. No segment of any movement, including "other feminisms" is above reproach, but this slur is undeserved and unworthy of a dialogic feminist and feminism. I am deeply disappointed.
I'm excited to read this book!
I've never heard feminists describe 'woman' too narrowly to include me - I have heard women speak about experiences I have not had or make arguments I don't agree with. And I've heard bad generalizations. But I've never heard any feminist make an argument that disabled women aren't women (though I have heard the right make that claim about women who can't or don't want to get pregnant due to their disability).
I can imagine a world full of ramps, wide sidewalks, cut curbs, elevators, excellent public transportation, audio and visual cues... a world that was fully and completely accessible both physically and socially. In that world the identity of 'disabled' might be worn differently than disability advocates wear it today. But I would never condemn today's advocates for speaking out for the changes that need to take place and incorporating that advocacy into their identity.
Same with feminists. The way we wear the identity 'woman' is contextual. Why condemn women for speaking out in our patriarchal world, calling for equity, justice, fairness, the basic freedom to walk down the street safely, receive medical care, be in relationships we feel good about? Is that really defining the self in a narrow and adversarial way? Or is it simply calling out injustice that needs to be corrected?
And just like people experience disability differently - so too do women experience patriarchy differently! That doesn't negate the speakers' or the listeners' experience of their bodies or our shared world.
Finally: I do wonder how you would draw lines around what is and isn't non-autonomous feminism. What wouldn't fall under that umbrella? What feminist thought (besides symbolic capital driven girlboss feminism) would you reject? A danger with 'other feminisms' is it can mean anything, including denying women life saving abortions, or the ability to freely travel from state to state, or a divorce, or a credit card, or the right to vote.
I'm glad you read that piece by Grace! Pretty sure it was republished there, since I remember reading it on her substack a few years ago, too.