(In)visibility

A little while back, there were some great posts at FWD/Forward (a blog you should definitely be reading if you aren't already) about the "invisibility" of disabled people.
In "Making 'Invisible Women' even more invisible", Anna talked about the problems of having dominant narratives about disability, and especially disabled women, that don't include the input of disabled women themselves. In "Whose Voices?", s. e. smith talked about the problems of presenting the narratives of disabled people in a discourse that is dominated by the narratives of those who provide care for disabled people -- a narrative that is about the challenges of living with disabled people. Since then, I've been thinking a lot more about the vocabulary of "(in)visibility".

I'm not all that keen on it, if I'm honest. I mean, I know it can be useful because when we're trying to talk about opposition to "We're here, we're queer..." type sentiments. But, well, I'm not keen. I think it sounds way too much like a euphemism for "we're not interested in people like you". When we say that a certain demographic of people is "invisible", it sounds to me like we're offloading the responsibility for social justice onto them: "not my fault I [did bastard thing/failed to include you in my Grand Unified Feminist Theory of Everything] -- you/your needs are invisible."

For those of us who fall into the groups that tend to be frequently described as "invisible", this puts us in a double bind. If we talk about queerness, show our affection in public, insist on fair treatment, we're "flaunting it". If we don't, we're "deceitful, straight-acting, self-loathing queers". If I talk about my needs for disabled access, I risk being "the annoying one who never shuts up about wheelchair access ramps". If I don't talk about it and just deal as best I can, I risk being told that "you've only just brought that up now, so how were we to know? It's your own problem" when I do mention that, eg, I can't get into a particular building.*

But the "visibility" discourse problems don't stop there.

The "visibility" discourse centers a particular kind of narrative. When I first started using a mobility scooter, I found it distressing that people sometimes walked right into me sometimes nearly stepping on me, or sometimes wouldn't give me room to get past on the pavements despite being told "excuse me" multiple times. Look, the pavement belongs to them as much as it belongs to me (and note the way round that I phrased that), but on a narrow pavement, I can't always maneuver around a large group of pedestrians, and sometimes people do have to let me pass, just as they would if I was a pedestrian without a scooter. These days, well, it's not that these things happen less, but it's just that I'm better at handling them. I'm more assertive about saying "excuse me". Early on in my scootering days, someone said to me (I now forget who), "maybe if you had a scooter-type-thing that was higher up, so you'd be nearer people's eye level..." and at the time I thought "yeah, that'd be good". And now I think "wait, whose eye level?" Social problems aren't solved by asking people to accommodate to a biased dominant narratives (which, in fairness to the person, is not how they meant it). Social problems are solved saying something like "Actually, public spaces belong to everyone and the clue is in the word 'public'."

But wait, it gets worse.

The amount of sexist street harassment I experience when I use a mobility scooter, compared to when I walk unaided, increases dramatically. The amount of airtime that abuse of disabled women gets in feminist theory? Tiny (especially compared to the amount of airtime devoted to straight White, non-disabled women). What's more, I think the people who grope me or shout at me in the street have no trouble noticing either that I exist or that I'm disabled, and I don't really think we're onto a winner by claiming less insight than the gropers. So. Whenever we say that someone's experiences are "invisible" and that's why we don't talk about them, we're also claiming less insight than the people who perpetrate violence against them.

Also: increasingly I feel that "invisible" gets uncomfortably close to the vocabulary of "blindness" and other sensory disabilities that are used as metaphors for ignorance and bigotry (as in "greed makes them blind" and similar expressions). That's another way that prejudice against disability is realised.

--IP

*It's worth noting here that my annoyance about these issues is not with people who genuinely care about access and just happen to lack one particular piece of information in order to make something accessible, but do what they can to arrange access when they're told about the problem. Those people are the people I'm grateful for.

[Cross-posted at Modus Dopens]