“The word ‘getting over’ is really weird”: Storying disability in desired futures

Abstract

Narratives we tell about the future reflect and shape forms of life we imagine as possible and desirable. As such, stories have the potential to transform curriculum and pedagogies oriented toward liberation. Yet, narratives tend to erase disability or employ it as a device to secure narratives of progress, imagining disability as a challenge to “get over.” These erasures and enclosures are reproduced in curriculum. Against narratives of an abled future, disabled activists, artists, and scholars argue we need crip ways of narrating the future. In this article, I consider how disability entered into the desired futures of young people. I draw from a multiyear humanizing qualitative study with trans and queer teenagers to examine how four young people constructed a story of the future with a digital artifact. Disability justice and crip theory lenses, my relationship with the participants, and my disability shaped my investment in reading these narratives toward an understanding of how disability can be made meaningful in the future. Through narrative analysis, I find that teens storied ways in which experiences with disability shaped their practices of imagining the future. Young people complicated narratives of “getting over” disability by turning to artifacts that position disabled futures or narratively expanding upon artifacts to make meaning with and through experiences with disability. In these stories, disability shapes practices of imagination and has a place in desired futures.

Keywords:

• Disability studies
• queer studies
• curriculum studies
• equity and inclusion

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I alternate between identity-first language (e.g., disabled person) and person-first language (e.g., person living with disabilities) to recognize the ongoing dialogue on language within disability communities (Sins Invalid, 2016). I use “dis/ability” in naming the structure of power that organizes ableism and to indicate the social constructedness and co-constitution of disability and ability (Hernández-Saca et al., 2018). I also use “experiences with disability” for moments when a person has named, narrated, and made meaning with a mental or physical illness but has not self-identified as disabled.

2 I primarily use the term “compulsory able-bodiedness” for concision, but I do not intend to focus on the body or physical disability to the exclusion of the mind or mental disability. Most of the disabilities or experiences with disability participants named would be described as mental disabilities, an umbrella and coalitional term that encompasses “cognitive, intellectual, and psychiatric disabilities, mental illness, m/Madness, and a/Autism, as well as brain injury or psychiatric survivorship” (Price, 2014, p. 13). I follow feminist disability studies in recognizing the inseparability of bodies and minds, also described by the term “bodymind” (Price, 2014; Schalk, 2018). Sami Schalk has written that bodymind, conceptually, “highlights how processes within our being impact one another in such a way that the notion of a physical versus mental process is difficult, if not impossible to clearly discern in most cases” (p. 5).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Addie Shrodes

Addie Shrodes, PhD, is a scholar-practitioner of equity-centered learning and organizational change. Broadly, their scholarship considers how youth and adults learn to question oppression, disrupt injustice, and work toward a more just world. Her work has also appeared in Reading Research Quarterly, The Journal of Literacy Research, and Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice. They hold a PhD in Learning Sciences and a graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies from Northwestern University.