Being the body in question: young people’s accounts of everyday ableism, visibility and disability

Abstract

The perception of impairments often relies on dominant, ableist presumptions about what disability ‘looks like’. This article builds from in-depth research with 35 young people who are Deaf or blind or have vision, hearing or mobility impairments and their parents, all of whom navigated ableist interactional dynamics in one form or another. In conversation with scholarship across disability studies, sociology and social psychology, this article explores how the perception of differences and disabilities influences everyday interactions. Our analysis teases out a series of relationships between the (non-)perception of participants’ impairments and the form and frequency of ableist intrusions they experienced. We focus, in particular, on the medicalised, diagnostic tenor of everyday encounters, wherein participants are routinely stared at, questioned, assisted and challenged by strangers. Our analysis points to the medicalised, ocularcentric nature of everyday ableism, demonstrating how these encounters function to sustain the interactional and social privileges of able-bodied people.

Keywords:

• Visible
• disability
• youth
• embodiment
• ableism
• privilege

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge and thank the young people, parents/caregivers, key informants and advisors who contributed so generously to this study. They also acknowledge the support of our Youth Advisory Group members, Kelston Deaf Education Centre, Auckland Deaf Club, Blind and Low Vision Education Network New Zealand, the Blind Foundation, Wheelchair Basketball and Sailability. The funding agency was not involved in the design, data collection, analysis, interpretation or publication of the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This research was funded by the Health Research Council of New Zealand [HRC15/260].

Notes

1 The full research team includes the three authors, as well as Dr Lanuola Asiasiga and Dr Judy Lin (Massey University), Associate Professor Melody Smith and Professor Robin Kearns (The University of Auckland) and Associate Professor Nicola Kayes (Auckland University of Technology) and Suzanne Mavoa (University of Melbourne).

2 A note on terminology: in this article, we employ a heterogeneous vocabulary of impairment and disability, using a mixture of the following terms: Deaf, hearing-impaired, blind, vision-impaired, physically disabled, mobility impaired, disabled young people and young people with disabilities. In doing so, we are deliberately making visible the diverse disability language and identifications of the young people we were working with. On a related point, we do not include specific diagnoses in this article. Instead, we substitute ‘[diagnosis]’ where necessary for comprehension. This strategic decision aligns with what we heard from participants about diagnoses: namely, that they reveal nothing of the person and usually very little about a person’s particular functional impairments.

3 The ORS is a national educational support scheme for students with high needs in relation to learning, hearing, vision, physical or language use and social communication. Students must prove that they meet the fixed criteria in order to qualify for ORS funding.

4 The ‘visibility to invisibility’ code covered all interview material related to the (mis)perception of participants’ impairments and capabilities. Our coding and analysis considers visibility/perceptibility as a relational phenomenon.