Youth and disability: a challenge to Mr Reasonable

Youth and Disability: A Challenge to Mr Reasonable is the first full-length monograph from Jenny Slater. At the centre of the book sits the character ‘Mr Reasonable’, a figure who we learn embodies and hopes to nurture in others a kind of mature ‘reasonableness’. Opening with a letter intended for Mr Reasonable, Slater informs the reader that the figure she is introducing is not intrinsically bad. He upholds liberal values of equality, tolerance, and personal freedom. Slater, however, tells us/him that he also likes to think in terms of sameness. The standards Mr Reasonable lives by as he ‘plays’ at being a grown-up – for example, ‘fairness’; obeying the rules; and observing norms of hard work, self-sufficiency and acquisitiveness – are ones he seeks to foster in others. It is his ‘reasonable’ model of adulthood to which all are expected to aspire that is the object of Slater’s challenge. Above all, she asks what his standards mean for those seen as distant from the masculine and able-bodied figure of the ‘reasonable’ adult. She asks what subject positions are available to disabled youths situated outside of, or as not yet within, adulthood. For instance, in Chapter 3 on disabled young people’s travels through the ‘border zone’ of youth, she shows how disabled young people seek to be taken seriously so others will see their potential as ‘becoming-reasonable’ adults. Slater signs off her letter by saying that the frameworks Mr Reasonable upholds are damaging. By preserving them, she says, ‘you make reasonable the marginalization and oppression of those who do not/cannot/will not conform’ (2).

Underpinning Slater’s narrative is a wide-ranging critique of developmental discourse, liberal exclusions of the ‘Other’ and neoliberal forms of subjectivization. Mr Reasonable aside, her main target is a normative imaginary that shapes beliefs many hold about what a ‘“good”, “ideal” and “normal”’ (1) adult life looks like, which all should aspire to reach but from which some may be ‘reasonably’ excluded. It is this reasonable exclusion that Slater contests. Chapter 2, for instance, queries the claims of disability scholars that disabled youths wish to become adult ‘just like everyone else’. She responds by asking who disabled young people are being compared with, what aspirations they are presumed to have, and how they are seen to be able to realize them. The issue, as I grasped it, is that perceptions of what it is to become adult mark parameters of success and failure. Seeking to situate everyone in one ‘reasonable’ mould, regardless of difference, legitimizes the denial of the space, encouragement, and resources many need to flourish outside that mould. Indeed, as Slater says of her reading around youth–adult pathways, ‘The normative and ableist focus on adulthood futures meant conversations of the future were routinely denied to young disabled people’ (7). To this end, Slater asks why we do not dispense with the idea of adulthood and see youth as part of a ‘continual becoming of life’ (17). The desire to reject ‘reasonable’ responses to difficult questions is echoed in Chapter 6 on gender. What would it be, she asks, if we did not turn to exclusionary norms of prettiness and beauty as a ‘reasonable’ way of securing girls and young women’s self-worth, and instead nurture a more challenging politics of ‘ugliness’ and ‘magnificence’? Thus, while Youth and Disability starts with a discourse of ‘becoming-adult’, and of adult independence as ‘doing things on your own’, it also tackles normative accounts of gender and sexuality as well as how young people are expected to inhabit space (in which calls for accommodation risk seeming unreasonable).

Youth and Disability does not set out to provide a ‘textbook’ account of youth and disability. Instead, it uses ‘the reasonable’ as a device to think through how dis/ability and youth, gender, and sexuality come together as they merge seamlessly or otherwise collide with the images of adult life that young people see continuously reinforced. At last her concern is with who succeeds and who fails – and thus who passes through the ‘border zone’ of youth into the privileged state of being a ‘reasonable’ grown-up. To work around this problem, Slater draws creatively on a number of critical theories, including critical disability studies, the intersectionality of Black feminist writers, and the more ‘social’ strands of queer theory that hope to recreate the world and the future from the point of difference. She adds elements of personal reflection to produce a queerer way of doing academic writing and theory, which is a pleasure to read. Finally if Slater’s efforts to think utopia and futurity seem so frequently frustrated by the more pragmatic ‘here and now’ concerns of the disabled young people she got to know, it speaks mainly to the fact that, as Muñoz (2009, 1) says, ‘Queerness is not yet here’. Can we yet imagine a future outside an ableist adult imaginary in which many can hope only to survive? Here we find a great deal of value in the text; it raises vital questions about the lives we typically value and seek to make accessible, often with an air of ‘reasonableness’, but only to those who can be folded in. To what extent are people excluded, or feel compelled into conforming just to live up to the expectations of others? And what does that do when you want to just be young and live, as Slater says in Chapter 5, ‘the “unreasonable” non-normativity of youth’ (82).

In the end, quoting Titchkosky (2007), Slater asks us to ‘watch our watchings’ and ‘read our readings’ (123). Drawing to a close with a second letter to Mr Reasonable, Slater asks him to attend more to who is included in the spaces that mark adulthood, and who is excluded. She asks him to ‘stop playing grownup’ (123), stop pretending he knows what is best, and listen and learn from disabled youths about how the world needs to change so they may be recognized and included.

Edmund Coleman-Fountain
Social Policy Research Unit, University of York, York, UK
[email protected]
© 2015, Edmund Coleman-Fountain
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2015.1075947