Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement (A Norton Short)

But why are an amputee, a person with dyslexia, a blind person, and someone who is bipolar all in the same category? (This sounds like the start of a joke.) What holds this category together? Disability, which today is a category of understanding, is actually a historical concept that developed relative to work, employment, and education. Historica

Today, many of our ideas about able-bodiedness and disability come from classifications based on who is suitable for plantation or factory work: we call people “disabled” when they can’t perform “normal” amounts of physical labor.

For some autistic people, eye contact not only doesn’t indicate engagement, it can be actively distracting and/or taxing.

Bill Peace, writes: “These images of prosthetized amputees and walking wheelchair users—taken as a representative of disabled people—make for a highly problematic case of a tokenism that insists that disability is something to overcome, something to eliminate, something that is simply a medical problem and not a social one.”

But technology—and the normative ideas of what it means to have the correct body or mind—increasingly separates our selves from the bodies with which we encounter the world.

So many of our stories about technology and disability are about technologies as redemptive, as having the power to normalize disabled people, to make us “overcome” our disabilities.

Many of us want futures where disabled people don’t have to be pushed to normalize our mere-difference in order to make ourselves palatable enough—“includeable,” to use sociologist Tanya Titchkosky’s term.

She should have exercised more!) and then denies proper access and care because they have a “lifestyle disease.” (Disgusting phrase.) This shows up around lung cancer (if you get a lung-cancer

we often get accounts of disability and technology completely wrong. Disabled