Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-...

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

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In the discussion that follows, I argue that choice is illusory in a context of pervasive inequality. Choices are structured by oppression. We shouldn’t offer assistance with suicide until we all have the assistance we need to get out of bed in the morning and live a good life. Common causes of suicidality—dependence, institutional confinement,

Alice Wong • Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

We take constraints that no one would choose and build rich and satisfying lives within them. We enjoy pleasures other people enjoy and pleasures peculiarly our own. We have something the world needs.

Alice Wong • Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

the presence or absence of a disability doesn’t predict quality of life.

Alice Wong • Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

God didn’t put me on this street to provide disability awareness training to the likes of them.

Alice Wong • Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

Disabled people have always existed, whether the word disability is used or not. To me, disability is not a monolith, nor is it a clear-cut binary of disabled and nondisabled. Disability is mutable and ever-evolving. Disability is both apparent and nonapparent. Disability is pain, struggle, brilliance, abundance, and joy. Disability is

Alice Wong • Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

These stories do not seek to explain the meaning of disability or to inspire or elicit empathy. Rather, they show disabled people simply being in our own words, by our own accounts. Disability Visibility is also one part of a larger arc in my own story as a human being.