One of the most important takeaways from Daniel Goodley and Katherine Runswick-Cole’s article Becoming dishuman: thinking about the human through dis/ability can be boiled down to one word: embrace. Embrace the differences around you, embrace your differences, and embrace the fact that people with disabilities are still people. They still have desires for things that people without disabilities have such as love, happiness, and independence. Daniel Goodley and Katherine Runswick-Cole state that “We are people, individuals in our own right, with preferences not just for tea or coffee but also for other elements of our lives such as where we live, what we do in the daytime and who we would like to share our lives with”. In my opinion, the world gets so caught up in dehumanizing people with disabilities by treating them like they are lesser people in an attempt to “help” them. Society forces a person’s identity to be entirely reliant on their disability rather than who they are as a person.
My twin sister has down syndrome so this article definitely hit a nerve with me. The article talks about very real things that anyone who has a disability ,or someone who is close to someone with a disability, has experienced first-hand. The constant staring, the assumption that they need help with every single task, and the assumption that they are stupid or less than a “regular” person is something that I have personally seen. It’s such a normal thing for so many people. Someone with a disability does not get to speak for themselves often. So many people ask questions to someone with a disability and accept an answer that an entirely different person gives. People with disabilities often have their opinions and personal wants or desires completely ignored because they are immediately deemed less valuable than those without disabilities.
I don’t think that the authors of the article necessarily want the reader to challenge the term disability, but rather the people who believe that the term literally means “not able”. Those who believe that people with disabilities are lesser people and that they need to be “cured” or “treated”. Those are the ones who need to be challenged. Eli Clare writes in his article Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Disability and Queerness: “the disability rights movement has created a new model of disability, one that places emphasis on how the world treats disabled people: Disability, not defined by our bodies, but rather by the material and social conditions of ableism; not by the need to use a wheelchair, but rather by the stairs that have no accompanying ramp or elevator”. The disability rights movement focuses on disability being how the world treats disabled people. An unaccommodating and quite frankly unsympathetic society is the true disability in the world.