It has been an exhausting summer to be disabled. Every day there seems to be a news story. The Lizzo ableist slur, followed by the Beyoncé ableist slur – the exact same one – mere weeks later. The model whose prosthetic leg was edited out of a celebratory “beach bodies” advert. The virulent bullying of the deaf Love Island contestant Tasha Ghouri, both on social media and in the villa.
Some of the slights have been more subtle, woven into the fabric of the work surrounding them so seamlessly that they could, and probably will, be explained to me by able-bodied people as being perfectly fine, actually. But it was disappointing to see the final episode of Derry Girls – lauded as “a triumph” by reviewers – using a disabled cast member as shorthand for a party not being as cool as it first appeared. The Oscar-winning film Coda, although well-meaning, centres on the struggles of an able-bodied person overcoming the great impediment of having a disabled family. In her medieval fable Lapvona, Ottessa Moshfegh, usually an incredible and fearless writer, uses her characters’ disabilities – their “clawed hand”, “unseemly disproportion”, being “misshapen” – as a way of evoking eeriness and discomfort. Able-bodied writers lazily turning to disability for horror is a time-honoured literary tradition, but perhaps we ought to move on.
None of the people involved in these unfortunate contretemps would ever admit to the faintest trace of ableism, of course. All of them, almost certainly, would argue they do not have an ableist bone in their body; too often, apologies take the form of “sorry if you were offended”. Lizzo and Beyoncé listened to the criticism and changed their lyrics, and will hopefully learn from their experiences. But whether the hurt is intentional or not, it is still painful when you’re on the receiving end. What is particularly difficult to comprehend is the lack of scrutiny at all levels of the entertainment industry: commissioning editors, producers, publishers and reviewers breezily waved it all through while garlanding the artists with praise.
It should not take disability activists to point this out every time. As Audre Lorde wrote in 1984, it is still “the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes … there is a constant drain of energy which might be better used”. For too long, we have let these things slide. As a form of self-preservation we’ve trained ourselves to laugh off inappropriate or thoughtless comments, to see them as “just a joke”. Even if inside it feels as though a dreadful weight is pushing down on you, pointing out that something is causing you pain can feel like spoiling everyone else’s fun, like you’re being overly sensitive and finding offence where there was none.
But enough is enough. We need allies to truly care, to shift their thinking and try to see things the way we might. We need them to change the way things are from the inside – to stop intolerance creeping into their work in the first place, not amend things retroactively, too late. What we need, in short, is empathy – not pity, or being put on a pedestal, but to be seen as fully rounded human beings with feelings that can be hurt.
In the past year, there have been positive movements in depictions of disability: Rose Ayling-Ellis’s Strictly Come Dancing win, a genuinely heartwarming moment; the BBC Two drama Then Barbara Met Alan, which told the moving story of a group of disability activists; Arthur Hughes, who has radial dysplasia, becoming the first disabled actor to portray Richard III for the RSC (although the privilege of playing an embittered child murderer is perhaps not top of most disabled people’s to-do lists). What we need more of are incidentally disabled casting choices, where the actor’s disability is not the character’s defining feature, or even mentioned at all – as with Daniel Monks in Jamie Lloyd’s recent production of The Seagull. Rather than another disabled-only dance or theatre group, what we need is integration: after all, we live in the same world, not two separate ones.
Over the past years it has felt as though a seismic shift has finally begun on matters of race, gender, sexuality and body size. But too often, it feels like disability is left behind. Time and time again, diversity is seen only through the lens of race or gender; body positivity is associated primarily with weight. Unlike with Black Lives Matter or women’s marches, mass protest for the disabled community poses numerous logistical difficulties, especially with Covid rates still so high and many vulnerable people shielding, so our suffering often feels invisible. With more and more people affected by chronic illness and taking extended sick leave after Covid, it’s surprising the discourse has not caught up more. But if your progressive worldview does not include disability, it isn’t intersectional. Now that people have belatedly started to “do the work” on racism, they might want to add disability to their list, too.
Ableism is pervasive, inextricably woven into our society and language: deformed, disfigured, crippled, handicapped, lame – these are objectively negative terms conjuring up something grotesque, to be avoided at all costs. Ableism in popular culture is just the tip of the iceberg: day to day, disabled people have to contend with the cost of living crisis, carer shortages, discrimination at work, inadequate medical care, disability benefits delays, feeling left behind by those who think the pandemic is over, and more. We need momentous change to start the fightback against thousands of years of prejudice. It’s not going to happen overnight. But if change doesn’t begin with the small things, the more important things will never follow.
Kathryn Bromwich is a commissioning editor and writer on the Observer New Review
