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05 Be Noticed (Women & Disability)




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This article is from the Essays on the topic of Women and Disability.

05 Be Noticed (Women & Disability)

The First Step Is To Be Noticed

by Dianne Pothier

Persons with disabilities are not expected to accomplish
anything of significance. If you have achieved anything of note,
you cannot really be 'disabled'

"We don't think of you as disabled because of what you have
accomplished." My friend thought she was paying me a compliment;
both our friendship and my degree of shock got in the way of my
bluntly explaining that her comment was instead very insulting.
And it was particularly ironic that her comment was prompted by
her knowing that I was in the final stages of writing an article
1 about disability from my perspective as a person with a visual
impairment (close to legal blindness).

What was so offensive about my friend's comment? The explicit
assumption was that persons with disabilities are not expected to
accomplish anything of significance. If you have achieved
anything of note, you cannot really be 'disabled'. A clearer
statement of able-bodied insensitivity to people with
disabilities would be hard to find.

In a different way, that same point had been brought home to me a
few days earlier at an academic conference. Again the point was
made more poignant by the fact that the incident in question
arose in a context in which disability was expressly under
discussion. There was significance not only in the incident
itself, but also in the differences in the reactions to it.

The location of the conference was itself disturbing. It would be
difficult to imagine a building more wheelchair inaccessible. The
only apparent access to the building was by stairs; there were no
elevators between floors; the floors themselves were not level,
with mezzanines connected by stairs; and many of the conference
sessions were in steeply tiered classrooms. In two days at the
conference, I had heard no comment, either
apologetic or critical, about the building layout.

There was a session at the conference devoted to a discussion of
a committee report on equality in access to education which
included disability issues. The program involved a short opening
plenary, a series of workshops, and a closing plenary. At the
opening plenary, one of the authors of the report gave some
background on its preparation and introduced the other authors.
He explained that one of the committee members was unable to be
at the conference because she was away training a dog. Several
people in the audience laughed at that remark. I thought to
myself: what is so funny about someone training a guide dog? I
resolved to myself that sometime before the end of the session, I
would comment on the inappropriateness of the laughter.

Shortly thereafter we broke into workshops. The facilitator in my
workshop was one of the members of the committee. She had arrived
late at the plenary and had not been present at the time of the
laughter. She started the workshop discussion by saying that we
all knew the nature of the problem, and it was only the solutions
that needed to be addressed. I decided I could not let that pass.
I said that what had just happened in the plenary was an
indication to me that there still was difficulty in
recognizing the problem. People with disabilities are clearly not
fully accepted and integrated if people thought it was funny that
a blind person would need to train a dog. Moreover, no one had
yet expressed concern about the inaccessibility of the
building in which we were discussing equality.

My comments did not generate any particular response. However,
there was good discussion on other points in the workshop, and I
was satisfied that I had made my point. At the start of the
closing plenary, I felt no particular need to repeat my
comments. But the tone of the closing plenary was far too
complacent and self-congratulatory for me to keep silent. Near
the end, I decided to say my piece.

I again noted the inaccessible nature of the building we were in,
and my offence at the laughter in the opening plenary. I added a
comment about my own frustrations in sitting through days of
people reading their papers. I know that I, a person with a
visual impairment, would have been judged very harshly for such a
performance, given the way I read.2 I was attempting to jolt
people out of their complacency, and the only way I knew how to
do that was to let my anger show. Showing anger carries with it
the danger of simply alienating people, but I had
reached a point where I was prepared to take that risk. At
least, I got people's attention. The range of reactions to my
point about the laughter was very interesting, from apology to
denial.

An Aboriginal woman friend who had been sitting next to me in the
opening plenary, and who had been one of those who had
laughed, immediately came up to me with a profuse apology. I
found that gratifying, because it showed she had understood my
reaction. It was obvious to me why she understood so readily. She
had just done to me what had been done to her many times before--
displayed an insensitivity that conveyed a message of exclusion.

At the other extreme, a white male friend started our
conversation by doubting that there had been any laughter at the
opening plenary. I gave a very curt response to that comment. I
had no patience for the attitude: "since I didn't notice it, it
can't have happened." There had been clear and unmistakable
laughter; that point was not open for debate. My friend backed
off, and moved from denial to defensiveness. He said that while
he had not himself laughed (which I had no reason to doubt), he
had found the comment about training a dog odd. He had not been
thinking of a guide dog, but of training dogs in the way that one
trains horses. My response was that, even accepting, as I am
prepared to do, that this sort of explanation accounted for the
laughter, it was still offensive. That is because it means that
the notion of needing a guide dog is simply not part of people's
thinking. Even in a setting in which access to people with
disabilities was the topic for discussion, they could not
comprehend a reference to a dog as meaning a guide dog. In an
able-bodied perspective on the world, guide dogs do not figure
prominently. My friend did not seem convinced that I had a
point. My interpretation of this is that someone who is not used
to being marginalized has a harder time recognizing it when it
happens to others.

Later that day, this same friend and I happened to be sitting
next to each other at a session on Aboriginal rights. The person
giving the presentation was Mohawk. In the course of his
discussion, he asked the audience if we could name the six
nations of the Iroquois confederacy. To our embarrassment, we
collectively could not do so. My friend recognized the parallels
to our earlier conversation, and its significance started to hit
home. He recognized and commented to me that this was the kind of
insensitivity that I had been talking about. I agreed,
feeling humbled by the fact that this time I had been among those
displaying the insensitivity.

A slight need not be intentional to be hurtful. Indeed, where
there is a simple failure to notice, the very absence of
intention may itself constitute the problem. People cannot feel
that they really belong unless they are made to feel that other
people at least recognize their existence.

Dianne Pothier is an Associate Professor at Dalhousie Law
School, teaching in the areas of Labour, Constitutional, and
Public Law.

1 Since published, D. Pothier, "Miles to Go: Some Personal
Reflections on the Social Construction of Disability." 14
Dalhousie Law Journal 526 (1992).

2 For elaboration, see above mentioned article.

 

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