Ableism as Disgust
CN: discusses ableism, LGBTQ-misia, fatmisia, and racism
In my work, I often point out the ways ableists apparently find us disabled people disgusting. A couple of recent articles from Vox and JSTOR Daily prompted me to spell this out explicitly: ableism hatefully depicts us as disgusting, repulsive, and abnormal. Stigma and Othering often function as fear and disgust.
I’ll probably write about this topic for the rest of my life, but Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny explicitly uses disabled people as examples of the uncanny. Here are my first two essays on Freud and the uncanny, both from 2019: “HOW FREUD’S “THE UNCANNY” EXPLAINED MY CHILDHOOD FEARS” on Book Riot.
And my Part 2 here: “Further Thoughts on The Uncanny”
For Freud, the uncanny is an unsettling, threatening, liminal quality between familiar and unfamiliar, human and inhuman, or animate and inanimate. As I Tweeted in 2019 and 2020: people often say that they thought a robot was human or “normal” until it started to move. Due to my unusual gait from cerebral palsy, some people have literally said to me that they thought I was “normal” (here, meaning non-disabled) until I started to move!
My essay on ableism as abjection, using Julia Kristeva’s critical theory, is here:
Many disabled people are also stigmatized for not fitting ableist norms of hygiene and continence. So, that’s another important aspect of disgust and ableism.
I was an editorial intern at Beacon Press in 2013, soon after they published A Disability History of the United States by Kim E. Nielsen. While working on publicity materials for the book, I learned about the so-called “ugly laws.” These ableist, classist, racist laws prohibited many visibly disabled, homeless, and poor people from appearing in public. One law described the prohibited people as “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object.” By criminalizing homelessness, poverty, and disability, these eugenic laws (cited above in a historical archive about eugenics) left their targets to die. Often, dehumanization is blatant.
The first paragraph of this “humorous” but mocking article jokes about bruxism, as if the possibility that “hot girls have bruxism” is obviously absurd or paradoxical. I have bruxism from cerebral palsy.
Many other disabled people and I always say we’re (for example) attractive WITH our disabilities. “With” means they’re part of us, and we’re human: equal, neither inferior nor superior to non-disabled people. So, we’re not hot IN SPITE OF our disabilities because they’re part of us. Our disabilities themselves are also not inherently “hot.” Only fetishists would think we’re hot ONLY BECAUSE we’re disabled, and this is dangerous.
As the Vox article says, Megan Thee Stallion coined the term “hot girl summer.” If something doesn’t resonate with me, but it makes other people feel good and empowered, I tend to leave it alone. This is especially true of hashtags and movements created by Black women. I don’t want to create my own version. Nor should I!
The Vox article says: “The joke, of course, is that these are deeply unhot ailments, couched in the acknowledgment that yes, I too am in on the joke, unlike you other weirdos who won’t stop earnestly debating the scraps of whatever the culture war most recently dredged up.”
That’s not the joke at all. People can joke about their own bodies and disabilities in ways that would be hurtful coming from any other person.
Some people say we idealize or romanticize our disabilities. I think this is very uncommon, or at least, usually unintended. We all have different boundaries, and that’s good. For me, there’s a huge difference between considering something too personal or private to discuss and either glossing over it or stigmatizing it. If we’re uncomfortable discussing something, that’s OK. Someone else is comfortable publicly discussing it.
Also, if a disabled person finds their disabilities, or certain aspects of them, painful and unpleasant, or wishes they didn’t have them, that’s just as honest, true, and important as feeling positive or neutral about it. I don’t want to project my own multifaceted feelings about disability — positive or negative — onto other people because we’re so diverse. The danger is stereotyping and assuming all disabled people agree about everything.
Not everyone wants to call themselves hot. That’s fine, but why diss those who do?
Earlier this month, I unsubscribed from JSTOR Daily over this ableist article: “Is Disgust Related to Morality?”
This whole essay reads like evolutionary psychology to me. I’m no expert on evo psych, but I’m disturbed with its tendency to codify prejudices like ableism and racism into universal “instincts.” It doesn’t question their universality at all. I view race, racism, ableism, gender, sex, and gender roles all as social constructs. Evo psych often takes the opposite view: biologically essentializing them.
This article quickly becomes very ableist, but universalizes ableism and takes it for granted. “Yet discrimination against others is not restricted to food taboos…These include such markers of apparent ill health as odd gait, extreme thinness, skin abnormalities, and asymmetrical features.”
Excuse me?! As someone with cerebral palsy (which, for me, includes an “odd” and asymmetrical gait), please allow me to point you to my own work on Freud’s The Uncanny, linked above. Please take a moment to consider how it feels to be on the other side of this stigma. Universalizing language in articles like this makes me laugh because it’s ableist by default. Who is “we?” Who is centered? Who is marginalized?
I recently Tweeted that assigning the same old novels perpetuates the same old stereotypes. This happens with academic writing also. I love the concept of JSTOR Daily: short articles on current topics using sources on JSTOR. But at least contextualize them if those articles are full of outdated language.
Ironically, as I mentioned in my Medium essay on Freud and the uncanny, I also have OCD. I can think of few people who wash their hands more obsessively or are more concerned about contagion or hygiene than I am. This is partly due to my CP: for example, the scarcity of accessible restrooms.
Also, ironically, there’s only one reference to sex in this JSTOR Daily article: “such as homosexuality and other behaviors that contravene traditional ideas of the family.” Many LGBTQIA people today eschew “homosexuality” as an outdated, clinical term.
I’m also amazed that the JSTOR Daily essay doesn’t mention HIV/AIDS! The AIDS stigma is a perfect example of ostracizing sick/disabled and LGBTQIA people over moral panic. We know now that AIDS isn’t casually transmissible, but many people refused even to shake hands with people with HIV or send their kids to school with them.
Ironically, though, the most obvious convergences of morality and disgust I can imagine are sexual: sexual abuse, incest, and other taboos, or even affairs and kinks, in societies where those are taboo.
In my Uncanny essays, and many more, I question the assumption that “everyone” is instinctively repulsed by disabled people. This is why, even though my work is taught in high school and college, I don’t think academia has done much to root out ableism. And I’m not even an academic.
In contrast, an example of moral disgust that makes perfect sense (even in terms of disease) is the taboo against cannibalism. Food is mentioned in the JSTOR article, but not cannibalism.
Instead, the article remains vague on food. “We expect a similar maneuver from new immigrants…by learning to eat recognizably American food alongside neighbors and coworkers, and replacing any markedly foreign clothing with styles they see at the local mall.” Yikes! Again, who is “we”? Very ignorant.
The outdated and racist idea of immigrants fitting into the “melting pot” if they assimilate, “disgust” for non-contagious skin conditions, and on dating apps, which is eugenic thinking, really…the article I quoted from JSTOR Daily above is a mess. It doesn’t unpack any of these biases. This is followed by sweeping generalizations re: the US and Canada and “tolerance.”
I Tweeted in June 2020 about intelligence and attractiveness as social constructs and conventions:
In my inexact opinion, intelligence is kind of like attractiveness. It’s socially constructed, which does not mean “not real.” It’s subjective. Many of us will agree that the same few people are highly attractive or intelligent. Others will disagree.
The underlying standards are sexist, racist, ableist, disfiguremisic, cis-normative — normative in every way. It’s great if we consider ourselves and our friends and partners smart and beautiful.
Intelligence and beauty confer certain privileges, but no objective standard exists.
“She’s a 10!”
“Her IQ is…”
Nonsense. Subjective and fluctuates.
Intelligence and attractiveness can impact self-esteem. I get that. But if you base your entire ego or personality on feeling superior to others, that’s an arrogant, asshole attitude. Confidence is not a scarce commodity. If people want to consider themselves — or everyone — hot and smart, that’s good!
You can be highly skilled or intelligent or attractive in certain ways and not others. But of course, even if you disregard all the unconscious, systemic biases for a moment, it’s largely all a matter of opinion!
