![]() It seems from this collection of essays that the days when, as an act of solidarity and as a conscious disavowal of the “medical model,” we would limit our referential range to “disabled” and “non-disabled” are behind us. A few refer to people as “able” and “able-bodied.” One writer calls the day she began taking psychiatric medication “one of the greatest days of life” (p. Some contributors write about “having” cerebral palsy or a “rare genetic disorder.” Others lament loss and value recovery. Contributors are at ease using such words as “Crouzon syndrome,” “congenital idiopathic nystagmus,” “fibromyalgia,” “Ehlers-Danlos syndrome,” “dysautonomia,” “multiple sclerosis (MS),” “spasmodic dysphonia,” “lipomyelomeningocele spinal bifida,” “bipolar,” and “myalgic encephalomyelitis” (p. 263). A few identify as Deaf, deaf, blind, deaf/blind, or simply, and quite powerfully, as disabled.Īs Wong notes at the outset, these are twenty-first-century disabled voices. Authors identify as living with the effects of brain injuries, tumors, chronic illnesses, cerebral palsy, and spina bifida. Some have been disabled all or most of their lives, others only for a few years. Contributors identify as women and men, as queer and nonbinary, as black, as Asian, as white, or as some mix of racial-ethno-religious backgrounds. The essays in part 4 are more overtly political. They are all politicized in their own way. They range from the poetic to the pragmatic. ![]() Most of the book’s entries are only a few pages. ![]() With both Disability Visibility and the larger project of which it is a part, Wong is succeeding in achieving her goal.ĭisability Visibility is a collection of thirty-seven first-person accounts of what it means to be disabled in an ableist world and of what it feels like to be part of a broad, and growing, disability community and of disability rights and justice movements. The relationships forged through the project and the book bring Wong “epic, Marie Kondo-level joy.” Wong writes that what she has “always been hoping to accomplish is the creation of community” (p. Wong admits that the project has “always been a one-woman operation,” but, she notes, “this doesn’t mean I do everything alone.” Collaborating and partnering with other disabled people is what makes the Disability Visibility Project thrive. The Disability Visibility Project had approximately 140 oral histories on record with Stor圜orps at the time Vintage published Disability Visibility in 2020. What began as a “one-year campaign” to record disabled people’s oral histories and archive them at the Library of Congress has grown into a multimedia movement (p. Hutchison (University of Glasgow)ĭisability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century is part of the larger Disability Visibility Project led by Alice Wong in partnership with Stor圜orps, a national oral history organization. Reviewed by Michael Rembis (University at Buffalo (SUNY)) Published on H-Disability (January, 2021) Commissioned by Iain C. Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century. New York: Vintage Books, 2020.
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