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Accessibility, asexuality, and more
Sep. 2nd, 2021 11:03 amThis is going to be a shorter review than this book probably deserves because it’s got quite a lot in it and I am awash in things I have to get done.
The aces book club decided we were getting a little sick of reading YA and were trying to branch out, so this month we’re reading Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alice Wong, a collection of essays and other short pieces by disabled writers. One of the essays is on disability and asexuality, a tricky intersection to navigate due to the ongoing desexualization of disabled people and pathologization of asexuality that often leaves disabled aces feeling like they can’t really do anything right and that they’re Playing Into Harmful Stereotypes just by existing.
While the essay that brought the anthology onto our radar is a small part of the book--it’s a large number of shorter pieces--I’m glad that we read it as I’m fairly under-read in disability justice; most of what I know has been picked up in bits and pieces over the course of organizing. While I sometimes found the reading experience to be a bit scattered--my brain is already a bit scattered lately, so changing subjects every three pages wasn’t my favorite thing--the wide range of disability experiences presented makes it a valuable introduction to the topic (assuming you don’t mind a bit of activist-speak from some of the writers who are pretty deep in organizing). So, overall: very good, glad I read it, probably not going to magically give me extra hours to devote to helping out AccessComm, but it definitely does help fill out my understanding of the issues a bit from like “here’s a list of accessibility-related Best Practices that I should remember.”
The aces book club decided we were getting a little sick of reading YA and were trying to branch out, so this month we’re reading Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alice Wong, a collection of essays and other short pieces by disabled writers. One of the essays is on disability and asexuality, a tricky intersection to navigate due to the ongoing desexualization of disabled people and pathologization of asexuality that often leaves disabled aces feeling like they can’t really do anything right and that they’re Playing Into Harmful Stereotypes just by existing.
While the essay that brought the anthology onto our radar is a small part of the book--it’s a large number of shorter pieces--I’m glad that we read it as I’m fairly under-read in disability justice; most of what I know has been picked up in bits and pieces over the course of organizing. While I sometimes found the reading experience to be a bit scattered--my brain is already a bit scattered lately, so changing subjects every three pages wasn’t my favorite thing--the wide range of disability experiences presented makes it a valuable introduction to the topic (assuming you don’t mind a bit of activist-speak from some of the writers who are pretty deep in organizing). So, overall: very good, glad I read it, probably not going to magically give me extra hours to devote to helping out AccessComm, but it definitely does help fill out my understanding of the issues a bit from like “here’s a list of accessibility-related Best Practices that I should remember.”