After my near-fatal crash in 2008, I was told that I would make a “full recovery”. What they didn’t realize at the time was that somewhere amongst the mess of initial damage, surgery, and recovery, I sustained significant nerve damage to my femoral and saphenous nerves on my right leg.
(more…)The Whole Mess
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Collector of contradictions, student of imperfection, and occasional meditator. Writing from the messy middle with equal parts honesty and humor.
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Part 2 of 2
Taken together, these policies reflect a narrow vision of citizenship tied to productivity. While SSDI is one central example, the ethical concerns discussed here apply more broadly across disability policy structures, where similar moral assumptions shape eligibility, access, and social worth. But alternative ethical frameworks exist. To counter this dominant framework, disability justice proponents offer an alternative rooted in care, reciprocity, and shared responsibility. Disability justice principles understand that humans are inherently relational and interdependent 1. It frames care as reciprocal rather than one-directional and rejects the binary of independence versus dependence. As Kittay (2015) 2 writes, “justice provides the fair terms of social life given our mutual and inevitable dependency and our inextricable interdependency” (p. 287). Disabled people are often hyper-aware of interdependence because policy overtly conditions our lives on it. In reality, non-disabled people are just as interdependent, but their dependence is socially hidden and normalized (Boni-Saenz, 2024, pp. 19-21 3; Kittay, 2015, p. 287). To be clear, interdependence does not look like paternalism (Savage & Bowers, 2022, p. 265 4), where one is responsible for another, but rather a recognition of the mutual aid that shows up naturally in our social fabric. While “the cry for ‘Independence!’ can be valuable,” it must not replace the reality of interdependence (Kittay, 2015, p. 287). Kittay goes on to argue that calls for independence are actually for independence “from certain oppressive conditions, and a dependence on other conditions that are hopefully more respectful of our desire to be efficacious agents” (p. 287).
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A major policy assumption is that success is defined as independence, whereas dependency is considered failure. Even within the disability community, it is easy to fall into a neoliberal capitalist assumption, with its emphasis on market-based individualism and minimal state intervention, that to be a “good” disabled person, we must prove that we can, with the proper accommodations afforded, live and produce on our own. This shows up in multiple ways in the legal and policy fields, including Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) policies, Social Security Income (SSI) asset limits, and the financial and social devaluation of caregiving labor, to name just a few. Disability justice principles remind us that, in fact, all humans are interdependent and that disabled folks are no different 1. If anything, that truth is starkly apparent in how we live our “independent” lives. Ethical disability policy must be grounded in interdependence rather than independence, recognizing care, reliance, and mutual support as fundamental to human life. This tension between ideals of independence and the lived reality of interdependence becomes especially visible in how U.S. disability policy is structured.
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Part 8 of 8
(…a continued reflection on Datable by Jessica Slice and Caroline Cupp)The disabled community is large and varied in its defining characteristics. However, “one pretty strong marker of inclusion is that you’ve been on the receiving end of some ridiculous comments” (p. 200). So. True.
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Part 7 of 8
(…a continued reflection on Datable by Jessica Slice and Caroline Cupp)Money, and discussions about it, are often complicated and fraught with deeper meaning. Cupp describes money as “one of those overloaded concepts that stands for far more than numbers on a bank statement: in relationships, how people earn, spend, and make decisions about money has everything to do with power, communication, and self-worth” (p. 191). And she’s absolutely right. I’m a therapist, and clients have a far easier time talking about sex (or any other subject) than they do money.
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Part 6 of 8
(…a continued reflection on Datable by Jessica Slice and Caroline Cupp)This may come as a shock to nondisabled people, but most of us disabled folks enjoy having sex. As Slice so succinctly puts it, “the sexless crip is a tired and painful trope” (p. 149). It may also come as a surprise to know that a significant number of disabled people are also trans and/or queer.
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Part 5 of 8
(…a continued reflection on Datable by Jessica Slice and Caroline Cupp)Within disability culture, we celebrate mutual aid, which Slice describes as “the practice of supporting one another in a complex web of practical and emotional support” (p. 135). This can show up in a multitude of ways, which become far more complicated when it involves romantic relationships.
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Part 4 of 8
(…a continued reflection on Datable by Jessica Slice and Caroline Cupp)Even though it’s been decades since the advent of the disability rights movement, it’s disheartening to see that the trope of the disabled person in an interbred relationship is portrayed as a burden and the nondisabled partner as a hero. A basic search will yield innumerable results discussing why it is completely natural and appropriate to leave a relationship simply because one person has a disability.
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Part 3 of 8
(…a continued reflection on Datable by Jessica Slice and Caroline Cupp)Let’s be real: sex education in the United States is a joke. Even when it does exist, rarely does it cover anything outside of nondisabled, cisgender, straight sex and biology. So, just like our nondisabled peers, we disabled daters have often unconsciously turned to popular media for guidance. Unfortunately, there are extremely few examples available to anyone outside of the white, cishet, thin, male pleasure-focused, penetrative sexual ideal.
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Part 2 of 8
(…a continued reflection on Datable by Jessica Slice and Caroline Cupp)Slice and Cupp remind us of an important decree for dating: it should not be about trying to “fill some empty hole in my life but to add to my life that is already full in so many ways” (p. 46). This axiom should be true for disabled and nondisabled daters alike. Cupp uses the analogy of ice cream: “I don’t technically need ice cream—it’s not an essential food group—but that doesn’t mean I don’t want it. Ice cream is rich and delicious—having someone special in my life could be rich and delicious too” (p. 46).
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