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What strategies do Deaf, Disabled and Mad people use to endure phonocentrism, ableism and stigma? How much more time do we need to waste enduring?

I was diagnosed with learning disabilities in the final weeks of high school. As such, I went through all of my public education as a struggling D student, who spoke often with intelligent analysis, dreaded spelling dictation, failed secondary math several times and skipped classes to teach myself darkroom skills in the old typewriter storage closet. To get through, to endure, the completely illogical, inconsistent and incomprehensible concepts of grade 10 Math, I spent countless classes honing my ambi-dyslexi-terity skills. I discovered that it would take exactly one minute to slowly write “one more minute left in class” in opposite directions using both hands. And so, for each minute of class I would write a line, until the class was finally over.

In the chapter “Along Disabled Lines: Claiming spatial agency through installation art” (2016) Amanda Cachia explores the work of georgrapher B.J. Gleeson and the concept of “enduring distorted space”. She explains through Gleeson that due to inaccessibility, which "‘exacerbates the distorting effect of disability’ (Gleeson 1996:389) - Disabled people must therefor inhabit and endure distorted space, which is the social space of the ostensibly “normal” person” (Cachia 2016:242) . This chapter by Cachia is a rich starting place, as she situates the work of two visual arts, Corban Walker and Wendy Jacob, and concludes that “there can no longer be an assumed “average” or normative uniformity in how to engage or respond to a work of art when we remember all of the variegated forms of knowing and being in space; just as there can be no one universal design in architecture or single-point perspective to buildings and public spaces.”

Works cited:

  1. Cachia, Amanda. “Along Disabled Lines: Claiming Spatial Agency through Installation Art,” in Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader, edited by Jos Boys. New York and London: Routledge, 2017.