Chapter 1: Steep Steps
(This is the second of a series of posts related to a reading group on Jay Dolmage’s Academic Ableism.)
(image description: a photograph of a set of stairs leading up to the wooden external doors of a Gothic building covered with ivy; the color of the photograph has been dampened so that it comes close to resembling a black and white image)
A central thrust of Dolmage’s book is contrasting three different approaches to disability, each represented by a different image:
- steep steps
- the retrofit ramp
- universal design
Dolmage uses these ways we approach physical space as metaphors and conceptual frames for how we approach disability not only physically, but also socially:
The metaphors are also spaces that are produces, ideologically, in the world in which we move. First of all, the university erects steep steps to keep certain bodies and minds out. Secondly, to retrofit our structures for access, we add ramps at the sides of buildings and accommodations to the standard curriculum–still, disability can never come in the front entrance. But finally, in theory and practice, we can recognize the ways that teaching can be universally designed–how we might create an enabling space for learning and a way to think broadly and inclusively about disability.
(Academic Ableism, 42)
The central chapters of the book explore these metaphors, with chapter 1 here focusing on ‘steep steps’. These steps, like in the image above, represent how spaces, communities, pedagogies, and structures can reinforce hierarchy and divisions even to the point of exclusion. And exclusion can happen even if folks don’t intend it to. If, for instance, the curriculum for a particular class is extremely hard for the sake of helping the very top students prepare for graduate study, then it can exclude other students simply by not having curricular offerings for other students in the same class or program. (In part because most faculty themselves had high academic aptitude, it can be extremely easy for us to team only towards those students who are like us in this respect.)
Ableism, then, is often an unnoticed ideology that shapes:
Ableism is not a series of bad or sad anomalies, a series of discrete actions. It is a rhetoric in the fullest sense of the word: gestural, social, architectural, duplicitous and plain, malleable, and immovable.
(Academic Ableism, 46)
Dolmage writes that the rhetoric of ableism requires agents and intentional inaction. While I think it often involves such, one of my largest disagreements with him is that I don’t think it has to be intentional. Yes, as evidenced in by some of the historical considerations he gives, it often is intentionally exclusionary. (Think here of courses intended to ‘weed out’ students hoping for a particular major.) However, once an environment or practice is established, it can reproduce and reinforce itself even apart from intentional exclusion. And often the environment or practice starts as exclusionary for some other reason, such as ignorance or lack of resources, etc… I think Dolmage comes close to recognizing this later in the chapter (53), notably in his discussion of how ableism can be a series of entrenched structures with unintended consequences.
Dolmage connects the fact that environments and structures exclude people with the social model of disability. (I like this short little video adaptation of Finkelstein’s presentation of the social model in “To Deny or Not to Deny Disability.”)
Precisely because exclusion doesn’t have to be intentional to be effective–the steeps don’t have to be intended to keep people out; they’ll do that nonetheless–ableist structures require an excluded body/mind for the prophetic call for inclusion to be offered. The disability rights movement (watch Crip Camp if you haven’t watched it yet) was prophetic in this way. But too often specifically religious organizations are more exclusionary than their secular counterparts, and ofter will use ‘good intentions‘ or organizational mission to demand more from folks.
The call to become accessible will sometime succeed in getting people to make the exclusionary spaces accessible–ramps are built, as we’ll encounter in the next chapter. But Dolmage points out here (as well as there) that such access is secondary to exclusion, for a ramp wouldn’t be needed if the space wasn’t exclusionary to begin with. There’s an important asymmetry here then. Spaces don’t have have to be intentionally exclusionary to be so, but as a matter of historical and practical fact, they are moved in the direction of access by work, by advocacy, and by prophetic witness.