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Tam Metin
When you are forced to realize that other people have more social authority than you do to describe your experience of your body, your confidence in yourself and your relationship to reality is radically undermined. What can you know if you cannot know that you are experiencing suffering or joy; what can you communicate to people who do not believe you know even this?
—Susan Wendell, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability,” 121
The dominantly situated treat them [the marginalized] as fodder for skeptical responses and harvest them for content that can be developed into straw man arguments and rejected out of hand. This practice gives the appearance of a balanced, reasoned debate from which the privileged position of active ignorance emerges as the rational victor. The dominantly situated feign engagement with the marginalized but refuse to listen to them.
—Nora Berenstain, “Epistemic Exploitation,” 587
In “Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability,” Susan Wendell asserts, “I learned at first by listening to other people with chronic illnesses and disabilities; suddenly[,] able-bodied people seemed to me profoundly ignorant of everything I most needed to know” (Wendell 1989, 104). The epistemic significance of disability communities is apparent in this remark, yet disabled people are likely to be socially isolated—in general, and specifically, from one another (Garland-Thomson 1997, 14; Amundson 2005, 119). Disabled people face obstacles to participating in epistemic communities that would be beneficial for making sense of our experiences and are susceptible to epistemic oppression. Knowledge and skills grounded in disabled people's experiences are treated as unintelligible within an ableist hermeneutic, specifically, the dominant conception of disability as lack.
Ableism is a type of oppression that values bodyminds1 on the basis of assumptions about ability, privileging those considered “normal” or able-bodied over those deemed “abnormal.”2 Ableism informs how society is designed, creating obstacles to not only the flourishing but also the very survival of some people while producing opportunities for others; in other words, ableism informs social practices that disable and enable individuals. I will focus on disabled people, but it should be noted that 1) ableism is deeply intertwined with white supremacy and patriarchy, and 2) disabled people's identities are multifaceted in terms of race, gender, and other social identities; there are...