Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

While living with her friend Bertie, she and Taussig struggled to find an accessible house. When Bertie got engaged and Taussig had to look for a house on her own, she still had difficulty finding something accessible and within her price range. She considered how easy it would be if she and Micah found a house together because they had two incomes, but she didn’t want their relationship to move forward because of her housing issue. She ended up moving back in with her parents and recognizes her privilege in comparison to other people with disabilities who lack resources or wait for specialized housing for years.

Once, when shopping at a thrift store, Taussig had to wait to use the one accessible dressing room, as two friends without disabilities used it to try on clothes together. She sat with an older woman who also needed the room. She then confronted her friends and asked how long they were going to take, and they continued to take their time. Taussig says the dressing room was better than most, which often don’t have enough room and sometimes lack handrails. At the time, the older woman didn’t seem bothered by the wait, but Taussig realizes she probably had a different frame of reference. Taussig grew up after the Americans with Disabilities Act, while the older woman probably had no choice but to accept others’ judgment and wait for service if available. She notes schools don’t teach the historical struggle for disability rights, and even some medical practitioners remain uninformed:

[This] perspective holds up only because ableism is built on self-delusion; we tell ourselves the story that accessibility is a concern for only the disabled body, conveniently ignoring every form of access that has been carefully, painstakingly breathed into existence to make life easier for nondisabled bodies (211).

Stairs and vehicles are examples of “accommodations” that make movement easier for everyone. The same logic applies to beds, chairs, clothes, and roads. These accommodations, however, only focus on a specific body type, and people with these bodies don’t consider accommodating those with disabilities like they themselves have been helped. Taussig reiterates that including people with disabilities helps everyone, describing how curb-cuts were meant to assist those in wheelchairs but ended up helping parents using strollers, cyclists, and others. Closed-captioning aids people with hearing impairments but also those who need to mute or who have trouble understanding dialogue. Taussig argues accessibility means more than accessible dressing rooms and housing: “[A]ccess is a way of life, a relationship between you and the world around you; it’s a posture, a belief about your role in the community, about the value of your presence” (213). Accessibility means feeling valued. Taussig describes how bars and parties are often inaccessible, making her decline invitations out of necessity.

During her search, Taussig eventually found a house that was accessible. She returns to the dressing room story, describing how she told the manager about misuse of the room. The manager told her that they would set the room aside the next time she was there, but she felt the manager did not recognize the real problem because she lives in a world that caters to her body type. To people with disabilities, experiences with inaccessibility are “more than a string of inconveniences. […] It’s a way of being in the world, or just outside of the world. It’s a blaring message on a loudspeaker to tune out. An ideology to survive” (222). Thus, continual inaccessibility creates a feeling of exclusion from the world. Overall, Taussig hopes for a different future, one that accommodates all bodies, first by recognizing the importance of all bodies: “In this future, we will not be encouraged to silence our bodies. Instead of rejecting and abusing our bodies to fit into boxes, our boxes will be bigger and malleable” (224).

Taussig argues for listening to others’ experiences and lists resources for learning about these experiences—including books, television shows, and Instagram hashtags, as well as activists, artists, authors, and their work.

Taussig learned she was pregnant after finishing the book, and then Micah was diagnosed with colon cancer a week later. She notes the unusual coincidence of her getting pregnant as a woman with a disability and Micah getting cancer at 33: “[A]ll of our bodies carry a multitude of strengths and frailties, and sometimes those are one and the same” (232). He had surgery and a positive prognosis but is dealing with changes to his body. Taussig is also experiencing changes to her body due to pregnancy. She acknowledges that COVID-19 made the world recognize the vulnerabilities that come with having a body and created more accessibility because of it.