In the short reading, Plato, Again, Stephen Kuusisto writes about disability through the character Caroline Moore, a woman who had breast cancer and has had a mastectomy, which will eventually become a double mastectomy. While Caroline is considered disabled due to the surgeries she has had, she is a fifty-two year old, black woman with a master’s in computer programming. This being said, if she did not have the breast cancer, she would be seen as an abled-bodied person. This story illustrates how many people with disabilities are discriminated against simply because they have a disability, but it also presents how disabled individuals can be taken advantage of and sometimes sexually assaulted.
When Caroline Moore returns to work, she gets sexually assaulted by her boss, Densk. When she returns to work after her first surgery, he brings her into his office and eventually after asking if “it,” in reference to her missing breast, hurt, he touched her where her breast used to be. This action is an example of what we had a discussion about in class regarding disability and having a prosthetic limb. For example, some people see someone who has a prosthetic leg and proceed to ask if they can touch it. For abled-body people, this does not occur as it is seen as odd; however, apparently, it is not odd or weird to ask a disabled person.
Kuusisto emphasizes at the conclusion of the story that his aim was “to show how ableism, sexism, [and] racism are utilized as workaday tools.” This comes in to play because as previously stated, Caroline is black, a woman, and disabled, so all three of those attributes intersect in the discrimination against her. In the office Moore worked at, she originally held a manager position, but upon returning was demoted to a lower, full – time job, and upon returning a second time, she was demoted to a part-time position even if she had more experience. Kuusisto compares this to an experience of his own. As a blind man, he was once told by a superior that if he wanted to keep his provisional faculty appointment, he would have to take a summer job driving a golf cart around campus. After telling him he could not do this because of his disability, the superior told him that he was not competitive enough for continued employment. Using both his example and the one in the story, this reveals the discrimination that many people do not want to admit occurs to those individuals that are disabled on a daily basis.
In Laura Hershey’s poem, Working Together, she portrays disability through the lense of the disabled speaker, who is making a comparison between their job and their caregiver’s job on a daily basis. Throughout the poem, the caregiver’s job involves physical tasks while the speaker’s job usually involves vocal instructions or simple and easy movements. This poem illustrates the different tasks one may do when taking care of someone. The last stanza stands out to me. It emphasizes how one’s job might not be what they ever expected to be doing especially when taking care of an adult. This can be seen in the line “Her job: what no one thinks of doing / except for self or child.” This poem reveals that the speaker feels almost a sense of guilt for being disabled and having to have someone take care of them as if they were a child.
Word Count: 576
I pledge. Alex Slaughter
