When combining the theories found in Snyder’s “Cultural Location of Disability” and Kafer’s “Imagined Futures,” it becomes clear that able-bodied disability activists do not understand the social expectations people with disabilities are subjected to. The possible effects of such pressures are perfectly exemplified in Lahiri’s short story, “The Treatment of BiBi Haldar,” and the experience of author Kafer, which both show the “relationship”(Snyder) between social pressures and actual disabled experiences and insist on an end in social bias against disability.
An example of able-bodied activists’ lack of understanding of the social pressures on the disabled is seen in Kafer’s example of “blindfold exercises”to simulate blind experiences. (Kafer, 5) This exercise focuses on physical lack of sight, but fails to simulate anything about the social experience of the disability, thus not fully representing disabled bodies through not exemplifying any of the bias and social pressures they deal with throughout their life.
Societal pressures are a pivotal part of understanding disabled experiences, as Snyder asserts that there is a relationship between society’s belief of what disabled experiences are, and what people with disabilities actually experience on page 7. Without an understanding of this relationship, able-bodied people could never simulate a disabled experience in any simple exercise.
Society views disabilities as an obstacle to leading a normal life, and insists that they are destined for a less fulfilling future of “pain and isolation”(Kafer,1). Not only does this affect how society views the disabled, but this also affects disabled people’s views of themselves, and therefore how they conduct themselves in life. Snyder compares this effect on the disabled to the obvious effect on “normal” people by saying, “If disabled people are subject to the internalization of dominant definitions and values of disability just like those who are nondisabled, then asking clients about their personal goals is not a pat solution…of intervention.”(Snyder, 8). This quote shows that a disabled person’s personal goals and true desires could be influenced and changed by these societal roles expected of them, because they have never seen themselves represented in another way.
The fictional character BiBi is an example of such an affected disabled person. In her village’s opinion, the only good future a woman can have is to become a wife. Somehow, a person cannot be a woman and disabled in this society because her parents deem that her disability makes her “ineligible” for marriage. If she hopes to be a normal woman, she must hope for a cure. In this way, BiBi’s true desire is to be part of society and not locked away by her parents. However, she conflates true desire with the misconstrued desire to be married, because her village tells her that is the only way to be cured, and therefore to be normal. Similarly, Kafer dreamed to be an academic of disability but was told that it was impossible because he was disabled and that he should focus only on curing his disability and not following his dreams. His dream, or his “goal,” was needing to be cured, just like BiBi; however, Kafer broke societal expectations, going on to become an educated academic.
The difference in BiBi and Kafer’s experiences fully shows that able-bodied disability activists do not understand what it is to be disabled, because the disabled’s true ailment is that society rejects them because of their physical differences. It is clear that disabled experience is built both on societal bias and the physical fact of their own abilities in this way, and for different people these characteristics have different outcomes. (Seen through BiBi and Kafer) This is why Kafer asserts to “think of disability differently” through “asking questions” (page 18), because this will truly break society’s biased system of labeling and expectations.
WORD COUNT: 620. PLEDGE: I have neither given nor received unauthorized help on this assignment
