“However, STEM folks tend to reassert the authority of science as an institution of capitalism and settler-colonialism by not recognizing that these are not “illnesses” or pathological conditions naturally. Yes, they are behaviours that we have no reason to believe are divergent or new from typical human life, and their status as pathological is conditional on the specific social and material conditions that are facilitated by this system.”
There’s a lot in this that I agree with, but in the past, I have been quite irked by people who take a hard line version of this stance, who say that I’m being ableist by referring to myself as disabled. Whilst the majority of things that being autistic and ADHD cause me to struggle with that are better understood as a function of our environment, there are plenty of ways in which I would consider to be independent of societal structure.
For instance, I struggle with sensory hypersensitivity, such that a bright sunny day, or loud sounds cause me physical pain, and also cause me to become fatigued quickly if exposed to them for a while. This sucks, and I think it would even in a society that was structured radically differently
I’m not sure what you thought my comment was suggesting, but ableism is not related to whether or not you subscribe to the idea that disabilities exist, it refers to the systemic oppression of disabled people and construction of disability as devaluing. Races as they are constructed socially are inherently racist as their existence is entirely contingent on a way of life where groups of colonized people are subordinated, but it would not be racism for a racialized person to correctly identify that race exists because of the world they live in. Structuralism and social construction aren’t terms that we use to prove that a thing doesn’t exist, but how human action is an effective explanation for why that thing has come to be.
What makes something like AuDHD a disability is that people are systemically oppressed for possessing those traits, not that those traits only exist because we made them up. It’s true that you may have pain or discomfort from those traits even outside of this system, but it wouldn’t necessarily exist in terms of ability when society isn’t orgsnized around commodification and profit maximization (wage labour, and the forces that coerce people into productivity). There isn’t a “natural” rate of neurodiversity or ability as that language and all of our understandings of it are inextricably linked as well as realized through a system that is organised around those imperatives.
We know that human beings have not always valued people by the productivity of their bodies because we have archaeological evidence of early humans caring for others who would not have been able to survive on their own (as though any person would). Even more, there is genuinely no way to tell if these kinds of sensory issues have in fact taken on the form they have because of these conditions. Schizophrenia produces wildly different experiences from the same symptoms depending on cultural contexts, for example. Even if you had the same symptoms, how would you experience them differently if you were not forced to hear loud noises or sun exposure, or with no negative connotation attributed to that intolerance, or with many other members of your community experiencing similar symptoms with your value as human beings left completely intact?
There’s a lot in this that I agree with, but in the past, I have been quite irked by people who take a hard line version of this stance, who say that I’m being ableist by referring to myself as disabled. Whilst the majority of things that being autistic and ADHD cause me to struggle with that are better understood as a function of our environment, there are plenty of ways in which I would consider to be independent of societal structure.
For instance, I struggle with sensory hypersensitivity, such that a bright sunny day, or loud sounds cause me physical pain, and also cause me to become fatigued quickly if exposed to them for a while. This sucks, and I think it would even in a society that was structured radically differently
I’m not sure what you thought my comment was suggesting, but ableism is not related to whether or not you subscribe to the idea that disabilities exist, it refers to the systemic oppression of disabled people and construction of disability as devaluing. Races as they are constructed socially are inherently racist as their existence is entirely contingent on a way of life where groups of colonized people are subordinated, but it would not be racism for a racialized person to correctly identify that race exists because of the world they live in. Structuralism and social construction aren’t terms that we use to prove that a thing doesn’t exist, but how human action is an effective explanation for why that thing has come to be.
What makes something like AuDHD a disability is that people are systemically oppressed for possessing those traits, not that those traits only exist because we made them up. It’s true that you may have pain or discomfort from those traits even outside of this system, but it wouldn’t necessarily exist in terms of ability when society isn’t orgsnized around commodification and profit maximization (wage labour, and the forces that coerce people into productivity). There isn’t a “natural” rate of neurodiversity or ability as that language and all of our understandings of it are inextricably linked as well as realized through a system that is organised around those imperatives.
We know that human beings have not always valued people by the productivity of their bodies because we have archaeological evidence of early humans caring for others who would not have been able to survive on their own (as though any person would). Even more, there is genuinely no way to tell if these kinds of sensory issues have in fact taken on the form they have because of these conditions. Schizophrenia produces wildly different experiences from the same symptoms depending on cultural contexts, for example. Even if you had the same symptoms, how would you experience them differently if you were not forced to hear loud noises or sun exposure, or with no negative connotation attributed to that intolerance, or with many other members of your community experiencing similar symptoms with your value as human beings left completely intact?