Care Tactics, Hacking an ableist world.

Laura Mauldin no.64 July 2022

” …None of this ingenuity on the part of disabled people is new. As the historian Bess Williamson writes in her book Accessible America, the medical subspecialty of rehabilitation emerged in the early 1950s, when many disabled people were institutionalized. Through assistive devices like prosthetic limbs, doctors endeavored to “return” those physically disabled by accident or illness to “normal” so that they could go home. While living at home was generally far better than being institutionalized, doctors’ ideas about what disabled people needed were often incongruent with the realities of their daily life. As Williamson notes in a 2012 journal article, “Individuals with paralysis, missing limbs, weakened joints, or restricted breathing left the hospital for home lives full of physical obstacles.” Homes, daily-care objects, and appliances simply weren’t designed for disabled people, so they took to hacking—modifying inadequate medical devices, wrapping rubber bands around slippery doorknobs for traction, and making “mouthsticks” for typing and other activities. Williamson’s research points to another development: that many disabled people then began to share these hacks in advice columns of the Toomeyville Junior Gazette, a newsletter for polio survivors.

The need for these hacks—and their circulation—did not lessen as time went on. Though the Fair Housing Act was amended in 1988 to prohibit disability discrimination, regulations intended to ensure accessibility in new residential construction pointedly did not apply to duplexes, triplexes, or single-family homes. And the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which addressed accessibility in public spaces, public transit, and the workplace, did not propose any methods for lessening discriminatory attitudes, nor did it apply to private residential homes. Unsurprisingly, developers did not subsequently go out of their way to build housing with the disabled in mind, and by 2011, less than 5 percent of the housing stock was accessible to those with “moderate mobility difficulties,” and less than 1 percent was accessible for wheelchair users, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Only about one-third of housing is modifiable, even though roughly a quarter of U.S. adults have a disability, and more than 80 percent of disabled folks live in their communities, not in institutions. Due to continued technological and medical advancements that allow people to live longer with more complex conditions, preferences for aging in place, and the aging of baby boomers, these numbers will only continue to grow. …”

(see website for the rest of this article’s content, including many specific hacks)

Care Tactics