During Ramadan, those observing the fast abstain from food, beverages, smoking, and kissing. It was late June, and the Middle East is a sauna at that time of year. I was eight years old and on summer vacation in my parents’ village. The first Ramadan I ever fasted was no joke. I spent my school days in beautiful New Jersey and my summers in the war zone known as the West Bank. I was born and raised in the United States. They offer diverse perspectives that speak to past, present, and future generations. The accounts in this collection ask readers to think about disabled people not as individuals who need to be “fixed,” but as members of a community with its own history, culture, and movements. The seventeen eye-opening essays in Disability Visibility, all written by disabled people, offer keen insight into the complex and rich disability experience, examining life's ableism and inequality, its challenges and losses, and celebrating its wisdom, passion, and joy. If, however, you want to read accounts of grief and joy, independence and interdependence, challenge and transformative creativity, then I highly recommend this book.Disabled young people will be proud to see themselves reflected in this hopeful, compelling, and insightful essay collection, adapted for young adults from the critically acclaimed adult book, Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century that "sheds light on the experience of life as an individual with disabilities, as told by none other than authors with these life experiences." - Chicago Tribune, "Best books published in summer 2020" (Vintage/Knopf Doubleday edition). If you are looking for a simple set of narratives to teach you about what it means to be disabled, this is not the collection for you. Even so, expect to experience some discomfort. The essays start with content notes, if applicable, empowering you to encounter any potentially triggering topics on your own terms. It’s possible to read Disability Visibility quickly, since it’s made up of mostly short essays, but I suggest that you take the time to engage deeply with each account. In part two, Sky Cubacub articulates their vision for a disabled queer clothing reform and asks: ‘If we eliminate the pressure to pass, what delicious and devastating opportunities for transformation might we create?’ Díaz-Merced’s TedTalk transcript appears in part three, while in the final section the Harriet Tubman Collective reminds the Movement for Black Lives that ‘liberation will never come without the intentional centering of Black Disabled/Deaf narratives and leadership’. The first section opens with activist Harriet McBryde Johnson’s essay Unspeakable Conversations, an account of her debate with Australian philosopher Peter Singer about the selective infanticide of disabled infants.
Wong has not painted a complete picture of the disabled community, nor does she claim to, but she has brought together an intentionally intersectional collection of stories to ‘show disabled people simply being in own words’. An outgrowth of Wong’s work with the Disibility Visibility Project, which she started in 2014 to collect and preserve disabled people’s oral histories, the book includes manifestos, poetry, love stories, transcripts and a eulogy. ‘Science is for everyone … it has to be available to everyone,’ she says.ĭíaz-Merced’s is one of 37 voices that speaks from the pages of Disability Visibility, edited by Alice Wong. Not only did that innovation allow her to continue in her profession, but also it revealed new information about supernova explosions that had never been observed in visual representations of the same data. Wanda Díaz-Merced lost access to this data when she lost her sight, leading her to come up with sonification – a way to translate intensity into sound. Instead, sighted physicists study graphs of light intensity over time to learn about this type of neutron star. A magnetar is born in a gamma-ray burst, an incredibly powerful astronomical event that, nevertheless, cannot be seen with the naked eye.
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