Reviews with content warning for Religious bigotry - Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman's Fight to End Ableism

Reviews tagging 'Religious bigotry'

Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman's Fight to End Ableism by Elsa Sjunneson

2 reviews

bookishmillennial's review

challenging emotional funny informative reflective sad medium-paced

disclaimer: I don’t really give starred reviews. I hope my reviews provide enough information to let you know if a book is for you or not. Find me here: https://linktr.ee/bookishmillennial

“It is a truth universally unacknowledged that you could become disabled at any point in your life. No matter how perfectly your limbs, eyes, ears, and whatever else works, it could all change in an instant.”

I am not someone who believes that you must find a way to connect to/have something directly impact you to care, so I do think the above quotation is important for people to get through their dense heads, but I also think we should build a more accessible world just because it's the right thing to do. Not everything has to be about *us* in order to make choices that promote accessibility and disability justice and equity.

Anyway, this was a fantastic, informative read which provided such a valuable disabled perspective - I listened to the audiobook on Everand, and if that's accessible to you, I really enjoyed that format. Sjunneson has chapters on dating, representation in media, navigating physical spaces like Comic Con, fandom, eugenics, inspiration porn, gender expressions and their impact on how a disabled person is treated, healthcare, police brutality, sexual/emotional/physical abuse, and much more. She notes both her lived experience, as well as societal attitudes and norms, and I really am so grateful that Sjunneson so graciously shared all of this with us.

I highly recommend ALL non-disabled folks to read this, and if you are a disabled person, I think there is value and a need to commiserate and lament with someone who just gets it. I think this should be required reading for anyone who is not as familiar with disability justice or the intersection of disability yet. I also just think everyone should read this!

Other quotations that stood out to me (I may just buy a physical or digital copy so I can go back and highlight more!):

“I was enough before ableism came for me. My dearest wish is that society will learn to accept disabled bodies as whole, instead of viewing disabled bodies as lesser than, instead of creating value judgements based on how a disabled person accesses their world.

Wholeness is not determined by how many eyes you have or how many working ears you have. It doesn't depend on which limbs work or how many of them you have, either. Wholeness is about personhood, and honoring the bodies of your fellow humans.”

“The English language is perniciously ableist. We speak in metaphor that constantly puts down disabled bodies, with phrases like "turning a blind eye" and "it fell on deaf ears" falling from our lips so easily. People often tell me it's not that big of a deal. But, of course, if you've been listening to your language make you sound stupid, ignorant, and useless for your entire life, when you've made a profession out of the craft of language, you cannot help but find pain in the ways that language cuts you to the quick."

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bi_n_large's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

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