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A review by lizshayne
Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman's Fight to End Ableism by Elsa Sjunneson
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
reflective
fast-paced
4.5
I have...so many feelings about this book. It's hard to talk about responding to this while still coming to terns with my own disabled identity. This book was a bonfire and it shone and it stung. Not as much as it hurt to live it, but to know and to vicariously feel this pain was a lot.
A lot is not bad. But that makes it no less a lot.
And that is, after all, the point.
There's this odd experience where Sjunneson is in the middle of an SFF community that I lurk (deliberately?) on the outskirts of and so the way she writes and speaks and delivers her comments (and her footnotes) feels oddly familiar from someone I've never met. The obvious endpoint of parasocial relationships.
The thing, however, that stood out to me as most crucial (and this was not her point alone and so it's not that you must read this, but that it's important to hear any disability activist on this topic) is how deftly she threads the needle on advocating for getting rid of disease while advocating against the eugenicist desire to erase disability, which means eradicating disabled people. (I happened to go from this to Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and it seems like the common these is "when people tell you not to take away the thing that makes up their identity, you don't get to ignore them because you've deemed it unworthy". But I digress.) This is the review, not the argument itself, so I'll leave it there because we need the language that lets us talk and think about these things.
(Also I feel like one should be forbidden from marking this book as "inspiring")
A lot is not bad. But that makes it no less a lot.
And that is, after all, the point.
There's this odd experience where Sjunneson is in the middle of an SFF community that I lurk (deliberately?) on the outskirts of and so the way she writes and speaks and delivers her comments (and her footnotes) feels oddly familiar from someone I've never met. The obvious endpoint of parasocial relationships.
The thing, however, that stood out to me as most crucial (and this was not her point alone and so it's not that you must read this, but that it's important to hear any disability activist on this topic) is how deftly she threads the needle on advocating for getting rid of disease while advocating against the eugenicist desire to erase disability, which means eradicating disabled people. (I happened to go from this to Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and it seems like the common these is "when people tell you not to take away the thing that makes up their identity, you don't get to ignore them because you've deemed it unworthy". But I digress.) This is the review, not the argument itself, so I'll leave it there because we need the language that lets us talk and think about these things.
(Also I feel like one should be forbidden from marking this book as "inspiring")