“Failure to be productive has visceral, material effects. It means many people with disabilities rely on public benefits for our very survival, a reality that is both stigmatized and subject to intense scrutiny. In a world that fetishizes productivity, disabled people get scapegoated as shirkers and scroungers, as lazy and worthless, as people who fail because we can't or won't work. But it isn't just disabled folks who face judgment if we're not working hard enough. Ableism doesn't demand a diagnosis or ask for a doctor's note. It's ready to sweep up any body that seems to be faltering, any mind that might not measure up. Ableist assumptions run through the very fabric of so many of our lives. I think of all the folks I know who can't afford to call in sick, all the folks who drive themselves to work regardless of how they feel. Those realities are shaped in large part by social policy and public choices, by the fact that so many workers labor without guaranteed sick time or family leave. But I'm also thinking about the way these values get inside our skins, the way we internalize them, swallow them whole. So many of us have learned to use our work as a salve against the fear that .”
Loving Our Own Bones, Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole, by Julia Watts Belser pg. 52
Invitation: “we are …. enough.”
Julia Watts Belser is a rabbi, scholar, and spiritual teacher, as well as a long-time activist for the disability community, LGBTQI, and gender justice. She is a professor of Jewish studies in the Department of Theology and religious studies at Georgetown University and core faculty in Georgetown's Disability Studies Program, as well as a senior research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. She is an avid wheelchair hiker and a lover of wild places.
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