Just had a conversation with my school’s access services in which the subtext was our graduate school is the problem. i.e. one man sitting behind a desk requiring disclosure for a petition.

But heartbreakingly, one of the first suggestions I was given was “why don’t you do [x] work on [a medical?!] leave and then come back,” because the clock starts ticking as soon as you come back which does not give me any hope for disabled students at all.

Being asked to describe the “functional nature of your impairments” in a predictable and time bound way (i.e in relation to the capitalist clock) when you have two poorly understood chronic illnesses and no treatment plan and no access to doctors ...

is like playing pin the tail on the clock face, or whacking away at an empty piñata: the game has no discernible end. Honestly, when the only advice someone can give you is get better and come back

—in the middle of a pandemic no less—the only conclusion I can reach is that access has come to be attached to particular kinds of impairments and particularly legible crip body-minds. (Never mind how impairment and disability remain synonymous in the medical model.)

I think the most depressing thing behind the formalization of access is the latent assumption that disabled students are faking our impairments for personal gain. And the only reason this assumption sticks is because the entire system presupposes a hyper able body-mind.

The next time you worry about fairness in respect to giving accommodations pause to consider all the various ways in which late capitalism is itself disabling before you impose the binary of deserving and undeserving (or functional enough) on others.

This has been another thread to add to the archive of #whydisabledstudentsdropout