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Disability, Sexuality, And The Other By Nancy Hirschman

1059 Words5 Pages

The third week of content introduces concepts that relate to disability and queerness. Key ideas from the lectures and the reading give more insight as to why both of these things are so important to look at together and show the challenging ideas that come with the comparisons that are made throughout the week. The main idea of this week's content was disability and queerness and the ways in which they intersect in their likeness to each other. Both disability and queerness have a history of being looked down on by others in society. A lot of it is to do with society's fear of what they do not understand or the fact that they have the possibility of ending up just like them. The fear can stem from the body's ability to change within seconds …show more content…

Hirschmann. The paper discusses the intersection between queerness and disability. It highlights the ways in which the people who experience either of them can relate to each other. Throughout the reading, Hirschmann brings up the idea of fear and its connection to the intersection between disability and queerness. Invisible queerness and disability is talked about in this paper. Hirschmann puts forward the idea “that voluntary invisibility offers a political strategy” (Hirschmann 2013, 146). When we think about how queerness and disability have the possibility of being either visible or invisible, we must think about how both of those have their advantages and disadvantages. Hirschmann talks about the fear that people have of disability and queerness and how it is caused by the idea in their minds that they could become like the people they fear. She uses the term “undecidability” when talking about this fear (143). Hirschmann suggests “the fear of disability provides a clearer and more tangible way of understanding the fear of queerness,” (144). What is meant by this is that she believes that the comparisons between both queerness and disability help society form a better understanding of them because they can see aspects of one in the …show more content…

One of these ideas was the way the concept of invisibility was discussed by Hirschmann when referring to both queerness and disability. Hirshmann discusses how both disability and queerness are not necessarily visible traits (Hirschmann 2013, 145). People can be visibly queer or disabled, but their queerness or disability can also be invisible to others. For some people, the visibility of these traits are a choice, but for some they do not have that choice. Whether the invisibility is beneficial to someone will definitely depend on the individual. There are a lot of people who have disabilities that are invisible, and while they do benefit from that in some aspects of life, they are also heavily disadvantaged at times. Hirschmann refers to Susan Wendell’s idea about people who are not healthy but appear to be when discussing this issue (144). When people with these disabilities need to be accommodated, they end up having to explain to others why because there is no visible issue. As a result, some people do not believe them so they do not receive the help they need from society. This can make their lives significantly more difficult than they need to be. The problem is that a lot of people out there have trouble understanding what they cannot see. In this way I think this is why some queer people worry about not being queer enough or why disabled people worry maybe they are not

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