Anna March, Disability Exploitation, and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs
By: Karrie Higgins
Tags: Criplit, Disability, Highered, Intermedia, Awp

Enter Anna March.

I seek advice in a Facebook group for women-identified writers, and Anna March comments that this agent is just concerned, maybe a little paternalistic. Anna is a new Facebook friend. We met through her New York Times Modern Love piece a few months ago, about which I have mixed feelings because, in it, she erases her boyfriend’s disability:

Here’s the thing about Adam and me. Despite all appearances, with him being disabled, I actually consider myself to be the less “able” person in the relationship. People may assume that Adam is dependent on me, but I think it’s the other way around: He’s the stronger one, and I rely more on him.

Right down to the quotation marks around “able,” Anna simultaneously erases Adam’s disability and wants it to be the center of their love story: Look at me, she says. I love a man in a wheelchair!

But also: My boyfriend isn’t disabled at all!

Even the illustrations feel like erasure:

Anna and Adam seated in a wheelchair made of bricks. Anna is poised on the armrest and Adam looks up at her.

Anna literally occupies his wheelchair. Except it’s not an actual wheelchair. It’s made of bricks, a symbol of their new, 3-story cottage, which is inaccessible for Adam until ramps get built:

One evening after the contractors left, Adam, trying to help, picked up a heavy box of discarded bathroom tiles and other trash and headed for the pile outside. As he rolled toward our mudroom, the box slipped off his lap, sending dozens of filthy tiles crashing to the floor along with someone’s leftover Big Gulp cup, which splashed soda over freshly painted walls. I didn’t know whether to scream, cry or run away. Instead, I said: “Leave me alone! I don’t need your help.” Adam disappeared, and I cleaned up alone, crying. “I can’t do this,” I whispered as I swept and scrubbed. Not this house or this man.

Able-bodied readers probably do not pick up on it, but this is abusive. You can’t buy an inaccessible house and get mad when your disabled boyfriend experiences … access barriers. In fact, disabled people face a much higher risk of domestic violence in part because abled partners can wield access like a weapon.

“You would never do that,” I say to my husband. “When I drop things or make messes, you always offer to clean it up and tell me it’s no big deal.”

Anna takes it one step further: She steals Adam’s disability — his spinal cord injury — for herself, as metaphor:

That’s why people who think Adam would be lost without me have it backward. After his world fell apart at 16, he rebuilt it, year after year, and now he is a fortress. My world was also blasted apart when I was a child, but I’m just getting a handle on it now. In many ways, it’s as if I’m trying to escape from a crushed minivan of my own and having to remind myself, just as he once did, that I’m O.K., that I’m alive.

I have scoliosis, cervical instability, and a spinal cord injury (in my case, caused by a birth defect in collusion with a genetic connective tissue disorder), and every single day, I grind my teeth as people use my Jenga Tower spine as a metaphor for cowardice and even evil:

Twitter account: Paul Ryan’s Spine with an illustration of a backbone and Paul Ryan

Even Alt_NIH:

ALTNIH Twitter account using #spineless hashtag to refer to POTUS

I am a patient at NIH because of my spine. Imagine seeing that on a Twitter feed run by — who? Doctors there?

Scientists Baffled by McConnell and Ryan’s Ability to Stand Upright Without Spines by Andy Borowitz

I have trouble standing upright. I am not a metaphor for Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell.

And Adam’s body is not a metaphor for Anna’s trauma or her “messes,” as she alludes to her shady past.

And besides, some of us carry both physical disabilities and psychological trauma: using one as a metaphor for the other erases our complex experience. My abuse — my childhood “crushed mini-van” to use Anna’s metaphor — was because of my disabilities.

Anna ends the piece by essentializing Adam as “Prince Charming in a Wheelchair,” listed along with “a yard full of trash” as the elements of her life.

When it’s convenient, poof! He’s disabled again.

And she was praised for this. She got into the New York Times for this. While I am called a liar about my childhood trauma because of my disabilities.

See the problem yet?