Hello, DTTS community!
As always, a warm welcome to new followers and subscribers—thanks for being here! If you’re still catching up on Season 7, be sure to check out our season finale, featuring Set Hernandez and Pedro, co-creators of the acclaimed documentary film, Unseen. I couldn’t have asked for a better way to wrap up the season than to share Pedro and Set’s journeys toward healing.
Check out the film’s website to learn more about this powerful film about disability, immigration, and mental health.
Disability and work
We’ve just wrapped up October, which is Disability Employment Awareness month. This time last year, I had just returned from some time abroad and away from my job. Since then, I have recalibrated my orientation to employment, reflecting on disability and how it relates to the concept of “work”.
Early laws related to the treatment of disabled people in the US at the height of the Industrial Revolution only established programs and services for certain disabled people. These were largely vocational rehabilitation programs, set up to ready disabled bodies to perform labor in support of capitalism.
Growing up in the US, I was programmed to believe that my body would always be measured on its potential for labor — a feeling that was exacerbated by my disability. As an adult, this meant devoting myself to proving that I could be a successful and productive member of the workforce.
The way I chose to prove this was by becoming a public interest lawyer. I thought that turning away from a corporate job would provide a path to productivity that was in service to a greater good. But over time, I realized that nonprofit work was not free from capitalistic ideas about productivity and the worth of bodies.
More often than not, nonprofits are driven by the support of philanthropic institutions, which are themselves the product of corporate and industrial wealth, held in the hands of the very few. The moguls who create these institutions believe that every cent of their investment should be devoted to their cause of choice—sometimes at the expense of the wellbeing of those employed by the nonprofits they fund.
In a sense, the body of the “do-gooder” is measured by its ability to produce service labor in a way that is not that different from the factory worker’s body, measured by its ability to produce widgets.
Setting boundaries
I fully and willingly participated in this system until the pandemic, and my introduction to disability justice. As all of our lives were touched by COVID in one way or another, and long COVID emerged as a new form of disability. Disability justice emerged for me as a beacon of hope—a new way of thinking about the value of bodies and minds that is radically outside of the capitalist framework. One of its core tenets is an anti-capitalist politic. But how do we live an anti-capitalist politic in a capitalist world?
With humility, I’m still trying to figure this out. But one important approach has been to set boundaries around my paid labor. In the past, like any dutiful nonprofit worker, I felt a sense of devotion to the mission of whatever organization I worked in—I felt a pressure to give every inch of myself and all of my mental energy to the cause.
But I quickly realized what a drain that was on my physical and mental energy. I discovered how nonprofit institutions often use the nobility of the mission to extract long hours of labor from their workers. I still care about the mission and serving my role in it, but not beyond my capacity. I cabin my hours of paid labor as much as possible each day.
I am slowly learning to say “no.”
With colleagues, I advocate for systemic changes, like flexible work hours, that will make work more sustainable for everyone, especially disabled people. I am also working to reconstitute my own identity beyond that of a laborer within my chosen vocation—I am more than my work. Outside of work, I seek activities that are restorative, creative, or generative, to counteract a job that can sometimes feel degenerative.
None of this is easy. For artists and media-makers—whose paid labor, necessary for survival, is creative—the line between work that is generative and that which is extractive is often blurred.
It’s not easy to assert yourself with an employer who has the ability to take away your access to food, housing, and healthcare if you don’t do what you’re told. And beyond the transactional, most people genuinely want to do well at whatever job they are doing.
Rather than solving with certainty these day-to-day conundrums, disability justice has offered me a new way of thinking about my relationship to work. Most importantly, it has made me realize that I am more than the amount of labor my body can produce. My identity is not wholly centered on my vocation. Even if my body prevents me from producing labor, I am still valuable inherently merely by virtue of my humanness. It has helped me see the intangible, unquantifiable gifts that everyone brings into this world.
I hope that all of my readers, regardless of their disability, see their own inherent value and the gifts they share with those around them. And if you’d like to hear some wise reflections on how to build disability justice principles into social justice work, check out my interview this season with Dom Kelly of New Disabled South.
Thanks for reading, and if you’ve made it this far, please leave a comment letting me know if your thinking on work and value has changed over time. You can also get in touch by emailing downtothestruts@gmail.com.
In solidarity,
Qudsiya