This was originally posted on The Gimp Parade in March, 2005.
A French energy company has produced a video advertisement about access for the disabled that is quite interesting. The link leads to a page in French (naturally) where you can choose high (haut) speed or low (bas) speed video. Here’s a quick description of the ad:
“One is the Loneliest Number” is sung by Aimee Mann in the background. On a noisy city sidewalk a nondisabled woman is jostled slightly by the busy activity of numerous people in manual wheelchairs hurrying about their business. She appears to be wanting help with something but no one stops to talk to her. A different woman in a bank informs a teller she would like to open an account, but he responds in sign language she clearly cannot understand.
On a street in the heavy rain, a nondisabled man slips and slides to keep his footing while people in wheelchairs easily roll by. At a public phone, a nondisabled man stoops over awkwardly because the phone is adjusted for a seated person’s height. Across the street, a person in a wheelchair points at him because he looks so strange. A “pedestrian” traffic signal that would usually show a symbol of a person walking has a symbol of a person wheeling instead. It turns green and a happy young man and woman in wheelchairs cross together. In a library, a nondisabled man steps around a woman using a white cane, but when he looks at a book he sees that it is all in braille and he cannot read it or any of the books around him in the library.
At the bottom of the screen: Le monde est plus dur quand il n’est past conçu pour vous. Translation, is, I believe: The world is harder when it is not conceived for you. Then a voice says: Desormais, les espaces EDF sont accessibles à tous. From now on, the spaces of EDF are accessible to all.
I’d be curious to know how nondisabled viewers of this ad interpret it. Would their description include everything mine does above or would they not have noticed some things that were obvious to me? For example, would they notice that the first nondisabled woman is not only the lone person without a chair but seems to need some help and no one stops? Would they notice that the disabled person pointing to the man at the phone is staring because he is not “normal?” These observations of the content of the advertisement involve inversions of everyday encounters to me, but does a nondisabled person viewing the ad even register that this is what is happening? I’d be interested to know.
The ad isn’t a perfect translation of the disability experience, of course, but it is much more sophisticated than most cultural statements about accessibility. It reaches beyond the idea of ramps and physical adjustments of the environment to include social relations and the conceptual privilege nondisabled people enjoy by sustaining an environment that is not “conceived” as being for everyone.
Often, the argument against compliance to the ADA is that disabled people are demanding something “extra” and their quest for equality oppresses business owners or employers who must suddenly provide something additional to the disabled person that no one else is asking for. The implied belief is that the nondisabled person never asks for anything “extra,” though this is not really true. Rather, the built world is “conceived” to include the extras they might need. Lights, for example, which none of us who can see consider an extra at all, but a blind person surely doesn’t need. Another “extra,” as seen from a traditional male perspective is on-site daycare at work. Of course, that view involves both the conception of a world where women take care of all the children AND stay at home to do it. “Extra” is in the eye of the beholder in many instances of disability access too.
Yet the idea that accommodating disability is an extra is so firmly implanted in our culture’s conception of the world that we don’t even see our nondiscrimination policies toward the disabled for the proof of and continuation of marginalization that they are. Look at the simple example of “disabled person access” signage. We have designated signs for where disabled people can find inclusion in our society. Can I get in this building? Look for the sign. Can I ride this bus? Look for the sign that allows for my existence on board. (Of course, even the universal symbol for disability is marginalizing in that a stick figure in a wheelchair hardly illustrates access for someone who is deaf.)
The signs ARE useful when used to designate actual wheelchair accessibility (which often has no relationship to compliance with the legal standard), but this is because the rest of the world continues to be conceived of without a thought for inclusion of everyone. And the ways the signs tend to separate us out is a form of segregation, however benign the intention. Having a place to put disabled folks in is as dangerous to us and our ability to be a part of society as having no place for us at all. We want to be everywhere. We want signs to be redundant. We want all of society conceived to include us.
There’s a short story that further illustrates this need for a paradigm shift. In a fictional utopia of disability inclusion in the year 2050, a historian tells the awakened Crip Van Winkle how things have changed:
All conveyances, public or private, for transportation by land, air, sea and cyberspace, for individual or collective travel are naturally covered by the Universal Design principle. You don’t seem to understand, van Winkle, the United States of Europe officially abolished Apartheid in the year 2024 — 30 years after South Africa but better late than never. Since then, Universal Design has been the law of the land and the international sign of access that you guys were so proud of, is forbidden. It singles out and stigmatizes a particular group of citizens. Besides, it is not necessary anymore — I guess it never really was necessary. Already in your day and age it would have been better to mark the places that were inaccessible in order to point out the full extent of the injustice. By using the symbol of access you did yourself a disservice, because the symbol served as an alibi for the accepted norm of inaccessibility emphasizing the exception rather than the rule.
Like the short story, the French ad attempts to reveal the ableist paradigm we all live under by inverting it. While a clever advertisement doesn’t indicate how well the company achieves inclusion in the real world, the awareness it shows is refreshing. It suggests that lack of inclusiveness is a failure of creativity that should not be explained with any alibi.
Ad via Aleja
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My goodness, this is an interesting ad, especially given its provenance – near-total social exclusion of people with disabilities is the norm in France. I’d venture to say that most people in the US have the idea that people with disabilities are entitled to access and enjoy public spaces, even though they might be unaware of the barriers that exist to that access. Not so much in France.
I’ll have to see if I can get my sister here to comment – the French attitude toward disability is the intended topic of her doctoral dissertation.
Background: I’m nondisabled, and American by both birth and geography.
I noticed pretty much everything in your description except the young man in the wheelchair pointing at the `freak’ trying to use the phone. I read a bit about ablism a few years ago, however, so my perceptions could very well not be representative.
Your point about access signs being marginalizing is interesting and well-taken.
Have you visited this blog? http://thegimpparade.blogspot.com I connected them to you as well since your topic today is on disabled folks. Interesting perspectives all the way around.
There are a few other things which I think were deliberate…
The guy who passes much too close to the first lady jerks to the side as if he’s afraid she’s contagious. There is a white line that marks the space next to the handrail for ‘able’ access, which may hint at a perfunctory job, given the absence of level steps.
Silent Spring: The Gimp Parade is me. [waves] I’m guest blogging here for a bit.
The Disability Rights Comission has a similar themed video for training, but a bit longer than that. It makes some of the things in it more explicit, such as someone asking the nondisabled protagonist how he manages. As nondisabled person I thought it was ok – simple, gets the message across etc.
However, it is notable that DRC Video-world is only inhabited by people who are thin, pretty and under 30. The protagonist ends up ‘converted’ at the end by sleeping with a very attractive woman who uses a power chair. I think the idea is to combat the whole disabled=asexual, but it seemed to me more “Look! Crip women are fuckable members of the sex class too!”. Apparently you can only takle prejudices one at a time. It may well be that they’re right – you may well have to use sex and beautiful people to get any sort of message across. Depressing.
Hi Blue,
great post, thanks. I’m a subscriber to the belief that ability/disability is purely environmental – if an environment is conceived as being able to be used by anyone of any level of ability, there IS no disability.
I wonder what you would think of an ad that has been running where I live for some time now. It’s a MADD ad, and pictures a young woman outside a building, smiling, with the caption “your girlfriend”. A young man comes along to meet her and they embrace. The caption says “your best friend.” Then the camera pans back and up to a young man looking out the window at the happy couple. The young man is in a wheelchair. The caption says, “you.” Then something like maybe “you don’t know what you might lose drinking and driving.” or something of the like.
I cringe everytime I see this commercial. The use of disabled bodies in this way really irritates me. Just reaffirms the “temporarily able-bodied” people’s assumption that disability means no one will ever love you, or you’ll never be able to do anything with your life – in fact, you don’t HAVE a quality of life worth protecting or celebrating. It just really bugs me. Have you seen this ad? Anyone else hate it as much as I do?
Thinking Girl: Yep, I’ve seen it and mentioned it very briefly earlier this summer in a post of collected links, I think. I’ve only seen it online, so it doesn’t torment me, but I did hate it.
No link, I’m afraid, but Ballastexistenz had a fabulous post up about a conversation she and her friend had (publicly!), discussing all the poor people who can’t bring their chairs with them everywhere. They pointed out how expensive it was for hospitals, restaurants, and about every other place having to provide endless numbers of chairs just for people who might need to sit down and have no chair with them.
It was hilarious, but also very true. One good-sized hospital may have 10,000 or more chairs all there for people who don’t bring their own chairs with them.
I’m not disabled myself, but I’ve worked with enough people who are to have developed a pretty good awareness of the advantages the world hands me simply because my needs are the assumed default.