Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“When I was younger, disability didn’t seem to exist outside my visits to the hospital and seating clinics for repairs for my wheelchair. For the most part, I felt really really weird…I’d never considered disability an identity worth understanding, let alone celebrating, and I was pretty sure I was the only one who experienced the world from this seat on the margins.”

From the start of Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, Rebekah Taussig points out the theme of Disability as an Identity. Because society does not view disability as an “identity worth understanding,” Taussig didn’t see it as valuable either. This lack of inclusion is a key struggle for people with disabilities, as they fight for inclusion in all areas of life and the right to frame disability as an identity as important as race, gender, and the like. One of the book’s goals is to show how disability is an identity worthy of inclusion.

“Most of what I saw of life felt powerfully, intrinsically inaccessible to me—how was I supposed to enter those spaces, let alone contribute in them? […] Not only did I discover I wasn’t the princess, but I was an uninvited intruder, a problem to push out of sight.”

Life’s “spaces” include work, an area that Taussig felt excluded from because she did not see herself as someone who could have a job—largely due to a lack of representation of similar people. As a child, she fantasized about marrying a prince but then realized her life was different from those without disabilities—to the point of giving up this fantasy. This illustrates how ableism makes people with disabilities feel like they don’t belong in the world, which reinforces the theme of Combating Ableism. Ableism creates not just inaccessible spaces but also inaccessibility to a self-fulfilling life.