HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Policing Disability: Our institutions of higher learning have fostered a new paternalism.

In the early stages of academic disability studies there seemed nothing remotely disturbing about efforts to think about embodiment and normalcy. Why not look closely at the works of gifted writers whose experience of disability allowed them to see the common world in original and sometimes shocking ways? Why not probe language itself so as to reveal the relationship between bodies and metaphor and to expose practices built into ordinary speech? Why not, indeed, move on to ask political questions about the rhetoric of diversity and wonder why disability issues are not always cited in conversations built around inclusion? All of that seemed, as I say, not only plausible but valuable, and some of the scholarly research sponsored in the field was rigorous and challenging.

But it is one thing to identify practices and assumptions and another to suppose that they can or should be eliminated. It’s one thing to open up a lively conversation and another to promote a conversion narrative in terms of which a cadre of language activists teach everyone else to watch what they say and thereby put an end to practices that are neither injurious nor offensive.

The proper response to “language activists” is something along the lines of: “Do the letters F.O. mean anything to you?”

One of the most important things to remember — and to say, loudly and frequently — is that these “activists” aren’t good people who are perhaps a bit overzealous in their efforts to make a better world. They’re horrible, awful people on a conscienceless power trip, whatever cause they purport to be serving at the moment.