Glamorizing the tech and the idea of these technologized bodies makes us ignore important issues, like maintenance and social meanings.
My fake leg breaks - and it disrupts my week or month, depending. I might end up gluing pieces of it together or trying to find the right screw combo as I sit on the floor of my local hardware joint.
This device is hella useful for someone with hard-to-locate veins and ppl with strong chemos - but it takes maintenance.
I use stuff because I need it - and sometimes I even like it.
But ideas about cyborgs usually gloss over what it is actually like.
Technoableism is a particular strand of ableism that is perhaps most prominently figured in narratives around transhumanism, but enjoys wider capital than that.
And, if you question it, the replies you get back doubt your experience and suggest that you actually agree.
It suggests that using devices amounts to agreeing with narratives about technology as overcoming disability.
That doesn't mean that every tech device that attempts to solve a "problem" - as framed by someone nondisabled - should be lauded.
The awfulness it is to go out as a young person with a walker, for instance, is why I might not use my walker more often.
Even though walkers/rollators are hella rad.
I take off my leg at the end of each day, and sail away with the fluid movements of my body on wheels.
No more heavy, only free -- as long as I stay on the wood floors. LOL.
It imagines that there will be a solution to the problem of body - with the idea that bodies are problems.
But the problems are often surfaces, environments, interfaces, places, and others.
He wanted me to give some history to help students imagine social justice issues in this context.
I, cheekily, presented about how Mars is for disabled people.
(Yes, this does play on the medical model a bit.)
Because they had had the assumption that disabled people couldn't and wouldn't be astronauts. And opening this space was huge.
I showed them some of the Crips in Space narratives from @thedeafpoets and videos from the CFP from the group. #cripsinspace
And it continues to perpetuate it in how tech is created, marketed, and understood.