Motherhood and Social Exclusion by Byvelds Christie;

Author:Byvelds, Christie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Demeter Press
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART III

Disability, Care Work and Motherhood

Chapter 8

The Trouble with Engineering Inclusion: Disabled Mothering at the Limits of Enhancement Technology

Kelly Fritsch

In the months prior to my first daughter being born, I began to lose my ability to walk. As my life transitioned from “walkie” (Clare 359) to mobility scooter and electric wheelchair user, I began to encounter new barriers and exclusions in my everyday life. I have been disabled since birth—I’ve always had difficulty navigating stairs, always limped along slowly, and dreaded falling because getting up from the ground was so difficult. And because of my life-long limited physical capacities, I have always faced various barriers and forms of social exclusion. But new challenges arose as I increasingly became unable to independently walk more than a few steps beyond my apartment walls. How to buy and carry groceries without using a shopping cart? How to open heavy doors? How to get around town with limited accessible transit and taxi options, and no access to an accessible vehicle of my own? Figuring out the answers to these questions and others that have since emerged has taken years, numerous failures, and more than one instance of being completely stuck. But answering these questions became all the more complicated as I became a mother. If I had trouble navigating the world on my own, how would I navigate it with a child? In the years that followed my first daughter’s birth, one thing became clear: there are plenty of organizations, institutions, and individuals interested in engineering technological solutions to the so-called problem of being a physically disabled mother. Ideas and designs for adapted cribs, wheelchair strollers, “baby-lifters,” altered highchairs and change tables abound. But such innovations, though often very useful and widely exalted, fail to sufficiently address and engage the ways in which disabled mothers are profoundly excluded from both mothering and community and social participation more generally.

Although I, like many disabled parents, face numerous barriers on a daily basis, it is not my physical limitations that exclude me from mothering as well as community and social participation. Rather, my limitations are social and relational: they are failures of my communities, even my disability communities, to address a lack of access to sustainable forms of disabled parenting and inclusion (Fritsch, “Contesting”). Nonetheless, it is difficult to specify how the individual physical limitations I face as a mother are not just mine and are not just an individual problem to solve but rather are embedded within broader social relations. This is in part due to the way in which the inclusion of disability within neoliberal economies makes systemic barriers out to be individual problems that can be solved and overcome through technological innovations that are embedded within neoliberal market logics.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which the dominant cultural discourses of disabled mothering re-enforce disability as located in an individual body in need of technological solutions. By charting out the extensive social barriers faced by disabled parents, I show how neoliberal processes of capacitating

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