Who's story is it anyway? Some considerations on disability from an aesthetic and narrative perspective of lived experience

This PaR aims to use film-making and theoretical materials to explore the persistent practical problems of social injustices and inequalities disabled people face in society today. In accounting for prejudices against those with atypical bodies and/or minds, disability is taken up as a core concept in society, that treats it as a symbol for how being human inevitably means embracing debility, dependency and pain. I examine how this projection upon disabled people is predominantly denied. How, in the failure to acknowledge the symbolic charge they carry on behalf of the whole of society, disabled people are rendered marginal. Their words carry less credibility than those of more powerful agents, and their knowledge is not integrated into shared epistemological resources, which exclusion perpetuates the prejudices they face. Two of the films submitted are exposés of injustices disabled people experience. One tackles the system of mental health; the other, government benefits provision. These injustices are explicitly intertwined with epistemic oppression. The impaired body (taken to include the mind), lies at the heart of the disabled lived experience, but is displaced in critical disability studies. This shortcoming is traced to a social constructivism that prioritises language and representation over the lived reality of bodily impairment. This exclusion, within theory, risks denying disabled people's agency, leaving their representation to be undertaken by the non-disabled, with a consequent neglect to combat the negative aesthetic judgements that inform prejudices against disabled people, and lead them to be targeted for unfair treatment and, sometimes, hate crimes and violence, a subject another of the films investigates. The idea of disability as central to social practices generally is examined in a film about art and impaired vision, where the manifestly extensive contribution of disability and disabled artists is recorded. Disabled people, by claiming agency and owning their own narratives, are able to show different representations of disability (and of humanity), that are not derogatory or dehumanising. The work specifically made for this PaR - the 'Untitled' film - seeks to reclaim the silence surrounding disability, and exemplifies the recommendations made in the text: that disabled people's perspectives be made room for. These narratives are inevitably also critiques of unacknowledged ableism, which makes them subversive.