Perceptions of wheels on chairs

A wheelchair is a joyful, freeing part of my body and sense that I love. I experience a constant clash between my experience and the perceptions of society.

Chairs are associated with sitting so a wheelchair is already a challenge to the perception of inactivity, sitting and moving.

“geez honey even the guy in the wheelchair is going faster than us”

Putting wheels on things makes them fun, office chairs with wheels are fun. Wheels make things go faster, going fast is fun. Using a wheelchair is fun.

“alright hotrod”

A Wheelchair is fun, active, fast and joyful. Young children love playing with my wheelchair, they don’t see it as something medical. As we develop in society we get stuck on the medicalisation of the wheelchair. I wonder if this is a product of society and the built environment excluding wheels and hence they are a less visible, normal part of society. How many of your friends and family houses can you not get through the front door? With the medicalisation of the wheelchair, the chair ends up being seen as a proxy for illness and forced limitations.

“… and I nearly ended up in a wheelchair, can you imagine”.

Having walking taken away is a radical change in an individuals context and is understandably scary. I’ve been there and through that. Initially I walked with crutches and did not want to use a wheelchair, I saw it as failure. I started using a wheelchair and went from years of only being at work or at home to travelling the world. My wheelchair has been through tropical rain forests, Sahara sands, up mountains, flying down ancient temples, glaciers, & deep snow. When I think of all the things a wheelchair stops me doing, I realise most are artificial barriers that are not of my body.

Often in medical treatment a doctor sees the wheelchair as something to be fixed.

“It must be very limiting using a wheelchair, we can get you walking again.”

Society has created the barriers and the problem to be fixed is you. This approach is prevalent in all attempts to fix access focused on the chair, avoiding societial change through an medical focus. Society invests in health care in an attempt to cure or manage disabilities medically and not socially. Perhaps this is the pragmatic response, but the context switch from seeing your body as the problem to it being societal barriers is critical in challenging disability discrimination. I feel different levels of disability based on the countries and cities I live in.

“As a disabled person if I could leave the UK I would right now.”

Glasses were once seen as medical, people who used them were stigmatised. In the UK the NHS explicitly would not provide colour, pattern or decorations on NHS prescription glasses. However the physical societal barriers for glasses were low, they transitioned from medicalisation into fashion. Could we see the chair as an expression of an individual rather than mountain bike aesthetics or medically sterile steel?

Izzy Wheels: https://www.izzywheels.com

Challenging Medicalisation

There are lots of efforts to tackle the medicalisation of wheelchairs through seeing people with wheelchairs in contexts where they are not expected or have been excluded. Often they have to reimagine what a chair is in order to explore their desired movement.

Arron wheelzs (https://www.aaronfotheringham.com) has developed new forms of suspension for his wheelchairs so he can explore the limits of his movements.

Ablezine is a London based publication and creative agency https://www.ablezine.com

“Our aim is to tackle ableism and discrimination through vivid, informative content and provide opportunities for those who may have previously been stigmatised or unwelcome in creative and cultural spaces.”

Ablezine issue 2 cover featuring Robert Andy Coombs

The artist Sue Austin (http://www.wearefreewheeling.org.uk/sue-austin-home) has taken her chair underwater and into the air.

The world leading dance company Candoco often incorporate wheelchair dancers as well as a wide variety of bodies. One of the company dancers Joel Brown (https://candoco.co.uk/people/joel-brown/) redefined what I thought was possible with a wheelchair.

Homepage - Candoco

Exceptionalism

To get noticed by society and challenge the wider social attitudes it often has to lean towards exceptionalism. While its effective it can leave little space to just be normal and use a chair.

“Are you training for the Paralympics? No, just keeping fit”

During the London Paralympics, I was frequently asked if I thought the games had improved the perception of wheelchair users in the city. It did challenge attitudes on inactivity and made more sports facilities accessible but it did nothing for the everyday barriers, being excluded from public transport, housing, workplaces & jobs.

Bodies

I’ve not mentioned perceptions of the body and its impact on the wheelchair but they are clearly interconnected. The system we live within and our social history effects how we value a body and our judgement of wheelchairs. When applying for a programming (desk) job after graduation I was told during an interview

“You probably wouldn’t pass the health and safety”.

I fought my way back to university after a year of medical leave, graduated with a first, won prizes for my thesis and was awarded a prize for outstanding achievement. All the employer could see was my non conforming body as a function of their profit.

I normalised that it was not ok to talk about disability openly with employers. In my next job while I was having a major health flare up my employer threaten to fire me for not being productive enough (measured through git commit rates…). When we discussed the health issues they told me I should be more open about my health. In order to particpate in this job I had to climb up and down 6 flights of stairs everyday (using only my arms).

Disability justice and perceptions of wheelchairs is an intersectional issue. Attitudes about wheelchairs show our values on environmentalism, capitalism, social care, health care, transport, urban planning, diversity, feminism, colonialism and many more.

Bodies with wheels

I see the wheelchair as a part of my body, I feel and react to the world through it. My sense of balance comes from it, movement and control operate as a subconscious activity, my chair effects my body and my body effects my chair. Understanding why it can so offensive to touch or push someones wheelchair without asking becomes more obvious when you consider it part of their body.

Donna Haraway: “Why should our bodies end at the skin?

I think the medicalisation of the wheelchair is hard to understand as I don’t see or think of the chair being present.

Absences

“Can I help you? No thanks. Sure I can’t help? No thanks. Come on let me help. No thanks”

The power curve

The wheelchair is often seen as an absence, be it a lack of activity, agency or health. From the perspective of the chair the absence is in society and how it enacts disability upon you. Society in the UK and Europe has decided it’s too expensive and unrealistic to guarantee access as a human right, be that through loose legislation or failure of enforcement.

Both societal attitudes and legislation need to be resolved, but it’s hard to work out which ones comes first. The societal issues promote unfairness (individual experience) and the legislation promotes injustice (wider experience).

My perspective is to create work that focuses on the individuals experience of disability, which promotes advocacy and creative expression that can challenge societal perspectives of wheelchairs. This (with teeth clenched optimism) leads to greater public pressure on the failings of legislation and removes some of the social barriers that are behavioural (don’t park on dipped curbs please).

We live with exclusion and forced absence and I will not be quiet about it.

Further Reading

10 Principles of Disability Justice - Sins Invalid

What Can a Body Do?

Support

Commissioned and supported by Unlimited, celebrating the work of disabled artists, with funding from SouthBank Centre and Arts Council England.