Disability service offices, human resources, and other institutions that purport to manage accomodations and access for disabled people are functionally biocertification machines. Biocertification, which I believe was first theorized by Ellen Samuels, is a process of using biology, medicine, and technology to 'prove' that someone properly belongs to a certain identity category, especially disability. Her book on this is quite good, if you want to learn more about this. My point for right now is that getting any kind of official accomodations for disability is almost entirely a biocertification process and nothing else. When I was at my previous institution, all students with officially registered disability accomodations were required to meet with their professors individually and disclose every single semeser. I always found this process tedious and nerve-wracking. Why couldn't the institution that had my needs on file contact my professors directly? Why make vulnerable students expose themselves in this way with the promise to play enforcement only if things go bad? It became clear to me that the function of disability services is not to protect the apparent privacy of disabled students or to mitigate the stress of disclosure. Even if you don't have to give a specific diagnosis, the act of requesting accomodations in and of itself is enough to mark you as disabled.
At my current institution, I've run into a new access problem. The reality is that this problem could be quite easily resolved by me having a brief conversation with a sympathetic staff member at the library. I know this because when I visited another university this week, they accomodated me without issue. But at my home university, I was refused the easy route and am being required to go through biocertification. It's easy to see that accomodation could happen on the interpersonal level if ablebodied people recieved requests for access at face value and did not scrutinize them as the underhanded trickery of fakers and bad actors. Biocertification requires rigorously proving that you are not a fraud, that there is something medically verifiably 'wrong' with you and that, most importantly, a doctor will testify to this. The disabled person is not allowed to be an expert on their own experience (we are either too disabled to know what we need, or we are not disabled enough to need any accomodations, or often both). Disability services as a bureaucratic entity is emblematic of this.
When disability services offers no real services to disabled people, we must question what it functionally does. And what it does, overwhelmingly, is act as yet another layer of biocertification, another link in a long chain that drains disabled people of their rhetorical capacities. If anything, the process of biocertification requires the disabled person to disclose more as it waters down our claims to self-understanding. It denies disabled people the ability to declare our own needs directly and expects us to turn over medical documentations on request to the part of our institution which promises to be good at handling it. The less disabled people are believed about our experiences, the more often we must go on our knees to beg for accomodation.
12:29 November 12, 2024
I am a newborn cyborg. I have been made a cyborg before my time. This isn't some abstract hailing of the cyborg future; it's really just that I might take a seminar on cyborgs in the spring. I guess I expected my transformation to be slower, or more realistically, I expected to have some choice in the matter. I don't care what Haraway thinks. The medical cyborg, the technological cyborg, the cyborg of wearables, these are particular types of cyborg and now I am a different type of cyborg from the person who uses a cell phone, the person who takes pharmaceuticals, the person who stands on the scale. We don't think of them as cyborgs, despite the interchange between flesh and technology. It is myself, standing outside a magnet gate I can not pass through, who becomes less than human, other than human. My body quite literally has a bad resonance, a bad reaction with unseen magnetic fields. It is not the machine, extractable from my body, which has this bad function. The function is of my body as the machine is of my body, stuck on, completing a circuit with the electricity of my heart.
20:15 November 11, 2024