Is the #MeToo Movement Ableist?

 

Is the #MeToo Movement Ableist?

 

by

Shelley L. Tremain and Melinda C. Hall

 

Is the #MeToo Movement ableist? We think it is ableist, in philosophy and elsewhere. Not surprisingly, the #MeToo Movement has taken little or no account of the sexual abuse of disabled women and men. Disabled women are sexually abused at a rate four times that of nondisabled white women. Yet, we have seen next to no discussion by the #MeToo Movement about the sexual violence that disabled women and men confront.

When the hashtag #MeToo initially circulated on social media, it encompassed myriad forms of sexual abuse, assault, intimidation, and harassment in various domains, involving people in all manner of relationships and settings, including familial, acquaintance, employment, educational, and professional.  

Nevertheless, with revelations about Hollywood actors, sitting senators, and comedians (among others), the concerns of the #MeToo Movement quickly became much more narrowly circumscribed, focusing almost exclusively on workplace harassment and sexual assault of employees by employers, of junior professionals by senior professionals, employees by coworkers, and service industry workers by customers and clients. Given that the majority of disabled women and men are unemployed, the sexual aggressions against disabled people have thus come to be ignored, obscured, and excluded from this supposedly universal social movement.

This exclusion has been replicated in discussions amongst philosophers about harassment in philosophy where disabled people are virtually absent. That thousands of Indigenous women and girls have been murdered or gone missing in North America has also been absent from these discussions, which is not surprising given that Indigenous philosophers are also remarkably underrepresented in the profession.

Indeed, the attention of the #MeToo Movement has been unevenly distributed—regarding both who can claim to be a victim and who can be framed as an offender. Gabrielle Union, a black actor and writer, argues that white women are the primary beneficiaries of the #MeToo Movement, saying: “I think the floodgates have been opened for white women”.

Although the race and class implications of this uneven application have been apparent to some people, we cannot stop the conversation there. We must begin to talk about the insidious and implicit ableism of the #MeToo Movement. A routine Google News search reveals that the word disability appears in recent news stories about the #MeToo Movement, but almost always only as part of a list of identifiers which includes race and class, almost never as a topic of conversation.

The assumption according to which disabled people are asexual, in addition to the general disregard of disabled people’s situation, seems to have conditioned the #MeToo Movement’s understandings of who is at risk of sexual assault, harassment, intimidation, and other forms of sexual violence. We want to point, however, that the best available data indicates that, disabled people in general are twice as likely to experience sexual abuse and assault. As stated at the outset of this post, disabled women are up to four times as likely than nondisabled women to experience violence and sexual assault from intimate partners, caregivers, and others.

According to the Office on Women’s Health of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “Women with disabilities may also feel more isolated and feel they are unable to report the abuse, or they may be dependent on the abuser for their care. Like many women who are abused, women with disabilities are usually abused by someone they know, such as a partner or family member.” The impacts of sexual abuse among disabled people are severe and heightened due to the common repetition of assault, social isolation, patronizing attitudes experienced by disabled people, and because of systemic and institutionalized abuse in nursing homes and other facilities.

Nor does the #MeToo Movement allow for important distinctions among various kinds of acts—such as the distinction between rape and sexually-charged remarks. In other words, the #MeToo Movement covers over these distinctions while subtly importing troubling assumptions about who can be harmed and whose harm counts, as well as who can be counted as harming. When the systemic rape and sexual abuse of disabled people is sidelined and sexually-charged remarks among (nondisabled) coworkers become the face of sexual assault, the social subordination and devaluation of disabled people is perpetuated and reinforced.  

Who can say #MeToo? And why?

 

posted by Shelley

Comments

[Dia Neighbors]

Thank you so much for writing this. It's literally the only article I could find on disability as it relates to the current movement. I am an autistic woman who has been assaulted multiple times and I am giving a lecture "Wallflowers are easy to pluck" at the 2nd annual Adult Autism Symposium in Chattanooga, TN. It will be the first time the subject has been tackled at an autism conference specifically about autistics over the age of 18. SAD! Again, thank you.

[Shelley]

Thanks very much for your comment. Here is something else that will interest you:
https://ca.style.yahoo.com/times-unless-youre-woman-disability-190614433.html

Best,
Shelley