Against Technoableism
Rethinking Who Needs Improvement
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One of BookRiot’s Ten Best Disability Books of the Year
Shortlisted for the Inc. Non-Obvious Book Awards
“Wonderfully lucid.” —Andrew Leland, New York Times Book Review
A manifesto exploding what we think we know about disability, and arguing that disabled people are the real experts when it comes to technology and disability.
When bioethicist and professor Ashley Shew became a self-described “hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn’s disease and tinnitus,” there was no returning to “normal.” Suddenly well-meaning people called her an “inspiration” while grocery shopping or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don’t want what the abled assume they want—nor are they generally asked. Almost everyone will experience disability at some point in their lives, yet the abled persistently frame disability as an individual’s problem rather than a social one.
In a warm, feisty voice and vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community. To forge a more equitable world, Shew argues that we must eliminate “technoableism”—the harmful belief that technology is a “solution” for disability; that the disabled simply await being “fixed” by technological wizardry; that making society more accessible and equitable is somehow a lesser priority.
This badly needed introduction to disability expertise considers mobility devices, medical infrastructure, neurodivergence, and the crucial relationship between disability and race. The future, Shew points out, is surely disabled—whether through changing climate, new diseases, or even through space travel. It’s time we looked closely at how we all think about disability technologies and learn to envision disabilities not as liabilities, but as skill sets enabling all of us to navigate a challenging world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Disability activist Shew (Animal Constructions and Technological Knowledge) asks people to reconsider the assumption that disability is a problem that needs to be solved by technology in this amusing and persuasive polemic. Shew describes technoableism, a word she coined, as a "belief... that considers the elimination of disability a good thing, something we should strive for"—and argues that the mindset is responsible for flawed, ineffective, and inessential technology that most disabled people don't want or can't use. For example, cochlear implants are widely portrayed as "curing" deafness in infants, but it often takes years for children using them to learn how to communicate, and they don't always work, need frequent maintenance, and remove all natural hearing; activists in the Deaf community have pushed back against the medical community's presumption that Deaf children, by default, require this flawed technology. Rather than assuming disability "is a problem that resides within individual disabled people," Shew prefers a social model of disability, wherein the problems caused by disability are viewed a structural issue. Questioning whether anyone needs to be fixed at all, Shew posits an alternative way of viewing the world—one where people with disabilities are considered not just the experts on their own bodies but as experts on uncertainty and injustice, who are uniquely qualified to be architects of a more equal future. "We should always be planning with disability in mind," she writes, "because disability is an inherent part of having squishy meat bodies." Equally fierce and funny, this will galvanize readers to demand genuine equity for people with disabilities.
