“The word ‘getting over’ is really weird”: Storying disability in desired futures

Abstract

Narratives we tell about the future reflect and shape forms of life we imagine as possible and desirable. As such, stories have the potential to transform curriculum and pedagogies oriented toward liberation. Yet, narratives tend to erase disability or employ it as a device to secure narratives of progress, imagining disability as a challenge to “get over.” These erasures and enclosures are reproduced in curriculum. Against narratives of an abled future, disabled activists, artists, and scholars argue we need crip ways of narrating the future. In this article, I consider how disability entered into the desired futures of young people. I draw from a multiyear humanizing qualitative study with trans and queer teenagers to examine how four young people constructed a story of the future with a digital artifact. Disability justice and crip theory lenses, my relationship with the participants, and my disability shaped my investment in reading these narratives toward an understanding of how disability can be made meaningful in the future. Through narrative analysis, I find that teens storied ways in which experiences with disability shaped their practices of imagining the future. Young people complicated narratives of “getting over” disability by turning to artifacts that position disabled futures or narratively expanding upon artifacts to make meaning with and through experiences with disability. In these stories, disability shapes practices of imagination and has a place in desired futures.