COVID-19 and the Disinheritance of an Ableist World

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intecritdivestud.4.1.0107
• Published date: 01 June 2021
• Date: 01 June 2021
• Pages: 107-126
• Author: Johnathan Flowers
• Subject Matter: Disability,phenomenology,ableism,COVID-19,inheritance,orientations

International Journal of CRITICAL DIVERSITY STUDIES 4.1 June 2021

COVID-19 and the Disinheritance of

an Ableist World

Johnathan Flowers

Department of Philosophy and Religion, American University,

Washington DC, United States

Dr Johnathan Flowers is a Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy

and Religion at American University. His current research focuses on developing

an affective theory of experience, identity, and personhood through bridging

American Pragmatism, Japanese Aesthetics, and Phenomenology. Flowers’s

work also explores how identities are lived affectively through technology and

society, with a specific emphasis on race, gender, and disability.

ABSTRACT

This paper will resituate the presumed accessibility gains that have emerged in the

wake of COVID-19 not as gains for disabled people, but rather as the products of

a world that is prepared for some people and some bodies and not for other people

and other bodies. I will show that a more productive approach to understanding

the sudden possibility of impossible accommodations would be accomplished by

drawing upon Sara Ahmed’s treatment of the inheritance of a world, inheritance that

places some objects within one’s reach while denying one access to other objects.

On this view, ableism, as an organizing force in the world, serves to determine what

bodies can and cannot do by virtue of the way that it “prepares” the world for some

bodies and not for other bodies. As I will argue, the previous impossibility of the

current widespread accommodations in academia and society broadly was due to

the inheritance of an ableist world. designed to be inherited by some people and

their bodies and not by other people and their bodies.

KEYWORDS

Disability, phenomenology, ableism, COVID-19, inheritance, orientations

In Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others, Sara Ahmed introduces “disorien-

tation” as a starting point to understand how we become “oriented” both in physical space

and social spaces through how we are in those spaces through our bodies. For Ahmed, our

orientation, specifically when deployed in the navigation of a space, is the result of the

108 Johnathan flowerS

International Journal of CRITICAL DIVERSITY STUDIES 4.1 June 2021

alignment of our bodies with the space that we are inhabiting: the more aligned our bodies,

broadly construed, are with the space, the more familiar the space becomes, and the more

easily we can navigate the space successfully. Thus, when we are disoriented, our bodies are

not aligned with the space such that we can easily find our way through the space: we

become disoriented when spaces are no longer familiar to us. To this end, becoming ori-

ented in a space, even a social space, is a process of becoming familiar with that space, its

contours, and its boundaries, as well as the limitations of our own bodies within that space.

Due to the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, spaces that were once familiar

to us are no longer familiar. Bodies, including social bodies, institutional bodies, and the

body politic, have been compelled to “reorient” themselves within an unfamiliar world. As

noted, for example, in the United Nations’s policy brief, Education during COVID-19 and

beyond (August 2020), “The COVID-19 pandemic has created the largest disruption of edu-

cation systems in history, affecting nearly 1.6 billion learners in more than 190 countries and

all continents.” Here, the language of “disruption” should be noted: by framing the COVID-19

pandemic as the introduction of a “disruption” to global educational systems, the UN brief

presents the pandemic as interrupting the continuity of these educational systems, the hab-

its that formed the background of the world of education which enabled students and

teachers to “find their way” through the process of education. In short, the COVID-19 pan-

demic, through disruption of the ongoing continuity of our world, has resulted in mass

disorientation across educational systems that requires the participants in these systems to

“reorient” themselves in a transformed world.

The world that has been disrupted, as the example above indicates, is, however, a world

inherited as the background condition for systems of education and, more broadly, a world that

has been organized prior to the arrival of some bodies within it. In “A phenomenology of

whiteness,” Ahmed (2007) argues that the world that we inherit is a world made white by the

history of colonialism. To this end, not only does the history of colonialism prepare the world

for white bodies, easing their entry into it, but it also serves to orient the features of that world

around whiteness itself. Thus, white bodies inherit a world already in reach, while non-white

bodies must struggle to reach the objects in the world. In keeping with Ahmed’s phenomeno-

logical approach, I maintain that the history of ableism also serves as an organizing force on

the world. In short, we emerge into a world made ableist before our arrival.

As the world that we inherit is a world made ready for the able body, the able body is

the orientation from which the world unfolds. Within such an orientation, not only are

disabled bodies unable to reach objects in the world; rather, accessibility too becomes an

object placed out of reach of disabled bodies, except insofar as they are forced in line with

the organization of the body privileged by an ableist world. In contrast, COVID-19 has

stripped the able body of the ability to inherit a world made for it. Accessibility, once

deemed impossible or unreachable, becomes an object “in reach”: it becomes part of the

“world” that the able-bodied subject inhabits. While, as a result of COVID-19, some modes

of accessibility have become part of the world that able-bodied subjects inherit, I want to

argue that this incorporation of “access,” specifically within academic institutions, will

once again place accommodations out of the reach of disabled scholars because these

modes of accessibility are framed as “for” the protection of able-bodied members of the