Month: Sep 2021

Walking Is (Not) Ordinary!

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Walking as practical, as perennial, as pretheoretical – arising prior to theoretical scrutiny or consideration. Walking justified in the Nietzschean sense as an ordinary activity that precedes theory, but serves as the motility through which theory is derived. Thus: truly great theory = the capacity to walk. Walking as exposure. Walking as experience. Walking as a philosphical exercise (consider the Socratic Method or the Socratic Walk).

Despite increased urbanization of the contemporary city and new methods of mobility (i.e., the automobile, bike riding, public transportation, etc.), walking remains “part of the mobility reportoire of hypermobile people” (Shortell, 2016, p. 3) engaging in the pedestrian hustle and bustle. Walking as the main signifier of the modern cityscape is a demonstration of self-mastery and active citizenship. In fact: micro-mobility practices (everyday walking), reveal the instrumental and intentional patterns of the everyday citizen as they navigate space for profit and for pleasure. Thus, walking as an everyday practice becomes a banal exercise of human agency – to walk is to take command of space. It is a tactic “used by the relatively powerless aginst the designs of the relatively powerful” (Shortell, 2016, p. 2). Consider pound the pavement politics in the form of street protests or demonstrations.

Walker as ordinary practitioner, modern rebel.

The performance of walking in a culture preoccupied with ambulatory navigation as a demonstration of agency codes walking as one of the ultimate signifiers of what it means to be human. Common literary archetypes of modern navigation go as far as positioning the city walker “as an exemplar of rebellion, freedom, and agency – the pedestrian hero or the flâneur” (Cresswell, 2010, p. 20). De Certeau (2002), in his Walking in the City theoretical-literary piece, further describes walkers as ordinary practitioners. He writes, “the ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below,’ below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers” (p. 93). 

However, the act of walking being labeled as ordinary, everyday, is problematic and not always accurate.  As a disabled person whose everyday navigation of the world requires the use of assistive devices, unassisted walking practices are not ordinary. Walking being codified by walkers as normal, pedestrian, and seamless, results in my being positioned as the “‘implicit ‘other’ who supposedly live[s] outside the ordinary, the everyday […]” (Highmore, 2001, p. 1). Claiming everyday life as self-evident and easily accessible based on the navigation patterns of the pedestrian serves as an implicit erasure of my struggle. The persistence of building ‘back door’ (Dolmage, 2017) accessibility routes over front door universal access, reifies disability as something that must be hidden from view. The wheelchair user is not a prominent figure of the modern cityscape. In fact, it is through back door accessibility that my entrance becomes front door spectacle. My attendence is not expected, but impossible to ignore as it sometimes requires the rearrangement of the space.

Thus, ambulatory negotiation of space – the capacity to walk is in and of itself a privileging act.  The inability to independently walk is a structural limitation that becomes spatially evident because a preoccupation with walking leaves little support for other modes of everday mobility. As such, different forms of movement as enacted and exercised by the body become intelligible markers of difference that inform subjectivity and intersect with those of race, class, gender, etc., to produce unique experiences of oppression and privilege.

If we consider the usage of something as a form of communication (Ahmed, 2019), the modern city was discernably built for able-bodied walkers. The prominent presence of stairs, the absence of curb cuts at the end of sidewalks signifies the lack of consideration for assistive mobility device users. The presumed presence of the able-bodied walkers is so banal that “walking is very much hiding in plain sight” (Shortell, 2016, p. 2). What is common recedes from view, unless it prevents ease of passage (Ahmed, 2019, 2017). Walking as a display of modern city life, Cresswell (2010) writes, “is wrapped up in narratives of worthiness, morality, and aesthetics that constantly contrast it with more mechanized forms of movement which are represented as less authentic less worthy, less ethical” (p. 20).

Being confronted with inaccessible city spaces and finding alternative routes from Point A to Point B (often short routes for the able-bodied walkers), become forced detours for wheelchair users dictated by the absence of smooth or level terrain. The absence of level pavement or presence of stairs is not coinsidental, it is a claim of the indended user and whether the terrain was meant to be used at all. In appraising the usefulness of something or for whom use was intended, “what is missing comes to matter” (Ahmed, 2019, p. 88 emphasis in original). It is an absent presence, a spectre, a moral imperative.

Struggling to find value in the way I move in the world, recurrent metaphors, archetypes, and everyday practices that privilege walking served as willful incentive to inscribe the Nietzschean quote (introducing this entry) on my inner right-hand wrist:

A greyscale photo of a clenched, inner right-hand wrist. Tatooed in black, loose cursive, handwritten-style text is:
All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.

As a sign of protest (not an ordinary walker, but still a rebel), the clenched fist rises again (see Ahmed, 2017, Living a Feminst life). As a refusal to accept walking as ordinary, I wear this quote as a badge of irony that it poses in my life. An attempt to queer the meaning of this quote, it is inscribed on a disabled woman’s wrist. It is a rearticulation of my biographical landscape – my theories of everyday life are borne out of my necessity to queer walking practices as a form of survival.

The aesthetics of motion…

My reflection eternally haunted by the generalized other.

I sit at the opposite end of the uncanny valley – my body and my mind real,

but the aura of the real, the desired is betrayed not by physical appearance,

but by movement, the aesthetics of motion.

Ev Baczewska

Until next time.

With vulnerability & shared refusal,

Ev XO

References

Ahmed, S. (2019). What’s the use: On the uses of use. Duke University Press.

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.

Cresswell, T. (2010). Towards a politics of mobility. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28:17-31.

De Certeau, M. (2002). Walking in the city in The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press. pp. 91-110.

Dolmage, J. T. (2017). Academic ableism: Disability and higher education. University of Michigan Press.

Highmore, B. (2001). Questioning everyday life in The Everyday Life Reader. Routledge. pp. 1-34.

Shortell, T. (2016). Introduction: Walking as urban practice and research method in Walking in Cities: Quotidian Mobility as Urban Theory, Method, and Practice. Temple University Press. pp. 1-16.

Featured

Feminst Limns: Sketching the Limns of Our Limbs

LIMN (verb) 1. Paint or draw (a picture) or portrait; portray a subject. 2. Portray or represent (esp. a person) in words: the portrait limned the poem. 3. To suffuse or highlight (something) with a bright colour or light: A crescent moon limned the night sky.

LIMB (noun) 1. A projecting part of a person’s or animal’s body such as an arm, leg, or wing. 2. A projecting part of a thing, e.g. the branch of a tree.

Student’s Oxford Canadian Dictionary, 2nd Edition (2007)

Blog art.

A suffused, water-coloured clenched raised fist as an international sign of protest. A refusal to lend our limb(s) to the (re)creation of ableism and patriarchy (Ahmed, 2017).  The ‘liquified’ characteristic of the image symbolizes the intersectionality of barriers, forms, and struggles for access. The fist is framed by the female gender symbol cut off at the wrist. Ascending from the bottom left corner to the top left corner is the word: ‘FEMINIST’ in uppercase, solid black font. Flushed right in the centre of the image is the phrase ‘A Disabled Archive’ in smaller uppercase and lowercase, solid black font. Slightly flushed left underneath, in squared brackets is the phrase ‘of Intersectional Struggles for Access.’ The word ‘ACCESS’ appears in uppercase font. The word ‘Limns’ is slightly flushed to the right at the bottom of the image in black, loose cursive-style font.

Feminist limns as undoing ableism.

As a person with a physical disability, my experience is limned by the necessity (and the struggle) of using a motorized wheelchair or rollator walker in a world that privileges walking as the optimal form of everyday life navigation. Dominant social, cultural, and structural assumptions of somatic norms do not align with my bodily disposition and comportment. These cascading assumptions result in my being continually confronted by the spectre of ableism – the value of my experience being measured against able-bodied people with ease of access. In a world where the pinnacle of self mastery is independene, my struggle to will my body to comply to the social aesthetics of desired bodily norms have led me to feminism: how we thrive in a world that we are confronted and restricted by, and denied access to (Ahmed, 2017). Following Ahmed’s conceptualization of feminism, developing feminist tendencies begins with recognizing the emotional and physical labour required when we experience social markers of difference – i.e. race, class, gender, disability – “as a restriction of possibility” (p. 7). Feminism begins with bodies (limbs) “not at ease in a world” (p. 7) and provides new ways illuminating (limning) what we must come up against as a form of survival.

An archive of (limned) limbs.

When we gather an archive assembled by limning the experience of our limbs, we not only include documents and texts, but the voices that provide first-hand accounts: the stories of our bodies and limbs in the world. Consider this blog as: my first-hand account limned by my experience as a disabled person with willful and unapologetic limbs in a largely inaccessible world. This blog is a deliberate curration of stories, experiences, texts, and images. A digital archive as the assemblage of memories, thoughts, and reflections that would have otherwise remained scattered, personal, and disorganized becoming legible, intelligible, public, and shared. By limning my lived experience as a disabled woman (my limbs) become part of a community of many that illuminate a cascade of barriers, blockages of access, and ableist tendencies. May my limns (and limbs) as a projecting part of a thing, move us and connect us to rearticulate disability as capacity, as value, as community with a shared refusal to limit the amount of space (Ahmed, 2017) and time we take up conditioned by the multitude of barriers we come up against.

Until next time.

With vulnerability & shared refusal,

Ev XO

Reference:

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press: Durham.

About Me

Featured

Evelina Baczewska

Sociology, MA

Disability Rights Activist, Feminist Sociologist & Self-described ‘space invader’

As a space invader, I relish in exposing the socio-spatial and political boundaries that govern bodies occupying spaces that don’t meet somatic norms. With wheelchairs, walkers, we invade space unveiling its limits. Invading space is a useful tactic that disrupts dominant assumptions of access and entry.

Ev Baczewska
Self-taken headshot. I am looking straight into the frame. The image is in grayscale to accentuate the rays of light that limn the right side of my face. The light pierces through a window with blinds drawn closed. The window is out of frame.

As a woman with a physical disability, my work is focused on foregrounding the voices and lived experiences of people living with disabilities as a way of illuminating and eliminating barriers. Being a feminist sociologist, my work analyzes the ways in which social markers of differencerace–race, class, gender, (dis)ability, etc., inform people’s unique standpoints, and how such identity categories coalesce producing distinct experiences of oppression and privilege.

In a world that largely privileges the voices, movements, places, spaces, paths, and representations already forged by those who meet gender and other embodied norms, my advocacy is informed by those that do not ascribe to normative ways of being–heteronormative, ableist, and patriarchal tendencies. 

Not shying away from exposing institutional barriers and limits, my experience demonstrates the continued necessity of making everyday life accessible. I rely on my lived accounts of navigating space (i.e., the workforce, places of higher education, and other social institutions) to speak truth to power by concretely illustrating that my presence in such spaces continues to be contested.

Feminist Limns: An Embodied Archive of Intersectional Forms of Access is a digital collection of my lived experience. An archive of a space invader: not expected but showing up anyway. My entry, like an invasion is never discreet – it is visual and auditory: a spectacle animated by the sounds of the whirling and twirling of wheels, the shuffling of chairs, the sometimes climbing of stairs and avoidance of stares, the switching of seats, the rearrangement of desks, and the struggle of opening doors. An archive of refusal and acceptance, and an archive of refusal of acceptance.

With vulnerability & shared refusal,

Ev XO