If you haven’t heard of, seen, or don’t know anything about Kylie Jenner’s recent
wheelchair photoshoot for Interview magazine, consider yourself lucky.
For Kylie, of course, all the negative responses to her photo are simply bad publicity, but as they say in her line of ‘work,’ “all publicity is good publicity.” For us, however, the photoshoot and all its responses, both positive and negative, brought an opportunity to talk about a prevalent
(though not necessarily widely known) issue: ableism.
Ableism is defined very simply, as “discrimination in favor of able-bodied people.”
Interesting to note that even the definition says nothing about the disabled.
Back to Kylie for just a minute, though. According to Interview, the shoot was supposed to make
her seem “powerful.”
Powerful?
In a wheelchair?
You’d think, that by now, in the tail end of 2015, people would have become more aware of the Stigma surrounding disabilities, and would have realized that most (if not all) of it has been put in place by those without disabilities. What Kylie’s wheelchair photos do is clearly illuminate how easy it is for able bodied people to mock those who need mobility aids, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, show exactly how many socially unacceptable things celebrities can get Away with. Many, many wheelchair users have critiqued her photos, calling her out for posing as “edgy” in her gold, minimalist wheelchair or discussing how she is fetishizing the idea of
having to use one.
Unfortunately, Kylie’s photoshoot is not the first and more than likely not the last time ableism will show up in the media. Lady Gaga did something very similar a few years ago in a music video, and received much less backlash for it.
Maybe because people are becoming more educated, maybe because the Jenner girls are crazy famous for not doing much of anything, maybe because Gaga’s performance took place when Calling people out on social media hadn’t yet become as big of a deal as it is now. We don’t know. I certainly don’t anyway.
At any rate, the conversation regarding ableism is one that needs to be had, however painful it may be for the parties involved. Here and now, it’s difficult to imagine that people are still being discriminated against for things they can’t control, and even the things they can control and choose to do. That being said, please think before you say and do things that will be seen by many people. (Think before you do anything else, too, but especially hugely publicized things.) Think about how it will affect those around you, how they will perceive it without context, and how it will appear to people who don’t know you. Just think about it.
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