Abstract
Based on research on the French disability rights movement, this article explores how activists use awareness campaigns to prefigure new social scripts for help and solidarity. Although help and solidarity are fundamental in our society, the manner in which they are performed toward minorities (e.g., providing unsolicited help, signaling solidarity as a token of pity, implying inferiority or dependence) may reproduce hierarchization and distance rather than fostering symmetrical solidarity. Relying on an ethnography of awareness campaigns established by two disability rights non-profits in France, I analyze how activists attempted to reorganize solidarity at the local level by challenging scripts dictating help, interactions, and by prefiguring new ways of performing help. They conveyed that help should be solicited or consented to, and that it was better performed as a quick, concrete, and precise service than as an emotional and pathologizing benevolence. I demonstrate how blind activists helped participants move from emotional to cognitive empathy, giving them cues on how to bypass their ocular-centric perspective to identify the concrete obstacles faced by visually-impaired people. One of the challenges for these activists was to communicate these new social scripts for solidarity without creating defensiveness or distance.
In 2017, Tommy Carroll—a Chicago-based jazz composer—released an extended play record, “Not Amazing,” described as “a musical journey into [his] life as a blind person.” 1 The jazz piece “Can I pray for you?” is a mirror turned on his (mostly sighted) listeners, depicting how unsolicited help received incessantly can be oppressive for a blind person. Being told “I hope you get better,” or, “It’s getting dark out there, do you want some help?” is not inherently deleterious, but everyday repetitions make such comments ultimately weigh on the person who hears them. Here, the artist sought to educate non-disabled people about the detrimental consequences of their well-meaning helping actions, emphasizing how they can feel like microaggressions instead of true solidarity.
This article argues that some activists seek to reorganize solidarity by prefiguring new social scripts that challenge the power relationships entailed in certain interactions, particularly in misguided performances of help. It contributes to the growing body of research that explores how solidarity can be organized in differences (Allen, 1999; Holck and Muhr, 2017; Thomann and Rapp, 2018), by bringing together research on solidarity (Banting and Kymlicka, 2017; Honneth, 1996; Nadler, 2020) and disability studies. Disability studies demonstrate how some current ways in which help is performed toward disabled people (e.g. providing unsolicited help, signaling affective solidarity as a token of pity, implying inferiority or dependence) may reproduce hierarchization and distance between disabled and non-disabled individuals (Barnes et al., 2002; Oliver, 2013). This hierarchic solidarity is comforted by medical disability narratives picturing “disability as an individual tragedy best ameliorated through the application of professional interventions” (Green and Loseke, 2019: 2). Using the literature on social scripts, which shows how cultural scripts can affect our daily interactions (Simon and Gagnon, 1984, 1999) and be contested at the cultural, interpersonal, or intrapsychic levels (Parker, 2010), I examine how activists reorganize solidarity locally by prefiguring new scripts of interaction between minority and majority groups.
I adopt an interactionist perspective and use ethnography to analyze the ways in which two disability rights non-profits in France—101 and Together—designed awareness events for schools and workplaces meant to challenge how non-disabled people perform help, and propose alternative scripts of micro-level solidarity that are not dismissive of disabled people. I use the word “(non-)disabled” to align with the social model of disability, which emphasizes how people with impairments are “disabled by society, not by their bodies” (Shakespeare, 2014: 19). At the core of this social process of disablement is the question of help, which—depending on how it is performed—can be an enactment of symmetrical solidarity or amount to microaggression, reinforcing social hierarchies. Microaggression is an interpersonal form of discrimination toward marginalized groups, often “delivered unintentionally” (Harris, 2017: v). While racial microaggressions can be hostile (Louis et al., 2016), ableist microaggressions tend to be more commiserative, akin to benevolent discrimination (Romani et al., 2019). People perform help in patronizing ways, conveying that disabled people are helpless or inferior, denying the privacy of that individual, and developing expectations of being approved for their generosity (Keller and Galgay, 2010). The burden of unsolicited assistance appears even more problematic within organizations where individuals feel compelled to demonstrate their performance as being autonomous and productive (Cahill and Eggleston, 1994), such as schools (Harris, 2017; Shakespeare, 2014) and workplaces (Ameri et al., 2018). This apparent paradox—that performances of help crystalized distress and tensions between disabled and non-disabled people—raises important questions for the micropolitics of solidarity.
I contribute to existing research on (re)organizing solidarity in difference by studying the prefiguration of new social scripts as a strategic repertoire to transform local interactions, showing how this plays out concretely for disability rights activists challenging scripts of help. While the activists implementing these programs do not dismiss the importance of solidarity, they seek to re-engineer how help can be performed without being associated with distancing emotions such as embarrassment and pity, which produce othering and stigma. These prefigurative scripts of solidarity are an understudied social movement tactic to refashion, at the micro-level, the performed interactions between majority and minority groups to fight against discrimination.
After a brief overview of the research of inter-group solidarity, I highlight how scholars of disability studies offered critical insights to theorize the limitations of affective and asymmetrical forms of solidarity. Showing how these questions also affect the micropolitics of solidarity, notably around the performance of help, I present the research on social scripts to argue that activists seek to challenge scripts of solidarity and help through local and embodied interactions. After discussing my methods, I demonstrate how activists locally prefigure new scripts of solidarity and help performance through interactions with sighted individuals.
Disability studies and tensions around the notions of solidarity
Research on inter-group solidarity
Solidarity describes support systems, forms of cohesive actions, or feelings of unity at the individual, organizational, or national level. While significant research has focused on intra-group solidarity as a means to build power of resistance within social movements (Allen, 1999; Hyman, 1999), this section briefly addresses theories surrounding the political and social construction of inter-group solidarity occurring between a minority and a majority (Banting and Kymlicka, 2017: 340). I build on scholars who examined how solidarity “is inherently built or eroded though political action” and stabilizes when “it becomes incorporated into collective (typically national) identities and narratives, when it is reinforced on a recurring basis by political agents, and—most importantly—when it becomes embedded in political institutions and policy regimes” (Banting and Kymlicka, 2017: 33–34). This literature questions why “societal-level solidarity is sometimes seen as the cause of this very oppression and exclusion of subaltern groups” (Banting and Kymlicka, 2017: 5). Accordingly, this section describes some debates in the literature on solidarity, before drawing on the nuances and additions brought by disability scholars on this question.
One critical discussion in the literature on inter-group solidarity—or solidarity in difference—deals with its affective or reflective underpinning. Recent research has drawn from Diprose’s (2002) notion of corporeal generosity to emphasize the value of affective relations, compassion or other feelings that are “experienced pre-reflexively through the body” (Pullen and Rhodes, 2015: 160). Researchers have explored notions of “affective solidarity” (Hemmings, 2012; Raghavan, 2017: 12) or “social solidarity” that can stem from witnessing suffering or pity (Chouliaraki, 2006: 208). By contrast, some scholars have developed concepts of reflective solidarity as “shared accountability for each other” (Dean, 1996: 8), and underlined “the responsibility to act combined with the responsibility to otherness” (Jones, 1993: 229), promoting forms of mutual support grounded in an intersubjective understanding that people should be equal and barriers to equality should be eliminated (Honneth, 1996).
Correspondingly, some scholars have explored whether inter-group solidarity builds symmetrical relationships between the parties involved or whether it maintains pre-existing hierarchies between the majority and minority groups. Honneth (1996) argues that solidarity can be conceived as symmetrical when all the subjects “esteem each other symmetrically” (p. 128). However, at the national level, researcher have analyzed the asymmetry at the heart of how nation states frame many solidarity policies toward minorities “seeking public assistance” (Thomann and Rapp, 2018: 2). At the organizational level, “solidarity as social responsibility” is a normative framework that “encourages companies to act responsibly by taking in allegedly marginalized minorities on state-subsidized schemes” (Holck and Muhr, 2017: 2), giving “minorities a precarious organizational position characterized by misrecognition of their skills and competencies” (p. 4), and casting them as inferior (p. 9). While solidarity policies are the hallmark of a welfare state (Heyer, 2005), their implementation and interpretation is challenging, as solidarity can imply an essentialization of differences (Allen, 1999; Butler, 1990), casting the recipients of solidarity as outsiders or inferior (Holck and Muhr, 2017: 9; Johnston et al., 2017) and involving questions of who is deemed a “deserving” minority (Kootstra, 2016; Thomann and Rapp, 2018).
To further elucidate these theoretical discussions, I provide insights from disability studies, which developed theoretical models to capture the various ways in which help and support can be provided to disabled people, and examined how different narratives surrounding solidarity with disabled people affect both policy models and disabled minorities themselves (Green and Loseke, 2019).
The critical contributions of disability studies
The field of disability studies developed its early theoretical formulation in the 1960s in parallel with political critiques of the systems established to support people with disabilities (Watson and Vehmas, 2019). It deconstructed the ways in which solidarity is concretely performed (Heyer, 2015), showing that some national or individual practices could be disempowering, dismissive, and exclusionary (Heyer, 2005; Oliver and Barnes, 2012), while also stressing how social movements have challenged these different models for providing support to disabled people at the national level (Heyer, 2015; Shakespeare, 2014). In this section, I demonstrate how the theoretical tools developed by international researchers in disability studies could further refine the previously-described analyses in the literature on the solidarity.
Disability studies’ researchers have explored the limitations of affect-laden conceptions of solidarity rooted in an understanding of disability as a personal tragedy (Oliver, 1990), and this has been characterized as the “individual” or “personal tragedy” model of disabilities (Barnes et al., 2002: 4). This approach can elicit “pity and fear” and other “negative emotional responses. . . [leading to] charitable paternalism and exclusion” (Barnes et al., 2002: 62; Fiedler, 1982). Affect-driven solidarity is associated with practices of charity, generosity, or assistance that have structured disability policies in many political contexts (Hahn, 2002; Heyer, 2007), and has been the focus of heated debates throughout disability rights movements worldwide. These welfare policies “turned away from notions of stigma and shame, replacing them with pity, charity, and a sense of social responsibility for helping the weak and dependent” (Heyer, 2005: 239). Accordingly, they crystalized a domination entrenched in emotional responses, which needs to be understood through the lens of the cultural politics of emotions, given that such charitable feelings “involve complex relations of power” (Ahmed, 2014: 22). For instance, generosity-tainted management and recruitment can lead to professional downgrading and pose challenges for workers with impairment, which in fine disadvantage disabled workers (Buchter, 2019, 2020; Everaere, 2010).
Disability studies scholars have also analyzed how political models of solidarity that emphasize the deficiencies of minorities could lead to essentialization and projection of inferiority. The “medical model of disability” describes how the “causes of the widespread economic and social deprivation encountered by disabled people were located within the individual and their impairment,” thereby conceiving solidarity as a response to individual flaws (Barnes et al., 2002: 4). Such a model therefore took for granted the inferior status of people with disabilities, and failed to address hierarchization within the society, merely providing subsidies compensating for flaws conceived as individual, and creating separated institutions for disabled people. While this model promoted support systems necessary for solidarity, it also emphasized that impairment is a “deficit from the norm, a malady to be fixed through physical therapy, technological devices, and personal willpower” (Manago et al., 2017: 170). Consequently, it emphasized “limitations, medicalization, diagnoses, individual adjustment” (Gordon and Rosenblum, 2001: 16) and failed to promote other fundamental aspects of solidarity, such as feelings of unity and cohesive action, favoring instead separation through institutionalization (Heyer, 2015).
Against these two traditional approaches at the root of national solidarity systems for disabled people, disability studies described how social movements promoted a social model of disability which “identifies society as the problem, and looks to fundamental political and cultural changes to generate solutions” (Barnes et al., 2002: 5). This model acknowledges unequal access to power and resources for disabled people and perceives the social world as the cause of disablement (Oliver, 1990). Through this perspective, a far-reaching solidarity would reduce asymmetry by favoring equal rights and equal access to all disabled people (Heyer, 2015) and shift the disability narrative (Green and Loseke, 2019), pointing that “remedying the effects of a discriminatory society is not an act of charity or social benevolence from an enlightened majority, but a form of civil rights enforcement similar to that of other minority groups” (Heyer, 2005: 240).
By bringing together theoretical debates on solidarity and critical disability studies, it is possible to capture how different actors (states, social movements, etc.) have shaped various cultural narratives for understanding what is solidarity—and how it should be performed (Raghavan, 2017)—through time. I argue that these cultural narratives do not only shape policies, but also define social scripts that impact the way people interact, perform different roles, and define themselves at the local level (Green and Loseke, 2019; Parker, 2010). Help is a frequent, local, and embodied manifestation of solidarity, a “behavioral expression of social solidarity” (Nadler, 2020: 15), and as such, subjected to the same tensions as solidarity. In the next section, I propose a theoretical framework to examine how disability rights activists also challenge scripts of solidarity at the local level, by transforming how help is being performed toward disabled people.
Changing scripts of solidarity and help at the local level: An understudied repertoire of action from social movements
Because some forms of solidarity can create deserving and undeserving minorities, scholars have stressed that we “need to consider the relational aspect of solidarity” (Banting and Kymlicka, 2017: 84–85). I build on the theories of social scripts to examine how disability rights activists sought to change the scripts of help performance targeting disabled individuals to locally transform the micropolitics of solidarity (Mohanty, 2003; Mott, 2018). Drawing from scholars who studied how solidarity is scripted and performed between disabled and non-disabled individuals (Oliver and Barnes, 2012), I will examine how activists seek to transform local scripts to change the power relationships embedded in help and solidarity.
The notion of social scripts derived from dramaturgical perspectives on social life developed by Goffman (1959) and was further elaborated around the notion of “sexual scripts,” which captures the ways in which human sexual life operates along scripted scenarios that are then performed in interactions (Simon and Gagnon, 1984). Simon and Gagnon (1999) used social scripts as “a metaphor for conceptualizing the production of behavior within social life,” which implies scripting “on three distinct levels: cultural scenarios, interpersonal scripts, and intrapsychic scripts” (p. 29). Interpersonal scripts describe socially-acceptable behaviors and roles in a given situation, and can encompass expected attitudes and sequences of interactions (Simon and Gagnon, 1984), socially-accepted speeches, stories, or narratives (Buchter, 2019; Loseke, 2007). At the intrapsychic level, it responds to culturally-imposed representations (Escoffier, 2003) and socially-accepted or expected “feeling rules”—the display of emotions expected in a given situation (Hochschild, 1975). The notion of scripting implies that our ways of thinking, feeling, and interacting are socially scripted and enter our socialization through cultural scripts—the cultural scenario available to us within societies, which “can be found in social institutions and cultural materials” (Whittier, 2007: 4130), such as social policies, the media, and all the elements that produce cultural narratives about—in our case—disabled people and their place within the society (Green and Loseke, 2019).
This perspective helps understand how social scripts are forged in the broader culture but also penetrate—through emotions and patterned performed interactions—personal and intimate relationships. Scholars have studied how pornography influences the sexual scripts available to young adults (Braithwaite et al., 2015), and how compulsory heterosexuality entangles culturally imposed scripts and individually-experienced emotions and experiences (Ahmed, 2014). For Ahmed (2014: 145), these scripts “do not. . . simply exist ‘out there’ to legislate the political actions of states. They also shape bodies and lives,” as well as “one’s approach to others.” Scripted emotions are not neutral, since “emotionality as a claim about a subject or a collective is clearly dependent on relations of power, which endow ‘others’ with meaning and value” (Ahmed, 2014: 4). In this article, I demonstrate how the concept of social scripts can be useful in studying help performance as a culturally-imposed script with deeply entrenched effects on interactions and their emotional dimension.
I use the notion of “help performance” to parallel the ways in which scholars (Brickell, 2003; Butler, 1990, 1994; Goffman, 1959; Jacobsen, 2019; Lehn et al., 2021; West and Zimmerman, 1987) conceptualized gender performance to deconstruct the idea that doing gender would be natural, showing how hierarchies of bodies are inscribed in our current cultural scripts through embodied repetitions. As argued by Nadler (2020: 15), helping relations can either reinforce “expression of belongingness” or become “a vehicle through which people create and maintain an unequal social hierarchy.” The performance of help can thus either convey scripts of domination and superiority or be a tool for liberation. While help is often fundamental (Shakespeare, 2014: 197), the question of how it is performed matters immensely, and the scripts around help shape how such help performance reproduces power relationships. Help performances that cast minorities as “inferior and in need of help” are forms of benevolent discrimination (Romani et al., 2019: 371). This construction of inferiority has an emotional dimension. Spelman (1997: 7) states that “compassion, like other forms of caring, may also reinforce the very patterns of economic and political subordination responsible for such suffering.” Ahmed (2014) similarly explores how charity discourses and overemphasis on others’ pain entrenches power relationships (p. 22).
This article expands on the little-explored idea that social scripts can be conceived as “contested territory where meaning and power intersect as part of ongoing social and political processes” (Parker, 2010: 59). The influence of such scripts on individuals is dialectical: people can be told to conform to scripts—embodying for instance, the deserving poor (Buchter, 2019; Kusow and Eno, 2015)—but they can also contribute to challenging the social script forced on them (Parker, 2010), attempting to reinvent dominant cultural scripts, which, through “feedback relationships,” can influence “intrapsychic scripts” and “interactional scripts” (Parker, 2010: 64). I contend that social movements can seek to bring about social change through altering some intrapsychic and interpersonal scripts that reproduce discrimination. This corresponds to what social movement theorists discuss in terms of “prefiguration” when they examine how activists attempt to create social change through enacting locally the changes that they hope to see in the broader society (Maeckelbergh, 2011; Yates, 2015). While most studies explored prefigurative politics (Yates, 2015), recent theories have turned to the analysis of the interpersonal and psychological dimensions of prefiguration, questioning how prefiguration could be a way of “constructing alternative modes of being and interacting that reflect a given movement’s desired social transformations” (Trott, 2016: 266). However, few studies—Parker (2010) being a noteworthy exception—have explored the ways in which activists attempt to change oppressive social scripts within a broader society. While Parker explored this idea for scripts of sexual liberation (Parker, 2010), my aim is to examine how social movement activists attempt to change scripts of solidarity, when such scripts dismiss or demean specific minorities.
In this article, I therefore study the local and embodied aspect of the social changes that disability rights activists promoted at a national scale (cf. previous section). In their local interaction with others, disability rights activists also encourage new models of solidarity that are not based on affective or hierarchical relationships. Affective and hierarchical solidarity—which parallels the individual and medical model of disabilities—have nefarious consequences for disabled people (reinstating power relationships, professional downgrading). This prompts some disabled people to refuse help, as they might want to “appear strong, independent, and brave so as to avoid ‘being perceived as self-pitying’ and overdemanding of others’ sympathy,” to the point that “they may take needless risks and expend needless energy rather than requesting even minor aid” (Cahill and Eggleston, 1994: 207). In this context, they experience unsolicited help as potential microaggressions (Keller and Galgay, 2010). Researchers have used the concept of helplessness microaggression to describe the “‘frantic’ attempts to help a person with a disability regardless of whether help was warranted or requested,” and described the potential anticipation of “secondary gain” that occurs “when someone expects intrinsic or extrinsic reinforcement for the kindness they direct toward people with disabilities” (Harris, 2017: 22). Unsolicited assistance creates tension for disabled people who feel obliged to reciprocate and avoid hurting the feelings of the people offering unwanted help (Cahill and Eggleston, 1994; Goffman, 1963). Disabled people thus have to help non-disabled people manage their emotions—feelings of guilt, embarrassment, pity, awkwardness, superiority, or disgust—which damage interactions (Cahill and Eggleston, 1994; Reeve, 2012; Shakespeare, 2014).
Nonetheless, forms of help and solidarity are often welcome, if not necessary within our current disabling society (Barnes et al., 2002; Oliver, 2013). Feminist scholars have pointed to the necessity to create “forms of solidarity in which there is room for difference” and acknowledge that vulnerability and dependency are “part of human existence” (Sevenhuijsen, 1998: 147). The point is not to discourage help and solidarity, but to chart new interpersonal scripts for providing help and solidarity that do not create adverse effects. If help is a “performance” (Brickell, 2003; Goffman, 1963; Jacobsen, 2019), the scripts surrounding this performance could be refashioned to move, for instance, from dependency-oriented help to autonomy-oriented help (Nadler, 2020: 25). This research examines how activists set out to reorganize solidarity through challenging traditional scripts of help performance and prefiguring new scripts of solidarity. Solidarities are indeed scripted or socially constructed (Hyman, 1999: 94) and performed (Raghavan, 2017). The role of activists in shaping policy orientation is well-known (Amenta et al., 2010; Freeman, 1975), especially in disability studies where activists have helped move from an understanding of solidarity as charity to solidarity as the proactive fight against discrimination (Heyer, 2015). Moving away from this macro-level analysis, I explore how activists challenge social scripts of solidarity at the interpersonal level, in daily interactions, and explore how such mechanisms of transforming interactions and help performance play out in the context of disability rights activism.
Background, case study, and methods
This research is based on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork that took place between 2014 and 2015 within two different disability rights organizations developing tools to raise awareness against ableism in France. These non-profits emerged in a context of significant changes in the inclusion of people with impairments, as the French government transformed its disability policies, partly under pressure from new disability rights movements that challenged the separate treatment doctrine of disability solidarity (Heyer, 2005). Since World War I, France has displayed a “moral consensus” for protecting people with impairments (Baudot et al., 2013: 6), while secluding them from social life through charity-based and pension-based policies (Romien, 2005: 232). The first effort to politically address the inclusion of disabled people in civil society and the workplace was framed in terms of a national duty of solidarity toward war-mutilated veterans after World War I (Romien, 2005: 231), later included civilians with impairments (Baudot et al., 2013), and relied on both solidarity pensions and employment obligations compelling—often unsuccessfully—private companies to hire workers with impairment (Barnay et al., 2016).
Since the 1970s, disability rights activists have criticized how this political framework increased their stigmatization and social seclusion (Bas, 2017). They denounced charity rallies—perceived as “institutionalized mendicity” reinforcing miserabilist perspectives on disability (Larrouy, 2007: 104); protested the reliance on separate school institutions, lack of professional integration, lack of accessibility to public spaces, and for the right to an affective and sexual life (Baudot et al., 2013: 5). This led to a disability law in 2005, which favored the inclusion of people with impairments in schools and workplaces, engaging in a process of deinstitutionalization (Morvan, 2010: 209).
The two disability rights organizations I studied flourished in this context. The first, 101, 2 is a non-profit organization founded in 1998, working for the mutual understanding and civic engagement of youth, and includes a significant group of young disability rights activists engaged in fighting against ableism. Students with impairments started organizing events, initially on their campuses, to fight the ableist stigma they faced. The organization became a national convergence space for these actors. In the effervescent context of the growing claims for deinstitutionalization before the 2005 law, 101 created initiatives of merging classes between accommodated classrooms for people with impairments and classrooms for non-disabled people to foster dialog and better integration between these groups. Members of 101 also promoted accessible sporting events. After the 2005 law, the non-profit grew exponentially, fueled by funding from both private and public actors. Between 2003 and 2007, 101 received an award for its activities on disability awareness-raising campaigns from the Parisian region, a national label, a national agreement from the Ministry for the Youth and Non-profits, and recognition from Europe. The group’s disability-related awareness campaigns expanded significantly after 2005; it included six post-secondary establishments per year in 2006 and up to 45 establishments per year around 2013.
Together is another non-profit that has been implementing advocacy work for disability rights since 2010. During my fieldwork, it had a network of 300 members who were students and young adults with various impairments. Some of the initial members of Together had earlier volunteered with 101; former students with impairments started to question how to mobilize beyond the school system and paid specific attention to the professional integration of disabled people. Together operated as an umbrella organization for many commissions and initiatives that reflected the interests of their members: sport accessibility, workplace integration, pain management, being a disabled manager, state advocacy, familial and sexual life with an impairment, and technological accessibility.
These non-profits served as frontline actors at the time of a major paradigm shift in French disability policies. They contributed, on a micro-scale, to promoting and enacting the deinstitutionalization advocated for by the disability rights movement, and to reinventing what solidarity could look like when disabled and non-disabled people interact. My fieldwork occurred at a time still marked by this transition from solidarity following the “separate treatment doctrine” (medical model) to a model of solidarity anchored in deinstitutionalization and inclusion (social model). This shift required changes in individual behaviors and perceptions. I witnessed interactions between members of these non-profits and their target audience in schools and workplaces. While my ethnography was also informed by 42 interviews, 3 this article focuses expressly on ethnography and informal conversations to develop an interactionist perspective. I focused on the workshops designed by blind activists (other programs raised awareness on deafness, motor, and mental impairments), to provide a thick description (Geertz, 1973) of the social scripts prefigurated in these awareness campaigns.
Ethnography helped me move beyond official self-presentation discourses to capture the motivations of actors (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). Volunteer opportunities were event-focused and the intensity and length of my immersion for participant observation varied depending on the events and their location. While events in Together were routinely close to Paris and lasted a few hours (providing limited space for discussions afterward), 101 organized awareness campaigns across France, allowing full-time engagement for several days in succession (which allowed for spending evenings and off-time discussions among workshop facilitators). These immersive experiences helped me forge ongoing friendships with some of these activists and supported significant reflexive conversations that shaped my understanding of their goals. As a volunteer, I could assist (e.g. carrying bags of materials); help connect potential participants with workshop facilitators, primarily disabled people; or break the ice to encourage people (children in schools, corporate employees) to participate in the workshop. I was also an occasional facilitator when there was a sizable audience.
Participant observation as a volunteer enabled me to cultivate trusting relationships and required that people provided clear guidelines on how to act. These guidelines made their expectations and goals explicit: when I received training to facilitate awareness campaigns, activists gave me much more specific information about the philosophy and concrete workings of programs than during interviews. My positioning during this fieldwork can be captured by Marcus’s description of the ethnographer as a “circumstantial activist” (Marcus, 1995: 113). During each fieldwork activity, I sought to enact what needed to be done to best address the discrimination against disabled people. As I “do not have a disability yet,” as one of my key informants put it when she introduced me, I strived to be the best ally I could be, practicing “situated solidarity” throughout my fieldwork to challenge assumptions from non-disabled individuals (Routledge and Derickson, 2015: 391). For instance, I learned how to deconstruct the postures—described by activists as miserabilist or de-humanizing—of people who would either pity or glorify disabled people, and not talk to them directly (e.g. asking me questions about blindness when I served as a guide for a blind person).
Regarding the current debates over how to conduct research with and about oppressed minorities when the researcher does not belong to that minority (DeTurk, 2011; Le Gallo and Millette, 2019), I wish to address three related questions about my positioning in the field, my writing for academic journals, and my way of collecting data. First, the fact that I “do not have a disability yet”—hence that I am privileged—could be a barrier to my inclusion in this movement and my deeper understanding of its stakes (Haraway, 1988). However, volunteering in these campaigns helped me break some barriers that would otherwise have isolated me from the experience of the disabled activists I worked with. My access to this (likely imperfect) understanding of the objective of these activists was facilitated by those who took the time to educate me so that I could help them achieve their goals. I tried to prefigure, at my own level, what attentive, inconspicuous, and collaborative help would be, picking up cues from the activists who trained me. The people who put in efforts into such types of campaigns are interested in building bridges with non-disabled communities, and we allied to facilitate such bridges. They wanted to amplify a message, and I was useful to do so (through the campaigns and later through my teaching). A tricky question about amplification emerges when dealing with academic publishing: writing “for” or “about” oppressed minorities is likely to feed into forms of “epistemic domination” of privileged people speaking about less privileged ones (Le Gallo and Millette, 2019: 14; citing Spivak, 1988). I still do not have a clear-cut answer as to how to address such epistemic domination through my research practice. Although this research project was not conceived as such, my most recent projects relies more on participatory action research to seek to co-create research through and with others (Fals-Borda and Rahman, 1991), to move from a “speaking for” to a “speaking with” position all the way through the writing process, while bearing in mind my privileged position as a researcher (Le Gallo and Millette, 2019). Last, working with blind activists also affected my perspective about data collection. Thought-provoking research has described how non-visually impaired ethnographers suffer from a visual “hypertrophy” in their method of collecting data (Ink, 2016: 106), and I tried to consider non-visual cues as I was conducting this research. The physical reactions, perceptible through trembling or specific kinetic elements, were elements that I experienced more than I saw. Working with visually-impaired individuals provided access to their perceptions of interactions during our debriefing (hesitation in the voice of interlocutors, awkward silence, etc.). Nevertheless, I had access to other aspects of the interactions that could escape my blind or visually-impaired colleagues (avoidant attitudes, looks, faces). Some aspects of their oppression were conveyed to me through visual cues only.
Findings
The ethnographic accounts below describe and analyze two workshops designed by activists from Together and 101 to raise awareness within schools and workplaces and foster better inclusion by transforming peoples’ perceptions and attitudes at the interpersonal level. I show how these workshops develop a non-tragic awareness about disabilities; inviting non-disabled people to move from emotional to cognitive empathy, and to develop friendly reports with disabled individuals. They used indirect tools that rely on performed actions and interactions (such as introduction to Braille or simulation of disabilities) to challenge current ableist social scripts and prefigure ways of interacting with and helping disabled people. Being indirect appeared important for them to avoid defensiveness. The last section discusses how they used different strategies to educate their sighted interlocutors without creating tension.
Introduction to Braille: Staging the capabilities of disabled people and prefiguring inconspicuous help
Within broader awareness events, 101 organized workshops providing introduction to Braille for a group of five-to-twelve participants, who were seated around tables arranged in a large circle. Laura—a blind activist I frequently assisted as a volunteer—would often launch the session by stating she was here to introduce them to Braille writing, but more importantly to answer any questions, about visual impairment or disability, which participants might have. She sought to establish an atmosphere of trust and complicity by making jokes and ensuring that there were no ludicrous questions. The workshop alternated between technical introductions to Braille and personal anecdotes. For instance, when Laura explained what slates and styluses were, she said she was introduced to these tools at age 5, when she became blind. This was the best age to become blind, she claimed, as she was able to see for some time, but then had the chance to be raised as a blind person, avoiding the challenges of learning these skills at a later age. Such anecdotes served at least three purposes, as we discussed during informal conversations: they invited people to open up; they passed on a message about the processes involved in learning Braille (and the challenge of doing so at an older age); and they conveyed a light-hearted message about blindness. Laura talked about her impairment in a way that conveyed she did not mind it too much. According to her, she would rather lose 40 pounds, or meet the man of her dream, than recover sight.
Back to technicality: Laura explained what the slate, a large plastic item with small holes spaced in six-dot cells (necessary for creating any letter combination in Braille), and the stylus (a blunted awl used to emboss the dots) were. She lent these to each participant, along with an alphabet showing Braille letters corresponding to their equivalent in the Latin alphabet, and promptly explained that, to write properly, one would have to write every single letter in reverse, starting with the upper right corner of the sheet, and emboss each dot combination in the cell backward (so that, once the paper was turned back, the embossed dots would be in the proper order to be read). Playfully, Laura would generally illustrate this teaching by speedily writing a long sentence, which tended to impress participants. She would then take the paper from the slate, read it aloud with her fingers, and ask participants to try their hand at writing a single word: their first name. Writing with a stylus and a slate in an unknown writing system backwards was challenging for participants. Nonetheless, Laura created an atmosphere of playful competition by asking to read the work of participants on a first-come, first-served basis, pointing to the awkward silence as people tried to focus on forming the first letters on the paper.
The speed difference between Laura and the workshop participants was intentionally striking. Placing non-disabled participants in a position to be outperformed by someone with an impairment was part of the experience. Even though Laura ostensibly wrote quickly with the slate and stylus, she discussed how such writing material was outdated and too slow and took the opportunity to introduce other tools available while participants kept practicing Braille. She presented a mechanic Braillewriter—a six-key typewriter that, according to Laura, played like a piano—asking an overwhelmed participant to decipher her message afterward. She then introduced an electronic one, combining the six keys and a line of Braille that could be read and connected to a computer to decipher what was written on screen. According to Laura, those were much slower than just using a screen reader with phone and laptop.
This part of the workshop involved a lot of struggling: participants inevitably made mistakes writing their first names. Laura provided assistance by showing techniques or directing gestures, reversing the taken-for-granted scripts where help would be performed by non-disabled people. In the meantime, she explained how to use three distinct blind-friendly reading and writing techniques—all requiring different skills—and moved from the most archaic (the slate) to those related to smartphones and computers. If people ignored that blind people could easily use computers, they learned by the same token how blind people outsmarted screen readers, accelerating the voice speed to take on information as quickly as possible. For most people, the screen reader’s fast-paced voice was incomprehensible.
Laura interspersed this pedagogical introduction to the writing tools available to blind people with reading the different papers, gently teasing the people who misspelled a letter. In the dozen workshops I attended, the technical challenge helped breaking the ice between participants and facilitators. People felt encouraged to ask questions, ranging from technical (How come this does not create a hole in the paper? Why six dots? How did she sensitize her fingertips?) to personal (How did Laura become blind? Did she remember the faces of her parents?) and professional (Could she use any software on a computer? How did recruiters react when they met her?). Laura responded to these wide-ranging questions, while skillfully including messages about ableism, lack of accessibility, and discrimination. When asked about computers, she said that most basic software worked perfectly, but others did not make their platforms accessible. She mirrored the question back to her interlocutors, asking them what other practices would make texts inaccessible (printed documents, restaurant menus, physical mail, and posters announcing events were inaccessible to blind people). By reflecting questions back at participants, Laura created an awareness of what people miss out in an ocular-centric culture (Måseide and Grøttland, 2015). While Laura answered all personal questions, she also specified that many people “in the real world” would not like to be asked personal questions about their impairment at the first encounter. She created a self-proclaimed “space for legitimate curiosity,” while suggesting that it might feel like an invasion of privacy at other times. This was a way to challenge, through interactions, an ingrained script of asking intrusive questions to disabled people.
The workshops had multiple goals. They operated as an ice-breaker between participants and a disabled person. Focusing on technical teaching was a useful method to smoothen the interaction and make people comfortable. In schools, the nervousness of children before the workshop was palpable, but adults also showed some reservations (a 28-year-old participant approached to tell me he chatted with Laura, he felt nervous about beforehand). Many of the members of Together, the other disability rights non-profit I studied, expressed how they often felt frustrated—in their workplace, for instance—by the distance they experienced with colleagues who did not dare to say hello. I also noticed, as a guide for blind colleagues, the many avoidant attitudes of people staring from a distance. Similarly, people often talked to me even when their question was addressed to the disabled person.
Last, this workshop also helped to reverse the entrenched roles assuming that the person with an impairment is always the one being helped. Many of these introductory workshops (sign language, Braille, accessible sports) were facilitated by a person with an impairment. Here, Laura placed the participants in a learner position and created an atmosphere of joyous over-stimulation in the workshops, providing random personal and technical information as participants were performing their tasks. Laura was being more performant at the task at hand than any participant. She demonstrated her proficiency with writing and computers, debunking the prenotion—often held in companies—that visually-impaired people cannot work with computers. Most awareness programs staged the capabilities of people with impairment, and often placed non-disabled participants in the position of having to struggle with things that disabled people master on a daily basis (e.g. using a wheelchair or a cane).
After the Braille workshops, people often lingered around, staying to chat with Laura. She kept the conversation going, but asked for some minor help throughout the process: “Could you please pile up the slate? Put the unused paper together? What can you see through the windows here?” These innocuous forms of help, made even less noticeable through the lively conversations, were another way to prefigure a script of help far from usual interactions: Laura was the one asking for what was useful to her, and the help—pointed, mechanic, quick—was almost inconspicuous within the interaction. As another activist from Together once told me, “The best help I can get is the one that does not elicit more reaction than the one a non-disabled would receive when asking for salt during dinner.” Laura was conscious of the importance of this, telling me once: “Oh, and something that I like to do, after the formal training, is to whisper to a group of girls: ‘Could you show me the restroom, please?’ This creates a sort of collusion, and it reminds them that we work the same. I am a human being, with the same kinds of needs. That I must be able, one way or another, to use the restroom on my own.”
Through this Braille initiation, Laura challenged many disabling intrapsychic scripts: she attempted to change some representations of disabled people (showcasing their abilities, proficiencies with computer tools, moving away from the tragic vision of disability), educated the participants about the social barriers that blind people faced, and discussed accessibility as a political stake. She also prefigured new interpersonal scripts by putting the participants in the situation of performing interactions and help differently. She outperformed non-disabled people to reverse the scripts about the lower-performance of disabled individuals; she put herself in the position of being the one performing help; and proposed ways to build reports and interactions without being oppressive (e.g. hinting at how some uninvited questions could feel intrusive, showing how help is better performed when it is pointed, inconspicuous, and answering to specific requests). Through this initiation, she enacted models of solidarity that would be more symmetrical and rooted in an understanding of the social barriers faced by disabled individuals, moving away from tragic or deficiency-oriented cultural scripts (Honneth, 1996; Oliver, 1990).
Walking blindfolded: Cognitive empathy and discussing inappropriate helping behaviors
Antonia, a blind activist who trained me to facilitate a game-based simulation of walking blindfolded with a white cane, described this workshop as a moment when “You get the whole range of human emotions.” Undoubtedly, I received much more emotional responses than expected, teaching sighted people how to walk blindfolded with a cane. Some people refused to be blindfolded, saying they found the exercise childish or that they were too afraid. Some adults were on edge as they went through a corridor or staircase with nothing but a white cane. I could feel tension through abrupt moves, tense muscles, shaky movements, and occasionally teary eyes. Some people forgot about the cane and just clung to the guardrail, pressed themselves against a wall, or were unable to let go of my arm during the simulation.
As a facilitator, I was trained to let these emotional responses be expressed. Walking blindfolded, I was told to remind people, would not be as difficult after a week, let alone a month of practice (“Just like babies are impressed the first time they stand on their feet,” a blind facilitator once commented). I was an example of someone sighted who had become more comfortable walking blindfolded with practice, and some of the participants were guided by a blind facilitator, reversing traditional roles in guiding, demonstrating the autonomy of blind people with a cane. My task was to re-channel participants’ attention toward the cognitive nature of the experience through a series of questions: “What did you feel when you were blinded? Could you notice the difference in floor textures? Do you know where you have been? Did it seem long to you? What helped you? The noises? The guardrail? How did being guided change things?” Subsequently, Antonia taught me to reintroduce discussion on the social construction of the experience: “Were the people around helpful or obstructive? What could facilitate the experience?” Guiding bumps on the floor could indicate close stairs. By contrast, doors without handles were difficult to identify. These questions triggered what Eyre called the “phenomenology of living as a disabled person without offering the [person] a chance to render disability as Other” (Eyre, 2014: 100). Facilitators put sighted people in the shoes of the blind and had them experience some of their down-to-earth challenges. The experience of surmountable challenges diminished the othering process and stigma. I analyzed this game-based awareness campaign as a form of “emotion-producing technologies” (Collins, 1981: 1009). The game eased the emotional embarrassment or discomfort surrounding an encounter with a disabled person (debriefings of this game were as lively as the Braille introduction); it allowed room for the expression of fear of disabilities, but with the cathartic goal of casting away these emotional responses to move from an emotional to a cognitive empathy. The idea was not to have them emotionally empathize with blind people, but to elicit cognitive empathy, the ability to grasp what was challenging for blind people in an ocular-centric culture (Måseide and Grøttland, 2015).
By providing access to the experience of impairment, these simulations sought to provide people with the scripts to acting appropriately when interacting with blind people. Participants were paired up during the training and blindfolded one after another (guided for half the obstacle course, then having to find their way back). This justified the need to train them as guides for blind people, which involves both technical skills and challenging deeply-rooted social scripts of help. When facilitating training, I was taught to bait participants into performing help inappropriately. After a few words of introduction, I would close my eyes and say: “Ok, let’s imagine I am blind and I look somehow lost in the Parisian subway. How would you act to help me out and guide me?” In most cases, after a few awkward moments, a participant would come and grab my arm. At this point, I would say: “Well, first, start with basic introduction: say ‘Hi, can I help you?’” The setup of this interaction led most participants to make this mistake. However, such types of interactions are frequent in real life, because people tend to be focused on the help they want to provide and leave little agency for the blind person.
The game-like simulation helped facilitators embody their message about what are inappropriate behaviors and develop new scripts for help. In the event that this setup did not work and a participant asked if I needed help, Antonia would jump in to congratulate the person:
“You might find it surprising that I feel the need to say this, but I have faced people who grabbed my arm without asking my permission. You know how it feels when someone twice your size grabs your arm and carries you away? Once, I was waiting for a friend at a traffic light—this was our meeting point—, and someone made me cross the street without asking if I needed to cross—I didn’t—and without even saying ‘hi,’ and then he was mad that I wasn’t quite grateful. Even worse: one day, a guy decided to guide me to the subway, and he decided to grab my cane and drag me down the staircase. As if I was a dog with a leash. I could have fallen at any second, because he was quick and I had no way to see where the steps were. So, this time I had to say something a little blunt. I said: ‘Hey! You know what you are doing there?! It is as if I was trying to grab you by the eyeball to get you somewhere!’ Ok, that’s a bit harsh, but I got scared, and I was furious!”
Other scripts for how to introduce oneself to a blind person were discussed during these workshops. For instance, Laura often described herself as being not “audionomiste,” a play on the French term “physionomiste” (someone who has a good memory of faces). Through this neologism, she suggested that she was not able to put a name to someone’s voice simply by hearing “Hi,” and needed her interlocutors to introduce themselves.
Here again, this simulation helped challenge ableist intrapsychic scripts: through embodied experiences, Antonia hoped to deconstruct the fear, pity, and sense of tragedy experienced by sighted people, inflecting the “feeling rules” around disabled people (Hochschild, 1975). She invited participants to move from emotional empathy to cognitive empathy, presented blindness as a surmountable challenge, and fostered political awareness of the social barriers faced by blind people. She also prefigured new ways to perform help and interaction through indirect strategies, baiting people to help them understand why they need to introduce themselves before providing help. These strategies (baiting people, creating telling neologisms to help people grasp some concepts) stemmed from the assessment that educating people in acceptable social scripts for interactions triggered discomfort, defensiveness, and awkward feelings. Awareness campaigns for adults, in particular, which reiterate some basic principles on manners adjusted for disabled people, may sound as if they suggest non-disabled people lack social awareness and empathy. The next section expands on these strategies to raise awareness without creating defensiveness.
Interactional strategies to prefigure new social scripts without eliciting defensiveness
While the previous sections showed how activists challenged both intrapsychic and interpersonal scripts of interaction and help during these workshops, this last section examines what strategies were used in interactions to convey these new scripts to non-disabled participants in an embodied and impactful way without causing defensiveness. I will focus on playfulness, contact, jokes, metaphors, and discourses.
Playfulness was an important aspect of many workshops. Laura’s playful style in facilitating the introduction to Braille was instrumental, and the simulation of blindness and walking with a cane were introduced as an “obstacle course” to participants. For activists, this playful tone alleviated the initial heaviness and tension they experienced when encountering people new to disabilities. Games were a lure to facilitate interactions between non-disabled and disabled individuals. Many of the activists in Together and 101 developed a culture of politically incorrect jokes targeted at themselves and each other to alleviate the tension with non-disabled people about their disabilities, leveraging jokes to counter the belief that disability is always a personal tragedy (Bingham and Green, 2016a: 278). Many blind activists made puns about sight: “you got an eye on everything,” “four-eyed,” “I see you coming,” hinting at the materiality of eyes, to break the taboo of disability. They used humor to lighten the mood and suggest a new “attunement” (Ahmed, 2014: 221–222) between disabled and non-disabled people—one that is cheerful and no longer tragic, fostering connections (Bingham and Green, 2016b). They relied on playfulness to convey new intrapsychic and interpersonal scripts without making their interlocutors defensive. As one interviewee in Together stated, “Teaching manners to adults is a delicate thing, so I would rather use a good dose of humor when explaining to people that their go-to behavior is rude.”
Beyond playfulness, these workshops mobilized the imagination of participants. Facilitators probed participants’ curiosity, and mirrored back their questions—“What texts are inaccessible to blind people?”—to teach them to see the world without an ocular-centric cultural lens. Disability rights activists used riddles, based on private jokes between disabled people, to stimulate the imagination of non-disabled people and see if they could understand. For instance, “You know you are blind when you cannot help yourself at a buffet lunch but you have no trouble emptying your drink quickly.” This conveyed that, while it is socially unacceptable to touch food you will not eat at a buffet, blind people have no ability to know what and where the food is without touching it. Therefore, they keep themselves from eating unless someone offers to help them or if they ask for help. However, they have no ability to compare the pace of their drinking to others and because of this, dread being mocked as quick drinkers. Sharing such a joke was a way to try to have sighted people put themselves in their shoes, and also to denounce how some social gatherings—here buffets—can be inaccessible to blind people. They also hinted that the friendly and inconspicuous help of a colleague might be sometimes appreciated.
While games were useful, activists pointed to the necessity of embedding them in more formal discourse: against miserabilism and pitying the disabled person, against an impromptu invasion of privacy (which is why Laura often called up a “legitimate space for curiosity” in her workshops). Activists designed awareness programs to help people move from emotional empathy (miserabilist views, pitying attitudes, sense of tragedy) to cognitive empathy, able to envision the potential (small) challenges of their disabled peers. The metaphor of the perfect help that Laura often mentioned was audio-description: describing things that are around to a blind individual. This type of help was minimal and unnecessary, but a good chance to develop complicity and include a blind person in interactions. Against the image of the savior rescuing someone on the streets (against their will), these activists emphasized the need for friendly and horizontal relationships between peers and colleagues. As stated by Shakespeare (2014: 200): “When people become friends with disabled people, the salience of the impairment may diminish, the disabled person becomes ‘relabeled’ [. . .] and accepted as normal and the relationship can become reciprocal.”
Discussion and conclusion
In the discussion, I will highlight how this study contributes to the literature on organizing solidarity, social scripts, and prefiguration within social movements. I contribute to the conversation on organizing solidarity in difference in two main ways. First, I confront theoretical debates on solidarity with critical perspectives from disability studies to show how some ways of performing help and solidarity can appear oppressive and problematic. Unsolicited help is conceptualized in disability studies as microaggression (Cahill and Eggleston, 1994; Harris, 2017). Affective solidarities—with their risk of being driven by feelings of pity or superiority—can be assimilated to charity model developed in disability studies that conceives disability as a personal tragedy (Barnes et al., 2002). I argued that asymmetric forms of solidarity (i.e. a solidarity that takes for granted hierarchies and does not aim at eroding asymmetry) can face the same criticisms that disability scholars have developed to deconstruct the medical model of disability: never questioning the socially constructed nature of disabilities and the inequalities they produced, this model regards disabilities as personal flaws located within the individual (Barnes et al., 2002; Oliver, 2013; Shakespeare, 2014), and provide “medical solutions to the ‘problem’ of disability” without questioning how inequalities were created (Bingham and Green, 2016a: 287). Such models therefore risk of reproducing hierarchies and isolating disabled individuals through institutionalization, focusing “on individualized cures, treatment, and rehabilitation for what are considered ailments and abnormalities” (Heyer, 2005: 239). Instead, what disability studies have emphasized as the social model of disability implies to see “people with disabilities as a political group with a history of discrimination” (Heyer, 2005: 239), which face social barriers that needs to be overcome to ensure true equality and inclusion. Such a model parallels discussions of reflexive (Dean, 1996) and symmetrical (Honneth, 1996) forms of solidarity. While disability studies have examined how activists challenged these models for providing solidarity at the national level (through changes in policy regimes and cultural narratives), I studied how activists also challenged these social scripts at the local level through embodied interactions. Using both disability studies and ethnographic accounts of the goals of disability rights activists, I provide further elements for the theoretical re-evaluation, already ongoing (Ahmed, 2014; Spelman, 1997), of the risks inherent in promoting affect as a central basis of solidarity or generosity (Diprose, 2002; Hemmings, 2012) and of assuming a pre-existing hierarchization when performing help and solidarity.
Second, I contribute to an emerging literature on the micropolitics of solidarity (Mohanty, 2003; Mott, 2018) by showing how activists challenge existing intrapsychic and interpersonal social scripts to prefigure new models of solidarity that are less hierarchical and affective, but instead are more symmetrical and reflexive. The three dimensions of these social scripts (summarized in Table 1) allows for a more systematic understanding of how activists reorganize solidarity at the local level.
Prefiguring intrapsychic and interpersonal scripts for interacting with and helping visually impaired individuals.
At the intrapsychic level, I analyzed how activists sought to challenge scripts rooted in emotional empathy and prefigure scripts related to cognitive empathy. Disability studies have shown how expressions of emotional empathy are misguided, rooted in a tragic perception of disabled people (Barnes et al., 2002). Emotional empathy arises from disabling cultural scripts of emotions (Ahmed, 2014), casting disabled people as others or inferior. Showing pity for disabled people created distance and positioned them as the object of non-disabled people’s feelings, to parallel Ahmed’s (2014) argument about sadness and charity (p. 21). Such affective pre-notions can hinder solidarity altogether (preventing interactions) and induce a one-sided, imposed form of help that does not leave room for recognition, mutuality, and negotiation (e.g. make a blind person cross the street without their consent). Affect-driven help performance can foster benevolent discrimination, that is, a “social relationship that constructs the others as inferior and in need of help” (Romani et al., 2019: 371). To foster more reflective and symmetrical solidarity, I highlight how activists gave non-disabled people intrapsychic scripts to identify the concrete obstacles faced by visually-impaired people—invisible in an ocular-centric culture (Måseide and Grøttland, 2015)—to promote cognitive empathy and awareness of the (social) barriers hindering disabled individuals. These activists attempted to change feeling rules, representation, and to educate through performed interactions in order develop more symmetrical relationships.
At the interpersonal level, activists proposed social scripts of interactions and help performance. Encouraging interactions, they sought to convey scripts on how to introduce oneself, talk to disabled people directly, and avoid making impairment the focus of conversations. They prefigured scripts of help performance that emulated reflective solidarity (Dean, 1996; Jones, 1993), embracing the perspective of disabled individuals, understanding their challenges as they expressed them, and moving beyond an ocular-centric perspective. This recognition enables a symmetrical solidarity that can include actual unity (interactions), cohesive action (addressing discrimination together), and support systems (non-oppressive help performance). From this perspective, help performance would be a way to bond with the disabled individual and collaborate with them to overcome disabling social barriers. These scripted elements seem key to reorganizing a solidarity not based on asymmetry and affect, but on a mutual recognition of equal albeit different (Honneth, 1996), where performing help erodes, rather than reinforces, unequal power relationships (Nadler, 2020).
While social scripts are a powerful heuristic tool to conceptualize how changes at the cultural, interpersonal, and intrapsychic levels are connected, I contribute to this literature by showing concretely how activists can seek to transform interpersonal and intrapsychic scripts. Parker (2010) theorized how activists could challenge “cultural scripts” which then “trickled down” to local levels (p. 65). By contrast, I analyze the work of activists on fostering new intrapsychic and interpersonal scripts in local embodied interactions where they invite sighted people to perform help and solidarity differently. Some social scripts discussed here are quite specific to disabled or even blind people, yet others can be relevant for other minorities: avoiding invasion of privacy, increasing interactions, building reports, fostering cognitive empathy, performing help without reproducing hierarchizations, avoiding pitying, understanding social barriers, avoiding getting defensive when called out, and showing cultural sensitivity. Beyond these social scripts, one challenge for these activists—relevant for other groups—relates to how to convey these new scripts for solidarity without creating defensiveness or distance. The last section of my analysis therefore shows how these activists used various strategies—jokes, playfulness, riddles, and metaphors—to convey these new scripts in an embodied manner, while preventing negative emotional reactions.
This article also contributes to social movement theory by exploring a little-studied form of prefiguration (Trott, 2016; Yates, 2015): reinventing social scripts at the level of interaction. According to Amenta and Polletta (2019: 1114), more attention should be paid to how “ideas, values, language, and categories produced by movements sometimes gain a place in people’s everyday talk, decision-making, and interaction.” While these authors believe these changes “lie outside activists’ strategic agendas” (Amenta and Polletta, 2019: 1114), I argue that some activists proactively seek to produce such change, especially those who design local interactionist awareness campaigns (Kimball et al., 2016). When activists seek to fight against the discrimination of some minorities, prefiguring intrapsychic and interpersonal scripts of interaction is instrumental for bringing about change. Such a repertoire of actions is relevant for other anti-discrimination movements. Like solidarity, discussions on allyship (Boutte and Jackson, 2014; DeTurk, 2011; Le Gallo and Millette, 2019), white fragility (DiAngelo, 2018), benevolent discrimination (Glick and Fiske, 1996; Oliver et al., 2018; Romani et al., 2019), and other concepts in the day-to-day fight against discrimination, are fraught with debates on how to enact them in a non-oppressive manner. I argue that activists design prefigurative social scripts to embody and materialize new ways to react, emotionally and physically, in situations where, even with well-meaning or non-nefarious intentions, people often end up reproducing forms of oppression.
While the concept of solidarity teases out strong imaginaries that can be a rallying cry for social movements, it has—like many evocative notions—the drawback of conjuring up numerous and potentially contradictory representations. Activists reclaim the notion of solidarity by prefigurating new scripts to materialize or perform solidarity in real, concrete, and local situations. Through these scripts, they break down these abstract and at-risk-of-being-misappropriated concepts by proposing concrete ways to perform them.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I wish to sincerely thank Sophie Dubuisson-Quellier, Guillaume Dumont, Gary Alan Fine, Sanjana Gooreba, Brian Grossman, Brayden King, Elise Lobbedez, Jane Pryma, Samantha Ortiz Casillas, and my three anonymous reviewers for their precious comments on previous versions of this paper.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
