[She didn’t write it. (But if it’s clear she did the deed…) She wrote it, but she shouldn’t have. (It’s political, sexual, masculine, feminist.) She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. (The bedroom, the kitchen,her family. Other women!) She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it. (“Jane Eyre. Poor dear, that’s all she ever …”) She wrote it, but she isn’t really an artist, and it isn’t really art. (It’s a thriller, a romance, a children’s book. It’s sci fi!) She wrote it, but she had help. (Robert Browning, Branwell Brontë. Her own “masculine side.”) She wrote it, but she’s an anomaly. (Woolf. With Leonard’s help…) She wrote it BUT…]
From the cover of How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ. I have never read this book, because every time I’ve tried, it’s proven to be one of those books that confounds my ability to comprehend the written word (there are a lot of those). But the instant I saw the cover, I bought the book, and I think I still have a copy. And the cover itself is worth it. I make no claims for whether the insides are any good or not.
Anyway -- slightly tweaked, you can apply these ideas easily to ableist ways of dismissing disabled people’s writing, especially those of us whose disabilities are said to make writing impossible (cognitive disabilities especially, like autism and intellectual disability, also some psychiatric disabilities), or insight into our own existence impossible (same groups of people usually). Here’s a blog post I made ages ago on the topic of disabled people’s writing and this book cover. And that doesn’t even cover the half of it.
And I’m sure I’ve seen these things attributed to many other marginalized groups as well. There just seem to be standard ways of dismissing what we have to say and how we’ve managed to say it and whether we’re capable of understanding it.
I also strongly suspect this is one of the areas I’ve talked about, where nondisabled marginalized people face ableist assumptions and ableist power plays even when they’re not, themselves, disabled. Ableism is the only form of oppression I’ve found that is at work deep within the heart of every other form of oppression. Because all oppression depends at least partly on ableist assumptions about whichever group is being oppressed. (This isn’t to say ableism is worse than other oppressions, just that it’s the only oppression I’ve found that universally seems to exist within other forms of oppression. Others come close, but not quite as close. This doesn’t make it better or worse, it just is what it is.
If that last paragraph is confusing to you, you might want to read my post: There is ableism somewhere at the heart of your oppression, no matter what your oppression might be. That was the first and only time I was able to really lay out what I mean when I say those things, and also what I don’t mean. It was difficult enough to write (from a technical standpoint, given my cognitive limitations) that there are things I was not able to adequately cover, but I still think I did pretty well.
Anyway, I thought people might be interested in this book cover. One of those rare examples where a book is worth it for the cover alone even if you never read it. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage and understanding out of this cover.
