Legible, visible, conspicuous: disabled ingenuity and “ability accommodations” in the disability memoir
Bibliographic record
Abstract

 
 
 First-person accounts of disability and chronic illness have been foundational to the development of disability studies and disability activism. The production of the literary disability memoir places certain rhetorical demands on its author, requiring the memoirist to “translate” their unique experiences as a disabled subject into language the nondisabled reader is equipped to understand. Using key concepts from disabled writers Eli Clare and Neil Marcus, the essay evaluates the disability memoir as a piece of assistive technology produced not for disabled people, but by disabled writers for the benefit of the reader whose embodied experience of disability and chronic illness is limited. These “accessibility accommodations” serve to mitigate the effects of experiential limitation in order to facilitate nondisabled readers’ engagement with disabled ways of being and knowing. The essay offers an overview of rhetorical strategies disabled memoirists use to make their narratives accessible, and surveys examples of literary memoir from authors writing from and through different mental, neurological, and physical conditions. I argue that adapting a first-person account of disability for the page results in a necessary, unavoidable disembodiment of the author’s story; this disembodiment is not a failure of the author to represent their lives fully and accurately, but rather an ingenious innovation on the part of disabled, chronically ill, terminally ill, and neurodivergent writers. As assistive technology, the disability memoir subverts of the typical disabled-nondisabled power dynamic, placing the nondisabled reader on the receiving end of the disabled author’s accommodations.
 
 
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".