Why it’s a problem: I’m not going to wade into the debates about Facilitated Communication (FC)/ Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) as the science is already clear that these communication techniques are junk.
Although it’s disconcerting that these communication techniques are treated noncritically in recent articles coming out in the mainstream media about Woody Brown, a nonspeaking autistic person who allegedly wrote and published a novel using RPM, what is more problematic is that these articles exploit a disabled person to reinforce ableist attitudes.
There is a reason why mainstream outlets like the New York Times are drawn to these particular kinds of stories about disability, and it’s not just because of its predictable inspiration porn — disabled person “overcoming” their disabilities — tropes, although this is an important aspect of their reporting. It’s also that FC/RPM are ultimately weaponized by the media as additional tools for centering the voices of nondisabled people over the voices of disabled people.
Take, for example, the title of the New York Times article, which is attributed to a quote from Woody Brown. Although no one is insusceptible to internalized ableism, I do question whether a disabled person who purports to be a disability advocate would describe nonspeaking autistic people as being “caged”? To me, that’s the equivalent of saying someone who uses a wheelchair is “bound” rather than liberated. In the case of people who use mobility aids, it’s the barriers built by society that restrict people, not their mobility aids.
Because of the abundant evidence that FC/RPM actually privilege the nondisabled facilitator’s voice over the disabled person, it is more accurate to state that these techniques restrict and confine the disabled person rather than liberate. And the implication is that only words constitute communication, that nonspeaking people are voiceless when the reality is that nonspeaking people do communicate, but often in ways that are not received well. When the author of the Times article, Alexandra Alter, writes that “it felt like an escape hatch had opened” after Brown learned to spell, then the message is that Brown became fully human only when he started to communicate with words. As an analogy, this would be like the scene in season five of Stranger Things when Max miraculously stands up after using a wheelchair for the entire season.
At the end of the series, the writers of the show expected the audience to deal with the fact that the main protagonist was possibly dead, but to leave one of the main characters permanently disabled – the fans would not have it! (Because as the media constantly reminds us, disability is a fate worse than death.) As Ella T. Holmes wrote in response to that moment in Stranger Things, “I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen this, of how many narratives fail to imagine a disabled person, a disabled body, taking an active and important role without somehow shedding their disability like a skin—just as an animal casts off parts of its body to serve some beneficial purpose.”
Alter uses the phrase, “uncomprehending, mentally disabled person” to describe the person that Brown once was in the eyes of others before he shed his disability and found words. Again, this implies that intellectually disabled people are inferior to what Brown identifies as today. It’s significant when Brown states that “they all assumed I was intellectually disabled,” because it is essentially a repudiation of that identity as something horrible, something in his past that he has transcended.
“I have all the thoughts, dreams, longings and intelligence as any neurotypical person,” says Brown. “I just present a little differently.” This sounds to me a lot like something the parent of an autistic person might say, as it is not how many neurodivergent people would describe their cognitive styles. We don’t just present differently, often we do think and feel things quite differently at a level that conflicts with others.
We also can’t overlook the elements of inspiration porn in these articles. As Alter frames the narrative, Brown was someone who was discounted in early life, but was able to transcend all those barriers and go on to finish graduate school at Columbia University and write a novel. The message for other disabled people is that we aren’t trying hard enough to overcome our disabilities. Woody’s mother, Mary Brown, claims that she is not harming anyone, but the message is that any family who can’t afford to have a parent attend school full-time with their intellectually disabled child (as Mary Brown did) is not doing enough to help their child reach their full potential. It also removes the onus on society to remove barriers, as it suggests that families need to invest more in their disabled children, to seek out more interventions, and that disabled people just need to try harder.
An article in The Guardian by Simon Hattenstone that appeared a few days earlier, takes the inspiration porn to another level. Brown is described as “strikingly eloquent” and “super-super smart and brilliant with words.” Again, disabled people can’t just be ordinary people, we have to be exceptional in order to be taken seriously and to be heard by nondisabled society. Brown allegedly states that one of his goals is to “reach the hordes who underestimate and infantilise us, and show them how vivid and magnificent we are.” But this is indeed harmful, because it denies the reality of the many autistic people who do have intellectual disability. It also stresses a cure narrative, that through the right tools or interventions, disabled people’s brilliance can finally come out even though the vast majority of us are just ordinary people who want to survive in this hostile, inaccessible world as we are.
If we ask, rhetorically, who are these stories in the New York Times and The Guardian written for, and if we judge by the definition of inspiration porn coined by the late Stella Young, which is the objectification of disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people, then we have to conclude that these mainstream narratives about Brown are indeed harmful and self-serving. And the fact that there is such a strong element of parental exploitation here makes it even more harmful.
The ableism in these articles is certainly coming from the expected places (journalists looking for a sensational story and family members who are presuming to be the voices for their children), which is why it’s not surprising that outlets like the New York Times and The Guardian have covered this story with such unabashed suspension of disbelief.
Source: The New York Times