Most recently, Natalia Cecire has called into question Tom Scheinfeldt’s definition of DH as being “nice” because it focuses less on theory and more on methodology. The latter, according to Scheinfeldt, is easier to resolve because “either one method or another wins out empirically or the practical needs of our projects require us simply to pick one and move on.”
Natalia responds “[t]o espouse collaboration over authorship, one must have an authorial voice to cede; to be ‘nice,’ one must be in a position in which ‘niceness’ does not connote ‘servility.’”
It’s a good point, yet I feel that the topic of disability and access complicates both Scheinfeldt and Natalia’s conceptualizations of niceness. If niceness depends upon a certain privilege, then access also depends upon a certain privilege. Does this mean, on the one hand, that we should struggle against ‘niceness,’ or on the other, that we find certain arguments being won simply through pragmatic concerns or – what works? I’d argue that the question of access and technology shifts back and forth between Natalia’s cultural concerns about ceding privilege and Scheinfeldt’s sense that practicality ultimately wins out simply because there is no easy answer to what it means to make something, or someone, accessible. I feel it is our duty to make spaces and discourses accessible, yet, I also think that the idea of accessibility is always revealing new complexities. Sometimes individual concerns are more important, other times we have to take those concerns and see what works.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argued in our brownbag discussion group that “empathy” – another “nice” term is often put into the service of an unconscious eugenics discourse with regards to right-to-die cases, in the sense that some lives are deemed worth living (read: forced to struggle to “overcome” disability) and some aren’t (read: allowed to die because the disabled life, ultimately in this discourse, is not worth living). How do we access disabled lives or bodies, when we’ve already determined that their experience is so alien, so different from our presumed normality, that their lives are simply not worth living?
“Niceness” is also a part of Melanie Yergeau’s work, particularly in the way her niceness and her “extreme gullibility” “authors” her “autism”: “I’ve yet to decide whether my extreme gullibility is a personality trait or an autistic symptom – but usually my decision depends on with whom I am speaking. When my doctor insists that my insane indecision camps me with autists, I nod, concurring that Asperger’s has struck again. When my mother reminds me that I’m not gullible that I’m a peacemaker, I muse over my heavenly gift of perpetual compromise.” To what degree is it important to not be gullible in this scenario? And how does the struggle to assert onesself in Melanie’s case reinforce ideologies of identity and personal autonomy that also reflect attempts to author her? Access is about pragmatism, but we must also understand to what end we are being pragmatic. Does the American desire for individual choice and agency end up winning simply because we feel it should?
I’d like to mention just one more example, that of Michael Chorost, even though I know that the work of George Williams, Katy Crowther, Margaret Price, and the GTRI group also struggle with these questions. Michael’s two books Rebuilt and World-Wide Mind are disarmingly confessional. He describes, for example, his cochlear implant feminizing his body – making it something that can be invaded and implanted. He also discusses in-depth how hearing is a perpetual progress of updating software. He has no sense of “natural hearing” (if such a thing exists) because new versions of software changes how he hears. He suggests that such constant change forced him early on “to become an athlete of perception. I had to learn to glide over the sound-stream like a skier over bumpy snow, to assemble meanings out of phonemes like a juggler keeping ten balls in the air” (171). Hearing, for Michael, means training his senses but also being willing and working to connect with other people.
When we think of access and niceness, perhaps Michael’s metaphor is particularly apt. There is never any final answer to how to access another person, even if that person is presumably “able-bodied.” But we must remain agile, always emphasizing what connects us, finding the specific experiences that separate us, and turn them into opportunities for learning to listen to one another, and yet also making things work.
November 3, 2025 11:20 pm via TweetDeck
