Educating the sighted: When activists reorganize solidarity by prefiguring new social scripts of help and interaction

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.

Coverage of Allies, Allyship and Disabled People: A Scoping Review

“…There is performative allyship, which is seen as a problematic form of allyship [5][6][7], and authentic allyship [26][27][28]. It is noted that there is the danger of allies being gatekeepers [8,9], that one can be an ally and oppressor [10][11][12][13][14][15]57], and that the very concept of allyship is contested [58]. Results of allyship are categorized as superficial or systemchanging [59].…”

“…However, the issue of having an ally is not simple. There is the problem of performative allyship, where the ally does not act in the ways disabled people wish [5][6][7], the danger of allies being gatekeepers [8,9], and that one can be an ally and an oppressor [10][11][12][13][14][15]. As authentic allyship includes being an activist, there is also the danger of activist burnout [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25], whereby authentic allies [26][27][28] are in danger of "authentic allyship burnout" due to the many stressors they can experience due to their actions.…”

More Than Prefigurative Politics? Redefining institutional frames to reduce precarity under neoliberal capitalism

“…They do so by creating communal spaces organized around other values, where different social practices and more relational and solidary subjectivities can emerge (e.g. Buchter, 2022; Haug, 2013; Reinecke, 2018).…”