Toward a politics of shame: cripping understandings of affect in disabled people's encounters with unsolicited advice.

Abstract

The prevalence of unsolicited advice in the lives of disabled people is well-catalogued in the mass of articles and social media posts dedicated to the issue. However, less is known about the affective impacts of this advice on disabled people and the potential resistance that may be enacted, such as shame, toward affects labelled negative. The present manuscript builds from original qualitative research to explore the links between emotion, mind, and body that occur in interactions involving unsolicited advice between disabled and non-disabled individuals. Non-probability convenience sampling was used to recruit 15 disabled individuals in Ontario, Canada for participation in semi-structured qualitative interviews that were inductively coded and narratively restoried. Building from these narrative accounts, the research addresses (1) the affective impacts of unsolicited advice on disabled people and (2) how disabled people negotiate the emotional impact resulting from unsolicited advice and blame culture individually and collectively. Ultimately, this research argues that, while unsolicited advice acts as a method of blaming and shaming that has the potential to structure disabled peoples' lives, disabled people resist feeling ashamed and instead bridge from initial responses of fear and shame toward other emotions such as apathy and sadness in resistant and potentially empowering ways.