“Not all bathrooms are created Equal”: Moral experiences of maneuvering in inaccessible infrastructure with physical disability

How do people with physical disabilities characterize their encounters with inaccessible infrastructure? I draw on interviews and focus groups with older adults with spinal cord injuries from the Midwestern United States to argue that participants experienced inaccessible space as morally harmful, damaging their sense of worth and dignity. They developed strategic bodily “maneuvers” to squeeze through narrow corridors, scale ledges, navigate the back of rooms and buildings, and avoid filth and garbage–resulting in situations of exclusion and marginalized inclusion. Maneuvering established inaccessible spaces and disabled bodies as “denied” and “undignifying,” two stigmatizing classifications which participants experienced as hurtful and unfair. Denied space was exclusionary and associated participants’ disabilities with what they could not do. Undignifying space facilitated a sidelined, dirty, burdensome sense of inclusion. These were moral experiences: they made participants feel less whole and welcome. While denied space offered fewer mobility opportunities, participants felt most stigmatized by undignifying space, precisely because they had greater opportunity to encounter its degrading features by navigating through it. Participants articulated forceful moral judgments toward degrading and exclusionary infrastructure. In instances when opportunities for maneuvering through space were totally unavailable or too degrading to bear, most participants maneuvered away from it. Through such embodied micro-protests against marginalizing spaces, participants constructed themselves as moral agents worthy of inclusion and dignity. This process developed out of encounters between the body and the material forms of inaccessible space, speaking to literature that indicates the relevance of material things–like infrastructure and the body–to sociologists of morality and disability.