Sometime during middle school a male relative told me that if I weren’t in a wheelchair, I’d be “tall, thin, and gorgeous.” He meant it as a compliment, and I took it as such. Even as my throat tightened and my palms tingled with discomfort, I thanked him. Because I knew could have been was the closest I’d ever come to beautiful so long as I used a wheelchair. Since I was never getting out of it, the best I could hope for was an acknowledgment of wasted potential.
I mention this to give you a glimmer of the personal context I brought with me to Kylie Jenner’s photo spread in the December/January issue of Interview Magazine. In two of the pictures—one of which is the cover—Kylie wears a black leather bustier and a vacant expression, sitting with legs slightly spread in a gold-plated manual wheelchair. Kylie, if you somehow aren’t aware, is abled. She doesn’t use a wheelchair, at least not outside fashion shoots.
These pictures are just the latest example of using mobility aids as props. In some ways, I can understand how and why this happens. After all, wheelchairs are objects like any other, right? People pose with props all the time, so a wheelchair should be no different. Except that certain objects, like wheelchairs, are imbued with meaning. Wheelchairs have very real and fraught societal, historical, and personal contexts, and to ignore that is to contribute to ableist oppression.
Perhaps the most galling component of this photo shoot (and others like it) is that posing in a wheelchair while abled is seen as edgy, provocative, and sexy while actual wheelchair users are wholly and continually desexualized by society. Our bodies are seen as broken, strange, and ugly, and our wheelchairs are seen as prisons. These beliefs aren’t even particularly well-concealed. We are either “confined to a wheelchair” or “wheelchair-bound”. When we’re allowed to exist in media, we’re tragic inspirations or disgusting villains. We are things to be pitied and feared, nothing more. We are not attractive, and we are certainly not sexual.
But Kylie? Well, her body is beautiful. More importantly, it’s functional. When Kylie sits in a wheelchair, it’s a statement—a statement of what, I’m not sure. Although given her comments in the accompanying interview about feeling “limited” and Interview Magazine’s statement that the shoot’s vision was about “placing Kylie in a variety of positions of power and control,” one can assume the goal was to emphasize Kylie’s perceived objectification and presumed powerlessness through the use of the wheelchair and doll-like styling. But that concept relies on an abled gaze to work. It assumes the audience believes wheelchairs to be limiting, to be proof of powerlessness. Placing Kylie in a wheelchair while looking like a kinky Stepford Wife does nothing to critique those assumptions. In fact, it reinforces them. The photographs play off the juxtaposition of Kylie’s conventially attractive and abled body with the shallowest trappings of disability, knowing that an abled audience will thrill at the beautiful being cradled (quite literally) by the disgusting veneer of disability.
It’s important to understand that this isn’t just about these pictures, though. This is about the myriad ways disabled people are shut out, dismissed, and detested because of our disabilities while abled people profit off of and are lauded for playing crippled. This is about how disabled models have to fight for work and respect in the fashion industry, and how even when they’re successful, it’s framed as being because they’re an aberration—the exception that proves the rule. This is about the lack of respectful represenation, not just on screens and on the runway but in the room where decisions are made.
This is also about how disabled folks are more likely than their abled counterparts to be raped, sexually assaulted, and domestically abused. These are complicated issues, of course, but I argue that the desexualization of disabled people (which is a form of dehumanization) in one contributing factor. It makes an already vulnerable population that much more easily exploited, controlled, and abused.
Nothing happens in isolation. When Interview Magazine chose to photograph Kylie Jenner in a wheelchair, they chose to contribute to a history of oppression. They chose to treat a wheelchair as a prop, while wheelchairs are our mobility, our freedom, our agency, our identities. They chose to ignore the context, to dismiss the harm they caused, and to deny their responsibility for that harm.
It took me years to start shaking off the belief that my wheelchair, my disability, the very reality of my body made me automatically undesirable. I still wince when my wheelchair is visible in pictures. It still feels like a victory any time I find myself attractive. I still mostly don’t believe anyone else ever will. Seeing Kylie wear an illusion of my reality, knowing that she’ll be praised and defended while we shout our pain once again, preparing myself for the next time this happens (and there will be a next time), is frustrating and exhausting.
But I’ll keep shouting. You’ll hear me again next time. And again after that. If for no other reason than the hope that if we’re loud enough for long enough, maybe the next generation of disabled girls won’t have to demand their humanity. Maybe they’ll be given it freely, the way we all should.
I’ve seen a lot of excellent responses to this photoshoot going around, and I’m happy to see one here on the Toast. I’m guessing it’s too much to hope that Kylie or Interview would have a response… But regardless, Kayla, thank you for writing this!
Allow me to be the first Toast commenter to offer a cordial “fuck you” to your male relative.
I raise my glass to you, sir/madam.
Thank you so much for writing this.
Tangentially related – in the webcomic Homestuck there is apparently a character who is legally blind and uses a white long cane. I have seen many photosets of abled cosplayers carrying these canes and it really, really pisses me off. DISABILITY IS NOT A PROP.
I hope I do not come out as aggressive in asking that, but if you cosplay a character you lift off the whole of their attire. Why would you leave the cane out, specifically? Carrying a white cane around for fun on its own as a prop would be off, sure, but when dressing as a character who is blind isn’t it normal? Wouldn’t you be cosplaying the character as abled otherwise?
Note that I don’t read Homestuck, so I might be missing something.
I guess what I’m saying with this is that I kind of put it in the same vein as darkening your skin color to portray a non-white character – that it’s more like…actual disabled people and POC can’t take these traits off at the end of the day. There are plenty of indicators in the costume to indicate who you are intended to be without having a cane (specifically intended for the visually impaired, and at times illegal to own if you are not in certain states) or being in blackface.
I see your point. On the other hand, I feel that this is demonizing the cane and the wheelchair. Some people use them to get around. If you have dressed up as one of these people, supposedly because you think they are awesome characters, leaving a part of them behind could be considered more offensive.
Dressing as a blind person in general, or dressing as a handicapped person as Jenner did, is disturbing. Disablity is not a game. But cosplaying Daredevil, who is blind, and uses a cane to get around, and leaving the cane out, does not make sense to me. You are effectively choosing to take the disabily out of the hero.
Ugh. That photo shoot was just WEIRD. Also, FWIW, the only person I ever knew who used a wheelchair was an OLYMPIC ATHLETE and I would DEFINITELY not have called him “bound” by anything.
Does anyone read Interview any more? (I’m not trying to minimize the damage to which they’re contributing … just snarking.)
When I was a teen, Interview was the height of cool… I wouldn’t have had a clue about the hurt caused by some of the images there and elsewhere. No one was writing pieces like this one, at least nowhere I could get at them.
Thank you Kayla… I’m glad to see your writing no matter what the reason. I’m sorry it’s such a hurtful one, though.
I didn’t realize Interview still existed until I read this! Happy to be in the here and now and not reading the stuff I did back then, but whooeee I sure loved it back in the day.
Thank you for sharing this.
Just wondering (and I haven’t seen these photos) if this is comparable to Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” video. I loved that on first viewing, then thought about it and felt like it was in poor taste, then read an interview with her where she copped to thinking the pimped-out wheelchair was a ridiculous visual prop, but a bunch of fans in wheelchairs were completely in love with it as it made them feel more visible, not less. Rich tapestry? I’m honestly not sure.
I don’t think it’s comparable in any way. In Paparazzi the protagonist falls off a wall and has severe injuries. She literally can’t walk without the chair (eventually when she improves somewhat, she graduates to crutches, I think). It’s not there to make some kind of statement.
Good point, thank you! In my internetty travels today I did run across at least one photo from this shoot, and it was Not Great to see. Makes me hopeful that being famous for doing nothing has an eventual expiration date.
Is that Sacramento City College in the photo? Community colleges are supposed to be super accessible but somehow because the concrete is always done on the cheap that one never really is. (it may be better in the last 7 years, but I doubt it).
Thank you for articulating for me what I could not. I am permanently disgusted by the Kardashian family and these photos rendered me mute with anger.
I can only hope that you get at least as many reads and comments as the kitten ones. I truly wonder at how really good, thoughtful articles are getting ignored for fluff. Literally.
More than once, I’ve lived in a wheelchair for a while, from injuries and illness. It was a revelation to me how differently I was treated. I became invisible to adults, a staring contest for children, and an obstacle to be avoided by everyone else, while I was busy trying to overcome all the obstacles in my way. The first time was in 1989, only a few years after the ADA went into effect, and most places were not compliant, at all. Recently, things have been better, but still….
Obviously, you have abundant other talents to equip you for the road ahead. Intelligence will compensate for many things the able, stupid people don’t have. Roll on!
Another article here that gets little attention is http://the-toast.net/2014/12/23/female-troubles-g…
Fwiw, I didn’t see it as a prop in the sense you are talking about it. I thought it was part of the concept of her being represented as a sex doll. Sex dolls, at least the realistic ones, are heavy and cumbersome and people who own them use wheelchairs as a means of conveyance for the dolls. And to be clear, I am not defending the photographs in any way. I found them abhorrent.
I am very sorry you’ve been subjected to such prejudice and hurtful comments. I hope your story it will help others to be more compassionate.
Really? That’s weird. I mean, in a ‘huh, that’s weird, humanity is complex’ way & also in a ‘it’s weird that the makers of realistic sex dolls don’t come up with a non-blow-up way to make them easier to move around’ way.
Also, it’s esoteric enough knowledge that even if it’s where Kylie’s shoot sprang from, they (the directors, the subject, the editors) should have figured out that the majority of viewers weren’t going to make that association, and found a more creative way to draw the parallels, if that’s what they wanted.
I would hazard a guess that anyone who made the association of her being portrayed as a sexdoll would be astute enough to understand what a wheelchair in that sense means. In the documentaries I’ve seen about people who have them (Real Dolls), it’s an integral part of their story and how they relate to them. Seeing as how those documentaries are fairly widely distributed, it’s not a far jump to assume the magazine and the photographer would believe the general public would get the association. But who knows what the photographer’s intent really was. Maybe he just wanted to generate buzz regardless of whether it was positive or negative and he was definitely successful in doing that.
Definitely successful, indeed.
I got a sex doll association from the photos, but not the wheelchair, but I’ve never seen Real Dolls etc. I didn’t expect it was such general knowledge – I could just be An Old Person in this regard!
Wow, this is outstanding. It’s everything I’ve wanted to get across about why Kylie’s shoot bothered me, and then some.
I hadn’t seen the photos but I am deeply grateful for your clean and lovely writing on them.
Thank you for writting this. A male relative of mine made similar comments and it really sucks because I want to believe it wasn’t ill intentioned (this is a person who prides himself in being very honest), but it still hurt.
Thank you for writting this. A male relative of mine made similar comments and it really sucks because I want to believe it wasn't ill intentioned (this is a person who prides himself in being very honest), but it still hurt.
Thank you so much for writing this. I still struggle with insecurity about my wheelchair and mainstream media tends to reinforce that. You wrote so clearly about something I’m still trying to understand.
I guess what I'm saying with this is that I kind of put it in the same vein as darkening your skin color to portray a non-white character – that it's more like…actual disabled people and POC can't take these traits off at the end of the day. There are plenty of indicators in the costume to indicate who you are intended to be without having a cane (specifically intended for the visually impaired, and at times illegal to own if you are not in certain states) or being in blackface.
I am super late to this party, but it’s too important not to let you know you are getting wild and prolonged applause from over here. That photoshoot aside, it needs to be an open discussion, an open awareness, that body image and beauty values are impacted by health.
It feels like an new idea that the spectrum of being abled/disabled and ableism is another measure by which we are taught to judge and ultimately disown, disavow, and devalue ourselves. My mind was blown a scant two years or so ago reading an article by someone with fibromyalgia discussing her condition in terms of body image. It struck home about how deeply my decreasing mobility and increasing limitations impacted my sense of being whole, attractive, and worthwhile as a person.
And the thing I am truly bursting to say: one of my best friends of many, many years (I want to say… 18 years?) has MD, and has been in a wheelchair since she was 8. Her childhood stories include one. Her adult stories include one. It is inextricably part of everything people perceive about her and how she perceives herself. However, that perception for me has not for a single second stopped me from finding her exquisitely beautiful and sexy as hell. She’s objectively gorgeous, and when you add in her charm and intelligence and humor and wisdom… she’s a bombshell. She happens to be a bombshell on wheels. Her force of life and internal and external beauty make it easy for *me* to discount her chair, despite that fact that I have been with her through some brutal, unforgiving, heartwrenching milestones of her disease and those insidious small ones that feel all too frequent. I know it never goes away, for her. But it’s never made her less in my perspective, only more. My heart aches fiercely with love and adoration for her, and her unstoppable brilliance and beauty have never been compromised.
I am super late to this party, but it's too important not to let you know you are getting wild and prolonged applause from over here. That photoshoot aside, it needs to be an open discussion, an open awareness, that body image and beauty values are impacted by health.
It feels like an new idea that the spectrum of being abled/disabled and ableism is another measure by which we are taught to judge and ultimately disown, disavow, and devalue ourselves. My mind was blown a scant two years or so ago reading an article by someone with fibromyalgia discussing her condition in terms of body image. It struck home about how deeply my decreasing mobility and increasing limitations impacted my sense of being whole, attractive, and worthwhile as a person.
And the thing I am truly bursting to say: one of my best friends of many, many years (I want to say… 18 years?) has MD, and has been in a wheelchair since she was 8. Her childhood stories include one. Her adult stories include one. It is inextricably part of everything people perceive about her and how she perceives herself. However, that perception for me has not for a single second stopped me from finding her exquisitely beautiful and sexy as hell. She's objectively gorgeous, and when you add in her charm and intelligence and humor and wisdom… she's a bombshell. She happens to be a bombshell on wheels. Her force of life and internal and external beauty make it easy for *me* to discount her chair, despite that fact that I have been with her through some brutal, unforgiving, heartwrenching milestones of her disease and those insidious small ones that feel all too frequent. I know it never goes away, for her. But it's never made her less in my perspective, only more. My heart aches fiercely with love and adoration for her, and her unstoppable brilliance and beauty have never been compromised.