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Carried and held: Getting good at being helped
- IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 5, Number 2, Fall 2012
- pp. 162-169
- Article
- Additional Information
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This personal essay uses the first-person voice to describe the author's experience as a dependent adult growing up in America after the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. The author's personal story is contextualized as a reality specific to her race, gender, class, and degenerative physical disability. Descriptions of the author's need for significant assistance serve as anchors for the essay's more open-ended questions concerning care on a massive scale for multiple generations of people. Such questions seek new social imaginaries that challenge Western social values of independence, individuated desires and activities, and an autonomous private life.