Towards Apathy and Joy: A Feminist Crip Exploration of Disabled People's Experiences with Unsolicited Advice


Megan Ingram, Queen's University

The prevalence of unsolicited advice in the lives of disabled people is well-catalogued through the mass of articles and social media posts dedicated to the issue (e.g., Blahovec 2017; Pulrang 2020). However, less is known about the affective impacts of this advice on disabled people and the potential resistance that may be enacted towards affects labelled negative, such as shame (Kolarova, 2012; Jóhannsdóttir, Egilson and Gibson, 2021). 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. Using narrative accounts from fifteen semi-structured qualitative interviews with disabled individuals in Ontario, Canada, the research addresses: 1) The affective impacts of unsolicited advice on disabled people. 2) Strategies disabled people use to manage the emotional impact resulting from unsolicited advice and “blame culture" (Hughes 2015), individually and collectively. 3) The ways disabled individuals emote or ‘perform’ their subject positioning in response to this unsolicited advice. Ultimately, this research argues that while unsolicited advice acts as a method of blaming and shaming, wherein non-disabled individuals work to soothe their own discomfort with disability and the broader neoliberal political context, disabled people resist feeling ashamed and strategically react to and deploy emotion in response to unsolicited advice in resistant and empowering ways. In this work, I conceptualize unsolicited advice as advice given without explicit solicitation of or requests for guidance, and which is largely understood to be unwanted by the recipient. Extant research on unsolicited advice is primarily oriented towards either cultural variance or social-psychological models that fail to account for the specific experiences of Disabled people as ‘affect aliens’ or ‘killjoys’ (Ahmed, 2010) in what Hughes (2015) terms a ‘blame culture’, wherein disabled individuals are resented and blamed for not only their own disability, but broader socio-cultural concerns and other’s health. Honing in on blame and the affective impetus for unsolicited advice is crucial, as recent scholarship on disability and affect has indicated shame as an affect with considerable political power (Jóhannsdóttir et al. 2021) due to its capacity to indicate the “political horizon:” what is considered politically desirable within a collectivity (Gould, 2009; Kolarova, 2012). While prior research on advice and ideological and sociocultural conceptualizations offer insight into the potential affective motivations for the giving of unsolicited advice, very little is known about the actual affective experiences, emotive consequences, and resistant strategies of disabled people who received such advice. Further, existing research on disabled experience and affect largely focuses in on the solely negative impacts of disablism, oppression and shaming practices, positioning some emotions as purely oppressive and as only useful in inciting a narrative trajectory towards the ‘better’ positive emotions. While this prior research has been critical to opening up space in affect research on disability and in conceptualizing both the oppressive impacts of affect within structural systems and the resistant potentialities of pride and joy, much is lost in the dichotomizing of emotion and the creation of narrative trajectories and affective binaries.  The failures of affective binaries (particularly around shame/pride) to capture the lived affective experience of unsolicited advice are explored in this manuscript through narrative data collected from fifteen semi-structured qualitative interviews with disabled people undertaken using a feminist re-storying and desire-based methodology (Tuck, 2009). Ultimately, while participants collectively identified unsolicited advice as an affective practice and shaming tool, they did not describe in their narratives a full rejection of shame, nor a complete embrace of disability pride at all times. Rather, participants were intentional in their narration, maintaining that both seemingly “bad” and “good” emotions coexisted across social encounters. Rather than navigating a linear trajectory from this initial “negative” affective response towards pride, participants instead spoke continually about an orientation towards connection that required sitting with their feelings, even “bad” affects, and allowing those emotions to guide them towards other people and other futures. Thus, while unsolicited advice undoubtedly caused negative affective experiences, harm, and oppression, this did not exist in a vacuum and coexisted with resilience, resistance, and a desire for futures and worlds otherwise.

This paper will be presented at the following session: