A blog post by Dr Abigail Pearson, Lecturer in Law at Keele University.
“For many weeks now there have been veiled references to the Queen’s state of health, hardly surprising at the age of 96, recently bereaved and having had her family’s behaviour dragged across newspaper front pages for the last 60 years at least. However, recently reports seem to be focusing on why the Queen has not been seen in public or has cancelled several engagements at short notice.
Speculation began to surface from the great and the good, including Giles Brandreth and Christopher Biggins, that it is because the Queen is ‘largely confined to a wheelchair’ and as some newspapers speculate, ‘Embarrassed to be seen.’
As a fulltime, lifelong wheelchair user with Cerebral Palsy, these are not sentiments I share. Far from confining me, my wheelchairs have over the course of my life enabled me to study, travel, make and spend time with friends and family.
However, as a disability scholar, I can appreciate the Queen, a woman who has always appeared to be physically active and raised in a time when people with disabilities were shut away from public view (including within her own family) may not view disability in the same way that I do.
I believe that disability is constructed by society, which fails to consider and respond to those with different needs, known as the Social Model of Disability. At the same time, I feel the effects of my impairment, my Cerebral Palsy (Pain, fatigue and difficulty swallowing to name a few) which are unpleasant and if I were given the choice, I would like to be free of these or manage them with medical intervention. This does not mean I subscribe to the Medical Model view of disability, that I should submit to cure and or treatment to enable me to access my rights, however ineffective those treatments and cures might be in reality.
Some have condemned the Queen’s apparent choice as ‘dispiriting that one of the most well-known voices in the world may be willingly hiding away because she is scared of being seen as disabled.’ However, I say this is unfair and counter to the aims of the Disabled People’s Movement and undermines the Human Rights approach to disability.
Firstly, the Queen rarely speaks to the press and certainly not about her personal feelings, so all that has been communicated in the media is based on conjecture. Secondly, if the Queen conceptualises her loss of physical vigour and development of ill health as a sense of loss, then she is entitled to do so. Just as I am entitled not to feel that way about my own disability. That is why people with disabilities marched and protested declaring ‘Nothing About us Without Us’, to challenge the belief that people without disabilities had the right to tell us what to do and what to think or that they could decide whether or not we should be able to access our rights.
If we say that people must accept that, then the reverse must also be true. We cannot tell anyone living with a disability (the Queen included) how they must feel about or reveal their disability.
The problem, which can and should be challenged, is the media representation of disability. The reporters have decided that the Queen does not want to be seen in a wheelchair, that she will be diminished and that she was ‘haunted’ by images of her sister in a wheelchair in public. These are the images of tragedy that the media likes to present of disability. Or they like the opposite, the Paralympians defying the odds, superhumans brought to life or happy, smiling children with rollators, emulating the equally stoic and inspiring Captain Sir Tom Moore.
Then there are the shadowy representations of people who are ‘putting it on’ too idle to work, living it up on benefits, a depiction criticised by the CRPD committee report in the UK in 2017. In response to this, people with disabilities drafted the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) in 2006. The UK government ratified it in 2009, agreeing to remove in compatible practices and alter laws which defeat its aims.
Article 8 requires state parties to challenge ‘stereotypes, prejudices and harmful practices relating to persons with disabilities, including those based on sex and age, in all areas of life; To promote awareness of the capabilities and contributions of persons with disabilities and Encouraging all organs of the media to portray persons with disabilities in a manner consistent with the purpose of the Convention.’
In July 2021, the UK government introduced the National Disability Strategy, as a domestic commitment to the UNCRPD. It stated that the Disability Unit will be established to combat harmful stereotypes. The media’s insinuation about why the Queen does not want to be seen in a wheelchair contravenes this commitment and if the Queen does not want to be seen in a wheelchair might explain why. The media suggestions highlight the continued belief that disability is a sign of weakness or incapability to hold public office.
In 2022, we should be challenging this view so that we can create an environment in which a disabled young person will find it incomprehensible that they could not be a future world leader, much like the image portrayed in Obama’s Hair Like Mine portrait with then 5-year-old Joshua Philadelphia touching President Obama’s hair. There are things we can do, such as mainstreaming people with disabilities within society, including the media and ignoring complaints when we do.
It would also be a strong illustration of Part B of Article 29 of the CRPD:
To promote actively an environment in which persons with disabilities can effectively and fully participate in the conduct of public affairs, without discrimination and on an equal basis with others, and encourage their participation in public affairs […]
Whilst Monarchy itself is exclusive due to the importance of birth right, such an image would help to sow the seed that we might in future see a Prime Minister, Chancellor or maybe a President with a disability.
If the Queen attends the upcoming Jubilee pageantry in a wheelchair that will be a positive step forward, but it is her choice to make. The Disabled People’s Movement has long criticised the use of people with disabilities as poster children or inspiration porn, so why should the Queen be judged for her choice or decision not become such an image? If she does choose to appear in public in a wheelchair, it will be positive and will underline the fact that people with disabilities are capable of leadership. Selfishly, I also hope that it might open up a new world of regally inspired wheelchair adaptions becoming available, like a loud Herald trumpet horn, for days when I need to get through a crowded station again, or failing that, a gold cup holder.”
