Overall Summary

Ashley Shew's Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement (2023) is a manifesto that dismantles the widespread assumption that technology will "fix" disability and that disabled people are simply waiting to be restored to "normal." Published as part of Norton's Shorts series, this concise but powerful book coins and defines "technoableism," a term for the harmful belief system that positions disability as a problem technology should solve rather than a natural variation in human experience that society should accommodate.

Shew writes from lived experience. At age 30, she became what she describes as a "hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn's disease and tinnitus." When people told her to think positively about her impending leg amputation because "prosthetics are so advanced now," she discovered the gap between media narratives about disability technology and the reality disabled people actually face. The simplest below-the-knee prosthetic costs $8,000 to $16,000, requires a lifetime of adjustments and replacements, and is never fully covered by insurance. The promise of technological restoration is often a lie told to comfort the nondisabled.

But Shew's critique goes deeper than exposing technology's limitations. She argues that technoableism does real damage by positioning the disabled body as fundamentally broken, creating the expectation that disabled people should aspire to appear nondisabled, and distracting from the actual source of most disability-related problems: a world set up to exclude disabled people. The wheelchair, she notes, is often better than high-tech exoskeletons for getting around, precisely because it requires the world to adjust to the disabled person rather than demanding the disabled person perform normalcy.

The book draws on disability studies scholarship and activism, celebrating figures like Harriet McBryde Johnson, Alice Wong, and the late Bill Peace while introducing readers to concepts like the social model of disability, inspiration porn, and cross-disability solidarity. Shew catalogs the tropes that saturate media representation of disability: pitiable freaks, shameful sinners, bitter cripples, moochers and fakers, and inspirational overcomers. Each trope distorts how nondisabled people understand disability and creates expectations that harm disabled people.

Central to Shew's argument is her insistence that the future is disabled. Whether through aging populations, climate change, new diseases like COVID-19, or even space travel, we should expect more disability, not less. This isn't dystopian; it's realistic. Planning for an accessible future isn't charity toward a minority but prudent preparation for the human condition. Disabled people, with their expertise in navigating uncertainty and adapting to challenging circumstances, should be leading these conversations rather than being excluded from them.

The book is written in an accessible, witty, sometimes sardonic voice. Shew describes ableism as "the sauce we're all marinated in" and insists that disabled people are "regular people, which is what we are." Part memoir, part academic essay, part manifesto, the book appeals to both disability community members who will find warm recognition and nondisabled readers who need introduction to these ideas. As poet Jillian Weise wrote in her endorsement, this is a book that marks a before and after: before the word "technoableism" and after it.

High-Level Overview: Key Arguments and Goals

Defining Technoableism: Technoableism is the belief that technology is a "solution" for disability, that disabled people await being "fixed" by technological wizardry, and that making society accessible is somehow a lesser priority than individual technological interventions.

Disability as Social Problem: The real problem isn't individual bodies that need fixing but a world set up to exclude disabled people. The social model of disability locates the problem in inaccessible infrastructure and discriminatory attitudes, not in disabled bodies themselves.

Disabled Expertise: Disabled people are the real experts on disability and should be centered in discussions about technology, accessibility, and futures. Instead, they're almost always excluded from designing the technologies made for them.

Narrative Harm: Media tropes about disability distort public understanding and create harmful expectations. Disabled people are pressured to be inspirational overcomers, to prove they're not moochers or fakers, and to perform normalcy even when it hurts them.

Technology's Limitations: High-tech disability devices are often expensive, inaccessible, require constant maintenance, and don't deliver what they promise. Lower-tech solutions like wheelchairs are often more effective than celebrated innovations like exoskeletons.

The Future is Disabled: Through aging, climate change, disease, and even space exploration, disability will become more common, not less. We must plan for accessible futures rather than dreaming of eliminating disability.

Cross-Disability Solidarity: Different disability communities should unite around shared goals while recognizing their distinct experiences. The book emphasizes intersectionality and the relationship between disability, race, and other identities.

Author Background

Ashley Shew is an associate professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech, specializing in disability studies and technology ethics. She cofounded the Disability Community Technology (DisCoTec) Center with the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her previous books include Animal Constructions and Technological Knowledge and Spaces for the Future: A Companion to Philosophy of Technology (coedited).

Shew became disabled at age 30 when a large bone tumor required amputation of her leg. Chemotherapy treatment caused hearing loss, tinnitus, and "chemo brain," which affects memory, focus, and information processing. She later received a Crohn's disease diagnosis. As she puts it, she had to "collect them all."

Her personal experience informs her scholarship. Before becoming disabled, even as someone who studied technology and ethics, she didn't fully understand daily disabled life. She was shocked when no one helped a wheelchair-using friend whose lift-equipped van was blocked in. This gap between what nondisabled people imagine about disability and what disabled people actually experience became central to her work.

Shew teaches courses on technology and disability at Virginia Tech, where she tells students frankly that her class is biased: toward disabled perspectives, toward disabled expertise, toward listening to what disabled people actually say rather than what nondisabled experts assume they need.

Chapter One: Introduction and Defining Technoableism

The book opens not with Shew's disability origin story but with her refusal to tell one. She hates that disabled people are forced to share their stories, often as prerequisites for being taken seriously. Disability origin stories, she insists, are usually not very interesting. Hers certainly isn't.

This framing itself makes a point: disability should be unremarkable, not the central drama of a person's existence. Yet technoableism demands dramatic narratives of tragedy overcome through technological miracle.

Shew defines ableism as bias against disabled people and toward nondisabled ways of life. Technoableism is one strand of ableism particularly visible in technology narratives. It appears in media stories about revolutionary prosthetics, in advertising for charitable organizations, in science fiction that imagines futures without disability, and in the assumptions of engineers and designers who create technology for disabled people without consulting them.

The core problem is framing disability as residing within individual disabled people rather than in social structures. This framing justifies pouring resources into individual technological fixes while neglecting the infrastructure changes that would actually improve disabled lives. It makes the disabled person responsible for overcoming barriers rather than society responsible for removing them.

Technoableism also creates the expectation that disabled people should be grateful for and eager to adopt whatever technologies are offered. Those who decline technologies, or who find them inadequate, risk being labeled as not trying hard enough, not wanting to be normal enough, not worthy of time, consideration, or inclusion.

Chapter Two: Bias and Disability Studies Foundations

This chapter provides an introduction to disability studies for readers unfamiliar with the field. Shew emphasizes that disabled people must be centered in discussions about disability, not talked over by nondisabled experts.

She explains the distinction between medical and social models of disability. The medical model locates disability within individual bodies that need treatment or cure. The social model locates disability in social barriers: physical inaccessibility, discriminatory attitudes, inadequate accommodation. Under the social model, someone who uses a wheelchair is disabled not by their body but by stairs, curbs, and narrow doorways.

Shew uses the term "bodymind," popularized by disability scholar Sami Schalk, to capture how bodies and minds are not separate but integrated, and how disability often involves both physical and cognitive dimensions. This framing pushes back against the tendency to think only of physical disabilities like mobility impairments while overlooking neurodivergence, chronic illness, and mental health disabilities.

The chapter introduces cross-disability solidarity: the idea that different disability communities should work together despite their distinct experiences. Blind people, Deaf people, wheelchair users, people with chronic illnesses, and neurodivergent people face different specific challenges but share common interests in accessibility, representation, and autonomy.

Shew also discusses the difference between disabled as an identity term embraced by many in the disability community and person-first language ("person with a disability") preferred by some institutions. She uses identity-first language throughout the book while acknowledging that individuals may prefer different terminology.

Chapter Three: Scripts and Crips

This chapter catalogs the narrative tropes that shape how disability appears in media and public consciousness. Shew opens with Lynn Manning's poem "The Magic Wand," about a Black blind man whose white cane transforms how people treat him, erasing his Blackness while marking him as disabled, pitiable, or threatening depending on context.

The tropes Shew identifies include:

Pitiable Freaks: Disabled people cast as objects of medical curiosity, pity, and charity. Charitable organizations like the Muscular Dystrophy Association's telethons and Autism Speaks have spread what activists call "bewareness," making people more afraid of disability rather than more understanding.

Shameful Sinners: Disability framed as punishment or penance for sinful action. This ancient trope persists in narratives that link disability to moral failing.

Moochers and Fakers: The assumption that many disabled people exaggerate or fake their conditions to receive benefits they don't deserve. This trope justifies invasive surveillance of disabled people and creates exhausting demands to prove disability over and over.

Bitter Cripples: Villains in media often marked by disability: facial scars, hook hands, limps. This trope associates disability with moral corruption and makes disabled people frightening. One consequence: hand amputees avoid using very useful hook prosthetics because children find them scary due to media portrayals.

Inspirational Overcomers: Also called "inspiration porn," this trope presents disabled people as inspiring simply for living their lives, overcoming their conditions through heroic effort. It creates expectations that disabled people should be exceptional rather than ordinary and positions nondisabled people as the audience for disabled performance.

These tropes share a common function: they make disability about nondisabled people. Disabled people become objects of pity, fear, suspicion, or inspiration for nondisabled consumption rather than subjects of their own lives.

Chapter Four: New Legs, New Tricks

This chapter focuses on mobility disabilities, drawing heavily on Shew's experience as a leg amputee. She describes learning that prosthetics are nothing like their media portrayal: expensive, uncomfortable, requiring constant adjustment, and not covered fully by insurance.

The first lie she heard was that prosthetics are so advanced now. In reality, the simplest below-the-knee replacement costs $8,000 to $16,000, all require lifetime maintenance, and the poor often go without. Advanced computerized prosthetics shown in inspirational media stories cost far more and remain inaccessible to most amputees.

Shew discusses exoskeletons, devices that enable some paralyzed people to walk. Media coverage presents these as triumphs, showing the noble paralyzed person walking surrounded by supportive engineers and healthcare professionals. But walking with an exoskeleton is slow, effortful, and often painful. A wheelchair, which requires the world to adjust to the disabled person, is almost always a better way to get around.

The chapter also addresses beauty standards and prosthetics. Realistic-looking prosthetics are often preferred by prosthetists despite being less functional than alternatives. The goal becomes appearing nondisabled rather than living well as a disabled person.

Shew cites the late Bill Peace (blogger at "The Bad Cripple"), who criticized media coverage of exoskeletons for perpetuating the idea that all paralyzed people want to walk. Few stories ask whether this is actually true or whether resources might better go toward wheelchair-accessible infrastructure.

The key insight: much disability technology exists to make disabled people appear more normal rather than to improve their lives. This reflects technoableism's assumption that looking nondisabled is the ultimate goal.

Chapter Five: The Neurodivergent Resistance

Shew acknowledges that neurodivergence isn't her primary area of expertise, so she draws heavily on conversations with neurodivergent people and scholarship from the neurodiversity movement.

Some forms of neurodivergence are disabling primarily because of social mechanisms. Expected eye contact, prohibitions against stimming (self-stimulatory behaviors like rocking or fidgeting), and demands for neurotypical social performance create disability where none need exist. If we stopped policing how autistic people express themselves, they would be healthier, happier, and more able to contribute.

Other aspects of neurodivergence remain disabling regardless of social structures. This distinction matters: the social model works well for some disabilities but oversimplifies others. Shew advocates for recognizing this complexity rather than pretending all disability is purely socially constructed.

The chapter discusses Hans Asperger's collaboration with the Nazis, who murdered disabled people deemed unworthy of life. Asperger advocated for certain autistic people he considered useful while allowing others to be killed. This history haunts autism advocacy and illustrates how easily disability becomes grounds for elimination.

Autism Speaks comes under particular criticism for its "bewareness" campaigns that frighten parents and for its historical rhetoric about autism as a tragedy to be cured. Neurodivergent activists have protested the organization for speaking over rather than with autistic people.

Shew introduces the concept of "cultural technologies" that neurodivergent communities create for themselves: weighted blankets, noise-canceling headphones, fidget tools. These low-tech, often DIY solutions emerge from disabled communities rather than being imposed by nondisabled designers. They represent counterventions: alternatives to the interventions that dominate disability discourse.

Chapter Six: Accessible Futures

The final chapter brings together the book's themes around one central claim: the future is disabled.

This means several things. First, if we achieve our greatest space dreams, astronauts will experience disability. Space travel causes bone density loss, vision problems, and other impairments. Some disabilities might actually suit space better than the abled ideal: astronauts don't need to walk in microgravity, and some neurodivergent traits might help with isolation and routine.

Second, even if we stay on Earth, climate change will create more disability. Changing disease patterns spread tick-borne illnesses to new regions. Environmental pollution causes higher asthma rates. Natural disasters injure and disable people. Long COVID has already created millions of newly disabled people with chronic fatigue, brain fog, and other lasting symptoms.

Third, populations are aging, and aging brings disability. Almost everyone who lives long enough will become disabled. We are all "temporarily able-bodied" (TABs).

This isn't dystopia. Shew insists that more disability doesn't mean lower quality of life. But it means we must plan for disability rather than dreaming of eliminating it. Every curb cut, caption, ramp, and accessible interface benefits not just current disabled people but our future selves.

Science fiction often imagines futures without disability, where technology has eliminated all impairment. These visions reflect eugenic fantasies more than realistic planning. Shew calls for different imaginations: futures where disability is accommodated, included, and unremarkable.

The book closes with Shew picking up her daughter from school. Other parents barely notice her prosthetic leg. This normalization, this unremarkability, is what many disabled people want. Not to be fixed, not to be inspirational, not to be pitied, just to go about their lives like everyone else.

Key Concepts

Technoableism: The belief that technology is a solution for disability, that disabled people await being fixed, and that individual technological intervention takes priority over social accessibility.

Social Model of Disability: The view that disability results from social barriers and exclusions rather than individual body failures. A person who uses a wheelchair isn't disabled by their body but by stairs.

Medical Model of Disability: The view that disability is an individual medical problem requiring treatment or cure. Shew critiques this model's dominance.

Inspiration Porn: Presenting disabled people as inspiring simply for existing or performing ordinary activities. It positions disabled people as objects for nondisabled consumption.

Cross-Disability Solidarity: Different disability communities working together while recognizing their distinct experiences.

Bodymind: A term capturing how bodies and minds are integrated rather than separate, used to include cognitive and mental health disabilities alongside physical ones.

Counterventions: Alternatives to interventions; technologies and practices disabled communities create for themselves rather than having imposed on them.

Temporarily Able-Bodied (TAB): Recognition that most nondisabled people will eventually become disabled through aging or circumstance.

Conclusion

Against Technoableism succeeds as both introduction and manifesto. For readers new to disability studies, it provides accessible entry to key concepts, history, and debates. For those already in the disability community, it offers recognition, validation, and new vocabulary.

The book's brevity is both strength and limitation. At under 200 pages, it introduces many ideas without exhaustively developing any. Some reviewers wished for deeper treatment of race and disability, gender and disability, or specific technologies. But Shew positions the book as a starting point rather than comprehensive treatment, and it succeeds on those terms.

The coining of "technoableism" may be the book's most lasting contribution. As Jillian Weise wrote, there is now a before and after: we did not know what to call it, and then Ashley Shew named it. Having language for a phenomenon makes it visible and criticizable. Future discussions of disability and technology will have this term available.

The book ultimately argues for a different imagination about disability and the future. Rather than dreaming of eliminating disability through technological miracle, we should plan for accessible futures where disabled people are included, accommodated, and unremarkable. The future is disabled, whether we like it or not. The question is whether we'll be ready for it.