feminist blogs

This is an image from the Icarus Project, a radical mental health support network. I saw it when it was reprinted in a local zine (more on that later): You can find a larger version here.

[Image description: It’s a poster headed taking care of the basics. It is divided into 5 parts: eating, sleep and rest, exercise, schedule and herbs, meds etc. Each has a cartoon drawing, half with people who are doing things in a way that is portrayed as unhelpful, the other half with people who are doing things in a way that is portrayed as helpful.]

I wish I was disappointed; I wish I expected more of so-called radical organizations. But no, when trying to illustrate unhelpful eating patterns for depression they show a fat person eating a burger and fries, and they contrast this with thin people eating a home cooked meal served by a woman (the headline is my alternative title for the Eating Well illustration).

The illustration is not radical. Fat-hatred is not radical. Food-hatred is not radical. People can pretend that their disgust at a burger and fries* comes from their dislike of multi-national corporations. But their disgust at a fat body is in plain view.

* Which as far as meals when you’re depressed go seems pretty good to me. It has protein, carbohydrates and fat. It will fuel your body.

Did you know that Dorothea Lange, famed Depression-era photographer, had polio and that her experience with disability informed her work?

Ms. CripChick presents the latest Disability Blog Carnival on Disability Culture and Identity: “Here They Come!”

“I think it was perhaps the most important thing that happened to me. It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, humiliated me, all those things at once. I’ve never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it.”
—Dorothea Lange on disability

Over 40 bloggers weigh in on how the shared history, struggle, and culture of disability inform personal and group identity. This is an impressive collection of varied explanations on how what is viewed as a deficit by mainstream culture can be a binding force and a cause for celebration. Go and read.

Image description: The icon above, provided by CripChick, is a color image of a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo with the words “DISABILITY BLOG CARNIVAL” in bold black type across the painting. The image is a close-up of Frida in her wheelchair from the 1951 painting “Self-Portrait with Portrait of Dr. Farill” described in detail in both English and Spanish here.

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade

Wheelchair Dancer wrote an excellent critique of the ableism in my last post on shades of grey in activism.

The whole thing is below, but you should also check it and her other works out on her blog, Wheelchair Dancer.

On Making Argument: Disability and Language.

We all use disablist or ableist metaphorical language, and I bet most of us say something that is potentially offensive every day: we might be blind to this, deaf to that, pass disabled vehicles, chat about being paralyzed in a situation, etc., etc. I’m often uncomfortable with it — I never use the moron or cretin words — but, honesty here, I do say idiot. I never say, “that’s lame;” I almost never say blind, deaf, paralyzed, cripple, but I occasionally I find myself saying, “that’s dumb,” with full negative rhetorical force. Most of the time, if I slip up the non-disableds I’m with don’t notice; however, the disableds get it, call me on it, and we talk.

If you are feeling a little bit of resistance, here, I’d ask you to think about it. If perhaps what I am saying feels like a burden — too much to take on? a restriction on your carefree speech? — perhaps that feeling can also serve as an indicator of how pervasive and thus important the issue is. As a community, we’ve accepted that commonly used words can be slurs, and as a rule, we avoid them, hopefully in the name of principle, but sometimes only in the name of civility. Do you go around using derivatives of the b*ch word? If you do, I bet you check which community you are in…. Same thing for the N word. These days, depending on your age, you might say something is retarded or spastic, but you probably never say that it’s gay.

I’d like to suggest that society as a whole has not paid the same kind of attention to disabled people’s concerns about language. By not paying attention to the literal value, the very real substantive, physical, psychological, sensory, and emotional experiences that come with these linguistic moves, we have created a negative rhetorical climate. In this world, it is too easy for feminists and people of colour to base their claims on argumentative strategies that depend, as their signature moves, on marginalizing the experience of disabled people and on disparaging their appearance and bodies.

Much of the blogosphere discourse of the previous weeks has studied the relationships between race, (white) feminism and feminists, and WOC bloggers. To me, the intellectual takeaway has been an emerging understanding of how, in conversation, notions of appropriation, citation, ironization, and metaphorization can be deployed as strategies of legitimation and exclusion. And, as a result, I question how “oppressed, minoritized” groups differentiate themselves from other groups in order to seek justice and claim authority. Must we always define ourselves in opposition and distance to a minoritized and oppressed group that can be perceived as even more unsavory than the one from which one currently speaks?

As I watched the discussion about who among the feminist and WOC bloggers has power and authority and how that is achieved, I began to recognise a new power dynamic both on the internet and in the world at large. Feminism takes on misogyny. The WOC have been engaging feminism. But from my point of view, a wide variety of powerful feminist and anti-racist discourse is predicated on negative disability stereotyping. There’s a kind of hierarchy here: the lack of awareness about disability, disability culture and identity, and our civil rights movement has resulted in a kind of domino effect where disability images are the metaphor of last resort: the bottom, the worst. Disability language has about it a kind of untouchable quality — as if the horror and weakness of a disabled body were the one true, reliable thing, a touchstone to which we can turn when we know we can’t use misogynistic or racist language. When we engage in these kinds of argumentative strategies, we exclude a whole population of people whose histories are intricately bound up with ours. When we deploy these kinds of strategies to underscore the value of our own existence in the world, we reaffirm and strengthen the systems of oppression that motivated us to speak out in the first place.

Some background and ground rules. Though I am using Mandolin’s post in detail, I will be referring to her throughout as “the writer.” This is because I am not interested in making an anti-Mandolin conversation. I wish to begin a conversation about disability, language, authority, and power. Mandolin’s post just got me started.

Organizational strategy. That was the theory and conclusions. In the rest of the post are some explanations of how I got there. I’d like to go about this two ways: first talk about details of the post and then talk about implications.

Part 1: Details

But more on the systemic level. We cut off our own feet. If we can’t acknowledge we’re all trapped in racist and sexist systems, systems which compromise our most purely intended actions, systems that prescribe our choices and make us choose between lesser evils… what can we fight?

We commonly talk about us “handicapping” ourselves in a given situation. Here, the writer takes a more literal approach: we become double BKAs (below the knee amputees). This, in itself, might be a small oversight, except that the image of the amputation as a self-inflicted injury is troubling. It is even disturbing because it reaffirms the idea that disabled people are trapped, paralyzed (by their own doing or perhaps not) and helpless — in this case before the forces of evil oppressive systems.

Yes, I know, images and language like this are so routine that they are almost invisible. But that doesn’t make it acceptable. Language and its ideas still have effects. In this case, they are part of a system of images that the writer has begun to use whenever she needs to talk about a powerless situation in the identity and cultural politics wars. The image is not hers to begin with, but she takes it on and takes it over in a title and in the post that follows that title. And then, the same image shows up in, here, in the Grey Activism thread. It’s almost as if amputation of the legs is this writer’s way of indicating the victimization of a well-intentioned person who then becomes helpless either in the face of critical discourse or in the face of discourse systems that have power to wreak havoc on an innocent speaker.

The second detail is an example of how, once it becomes acceptable to take small images in brief words and phrase, it becomes possible to make huge paragraphs:

There’s a personality disorder called Borderline Personality Disorder in which sufferers have a great deal of difficulty understanding ambiguity. They tend to view themselves and others as either entirely good or entirely bad, a switch that will flip with great regularity. On a good day, they are all good. On a bad one, they are the worst person who ever lived. If you give them something they like, you’re an angel; if you speak a harsh word, you’re an evil person conspiring against them.

I tend to drive some of our legalistic commenters here crazy…

This is an awfully generalized description of Borderline Personality Disorder. Short on factual information, it relies on the safety of the You and Them dichotomy: You and those awful Them. And it highlights Their irrationality, Their craziness, Their suffering. The suffering thing is a key point. To use such language is to imply that people are prone to their diagnosis, stripped, in some ways of their personhood — to the point that they can become THEM, a safely otherable pile of flesh. The disability civil rights movement has worked years to educate people on language like this. We don’t “suffer” with our disabilities; we are not our medical diagnoses. To reduce us to our diagnoses is to suggest that there is a fundamental binary of human existence: able-bodied and not. And those who are not, suffer. And it offers an understanding of disability that is wholly medical and awful. There is no natural physical variation, no understanding of how environment and culture contribute to the understanding of disability; there is only the awfulness of BPD. BTW: there’s a tremendous amount of dispute in disability communities about how diagnoses like this are formed. It’s not like irrationality is objective. It’s not like, medically speaking, you do these things and BOOM! BPD.

Essentially, this is a coercive argument by analogy that is successful because of the awful image of BPD it uses. It kind of runs like this. BPD is bad. People who have it aren’t like you and me — they’re irrational. Crazy. And when we do these kinds of things — “trying to define THAT person as evil for THIS compromised act and making that declaration of good or evil a single, solid, reified thing” — we are exhibiting the behaviours of someone with BPD. So, don’t do them. You wouldn’t want to be seen as having BPD, now, would you?

And what to make of the writer’s very next sentence where she declares that she drives people crazy? If you don’t acknowledge the power of the words you wield, the border line between the real and the figurative is very porous.

OK. Enough. I’ve spent so much time on the literal value of the metaphorical details and figurative language because I think not recognizing the literalness of all of this is critical to the next move.

Part 2: Implications

The most important things to me here are one: the fact that one of the people posited throughout the post — the poor liberal who in trying to do good and be complex makes a couple of mistakes — ends up helpless before the dysfunctionality of the politics of the system. And two: the fact that, by the end of the post that person is represented as a double BKA with BPD: a double below the knee amputee with borderline personality disorder. A wacky, helpless, and perhaps dangerously irrational, disabled person. The details may seem small when looked at individually, but that final image is extraordinarily undermining of the disability civil rights movement and of modern progressive understandings of disabled people’s place in society.

Relying on the figurative value of disability metaphors tends to render disabled people invisible; it cuts us out of the conversation. And we are a part of those communities — a necessary part. Disability IS a feminist issue and vice versa (think choice, think end of life, think pre-natal testing, think any part of body autonomy). The constructions and experiences of disability in a divergence of racial and ethnic communities are important to us — for the disability civil rights movement is mainly white. We who are feminist, of colour, and of disability are critical to the conversation, but, to quote Vicki Lewis, we disabled folk are not your metaphor.

And we do experience the exclusion from the conversation in many of the same ways discussed over and over again in the past weeks. Personally, I get tired of trying to bring the disability angle to the table — others I know do, too. As a movement, in our daily lives, and even as a scholarly field in the hallowed halls of academia, disability and disabled people have yet to be recognized as full participants in the conversations about intersecting identities, power, the body, etc. etc.

In the disability movement, we often talk about interdependence and the way all humans are dependent, in some ways, on each other. We use these terms as a way of countering the very material point that disabled people are dependent, non contributing burdens on society, and we use it to challenge the narratives of able-bodied American self-sufficiency. I can’t speak for a very diverse movement, but, to me, one of the signature disability moves is to look for a collaboration that acknowledges the interdependence of all peoples while respecting and valuing their differences. There is no logical need for one of us to leverage off the other: collaboration not competition floats more boats on a rising tide.

So, the next time you need to make an argument about the value of your particular minoritized group, its place in society and culture, its history, etc., I’d ask you to look down and check whose broken back (metaphorically speaking, of course) you are standing on.

Some of my response to the email where she was kind enough to send me this is below the fold.

Michael Bérubé at Crooked Timber has a good and fairly long post comparing the disability policies of Clinton, Obama and McCain. Kathy at The G Spot nutshells for us:

– Hillary Clinton’s disability policy? Very, very good.

– Barack Obama’s disability policy? Even better!

– John McCain’s disability policy? Complete and utter craptastic-ness.

Both Michael’s and Kathy’s posts are excellent and well worth reading in full.

I did wonder if some disability activists wouldn’t look at the candidates in terms of “right to die” laws and find McCain to be better on that issue than the two Democrats. (Although I don’t know if any of the three have specifically spoken about that issue.)

A bit from Michael’s post:

And I have to admit that I’ve been mightily vexed by […] the phenomenon of the avoidance of disability qua disability. It’s as if we Americans have been talking about disability all our lives, as Molière’s M. Jourdain has been speaking in prose, without realizing it. Remember that debate about SCHIP? You know, the one we lost on Bush’s veto? What the hell was that about? It was about disability, folks – about children suffering catastrophic illnesses and traumatic injuries for which their parents couldn’t (and their parents’ dastardly, moustache-twirling health-insurance providers wouldn’t) provide. Vets returning from Iraq with PTSD or TBI (post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury) and being warehoused and/or underserved and/or neglected by VA hospitals? Uh, well, once again, here we’re talking about disability. Why in the world do we frame these things as matters of “health” or “employment” or “veterans’ benefits,” when doing so prevents us from realizing that we’re all touching different appendages of the 8000-pound elephant in the room? The subject is disability, people. It’s about our common frailty and vulnerability. Get used to it.

The newest Make/Shift has a great interview with Mia Mingus, a “twenty-seven year old queer, disabled, Korean transracial adoptee” who is the co-director of Reproductive Justice Now!. Mingus’ interview is excellent and covers a lot of ground.

The whole interview isn’t available online, but Aaminah Hernández quotes a passage:

… I was taught to claim my body as a girl, female, woman, but not as a disabled person. When it came to my disability, my parents looked to doctors, health-care providers, medical experts, and brace makers. I was not the expert on my body; they were. No one ever connected that my experiences with teh medical industrial complex as a disabled child would ultimately discourage me from seeking medical services (reproductive or not) in the future. Or that standing in my underwear in front of male doctors as they studied me was no different from standing in my underwear in front of any old men as they studied me.

For years I wore a brace on my right leg. I had some that went from my foot to my knee and some that went all the way up to my hip. My braces were made of plastic and/or fiberglass. In the Virgin Islands Caribbean weather, they itched, pinched my skin, and gave me painful blisters. When I wore them, I could hear horrible brace makers’ voices in my head: ‘that’s an ugly walk,’ ‘walk down the hallway again - and this time, try to make it prettier,’ ‘don’t worry, you’ll be able to hide the brace under your clothes - boys won’t even know it’s there.’

The invasion of my body at such a young age by people who never engaged with me about what I felt being told that my body was ‘wrong’ and ’something to fix’ over and over again…The ownership and entitlement of the medical industrial complex of my disabled body is, in my mind, no worse than the ownership and entitlement of the system of white supremacy of my body of color, or the ownership of the system of male supremacy of my female body. In fact, they are so connected and mutually interdependent that they are impossible to separate…

… The way in which I was receiving care was not about actually caring for who I was, but about making me fit into the mythical idea of ‘normal’ - and of course it was assumed that being ‘normal’ is what I wanted. I think one of the key issues for me around receiving medical care is that it is already working from a paradigm of ableism that pathologizes bodies. It’s not to say that all medicine is bad, but more that the particular way that I got treated as a disabled woman of color was about ‘fixing’ my body, as measured against an ableist (racist, sexist, heterosexist, etcetera) standard of what was ‘right.’”

The interviewer was Irina Contreras.

(Watch the ad before reading further if you prefer to avoid “spoilers”).

From the Sacramento Bee:

Older, sicker patients could be allowed to die in order to save the lives of patients more likely to survive a massive disaster, bioterror attack or influenza pandemic in California.

It’s not how nurses and doctors are accustomed to doing things, nor how Californians expect to be treated. But it is part of a sweeping statewide plan being praised for its breadth, even as it rankles providers who will have to carry it out.

The new “surge capacity guidelines” released by the state Department of Public Health, depict a post-disaster health care environment that looks and feels nothing like the system most Californians depend on.

It provides for scenarios in which patients could be herded into school gymnasiums for life-saving care or animal doctors could stitch up the human wounded and set their broken bones.

The 1,900-page document lays the practical – and ethical – groundwork for local and county health departments, hospitals, emergency responders and any able-bodied health care worker likely to be called upon in a catastrophe.

Striking in its specificity and its frank focus on the need to suspend or flex established laws and to ration health care, the plan is being hailed as a model for the rest of the nation.

You really need to read the whole thing to get a sense of how the plan would simultaneously limit patient protections and provide freer access to care.

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade

I’ve heard good things about a new documentary film, Praying with Lior, only opening now in a few cities and playing primarily at Jewish film festivals. From the film’s website:

An engrossing, wrenching and tender documentary film, Praying with Lior introduces Lior Liebling, also called “the little rebbe.” Lior has Down syndrome, and has spent his entire life praying with utter abandon. Is he a “spiritual genius” as many around him say? Or simply the vessel that contains everyone’s unfulfilled wishes and expectations? Lior – whose name means “my light” — lost his mother at age six, and her words and spirit hover over the film. While everyone agrees Lior is closer to God, he’s also a burden, a best friend, an inspiration, and an embarrassment, depending on which family member is speaking. As Lior approaches Bar Mitzvah, the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony different characters provides a window into life spent “praying with Lior.” The movie poses difficult questions such as what is “disability” and who really talks to God? Told with intimacy and humor, Praying with Lior is a family story, a triumph story, a grief story, a divinely-inspired story.

It sounds like this could go either way, right? The stereotyping of a child with Down syndrome as closer to God than the rest of us, an inspiration or a burden are themes on developmental disability we’ve heard many times before.

But filmmaker Ilana Trachtman’s motivations as reported by Devorah Shubowitz at Media Rights reveal complexities behind the intent of the documentary:

As Trachtman struggled to focus during a Rosh Hashanah service at Elat Chayyim, a multi-denominational Jewish retreat center in the Catskills, she was mesmerized by the soulfully attentive off-key voice that came from behind her. When she saw the source, a boy with Down syndrome, she was shocked. Lior’s praying shattered her expectations of what people with disabilities can do. “He amazed me. He could do something that I can’t do — pray with real concentration in Hebrew and in English. So I stalked him because of my own spiritual curiosity.” When Trachtman heard Lior was going to have a Bar Mitzvah, she thought somebody should tell his story on film and shortly after, she decided to be that person….

Audiences may debate whether this photogenic young person’s “star quality” sets him apart from other people with disabilities. Some may argue that Lior’s integration is dependent upon his recognition by and attractiveness to non-disabled society. Others may think his charisma is connected to his disability. The film certainly brings to the foreground issues of the aesthetics of disability, and non-disability, in film.

Another review at Cinematical also suggests that disability is just one (important) facet of this complex family story about love and religious faith.

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade

From the AP story:

A wrongly deported U.S. citizen who was missing for months in Mexico sued the Department of Homeland Security and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department on Wednesday.

Pedro Guzman, 30, who is mentally disabled, was deported last May after he was arrested and jailed on a misdemeanor trespassing charge. For nearly three months, his family searched for him in shelters, jails and morgues in Tijuana, Mexico, and the surrounding area.

During that time, he rummaged for food in garbage cans, washed himself in rivers and walked as far south as Ensenada — more than 60 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the lawsuit.

Guzman tried to return to the United States several times, but was turned away. He was found near the Calexico border crossing in August and reunited with his family.

“I will never forget what Peter looked like when he finally returned to the U.S. — exhausted and in terrible shape,” said Guzman’s brother, Michael. “Peter’s life is forever changed by what his government did to him.”

His lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, was filed in federal court in Los Angeles by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Guzman.

“Not only does Peter and his mother want some vindication, they want to make sure immigration officials understand they can’t do this,” said attorney Jim Brosnahan, who represents Guzman. “They should have apologized and said they would take steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

A statement released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a branch of Homeland Security, called the incident a “one-of-a-kind case” and added more than 1 million illegal immigrants have been deported since the agency’s inception.

See other posts on Guzman here and here.

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade

Through the appeals process, the decision to deny Robert Latimer parole has been overturned:

After seven years in prison for killing his severely disabled daughter, Robert Latimer will be freed on day parole this week.

The appeal division of the National Parole Board this afternoon overturned a parole board decision last December that rejected Mr. Latimer’s bid for parole.

The appeal division, following a month-long review, concluded Mr. Latimer does not in fact pose an undue risk to reoffend.

….

In its decision in December, a three-member panel of the parole board concluded: “You could not or would not describe the feelings or thoughts underlying your actions at the time of the offence…. You appear satisfied with the position that you and only you were able to determine her life or death, describing such decisions as beyond the law.”

The appeal division, however, found that although Mr. Latimer was at times unfocussed, he was not unwilling to answer their questions.

“The Appeal Division finds that the Board’s determinations in this regard are unreasonable and unsupported. Your responses at the hearing reveal that you did in fact demonstrate insight and were able to explain why you decided to end the life of your daughter.

The appeal division has applied two conditions to his parole: Mr. Latimer cannot have responsibility for, or make decisions for, any individuals who are severely disabled.

See previous post on Latimer here.

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade