Monthly Archives: December 2009

Question Time: Spoon-saving Wee Web Widgets

accessibility

I’m probably the last person on the block to find out there’s a better way to delete hundreds of old comment subscriptions in livejournal. I’ve been going to the Subscription Tracking page and deleting each one by hand – which then forces a reload of the page, sending Firefox to using 100% of one of my CPUs, and generally taking a whole lot of time, spoons, and aggravation.

Searching around, I now find that Afuna has a Greasemonkey script, Delete Multiple Subscriptions, that at least makes the job easier. You click on the little trashcan, it highlights with a red box, then when you’re done selecting the outdated subscriptions you click “Delete” at the bottom. Hoorah!

Now, if anyone finds a way to mass delete the oldest x00 subscriptions, or all those older than x0 days, please, please, please let me know.

I’ve also only just discovered YousableTubeFix, which makes my Youtube use much easier. YousableTubeFix allows you to customise a whole lot of interface stuff on Youtube:

Removes ads and unwanted sections (configurable), allows downloading and resizing videos, displays all comments on video page, expands the description, can prevent autoplay and autodownload, adds a HD (High Definition) select, etc…

I’ve been attached to Remove It Permanently forever, though it seems rather flaky these days and probably needs updating. It gives a different set of functions from Adblock. I see there’s a Yet Another Remove It Permanently, but I haven’t tried it yet.

There’s another one I use all the time, for websites with colour schemes I find unreadable (white on black, grey on black, pale grey on white, light green on medium green…): Black And White, a little bookmarklet, shift most pages to plain black text on a white background.

These particular scripts and extensions may not be accessible to all users – so I’d love to hear your tips and experiences.

What other wee web widgets make your life easier? Spill! Shar

Recommended Reading for December 16

recommended reading

* Boston.com The Big Picture’s 2009 in Photos [click through for much larger image]:

wheelchair on the beach

caption: An empty wheelchair belonging to quadriplegic Patrick Ivison, 15, sits idle on the beach while Ivison, his mother, and friends prepare for another surf ride at the Cardiff State Beach in San Diego, California on October 6th, 2009. The photo has the focus on the empty chair at the edge of the beach, with people in the waves, some standing, one on a board. The people are out of focus so you can’t see anyone distinctly. There is scattered seaweed in the wet sand.

* very filled with dreams: “yeah so this got too long for a quote post”

[…] i guess i am saying that there’s a limit to how actually subversive a blonde skinny white pop star can be. that isn’t a reflection on gaga (or any other blonde skinny white pop star) herself at all – it’s a reflection on a culture that marks some bodies as acceptable and some bodies as inescapably transgressive. for gaga, the grotesque is a costume, an act.

* ABC News: Minister grilled over disability accommodation

ACT Disability Minister Joy Burch has been grilled over the treatment of disabled people who are stuck in hospital while the department tries to provide supported accommodation.

The ACT Liberals have used an Assembly committee hearing to highlight the case of one woman who has been in a Canberra Hospital bed for nearly three years.

* Ireland On-Line: Cowen rejects call for reversal of budget cuts on carers

The Taoiseach Brian Cowen has rejected opposition calls for the budget cuts on the blind, the disabled and carers to be reversed.

Mr Cowen said the Government has to create a sustainable social welfare system next year.

Recommended Reading for December 15

recommended reading

Happy Bodies: Dementors [note: some of the videos at link are not transcribed]

Can we please stop talking about non-neuro-typical people as though there is something wrong with them? They may be different, but they are not deficient and attitudes like those expressed in the Autism Speaks video just serve to promote the idea that people with ASD are somehow lesser than neuro-typical people.

Inky Ed: what happened?

He couldn’t have been more than three years old. I watched him as he discreetly looked out of the corner of his eye, checking, peeking, stealing another glance.

He sidled up to Mac, this time for a closer look, him standing, Mac sitting – they were almost nose to nose. A perplexed look formed on his face, something was clearly amiss, he needed to know…

“What happened?” he asked me with wide eyes and hands upturned.

Feminists with Female Sexual Dysfunction: The ugly things people say about FSD

Sometimes there will be something of value to take away from the comments section, especially if an article is intended to be supportive. Someone with personal experience in the matter at hand may point out flaws in an author’s language, or offer resources to more information on the topic at hand. Other times, comments are less than helpful. The comments that stand out the most though, are often the worst, most hurful ones. They are the unavoidable, spotted-too-late Ice Bergs (“Right ahead!”) floating among a sea of free speech.

Gregor Wolbring in M/C Journal: A Culture of Neglect: Climate Discourse and Disabled People

Although climate change will disproportionately impact disabled people, despite the less than stellar record of disaster adaptation and mitigation efforts towards disabled people, and despite the fact that other social groups (such as women, children, ‘the poor’, indigenous people, farmers and displaced people) are mentioned in climate-related reports such as the IPCC reports and the Human Development Report 2007/2008, the same reports do not mention disabled people. Even worse, the majority of the material generated by, and physically set up for, discourses on climate, is inaccessible for many disabled people (Australian Human Rights Commission). […]

Ableism and disablism notions experienced by disabled people can now be extended to include those challenges expected to arise from the need to adapt to climate change. It is reasonable to expect that ableism will prevail, expecting people to cope with certain forms of climate change, and that disablism will be extended, with the ones less affected being unwilling to accommodate the ones more affected beyond a certain point. This ableism/disablism will not only play itself out between high and low income countries, as Desmond Tutu described, but also within high income countries, as not every need will be accommodated.

CNET: Web accessibility no longer an afterthought

Web accessibility has come a long way in the decade since many of these proposals were first floated. It’s still a challenge, however, for the Web community to remember that as it pushes forward with exciting new technologies like HTML5 that could reinvent the Internet experience, it must keep in mind the needs of those who can’t type 60 words per minute, operate a mouse like a scalpel, or see the unobtrusive pop-up windows that point to the next destination on the page.

“As the Web gets more and more dynamic, the accessibility requirements get more and more interesting, and sometimes challenging, to implement,” Brewer said.

ABC: Taxis refusing to pick up disabled people

Disability advocate Lynn Strathie says at a recent forum in Darwin the main complaint was about transport services. She says taxis in Darwin are unreliable, inconsistent and have refused to serve the blind and others with an impairment.

“At that forum we had a person who is totally blind and has an aid dog who continually was refused taxis,” she said.

The executive officer of the Territory’s Taxi Council, Colin Newman, says it is true that some drivers have refused to serve the disabled. “The service is getting better but it is not perfect,” he said.

Why ‘What People Think’ Matters

introspective, life changes, military, shaming, social attitudes, ,

Permanent Limited Duty is an option that a service member has to being fully medically discharged.  It allows the member to stay active duty on a strict schedule and with very strict limitations of duty.  It allows them to fulfill their contract obligation as opposed to being released from it early.  There are specific criteria that must be fulfilled, including proving a need to be allowed to placed on PERMLIMDU Status.  For me, things like having a minor child who needed insurance and being unmarried and without another source of income would have been sufficient for me to prove a need for PERMLIMDU.  There are other factors involved, including approval from your CO and CoC.

In the year leading up to my Medical Board and subsequent discharge I was in so much pain and so tired all the damn time and overall not coping well with what was going on with my lack of medical care.  On top of all of my work and training and single motherhood was Physical Training (PT), which was increasing because as my body was struggling my readiness standards were falling due to my inability to push through the pain.  As I was forced to ease up I gained a little weight which meant I had to increase my PT.  Increased PT increased my pain, which increased my problems overall, and somewhere along the line something broke completely inside me.  It was a vicious circle of some of the most cruel means of my life.  I needed more PT, but increasing PT caused  more injury that meant I had to decrease the type, intensity and amount of PT my doctors would let me do.  That decrease caused weight gain…you can see where this is going…

Long story short, I had to be put on a day shift and have my hours reduced to half days because I was not doing so well.  While the rest of my friends and peers were moving on to the things that we had now spent over three years training for, things that were going to expand their careers, the actual finish line of all we had worked for, and I was riding a desk.  To be fair, it was a job I really grew to love and something I could see myself doing again.  My direct supervisor was awesome, and our division boss was incredible.  To date he is the most wonderful Senior Enlisted person I have ever had the honor of working for who also happened to be very supportive of my medical process.  But it wasn’t what I had trained for, and the sudden disappearance of all of my friends made that even more heavy for me.  I was devastated that I was missing that.  I felt, once again, like a failure, like my body was a failure.  The career I had worked for was crashing down around me and it seemed I had no one to support me through it.

When you are going through a serious medical Thing (for lack of a better…whatever) you start to notice that people tend to disappear.  I don’t know if it is too hard for them to handle or if they don’t give a fuck or what…but you run out of people who you can call to take you to a doctor’s appointment because whatever medication you are on makes you so dizzy you really shouldn’t drive, or people who you can call to watch your children while you go to physio.  You can’t get someone to hold your hand during an X-ray, let alone get them out for coffee.  While I adamantly maintain that my medical problems and disability were not brought on by depression as some would have you believe, being utterly alone during this time cause me an at the time crushing depression.  Sometimes I still feel it. I literally did not hear from my former friends.  Sometimes if you run into people you used to have energy to club or shop with they bring it up as a polite thing to say, kind of like when people say “How ya doin’?” and never really expect you to answer.  So when they would say “How’s…all your…stuff?” I would tell them, “Oh, it’s a big boring mess, how’re you doing?”.  If I actually did talk about it I would notice that they tended to not really want to talk to me again (even though most of them had to eventually because of my new job).

I still had to take my yearly training.  During my yearly training our annual Evaluations came out.  I was pleasantly surprised to receive a relatively high mark on mine.  My boss apparently thought that I was doing a lot in the hours I was allowed to be there during the day.  I worked as hard as I could with what I had to give, and someone noticed.  I was beginning to feel as though maybe I could still do something productive in the Navy, as if the thoughts of PERMLIMDU Status wouldn’t be the end of the World as I knew it.  I began to seriously consider it.  I was in my annual training with the sister of a friend whom I still had occasional contact with, and who was unhappy with her own eval.  As much as I sympathized with her situation, I understood that due to my circumstances our peer groups were different, and my evaluation was not competitive with hers.  I made it a point to not discuss my eval with her or even bring it up.  But when she asked me point blank about mine, my refusal to answer made her assume that mine was better, and this caused a riff between us that I had hoped to avoid. I felt awful, because she was a really great person whom I had actually though I had made friends with. It is such a tricky thing to make new friends when you are going through so much…

It was very difficult.  Nothing I could say was good enough.  It wasn’t fair, she said.  It was wrong, she said.  I was on the same fitness enhancement, she said, and I didn’t even work shift work, she said.  I only got that mark because I sucked up to my boss, she said, and because I “lucked” into a job above my pay grade, she said.  All she could see were the positive outcomes of what was, for me, a really shitty situation.  The one good thing I had going for me was that someone had need of a body to fill a position when my world fell apart, and that it could have been a semi-permanent thing.

That night I received a phone call from my friend, inviting me to meet her for coffee…something that we hadn’t done in I don’t know how long.  She certainly hadn’t had time for socializing in a long time, it seemed, and I was pleasantly surprised.  We met at the Starbucks near my house, another nicety, so I didn’t have to go far.  She treated and we split a big chocolate brownie, because we shared that superhuman tolerance I brag about.  We had polite chit chat and I really felt great getting to talk to her.

Until she brought up my eval.

She brought me there to defend her sister’s side of the whole thing — to tell me that she didn’t think it was fair that I would try to stay on in an office where I could get unfair evals when the rest of my peers were doing real jobs in the Navy.  I was so ashamed that I didn’t even think to argue on my own behalf.  To tell her that it would have been the best thing for me to do so.  That it would mean that I could still give my Kid insurance and have an income and finish my obligation.  That I would still have some connection to all the work I had put in.  But again, all anyone could see was how my situation was unfair to them (even though, in reality, it wasn’t, since my evaluations had no effect whatsoever, on theirs, in case I haven’t made that clear). No one else could see beyond how they felt, to what it meant for me and my family, to me and all the work I had done. Instead of a legacy of nothing finished, I could give something back. So, I lied. I said that I didn’t have that intention — I said I intended to quit and just go away.

But now I was just ashamed.

I was so embarrassed.  I put on my Brave Face and finished up the visit as well as I could.  I cried the whole way home.  I remember deciding that night that if I chose PERMLIMDU that people would all think that I was some big lazy slacker.  A Bad Cripple, even though some people would never see me as disabled at all, and why should they? I hadn’t even considered that label for myself yet. They would all see me as someone who was there to milk some system and gain some unearned privilege.  I had let someone who was supposed to be my friend shame me into giving up things that I needed for my life. So, when the choice came up with the Medical Board Liason and my Division Officer, I turned it down. Again, I lied. I said that it wasn’t something I thought I could do. It wasn’t what I joined the Navy to do, I said.

It is easy to say “who cares what people think” because we all want to assume that we don’t make decisions based on the feelings of others. But the guilt and shame we feel at the stares and hands of other people is hard to take, so much so that we will often expend our spoons to make the feelings go away — even if it is not to our own benefit.

One thing I should add: Through it all, I learned the value of the friends who come out of seemingly nowhere to support you, just when you least expect it, and the value of friends in Bloglandia. Never let anyone tell you that your blog world friends aren’t as good as Meat World friends. They are all appreciated, especially as the wounds of the lost friends heal. The Meat World friends who held on might be few and far between, but they have been a much needed comfort through the many tears.

It’s a scooter, not a Mack truck

accessibility, social attitudes

Something I’ve noticed a lot since starting to drive a scooter is how TERRIFIED people are.

Really.

On the sidewalks, I zoom along at six kilometres an hour if I’m unaccompanied and there’s no one around. That feels really zoomy to me, having not locomoted that fast bipedally for quite some time.

But when I’m in a place with people around, or in a shopping centre, I dial the speed right down to minimum. This is actually a fairly slow walking pace.

Yet every single time, people look frightened, and leap out of my way – when they’re not deliberately ignoring me and completely blocking the way while I wait or request passage.

Partners grab their partners to pull them aside, with alarmed looks on their faces, as if tackling them out of the path of a speeding bus in a spectacular Hollywood scene. Parents grab their toddlers and whisk them into arms, glaring at me as if I was charging the kid brandishing a sword and ululating. People in groups jolt visibly when and if they decide to finally acknowledge my existence, and make a giant production, involving a lot of discussion and back and forth and extendings-of-arms, of shuffling each other around to make space for me to get by. People blocking aisles with their angled trolleys ignore me for as long as possible, then make a big deal of moving the trolley, as if they’re compassionate solicitous generous souls who are doing me a giant favour.

People. PEOPLE. It isn’t a drama. It isn’t a big deal. It’s just a scooter with wheels. I’m quite obviously riding slowly and carefully – slower than you’re walking, most of the time. I can see your toddler, your husband, your friend, with these here eyes in my head, and much as I occasionally joke about scooter-mounted flamethrowers, I’m not actually planning to mow them down in cold blood. I don’t take up five metres of side-to-side space; you don’t need to flatten yourself against the wall as if you’re in a commando movie; you need only make enough space for me to get where I’m going.

Just treat me as you would any other human.

Recommended Reading for December 14

recommended reading

Wheelie Catholic: Imagine no one has to imagine

One of the other questions I’ve been asked is “What’s it like to be a quadriplegic?” usually followed by “I can’t imagine!”

My answer to that is no, you probably can’t imagine, although you may try , with the misguided help of maudlin movies about disability, on the one hand, or inspirational tales of people climbing mountains, on the other. You’ll read stories about quads who want to die and stories about quads who help others find better ways to live. You may tap into societal myths and assumptions about disability, through no fault of your own because we are surrounded by them. You may base your ideas on the few disabled people you’ve met and generalize from there how it is to live with a disability. And, sadly, you may avoid being around disabled people because you are so worried that you’ll say or do the wrong thing as you try to imagine what it’s like for them.

To all that I say – please, don’t imagine what it’s like.

LaToya Peterson at Racialicious: Why is it so important to have productive conversations on race?

Conversations about race are not amusing at all when the people who you are discussing the issue with make it clear that (1) they have not thought about the issue much, (2) they don’t care to think about the issue much, but (3) they are determined to talk about the issue anyway. And, as some of you may know, I was recently confronted with this situation over at Jezebel. […]

Writing about race in mainstream spaces can often be frustrating and it can often be rewarding, just as many of you know from doing the same thing in your daily personal interactions. And while we are all encouraged when we have a breakthrough by talking to others and expanding upon or ideas, it is also important to remember that this must be done in a sustainable way. I have seen too many people with amazing ideas and wonderful perspectives become burnt out and disengaged because they felt they could reach everyone, every time, at every occasion. But as these structures were not built in a day, and not upheld by one person, the process to dismantling them will also be a long, hard road.

A Femanist View: Heads-up for Feb.

On the Paul O’Grady show today, professional dancer Brian Fortuna from the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing (the US version is called Dancing with the Stars) announced a new show called Dancing on Wheels.

Knowledge Ecology International : Writers Open Letter in Support of WIPO treaty for People who are Blind or have other Disabilities [via BoingBoing]

The undersigned, writers and journalists, are writing to ask you to support the World Blind Union proposal and initiate discussions at the World Intellectual Property Organization on a treaty to improve access to works, articles, blog posts, subtitled films, etc in formats accessible to people who are blind, visually impaired or have other disabilities that impair access.

New York Times: Poor Children Likelier to Get Antipsychotics

Some experts say they are stunned by the disparity in prescribing patterns. But others say it reinforces previous indications, and their own experience, that children with diagnoses of mental or emotional problems in low-income families are more likely to be given drugs than receive family counseling or psychotherapy.

Part of the reason is insurance reimbursements, as Medicaid often pays much less for counseling and therapy than private insurers do.

Nashville Scene: Even after a sex-abuse scandal, NHC Bristol nursing home employees still don’t know how to handle abuse allegations

Last August, after a staffer was charged with molesting elderly patients—some of whom were too ill or frail to plead for help—at a Bristol, Va., nursing home run by Murfreesboro-based National Healthcare Corp., whistleblowers hoped that the ensuing attention would create an inhospitable climate for serial predators.

Instead, an October survey of the nursing home’s staff obtained by the Scene—prompted in part by a sexual-abuse complaint lodged in September—found that most of its employees don’t even know they are required by law to report abuse allegations to the state. […]

NHC Bristol may serve as an extreme example of just how bad a nursing home can be. The allegation of sexual abuse wasn’t the only complaint that prompted the survey in October. According to Brenda Bagley, supervisor of the complaint unit for the Office of Licensure and Certification at the Virginia Department of Health, the nursing home had been reported for a “general lack of care.”

Inertia

introspective, , , , , , , ,

Asking for help is something I have never been good at. It’s rather like standing in front of a car hurdling toward you, intending to push it in the opposite direction. It requires an enormous amount of resistance. And I’m almost certain to come away with some sort of injury.

Lying in bed the other night, I had a realization. I seem to have two modes of being: at rest, sitting or leaning or lying in one place, unmoving, still; or in motion, pushing, moving, rushing, doing, working, over-working. And it is very, very difficult for me to move from one state to another. It is not as easy as just get up and go or sit down and stop. It would be expected, with my disabilities, that I would have trouble getting up from a state of rest to start doing, but wouldn’t you think it would be easy to just stop myself from doing and rest?

But it’s not. I find it very, very difficult to stop moving, working, doing when I am already doing it. Very difficult. In fact, I actually have to work at stopping working. It’s like once the do switch is on in my brain, turning it off is about as easy as pushing that hurdling car. I get to a point where I don’t even notice that I am doing; my consciousness turns off and I am pushing forward on autopilot, working from habit, memorized routines, just going and going — and my awareness has been switched off, perhaps as a way to avoid feeling the pain?, but that means I don’t know when it’s time to stop. I don’t know when I’ve reached the critical point, when I’ve done too much, when I cannot do any more — often, I don’t know until my body just stops doing and I am confused inside it, trying to make it move and being denied, and it takes time for my consciousness to boot back up, to kick on and make me realize oh — I need to stop.

It has come to a point where I’ve learned that I need to stop before it feels like I need to stop, because my body and brain simply do not have the ability to sound the alarm for me. Even when my body can’t keep going anymore, no matter how much I push it, it still doesn’t feel like I can’t keep going anymore.

So I’ve been teaching myself, over the years, to force an override at a certain point — not based on what I’m feeling at the moment, but based on predetermined amounts of time/work that I believe is what I can handle on the balance. It’s hard, because I’m so stuck in that inertia of doing that I often don’t even remember to keep track of the amount of time/work that has passed, so I might forget for some time after I’ve reached that point, and then try to abort belatedly.

Either way, even when I’m “being good” and recognizing when that predetermined point has come, the act of overriding my natural inertia — my natural tendency to keep moving — is not as easy as flipping a switch. I actually have to go through a process of convincing myself that yes, it is time to stop, and yes, I really should stop, no, I should not keep going, and yes, it is okay to stop, really, it’s okay, and yes, I need it — and so on (and on, and on, and on). And then even if I am convinced, I have to try to push in the opposite direction of my body pushing to go and do. And pushing your body to stop pushing is about as technically-impossible as it sounds.

Now, convincing myself just that I should stop doing is a difficult enough thing to do. But add in a sense of pride… and a sense of guilt… and suddenly convincing myself that I should do (or stop doing) something doesn’t seem like such a hard thing in comparison.

***

I am one of two clerks working on our program at my office. Last week, for three days, my partner clerk was not there — it was just me running the show. And I happen to think that I am knowledgeable and capable enough to do a pretty good job of it. The problem is that we are severely short-staffed — the two of us in our corner of the building are already balancing a workload that should require four or five clerks. So when one of the two is gone, well, things move from chaos to crisis, so to speak.

I have an amazing supervisor. I absolutely adore her. And she was keeping an eye out for me. She kept coming back and asking if there was anything she could help with.

And for that first day, I kept saying no. And I thought it was legitimate! One of the main assignments is something she is not supposed to do at all, and another couple are things that I just thought would be more complicated to have someone else do than to do myself. So I said no.

And then my husband poked a little bit of fun at me — he works at the same office — saying that my supervisor had been talking with him (casually) and mentioned that she kept trying to offer help, and I kept refusing. And they shared a laugh, and he said yeah, that sounds like her. She’s not very good about asking for help when she needs it.

And I needed it. I just couldn’t convince myself inside that I needed it, that it would help, that it would be OK to ask, and so forth. I was already so overwhelmed and using so much energy, and I watched that car hurtling toward me and knew I did not have the strength required to push it the other way. Not on top of everything else I was doing. I did not have the capacity to make myself ask.

Because I’m not supposed to ask for help. That means admitting I can’t do my job. It means admitting my disability does make me less capable than other people. It means admitting my disability does exist and does affect me. And I’m not supposed to ask for help, because other people can’t spend their time and energy doing something for my sake. It’s not fair to them. I don’t deserve that, to have anyone other than me devote a single second to me. Other people would deserve that, but I am not deserving. If I ask for help, I am telling that person “I am worthless. Useless. I can’t do anything right.”

Asking for help means sending the message to the people around me that I am actually not as good a worker (as good a person) as I keep insisting to them that I am. That actually, I am inept and incapable. That I can’t do anything right, that I do mess things up.

Asking for help is asking for special treatment. Asking for help is asking other people to pretend like I deserve the same consideration as everyone else, and deserve to be considered just as capable as everyone else, while also demanding that they treat me differently, do special things for me that no one else gets to have done. Everyone else has to stand on their own, and here I am demanding that all these people prop me up and say that it’s just the same as that person over there standing on their own.

Every single time I need help, I have to fight these thoughts. Even if I don’t actually think them consciously. Every single time I need help I have to take time and energy to refute all of these thoughts to myself. I have to take time and energy to prove all those thoughts wrong. And that takes quite a lot of energy.

So I don’t ask. Even when I need it. Even when I know I need it. And even when I know, intellectually, consciously, that it is OK to ask for help, and that I should ask for help. I still don’t ask.

Because by the time I’m needing help, I’m already at my limits. I certainly don’t have any energy left to deal with that hurtling car.

(Cross-posted at three rivers fog.)

http://amandaw.tumblr.com/post/273729603/snow-is-predicted-for-the-valley-floor-here-in

Quotation: Why We Do Disability History

anna history rants, history, Quotations,

[I promise that I am so close to being done all this reading that there will soon be less quotation-posts, but I keep finding all these lovely words, and I’m very fond of them.]

Reminders of the immediate relevance of history to contemporary issues of disability confront us daily. In but the latest example, as we write these words [in 2001], the United States Supreme Court has accepted appeals from several states which claim that Congress exceeded its constitutional authority in imposing the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] on the states. Congress lacked evidence to prove that state governments had engaged in a historical pattern of discrimination against persons with disabilities, this argument claims in part; without evidence of state discrimination, the general government overran its jurisdiction. The essays gathered here indicate that evidence of discrimination against disabled people reaches well beyond our living recollection. Until we can document the past with the evidence and rigor that solid historical research necessitates, the absence of disability from our written history, its suppression in our formal collective memory, jeopardizes the current quest of Americans with disabilities for full citizenship. This history matters, and not in the abstract.

– Paul K. Longmore & Lauri Umansky, The New Disability History: American Perspectives, pg 14. Sadly, there is no limited preview of this book on Google Books, but Why I Burned By Book and other essays on disability, by Longmore, does have limited preview, and I love that book to pieces, especially the last essay.

Obviously I have quoted this for truth because I’m an historian and I’m often questioned on why I consider the history I do to be both political and activist in nature. And, this is (in part) why.

Quotation: “Disability & Sentimentality”

Quotations

When the disabled body and the handicapped self are inscribed as deficient and dependent, disabled people are aligned with other social groups perceived as needing supervision, assistance, and guardianship. The idea of autonomy and independence, central to most psychological definitions of healthy adult selfhood, is premised on the presumption of physical independence, of a self that embodied its own freedom in its very movements. In the absence of such bodily autonomy there is little basis for assuming any other forms of autonomy; hence disabled people who have limited independence of movement are also often subject to limited independence of decision-making and self-governance. Disability rights activists point to several important areas where the ideas of bodily-based autonomy have infringed on the basic civil rights of disabled people, including the right to make one’s own decisions about sexuality and reproduction, the right to equal access to education and employment, and the right to vote.

– Mary Klages, Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America, 1999, pg 3.

Limited Preview of Woeful Afflictions is available on Google Books.