This is our weekly Chatterday! open thread. Use this open thread to talk amongst yourselves: feel free to share a link, have a vent, or spread some joy.
What have you been reading or watching lately (remembering spoiler warnings)? What are you proud of this week? What’s made your teeth itch? What’s going on in your part of the world?
Today’s chatterday backcloth, one weeny turtle on the head of another, comes via The Daily Squee.
“Supporting access to post-secondary education and employment for students
with disabilities”
All Abilities Awareness Week will take place at McMaster University, The Pulse centre, from March 1st to March 5th. The week has been designed to promote active living for people with disabilities, increase awareness in the general campus population of disability issues and provide information regarding disability services and supports on McMaster’s campus and in the community. There will be a focus on the upcoming Winter Paralympic sporting events and the Special Olympics. Paralympic athletes Jessica Tuomela, Darda Sales and Victoria Nolan will speak on Monday, March 1 to open the week. Other activities include an intramural wheelchair challenge and display tables with information on services for persons with disabilities.
For further information on the schedule for the week contact Disability Services at McMaster University: (905) 525-9140, ext. 24339.
http://www.neads.ca/en/about/events/index.php?id=187
There’s been a couple of recent high-profile celebrity suicides. Earlier this month, celebrated fashion designed Alexander McQueen hanged himself in his London home at the age of 40. Then this week, actor Andrew Koenig was found dead from suicide in Vancouver after being missing for several days. These are just the most recent – there’s also David Foster Wallace, Spaulding Gray, Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis, back to Diane Arbus, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath.
Of course, there are a lot of people who commit suicide who don’t make international headlines and don’t get websites doing slideshow retrospectives of their careers and bodies of work. But I don’t always know about those – it’s only the celebrities or the dramatic suicides (burning down a house while inside it to avoid foreclosure, for example) that come to my attention through the media. And every single time it happens, it stops me in my tracks.
These events remind me that the monster of depression can always get you. No matter how creative and inspired you are. No matter how much admiration and respect you earn from the fashion industry, the music industry, the world at large. No matter how privileged and rich you are. No matter how well known your struggles with depression are, no matter how many friends and strangers love and support you, no matter ho many people feel your loss. No matter how many years you’ve spent running from the monster. It can always catch you. It can always kill you. You are never and can never be safe.
I follow the twitters and blogs of a lot of alternative comedy people and the past week has been filled with concern about Koenig’s disappearance and ferverent please for help in finding him and making sure he was ok. This is even more notable from the comedy crowd who tweet only silly and humorous things and have essentially broken character to express their concern and love for Koenig. While I realize I can’t tell whether Koenig had actual love and support in his life just from reading a tweet from Doug Benson, I can see that there was a network of people who were really worried about him and who seem deeply affected by his loss.
If I committed suicide, it wouldn’t make any headlines. I’ve done a lot of work of which I’m very proud, but it wouldn’t be reviewed and featured on the Huffington Post. And certainly a generation of people wouldn’t have vivid memories of where they were when they heard about my death, as exists for Cobain. (I was in a car with my dad on Folsom Ave. in Boulder, C0lorado, driving south, when I heard it announced on the radio.) So the fact that the monster overtook these celebrities makes me feel even more vulnerable to succumbing.
Everything they did, everything they had, it didn’t help them. Couldn’t save them. What chance do I have?
[A version of this post appeared at my personal blog.]
I’m reading The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, by Robert Darnton. I’ve just finished the first chapter, which makes some interesting arguments about folk tales and their use in determining what non-elites/peasants thought about… well, anything in a time period where most of them lived nasty, brutish and short, unrecorded lives.
His argument is basically that one cannot just look at folktales – whether raw, or prettied up for modern audiences, or in translation or whatever – and determine much of anything. Instead, one needs to do two things: First, one needs to look at all the surviving folktales, all the variations, and pick up the themes. Second, one needs to compare those themes to the themes one gets from folktales in other regions. It’s only in the comparison of themes that one can sort anything, and even then it’s feeling around in the dark and hoping you can sort out the elephant from the cake.
ANYWAY, what I find very interesting (as an historian who looks for hints and tips of history of disability) is where people are totally talking about disability while at the same time dismissing it or not even acknowledging it.
It’s problematic, of course, to try and apply our modern notions of disability to the past and call it good. Even the concept of disability didn’t really exist the way it does now until sometime around the industrial revolution, and there are tons of examples of people being described by contemporaries in ways that modern audiences would consider “disabled”, but that’s never anyone’s concern. So, you’ll read in the past people described as taking to their beds for months at a time, having tics and the like, but no one remarks on it as anything other than just how that particular person is.
So, in a more formal review of A Midwife’s Tale, I wrote this:
There are ten references that could be read as an opportunity to discuss mental health in A Midwife’s Tale. Ulrich mentions four people who are considered insane by the people around them – John Howard is described on page 67 as having “sank into hopeless insanity”; Rebecca Foster is “mentis inops” according to a letter outlined on page 127; and both Tabitha and Mary Sewall are described by Ulrich as suffering from “mental illness” or derangement on page 260. Three people commit suicide, including James Purrington. One of Ballard’s patients seems to suffer from post-partum depression, while Ballard herself describes her mental state as one that reads as familiar to many people with depression on page 226.
There are a variety of reasons the author might not have gone into that discussion – the one I think is going on is that the book was published in 1990 and there was even less discussion of disability in history then than there is now – but it did stand out to me.
The Great Cat Massacre does something a bit different though, at least in the first chapter.
In describing what French peasant did when hard times were really hard, Darnton writes:
…life on the road meant ceaseless scavenging for food. The drifters raided chicken coops, milked untended cows, stole laundry drying on hedges, snipped of horses’ tails (good for selling to upholsterers), and lacerated and disguised their bodies in order to pass as invalids wherever alms were being given out. … They became smugglers, highwaymen, pickpockets, prostitutes. And in the end they surrendered in hopitaux, pestilential poor houses, or else crawled under a bush or a hay loft and died…
(pg 26)
Yes, of course Darnton. You describe a life of abject misery and back-breaking labour, so obviously people faked being disabled all the time.
Throughout this first chapter he says things like (in describing a folktale) “…two discharged soldiers draw lots to see which shall have his eyes put out. Desperate for food, they can think of no way to survive except by operating as a team of beggars, the blind man and his keeper” (pg 38), describes Simple Simon as “the harmless village idiot” (pg 40), talks about Rapunzel’s lover being blinded (pg 52), and witches adding additional hunches to hunchbacked beggars just because (pg 53).
And yet, obviously people faked being disabled all the time. Because there was nothing going on that might lead to actual disabilities.
I know, it’s a throw-away comment in a book originally published in 1984 (disability-focused history is more accepted now – we even have an association), but it bugs me. It’s not a unique occurrence, and it’s difficult to know quite how to respond.
For me, of course, the thing it does most is highlight people’s biases. When I previously tried to discuss this in a class, I could not actually get the professor to understand my complaint. “But people do fake disabilities all the time!” was her response, and there are only so many hours in a day one can give towards advocacy work.
But people with disabilities are quite common in the literature, if you actually pay attention to it.
Related:
Disability Social History Project
Disability Studies, Temple U Blog
Greg Carrier on Medieval Disability
Debilitas Mentis
Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.
Mia Mingus at Leaving Evidence: “Intersectionality” is a Big Fancy Word for My Life (Excerpts from MBGLTACC 2010 Keynote Address)
We live in a heterosexist society, we live in an ableist society and we all have a responsibility to actively work against it. We can’t guarantee that things won’t be ableist or won’t be racist (that’s not the world we live in right now); but we CAN guarantee that when there is racism, when there is ableism, that we will do something about it. We will LISTEN to those most impacted; we will listen to people of color, we will listen to disabled folks; we will listen to trans folks; we will listen to the queer disabled people of color—and hear them. […]
So I would say the same thing to the queer able-bodied folks in the audience and the folks who benefit from able-bodied privilege (in many different ways): how are you connecting your fight for queer liberation to challenging able-bodied supremacy? How are you connecting your queerness to your able-bodied privilege? How are you listening to queer disabled folks in your world, supporting them and practicing solidarity? How are you actively noticing how ability, ableism and able-bodied supremacy play out in queer communities, student groups, organizations, and movements?
cripchick: memo on “intersectionality”
“intersectionality” is not simply the meeting place of single issue politics. it is something where pieces of our experiences are so intertwined and so entangled together that they cannot be pulled apart into strands.
the way you treat intersectionality is like asking me to look up in the sky and pinpoint where the clouds begin and end.
megpie: Sometimes Shit Happens
But try explaining this to the average layperson who doesn’t have depression, and they look at me as though I’m even more crazy than I actually am – I can’t just be this depressed without a REASON; it goes against all logical thought. […] So maybe what’s needed is a little less time spent searching for the massive, traumatic REASON for my mental illness, and a bit more time spent on dealing with the reality of its existence.
justira at Dreamwidth: Utah actually considers criminalizing miscarriage, my brain explodes
And then there is the presumption that a family without children is incomplete, not a proper family, so when are going to start a family? You better do it before you’re 30, or 90% of your eggs will shrivel up! And then it’s back to the fertility clinic, but watch out, if you have the gall to delay having children for that long you will probably have some kind of gross disabled kid. Better get a gene scan just to make sure and keep working on those cures! Unless you’re some lazy unemployed slut, in which case you should be sterilized against your will. Feminists / liberals / pro-choicers / whathaveyou don’t get a free pass here, either, not when shit like this and this needs to be said. Not to mention this and this. Not when you use a misogynist slur to describe one of the lived realities of women in childbirth. In short: white, non-disabled upper-class women are to have white, non-disabled children, whether they want them or no, and be goddamn happy about it.
The Washington Post: Shinseki: US will fix broken VA disability system
Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki said he’s making it a top priority this year to tackle the backlog of disability claims that has veterans waiting months – even years – to get financial compensation for their injuries. […]
Shinseki said he’s often asked why, 40 years after the Vietnam war and nearly two decades after the Gulf War, his agency is still trying to resolve issues related to those veterans’ illnesses. […] Shinseki said he’s looking ahead to make sure Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries don’t have similar problems getting financial compensation.
The Telegraph: Travel industry ‘failing to cater for disabled’ [via Rolling Rains Report]
Britain’s leading travel companies are failing to serve the needs of disabled travellers, new research has found. […]
Brian Seaman, head of consultancy at Tourism for All, said the travel industry needs to do more to understand the needs of disabled travellers. “We have conducted independent research in the past by sending disabled travellers to the high street to find a disabled-friendly holiday to Majorca,” he said. “In every case, not one travel agent was able to offer a product that might have resulted in a booking. The agents had great difficulty in finding suitable accommodation and when it came to visiting the accommodation on the island that they were able to find, they turned out not to be as accessible for disabled people as the agents had suggested.”
Went up on the 15th.
asian women blog carnival #5: who i am when i’m (not) with you
One of the big things for me in presenting as an Asian woman is that when I think of my identity, and of my performativity, I don’t think ‘Asian,’ I think ‘Chinese’ and I think ‘Malaysian’ and I think ‘mixed-race’ and I think ‘Caucasian.’ So when I was compiling these amazing posts by these great Asian women, I thought about indicating their ethnicities – just about every one of them mentions their ethnicity in their posts (myself included). But part of performativity is choosing how we represent our identities, and our ethnicities. This edition of the carnival is, after all, about how we choose to present as Asian women. So instead of describing the posts, for the most part, I’ve simply excerpted from them.
We are who we are, but we’re not always how you see us.