Monthly Archives: December 2010

The Largest Minority Round Table Discussion: Glee and Disability in Pop Culture

Last week s.e. smith and several other members of the disability community, including Alice Sheppard (a dancer with AXIS wheelchair dance company), TK Small (a lawyer and disability rights activist), Christine Bruno (who works with the advocacy group Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts), and Maysoon Zayidd (an actor and comedienne with Cerebral Palsy).

came together on the WBAI show The Largest Minority to discuss Glee and depictions of disability in popular culture. This particular episode of the radio show was inspired by s.e.’s post, A Very Glee Christmas.

You can download directly from their site: This is a direct download link to save-as. Alternately, you can play it on the WBAI site by going to their archives and scrolling down to Shared Timeslot Wednesday 10pm to 11pm on Wednesday, December 22, 2010 10:00 pm. Alternately, you can read the transcript.

The actual show itself doesn’t start until 3:52 in to the program slot.

It’s taken me a while to get the transcript of this done, for which I apologize. I did mean to get this up far faster than I did. I also should note that I had some difficulties always identifying who was speaking, and there are points in the program where the show’s audio cuts out terribly and I’m unsure what they’re saying.

Continue reading The Largest Minority Round Table Discussion: Glee and Disability in Pop Culture

For Your Tool-Box: How to get YouTube Captions to make a Transcript

My friend Capriuni passed along to me this awesome YouTube video of “Your Brains” (original song by Jonathon Coulton). In and of itself, that’s not really note worthy – Capriuni is my source for many cool things in YouTube’s Deaf communities. The video itself is subtitled for the ASL-impaired.

That’s where things got interesting, because my friend particle_person passed along to me how to get the captions off a YouTube video so one can make a transcript without duplicating work!

This is awesome to me because, of course, transcripts are necessary even for subtitled or captioned work, for a variety of reasons.

I wanted to pass along particle_person’s instructions, and the video itself because it made me laugh.

Continue reading For Your Tool-Box: How to get YouTube Captions to make a Transcript

Disability Rights Activist Max Starkloff has died

I have just heard on twitter from CripChick that Disability Rights Activist Max Starkloff has died. Please read his obituary at the River Front Times

Among other achievements, the Starkloffs and Paraquad introduced curb cuts and handicapped parking spaces to St. Louis, made St. Louis the first city in the country to have wheelchair lifts on public buses and fought to make more buildings accessible to disabled people. Starkloff co-founded the National Council on Independent Living and lobbied for the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

To understand just how significant all these changes were, take a look at Annie Zaleski’s feature, “You think the Americans with Disabilities Act has leveled the playing field? Try walking in my shoes.” Both Max and Colleen play a prominent role in Zaleski’s story, discussing what it’s like to be disabled in St. Louis, both pre-ADA and today.

Signal Boost: International Network of Women with Disabilities

The International Network of Women with Disabilities (INWWD) is a group of of international, regional, national or local organizations, groups or networks of women with disabilities, as well as individual women with disabilities and our allies. The mission of the INWWD is to enable women with disabilities to share our knowledge and experience, enhance our capacity to speak up for our rights, empower ourselves to bring about positive change and inclusion in our communities and to promote our involvement in relevant politics at all levels, towards creating a more just and fair world that acknowledges disability and gender, justice, and human rights. We are a group for women only. We invite ALL women with disabilities to join us and we will achieve these goals TOGETHER.

INWWD Yahoo! Group

I’m a member of this group. They spent a lot of time this year developing some excellent documents for the UN regarding women with disabilities as victims of violence.

Signal Boost: SUPERFEST International Disability Film Festival Calls for Entries

Via Email

Your Opportunity to Contribute to Disability Culture

SUPERFEST, the world’s longest-running juried international disability film festival, is seeking your entry for submission to our 2011 film competition. SUPERFEST is the primary international showcase for innovative films that portray disability culture and experience in all its diverse, complex, and empowering facets.

This year we have selected a theme for Superfest: CHILDREN & YOUTH.
Work must be about, feature or be appropriate for children or youth (up to age 24).
Continue reading Signal Boost: SUPERFEST International Disability Film Festival Calls for Entries

Guest Post: Embracing Disability, Struggling for Emancipation, Part two: Dissecting Content and Medium

Eliot Renard is a genderqueer, feminist, socialist Chicagoan who enjoys making math and science accessible and fun for students through various online tutoring programs.  Ze also has a health blog, personal blog and tumblr, because compartmentalizing is fun.

This is the second post of a short series; part one, “Rocky Beginnings,” can be read here.

There is a part of growing up that was never really addressed in my family: leaving home and starting your own family.  When I met my spouse in college, I realized that I had no idea how to become a healthy, emancipated adult; I simply had no examples to work from.  When you throw in the fact that my health began to decline shortly after I began to make earnest attempts at emancipation – and stopped backing down every time I received substantial pushback – the process has frankly been excruciating.

I keep many aspects of my personality secret from my family – as a genderqueer atheist Catholic*, I have decided it is just not worth the effort.  I also imagine that the “I thought it was obvious!” defense would be plausible if I were outed, which assuages my guilt a bit.  Unfortunately, it becomes difficult to hide the extent to which your illness is affecting your life when you are sleeping 15-20 hours per day, and have dropped out of grad school.  Hence, the fact that I have not had a conversation that neither devolved into a frustrating, tear-filled shouting match, nor focused largely on the weather.

As discussed in part one of this series, I have addressed the content of my family’s objections to my “life choices” – because getting sick is obviously a life choice – extensively.  Numerous emails, phone conversations and weekends in my hometown have been devoted to explaining exactly what was wrong with each hurtful, disrespectful thing my family says.  These conversations usually end with my mother suggesting that if I can’t hold down a job, I should just move back home.  Yes, screaming at me, denying my illness, and accusing my spouse of abuse are all meant to make me want to be around that behavior 24/7.

Pursuing a suggestion from my therapist, I have tried redirecting the conversations to the core issues at play – emancipation, healthy boundaries, and the fact that I am an adult.  Given that similar discussions took place before this most recent series of health developments, many in regards to the fact that I went to college 200 miles away from home, got married, then moved to a city 500 miles from home, and that my mother has also dealt with issues concerning emancipation and healthy boundaries, I felt that these issues were worth discussing. I recently asked my mother whether she thought she had a right to know every detail about my life.  Her response terrified me in a way few things have: “Well, you’re the one having trouble.”  The thought that if I ever need help, I may have to trade my basic privacy scared me so much that my vision blacked out.  I had never felt the loss of my family’s support as strongly as I did then.

When my attempt to create healthy boundaries is perceived as an abusive spouse separating me from my family, what actions can lead to a happy ending for all involved?  I am afraid that, by insisting on what I perceive to be a normal, adult life, I am causing substantial pain to my family, who interpret these actions to be the results of abuse.  They are afraid of losing me forever to a terrible situation, and cling more tightly.  I am afraid of losing myself forever by staying.  No one is happy here.  No one is benefiting from this pain.

I don’t know what to do if this continues; I am worried about the effect that being in hopeless situations has on my suicidal and self-harm ideation, especially given that this very situation has triggered both.  I have no control over anyone’s actions but my own, but the idea of distancing myself from my very tight-knit family is disheartening.  Also unfortunate is the fact that if I don’t talk to my grandmother, Uncles A, B and C won’t talk to me, and Uncles D and E will spend any conversation time pressuring me to reinstate contact.  I would also lose absolutely all contact with my brother, niece and nephew.  Sadly, I know that if I chose to play family politics here, I would “win”.  It just isn’t worth the slimy feeling afterwards.

I am working to build a support network outside of my mother’s family.  I have a few very close friends from college and my neighborhood who have helped me tremendously.  I was only at my graduate school for a few months, and was so consistently physically excluded from events that I gave up on forming connections there.  The group of people that has consistently come through on helping me with whatever I needed is spread all over the world, and many of us have never met face-to-face; my friends from various online communities – activist groups, fandoms, friends-of-friends – have saved my life.  Days when I cannot get on the computer (which lives on my bed, along with all of my medications and enough food to last a few days) are rare, and the communities there are amazing – and not always in the inspiring way.  It is in this very community that I came to accept my right to feel angry and defeated at times.  I don’t have to be a “super-cripple,” and that realization is what keeps me going through the bad days.  I am hoping that this ability and time will lead to a healthy resolution with my family.  If not, I already belong to a strong community here.

*Trust me, it works.  You just have to stretch your definition of “cafeteria Catholicism” a tiny bit further…

Recommended Reading for 24 December, 2010

Gentle reader, be cautioned: comments sections on mainstream media sites tend to not be safe and we here at FWD/Forward don’t necessarily endorse all the opinions in these pieces. Let’s jump right in, shall we?

The Broken of Britain: The GP’s Story by Dr Jest

So there you have it. Neither Pete nor Dud would have chosen to be where they are now, and neither has asked not to work when they were capable. Indeed both have rather struggled on when reason would have suggested they ought not. And I could name you a dozen others in a similar position. All present talk of making it more profitable to work than rely on benefit may sound very noble and high minded in the marbled halls of power, where hard graft means having a lot to read and a few late meetings to go to. It completely misses the enormous efforts made by the likes of Pete and Dud to keep going against the odds, and any move to impoverish them is little short of scandalous and should be relentlessly pointed out for the evil narrow minded bigotry it is.

Sarah at Cat in a Dog’s World: PWD and TSA

From information I’d heard from TSA administrators, I thought that the body scanners would reducethe need for physical pat-downs. Little did I know that TSA would use the new technology as an excuse to conduct more invasive pat-downs! It is obscene, especially when one considers that many people with disabilities don’t have any “choice” at all. If someone is unable to stand independently for ten seconds with their arms up, or if one wears any number of medical devices or prostheses…there is no “choice.” (And no, for many people, “don’t fly” is not a realistic choice.) There is, additionally, reason for concern about the radiation from the body scanners, particularly for cancer survivors and people who have a genetic predisposition to cancer. It is now pretty clear that body scanners, far from being a panacea, are making things worse. And people with disabilities are being affected disproportionately.

At Spilt Milk: Thanks for your help, doctor.

Make no mistake: I know that this only happened to me because I am fat. If I were a thin person and I walked through his door with the symptoms I described, he would have been forced to dig deeper. To ask me more questions, to hopefully come up with a wider range of options. Maybe run more tests.

United States: Megan Cottrell at ChicagoNow: Got a disability? You’ll see the difference in your paycheck

A lot of people might assume that if you have a disability, you might not make as much money as someone without a disability. But how much less? How hard is it for people with disabilities in Illinois to get by compared to their neighbors?

India: An unnamed special correspondent at The Hindu: Social barriers keep the disabled away from workforce:

Persons with disabilities are the last identity group to enter the workforce, not because their disability comes in the way of their functioning, but because of social and practical barriers that prevent them from joining work, a study on the ‘Employment Rights of Disabled Women in India’ carried out by the Society for Disability and Rehabilitation of the National Commission for Women (NCW) has said.

Guillermo Contreras at Chron.com: State sued over care for disabled Texans

The federal lawsuit, filed Monday in San Antonio, alleges the state isn’t providing some mentally and physically disabled Texans the opportunity to move into community-based settings, which advocates say are less restrictive and more rehabilitative than nursing homes.

Lastly, here’s a transcript of a story on Australia’s 7.30 Report program called Setting Sail:

Known as the ‘Everest of sailing’ the Sydney to Hobart race challenges the most seasoned of yachtsmen on what can be a treacherous ocean voyage.

Most of the focus is on the big maxi-yachts competing for line honours. But a unique crew of blind and deaf sailors is also commanding attention.

The charity organisation, Sailors With Disabilities, has been gifted a half-million dollar fast yacht, making them eligible for the first time in the prestigious Rolex Cup.

Send your links to recreading[@]disabledfeminists[.]com. Let us know if/how you want to be credited. And have yourself a fabulous weekend.