All posts by abby jean

Why I Am Not a Libertarian

class issues, disability activism, justice, news, policy, politics, poverty, race, reproductive justice,

Here in the U.S., there’s been a lot of buzz about Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul, winning the primary for Republican senator in Kentucky. Paul is a darling of the Tea Party and largely espouses libertarian values of decreased taxes and decreased government regulation and intervention.

There are some things about libertarianism that I like and agree with. I’m against state interference in romantic and/or sexual relationships between consenting individuals with full capacity. I’m in favor of strong civil liberties and freedom from search or surveillance by the state.

But I do not trust the free market to take care of civil rights issues, primarily because I’ve seen the free market fail to take care of civil rights issues for hundreds and really thousands of years. And I believe that getting the government out of the business of defining and enforcing civil rights would have disastrous results for all but the most privileged among us. And Rand Paul’s espoused views bear that out. Here’s what he’s got to say about LGBTAI rights and women’s health:

Not only is Paul perfectly fine with government prohibiting marriage between gays and lesbians, it bears mentioning that Paul’s anger towards the government for “betraying the medical privacy of ordinary citizens” doesn’t extend to women, whom he believes should be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term if state legislators deem it so. He also wants to offer legislation “restricting federal courts from hearing cases like Roe v. Wade.”

This isn’t even a consistent position – Paul is in favor of government intervention in personal relationships, as long as it’s “only” LGBTAI relationships. He’s also in favor of government intervention in personal medical decisions, as long as it’s “only” affecting the decisions of women considering whether to terminate a pregnancy. What he has to say about protections for people with disabilities is even more troubling:

You know a lot of things on employment ought to be done locally. You know, people finding out right or wrong locally. You know, some of the things, for example we can come up with common sense solutions — like for example if you have a three story building and you have someone apply for a job, you get them a job on the first floor if they’re in a wheelchair as supposed to making the person who owns the business put an elevator in, you know what I mean? So things like that aren’t fair to the business owner.

Yes! Let’s let the free market take care of rights for people with disabilities! Because it’s for damn sure that even with the existing governmental protections for civil rights, companies are taking an unbiased and totally not ableist at all approach to employing PWDs and even accommodating them as customers! So eliminating those marginally adequate and woefully underenforced protections would surely have the effect of enhancing overall liberty and freedom! That is, if you are looking only at the liberty and freedom of the already privileged.

There has been a lot of discussion on this site of how entrenched institutional ableism results in discrimination against PWDs, makes them more likely to live in poverty, lack employment, and have disproportionately negative health outcomes. That’s the status quo that would be preserved if government intervention and regulation of the rights of PWDs were to end. But there are definitely people who are benefiting from the status quo – white, cis, hetero, TAB men, predominantly. And we should be very clear that limiting government intervention would primarily preserve the status quo that benefits them.

Which is why you should not be surprised by two facts: 1) Rand Paul is a white cis hetero TAB man, and 2) I strongly disagree with these political ideas. While there are some areas in which I support limiting government intervention, my overall goal is to maximize rights of historically disadvantaged and relatively unprivileged populations, whether it takes more or less government to reach that end.

Recommended Reading for May 13, 2010

activism, autonomy, global, intersectionality, justice, news, policy, politics, recommended reading
Jacquelyn Palmer-Boyce lies on her back, wearing a yellow t-shirt and jacket and a yellow bandana on her head, surrounded by dandelions for MCS Awareness Month. ©2010 John Boyce

Photo via The Canary Report, who writes: “Heralding MCS Awareness Month, profile photos radiating the warmth and vibrancy of yellow are popping up throughout our community on Facebook and on our network. Yellow, for those of us with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, symbolizes the canary in the coal mine, with which we all identify. Our identity as a canary embraces and honors our bodies’ wisdom, and uses our song to alert the world of the menacing dangers of toxic consumer goods and a polluted planet.”

Alexandra Lammers and Eric Hoyle, she in a wedding dress with a festively decorated cane and he in a morning suit exit the church after their wedding.
Alexandra Lammers and Eric Hoyle, she in a wedding dress with a festively decorated cane and he in a morning suit exit the church after their wedding.

Photo from The New York Times Vows article about Lammers’ and Hoyle’s wedding. While Lammers was using a cane due to an injury, rather than a disability, it was still nice to see a mobility aid in the New York Times like this.

Disability Scoop – Disability Advocates Reserving Judgment on High Court Nominee

Disability advocates were hesitant to say much about [nominee to the United States Supreme Court Elena] Kagan. Without a judicial record, they said little is known on her positions regarding disability rights law. “I think her hearings are going to be important,” Louis Bossing, senior staff attorney at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, said of Kagan’s upcoming Senate confirmation process. “We’re going to spend time working with the judiciary committee so the senators can ask questions we’ll need to know whether to support or oppose her nomination.”

The New York Times – When Treating One Worker’s Allergy Sets Off Another’s

On the first day Ms. Kysel took Penny, [her allergy-detection service dog] to work, one of her co-workers suffered an asthma attack because she is allergic to dogs. That afternoon Ms. Kysel was stunned when her boss told her that she could no longer take the dog to work, or if she felt she could not report to work without Penny, she could go on indefinite unpaid leave. She was ineligible for unemployment compensation because of the limbo she was put in.

Ghana News Agency – Women with disabilities demand respect from society

Women with disabilities in the Upper East Region has called on society not to see them as liabilities but help empower them so they could take care of themselves. They complained that many people regarded them as a curse to their families and did not want to associate with them especially in issues of marriage. They explained that when they receive marriage proposals the potential groom’s family would usually argue that the disabled woman would join the family with her curse and discourage their son. These concerns were raised at a meeting of the Association of Women Living with Disabilities, held in Bolgatanga, to discuss their situation and find ways to make things better for their members.

MB the MD/MC – on (dis)ableism

I have a lot of people in my family with disabilities, though none of them would consider themselves disabled. In talking with another radical woman of color, it seems that disability is so the “norm” in our communities, it’s often not marked as an identity unto itself. I often wonder about what a release it might be for women of color to see disability as a framework that intersects with race and gender, to not always feel the need to keep fighting, even when it hurts, to let go of the ways that we as cis and trans women of color in particular, have taken up ableism in ways that reproduce harm to ourselves and the communities we “work” so hard and care for. Why does disability mostly look white?

Associated Press –Feds Sue Over Treatment of Disabled in Arkansas

The federal government accused Arkansas in a lawsuit Thursday of leaving people with severe mental or physical disabilities with no choice but to go into state institutions. The Justice Department lawsuit accused Arkansas of a “systemic failure” that places people in institutions when the state should pursue less restrictive avenues for their care. “The state gives individuals with developmental disabilities the draconian choice of receiving services in segregated institutions or receiving no services at all,” the lawsuit states. The federal government accused the state of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, which guarantees people with developmental disabilities the right to live in the most appropriate setting for their needs. The state has six centers for the developmentally disabled that, in all, care for about 1,100 people.

A faded street sign reading 'CAUTION DEPRESSION AHEAD' is in focus with a blurry background of escalators.
A faded street sign reading 'CAUTION DEPRESSION AHEAD' is in focus with a blurry background of escalators.

Photo credit unknown, seen at Nowhere Pixie.

Psychiatric Hospitals and Music Videos: Part 2

media and pop culture, mental health, representations

People seemed to like the first edition of this series! So here are some more music videos set in psychiatric hospitals! In the last post, all of the videos used the mental hospital setting as a visual demonstration of the depth and intensity of love, depicting institutionalization as a result of loving someone a whole lot. These videos do not do that.

One video that especially doesn’t do that is Green Day’s ‘Basket Case’

Visually, the video seems similar to the previous ones. The band plays in the common room of a mental hospital in which they are patients. There is no padded room, but several people are being wheeled around passively as if they are catatonic or sedated. Later in the video, both staff and patients appear wearing masks from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. So what is different? The song itself (lyrics here), which is about lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong’s struggles with anxiety and panic attacks. So while in the same setting, instead of declaring his love for someone, he is saying:

Sometimes I give myself the creeps
Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me
It all keeps adding up
I think I’m cracking up
Am I just paranoid?
Am I just stoned?

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s Eminem with the video for “The Real Slim Shady.”

There’s a lot going on in this video and I really don’t want to describe or discuss very much of it at all, because it is offensive up and down and across and diagonally in 17 different ways. (Wikipedia has a very detailed description of the video and an explanation of all the references and insults in the lyrics and the video.) Let’s focus just on the portions set in the mental hospital, where Eminem and other patients, in scrubs or hospital gowns, fidget and wander in a waiting room while Kathy Griffin and another nurse try to control them and hand out their medications. It is just as cliched as the other videos’ portrayals of hospitals, but seems to be played for laughs. And the message of the song and the video are that Eminem is so much better than other celebrities and musicians, so much more clever and original and “real,” that he’s been institutionalized to control him for speaking truth to power. This message could be read as a good reminder of the use of institutions to control and punish people both with and without disabilities for being political and advocating for their rights! Like happened just recently! However, the whole rest of the song and the video is so puerile and hateful that the comparison itself is offensive.

Ugh. I dislike Eminem very much.

Let’s move on and look at a video that is utterly ridiculous and is a tie-in to a movie that is also utterly ridiculous – Limp Bizkit and ‘Behind Blue Eyes,’ from the Halle Berry movie Gothika:

I have a really hard time doing any kind of critical analysis of this video due to the aforementioned ridiculousness factor. The song (lyrics here), which was originally written and performed by The Who, can be read as expressing the lived experience of mental illness? Maybe? But the video – which starts with Limp Bizkit lead singer Fred Durst as a patient in a phsyciatric hospital and Halle Berry as a doctor, and then they kiss, and then they have magically switched bodies? souls? something? So now Berry is the patient and Durst is the doctor! Gothika the movie featured Berry as a doctor in a psychiatric institution who became possessed by a ghost and murdered her husband and then was a patient in the institution but only because of ghostly possession, not because she had a mental illness or anything. But even putting all of that ridiculousness aside – and that is a boatload of incomprehensible creative choices – Fred Durst’s efforts to engage in “acting” when he becomes the doctor and leaves Berry in her padded cell make me laugh so hard it’s impossible for me to focus on anything else in the video.

I have a few more videos for a part 3, but if you know of any I’ve missed, please let me know in comments!

American Apparel, Meet American Able

bodies, media and pop culture, normality, othering,

Oh, American Apparel. For those of you lucky enough to evade their reach, AA is a good company with a lot of problems. They started out selling themselves as the sweatshop-free, made in the USA, source for cotton basics like t-shirts, primarily wholesaling to people who would print and resell the clothes. In 2003, AA got into the retail business and started aggressively developing their brand, largely through their … controversial advertising style and campaigns.

The ads feature “ordinary girls” who tend to be young and thin (they’ve been described as “pre-pubescent“), are mostly white, and are often nude and/or in sexually suggestive poses. It is heavily featured on their website and in their stores, and the store employees are selected to resemble the ad models. I don’t want to post any of the images here, but you can see some examples here, here, and here (NSFW? Potentially? I wasn’t even looking for bad ones – those were the first ones in the Google search.). I live in Los Angeles – where AA is based – and I can walk to at least two AA retail stores from my house. There are billboards and store displays and newspaper ads and posters of AA ads seemingly everywhere I look, and beyond that, I see the same style replicated in other magazines and videos and tv shows and …

So when I saw the photo exhibit “American Able” float across my tumblr dashboard this afternoon, I was really excited. The photographer, Holly Norris, explains the project:

‘American Able’ intends to, through spoof, reveal the ways in which women with disabilities are invisibilized in advertising and mass media. I chose American Apparel not just for their notable style, but also for their claims that many of their models are just ‘every day’ women who are employees, friends and fans of the company. However, these women fit particular body types. Their campaigns are highly sexualized and feature women who are generally thin, and who appear to be able-bodied. Women with disabilities go unrepresented, not only in American Apparel advertising, but also in most of popular culture. Rarely, if ever, are women with disabilities portrayed in anything other than an asexual manner, for ‘disabled’ bodies are largely perceived as ‘undesirable.’ In a society where sexuality is created and performed over and over within popular culture, the invisibility of women with disabilities in many ways denies them the right to sexuality, particularly within a public context.

The photos are amazing! They are spot-on emulations of the AA ad style, but feature Jes Sachse as a model. Sache, who in another amazing photo project explains that her spine was fused as a child, looks enthusiastic, playful, sexy as hell, and very different from AA’s usual TAB models. The photos are all copyrighted so I can’t embed any of them here, but I really strongly encourage you to click through and look at the whole series!

There has been some discussion of whether this art project “works”, in terms of making the intended point of mocking the original ads and portraying a woman with disabilities in a positive and sexualized context. I’m not sure that’s a concern for me – I can’t see these photos gaining enough exposure or distribution to cause any serious harm to PWDs, even if people do feel disgusted or upset at the images. For me, their true power is how they both quickly and precisely underlining the narrowness of the American Apparel view of beauty, while demonstrating that PWDs can be enthusiastically sexual. Ms. Sachse looks like she is having a blast, which also makes me happy.

What do you think?

Social Campaigns Based on Ableism

blaming, bodies, normality, othering,

Via Information Aesthetics, a blog I read because i am obsessed with data visualizations and charts and graphs, I read about a new campaign designed by “eco-design consultancy Giraffe Innovation.” They’ve created a website where a user creates a humanoid form to represent themselves. The site then tracks the person’s environmental impact – things like home energy use and waste creation – and represents their individual environmental impact by modifying the humanoid form that represents them.

It’s when we get to the specifics of how the representative form is modified that I start to get uncomfortable. As the site describes:

The website shows the environmental impact of a person by using humanoid forms with body parts distorted relative to the environmental impact of common activities. Each part of the body is allocated to a different type of environmental burden: the feet correspond to the transport footprint, the hands to home energy, mouth to water, stomach to consumption, bottom to waste and the eyes and head to electrical consumer products.

Here is a sample image demonstrating some of the distortions:

A group of humanoid figures, seemingly sculpted from grey clay. The center figure is a "normal" man. The surrounding figures have distended bellies, exaggerated hands and feet, larger skulls, and protruding lips.
A group of humanoid figures, seemingly sculpted from grey clay. The center figure is a "normal" man. The surrounding figures have distended bellies, exaggerated hands and feet, larger skulls, and protruding lips.

The whole purpose of the website, the underlying assumption that makes this a meaningful exercise to convince people to reduce their environmental impact, is that when people see these “distorted” human forms that represent themselves, they will be so horrified that it will motivate them to reduce their impact so they can again be “normal.”

There’s got to be a way that we can encourage and motivate people to be more environmentally aware without drawing from, relying on, and reinforcing these ideas about “normal” bodies.

The full site for the project is available here.

Recommended Reading for Thursday, May 6

recommended reading, Uncategorized
A collage, with black and white newspaper figures at the bottom. Some have bubbles above their heads, some reading 'abled' and some reading 'disabled.'
A collage, with black and white newspaper figures at the bottom. Some have bubbles above their heads, some reading 'abled' and some reading 'disabled.'

“Society” by Martin O’Neill, via Laugh or Cry.

the personal hurricanes of kirsty mitchell – the guardian asks why so many women suffer from depression.

hmmm, i’m getting a little tired of articles like this that always seem to be about the same thing. white, middle class, married, slightly older than ‘normal’ mothers talking about how they got depression trying to hold down a city job, run a family, and still look (and i quote) fabulous. the tone is always this one of overwhelming apathy, this ‘but i was only trying to have it all’ whinge, rather than a direct look at the root causes of what’s making them feel that they have to have it all, at once, in the first place.

MarketWatch – MetLife Study Finds Less Than Half of Americans out of Work Because of a Disability Had Income Protection in Place

Three in five individuals who were out of work for at least six months because of a disability did not have disability income protection, according to findings from a new MetLife study released today. The MetLife Study of the Emotional and Financial Impact of Disability also found that among those individuals who did have coverage, only about one-third of their income, on average, was protected.

Journal of Medical Internet Research – Mobile Therapy: Case Study Evaluations of a Cell Phone Application for Emotional Self-Awareness

We developed a mobile phone application with touch screen scales for mood reporting and therapeutic exercises for cognitive reappraisal (ie, examination of maladaptive interpretations) and physical relaxation. The application was deployed in a one-month field study with eight individuals who had reported significant stress during an employee health assessment. Participants were prompted via their mobile phones to report their moods several times a day on a Mood Map—a translation of the circumplex model of emotion—and a series of single-dimension mood scales. Using the prototype, participants could also activate mobile therapies as needed. Five case studies illustrate participants’ use of the mobile phone application to increase self-awareness and to cope with stress.

Disability Scoop – Poll Shows Public Support For Community Living

A Harris Interactive poll released Wednesday indicates that a majority of Americans support legislation that would allow people with disabilities to choose community-based care over nursing homes. The poll commissioned by the self-advocacy group ADAPT and the Coalition for Community Integration, gauged opinions on the Community Choice Act, a bill proposed in Congress that would mandate that states offer people with disabilities the option to use Medicaid funding to pay for community-based rather than institutional care. Findings from the poll indicate that 66 percent of Americans support the legislation without knowing what it would cost. When informed that the measure would likely add no more than $6 to a middle class taxpayer’s bill, 89 percent of respondents were supportive.

More Than Coping – “When Medicine Got It Wrong”: When We Blamed Schizophrenia On The Parents Airing on PBS Beginning This Week

When Medicine Got it Wrong is the groundbreaking story of a small group of loving California families in the 1970s who challenged the commonly-held belief that schizophrenogenic parents caused schizophrenia. Angry at being blamed for an illness they knew was not their fault, mothers and fathers in San Mateo, California started Parents of Adult Schizophrenics (PAS) and began fighting for better understanding and treatment. The story starts in 1974, and centers on two families — the Oliphants and Hoffmans — whose sons developed schizophrenia in their teens. Doctors told the boys that their parents were the cause of their problems. Medical records labeled each child as the “identified patient” in a dysfunctional family structure wherein the parents were more psychologically ill than the family member exhibiting delusional and psychotic symptoms. The cure: separation from the parents. The boys were institutionalized at Napa State Hospital, and the parents were warned that visits would be detrimental to their sons’ chances of recovery. The Oliphants and Hoffmans prompted researchers to question their assumptions about schizophrenia’s etiology. Their passion inspired parents across the country to organize and lobby for research and more appropriate, compassionate care. Their passion paid off: by the end of the 1970s neuroscience was investigating causes outside of family dysfunction and interpersonal relationships. Rapid discoveries in the next decades revolutionized medicine’s understanding of these brain diseases. By the mid-1980s, textbooks dropped the term “schizophrenogenic,” and in the 1990s pharmaceutical companies introduced the first new generation of medication in decades.

Los Angeles Times – When prescribing a drug, doctors have many choices — too many in some cases (h/t notemily)

Even when research has identified the best drug choice, doctors don’t always prescribe it. “Physicians make many decisions that aren’t evidence-based,” says Dr. Michael Hochman, assistant professor of clinical medicine at USC and lead author of the JAMA article. “Every physician decides a bit differently.” Some physicians can’t keep up with all of the new drug information. Others simply prescribe medications out of habit; they may learn to use one drug during their medical training and, if they have good experiences with it, continue to use it for many years. Still others factor a drug’s cost into their decision-making to help their patients save a bit of money. Then there’s the pharmaceutical industry. It can affect the choices of doctors and patients. Many drug companies provide physicians with medication samples, and the availability of these samples can dramatically alter doctors’ prescribing patterns, studies have shown. It can lead physicians, in short, to dispense and prescribe medications that wouldn’t otherwise be their first choice.

I Can’t Decide What I Think of This

medical practice, policy

Via Sociological Images, I read a story about a nursing home in Dusseldorf, Germany.

As patients age, nursing homes risk that they will become disoriented and “escape” the nursing home.  Often, they are trying to return to homes in which they lived previously, desperate that their children, partners, or even parents are worried and waiting for them.

When they catch the escapee in time, the patient is often extremely upset and an altercation ensues.  If they don’t catch them in time, the patient often hops onto public transportation and is eventually discovered by police.  The first outcome is, of course, traumatizing for everyone involved and the second outcome is very dangerous for the patient.  Most nursing homes fix this problem by confining patients who’ve began to wander off to a locked ward and resigning themselves to physically or chemically restraining a desperate and emotionally-wrought patient.

An employee at the Benrath Senior Center came up with an alternative solution: a fake bus stop placed right outside of the front doors of the nursing home.

This fake bus stop is described as having two beneficial effects. First, making it easy for staff to find and protect the people experiencing delusions, which “meant that many disoriented patients no longer needed to be kept in locked wards.” Second, comforting the person experiencing a delusion and allowing them to move towards their goal.

I think this is an interesting idea and I definitely support minimally restrictive policies that avoid people being locked up or restrained. But it makes me feel just a little uneasy, like there’s an edge of mockery. Am I being too prickly? What do you think?

Psychiatric Hospitals and Music Videos: Part 1

media and pop culture, mental health, representations, social attitudes, television

After reading Anna’s recent post on Janelle Monae’s ‘Tightrope’ video and how it “is a great example of how not to completely screw up representation(s) of disability,” I started remembering other music videos set in psychiatric hospitals. And then I started watching all these music videos!

One of the earliest I remember is Melissa Etheridge’s ‘Come to My Window.’

In the video (lyrics here), Juliette Lewis is in a bare room with a cot-like bed and a barred window. She wears a white tank top and white srub pants and has a white bandage around her left wrist. She paces, climbs, cries, scrawls on the walls and the floor. Intercut are shots of Etheridge, singing with an acoustic guitar and an old fashioned microphone. At times, the song stops and Lewis speaks/screams the lyrics in the bare room. At the end of the video the bandage comes off Lewis’ wrist and there is no cut or scar.

I feel kind of neutral about that one – I think the ending can be read either as “she was never crazy the whole time!” or as “she’s healing and going to be ok!” and both are somewhat problematic. But neither is it overtly offensive. For that, you have to look for N’Sync’s video for “I Drive Myself Crazy” (I bet you can guess where they’re going with this…)

The video (lyrics here) has segments of each of the band members with their girlfriends and then breaking up with them – inter cut with scenes of them in a psychiatric hospital, acting as stereotypically “crazy” as is possible. (Although wearing satin pajamas, inexplicably.) Clearly meant by the band to be a lighthearted and humorous video, the “joke” is that losing the girlfriend has been so traumatic that the band members have been rendered “crazy.”

Another video featuring psychiatric commitment as a result of losing a romantic partner is Missy Elliot’s “Teary Eyed.”

In the video (lyrics here), Missy Elliot breaks up with a boyfriend, follows him to a building where he is with a new girlfriend, and slashes the tires on his car, causing a horrible accident that kills him. She is sentenced in a court and goes to jail and then presumably to an institution for the “criminally insane.” There are several scenes in a stereotypical padded room, where Missy and sometimes backup dancers wear and dance in straitjackets. While this video certainly brings more seriousness to the subject, it’s hard to argue that it’s portrayal of people with mental illness was any more positive or accurate.

A video I have much more mixed emotions about is Bjork’s video for Violently Happy:

The song (lyrics here) is about the wild and overwhelming emotional exuberance that can go along with love and has long been a favorite of mine. But the video – featuring Bjork and other dancers shown individually in a stark padded room – seems to depict that emotion through the imagery of a psych hospital. I’m not entirely sure how to read this video – is it mocking or endorsing equating of the flush of love with psychiatric disorder? Why is everyone cutting or shaving their hair? – but overall it leaves me with a vaguely icky feeling. (Precise language, I know.)

I had to take a little break after watching those four. All of which depicted almost cartoonishly stereotypical “mental institutions,” with bare cots, padded rooms, and straitjackets. All of them drew parallels between psychiatric hospitalization and jail – the room in Ethridge’s video was bare like a jail cell with bars on the wall, the N’Sync boys were kept in line by guards, and both Bjork and Missy Elliot were straitjacketed in padded cells, Elliot having been sentenced there for her crimes. But none of this directly relates to any actual mental illnesses or disabilities. Instead, the videos co-opt the symbols and accessories to illustrate the extremity and depth of the singer’s emotions. And in all the videos it’s the same emotion being felt so extremely and deeply – love.

Thus concludes Part 1 of Psychiatric Hospitals and Music Videos! Check out Part 2 to see if these patterns continue!

BADD: Why I Write

activism, intersectionality, justice, make the world a better place, politics, poverty, resistance, social attitudes

(This was originally posted as a BADD contribution at my tumblr.)

I spend a lot of time blogging about and against ableism, about being a person with a mental illness, about the way policies and cultural attitudes and assumptions act to disadvantage people with disabilities. But for some reason, I was having a lot of trouble coming up with a topic for[BADD] . I got some good suggestions – issues of ableist language (and I’ve written in the past about the words ‘retarded’ and ‘hysterical’ and their ableist roots and effects), issues about the enormous intersection between poverty and disability (poverty leads to bad health outcomes and disability often leads to poverty, making a self-reinforcing cycle), and disability tropes in pop culture (I don’t watch family guy but have talked about 90210!).

I thought of some other topics I could address – why I see today’s immigration protests and related activism as a disability-related issues and the importance of intersectionality issues in meaningful social justice work, or even an info piece on how PWDs should take steps to prepare for emergencies such as natural disasters. but I didn’t feel excited about any of those.

So I’m going to go back to the beginning, and talk a little about why I identify as a person with a disability, why I talk about disability issues, why I’m a contributor to a blog about feminist and disabilities, why I spend so much time and emotional energy on these topics. (Which are, frankly, often personally distressing, what with all the info about how I’m going to die poor and alone.)

I write because I want things to change. I’m not always sure the writing helps me individually – it is hard to focus on these issues, to perpetually remind myself of the limitations caused by my disabilities, of the societal attitudes that assume that I am lazy and worthless and dangerous to be around, of the innumerable policies and laws that reinforce and ensure the unequal status of PWDs. And while I see the value of creating a space where other PWDs can discuss their personal circumstances and struggle and receive support instead of judgment and blame, the internet is a big enough place that I think that role is being filled, well, by lots of blogs and LiveJournal/Dreamwidth communities.

I write because I want people – both PWDs and TABs – to recognize the larger cultural and political forces that create and maintain societies that use disability as a punchline, as an insult, as a reason to keep people unemployed, poor, disempowered, and sometimes leading directly to their deaths. I want PWDs in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and other “first world” countries to understand that lobbying their governments to abandon use of land mines can directly affect the prevalence of disabilities in poorer countries like Cambodia (thanks to s.e. smith for that great post!). I want people to think about how recovery efforts in disaster-affected areas like Haiti need to include specific focus and attention on the unique and disproportionate needs of PWDs.

But for me, it’s not enough to just help people understand. I desperately want them to act. To get involved in the political process to advocate for the rights and needs of PWDs. To get involved in social justice issues as a whole, because issues affecting immigrants are going to fall heavy on immigrants with disabilities. To tease out how a national policy can and will affect PWDs in other, poorer, countries. To vote, to talk to their elected representatives, to encourage others to act.

I believe that change is possible. And I blog to facilitate, encourage, and promote that change.

Recommended Reading for whatever day it is now

accessibility

Reminder: Blogging Against Disablism Day is coming up on May 1. Diary of a Goldfish has hosted BADD since 2006. It’s an awesome blogswarm, and it’s this Saturday. You can participate by spreading the word, making your own post, commenting on people’s posts, and/or linking posts for others. </ stolen from anna>

It has been a rough week and I’ve lost several days to medication haze, so I’m not really sure of the date. Sorry!

A map of the continental United States, filled in entirely with pills in different shapes and sizes.
A map of the continental United States, filled in entirely with pills in different shapes and sizes.

Herz Und Seele – Rant: Ableism

Only 5 years ago did I switch from analog to digital hearing aids.  I made the switch mostly because the big clunky thing was so clearly visible.  Once people saw them, they treated me differently- speaking more slowly, yelling and even making up sign language.  I have to be honest, it angered me, and it still angers me.  They talk slowly as if my hearing impairment is a cognitive impairment- when in fact, it is congenital neurological damage [in my case].  They yell as if that makes it easier for me to hear, when the problem is not volume, but frequency, tone and pitch.  Sound has ranges, and those ranges are narrower for me than most people.  Oh, and making up sign language?  That’s just stupid.  What am I, a chimp? These hearing aids don’t make me any “lesser” than you.  If you think otherwise, you have another think coming.  I’m so TIRED of be talked down to like a child, yelled at like an unattentive child, and generally treated “differently.”

with you – questions about the braille “porn for the blind”

If news outlets are going to call this porn, even softcore porn, why are transliterations (images, roman letters & sentences) of this magazine making it into their articles? At first I was intrigued and a little bit in support of Tactile Mind (NSFW?) as porn. Or at least in support of the idea of accessibility. This magazine is certainly flawed (“perfect breasts”? masks?) and I’m not sure where I stand on the politics of porn anyhow, but accessibility is good, and noting the sexuality of people with differing abilities seems rudimentary but is unfortunately an ongoing battle. Still, many news stories have covered this magazine in a way that proves that ableism reigns and that, in practice, most people don’t really think of blind people as fully sexual people. Why doesn’t Lisa Murphy’s site have a warning banner? Why can news media print/post transliterations of explicit raised images/braille porn without censoring the transliterations? I’m not arguing for censorship, just wondering why the standards are different. If this is porn, why is it showing up in Google Image Search?

Essin Em – Avenue Q and Discrimination (post is SFW but blog is NSFW)

Thinking I had misheard (I mean, this was a national tour of Avenue Q, not some local rep putting in on in a warehouse turned brilliant theatre), I asked him politely “so, if one is disabled, how might they avoid the three sets of steep stairs to get to their seat?”
“You should have bought the disabled tickets.” I was stunned. Ok, fine. Maybe I should have called Q to remind her to ask for something accessible. However, I can walk down one or two stairs, and every large theatre I have ever been in (a lot) has had elevators to the balcony level.
“Ok, well, we bought the tickets we could afford, on the balcony. Would the disabled tickets at the orchestra level have been the same price as the cheaper tickets?”
“No, you would have had to pay orchestra prices. Now, can you just get inside?”

Politico – Disabled get job training on Capitol Hill (good program, problematic framing!)

During the past month, Gutkowski and two other students with intellectual disabilities have worked in the offices of Harper, Reps. Bill Cassidy, John Fleming, Cynthia Lummis and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, as well as the Republican office of the House Administration Committee. The students do everything from answering constituent mail and shredding paper to learning how to give tours of the Capitol. Harper’s 20-year-old son, Livingston, has a genetic condition called Fragile X syndrome, which is the most common cause of inherited intellectual disabilities. Since graduating from high school, Livingston has worked several days a week in a Mississippi restaurant and takes a few community college courses but still dreams of attending Mississippi State University in Harper’s district, just like his sister. Harper told POLITICO, “A lot of times, when you get out of high school and you’re dealing with intellectual disabilities, you fall off the educational face of the Earth. Sometimes you’re looking to give hope to some of these families who want their child to continue on.”

One of Australia’s leading mental health experts says he is “dumbfounded” at the “token” amount of money handed out to the sector in the Commonwealth’s national health overhaul. Professor Ian Hickie of the Brain and Mind Research Institute at Sydney University has demanded Prime Minister Kevin Rudd explain why more has not been delivered to mental health services. Mr Rudd has promised over $5 billion in sweeteners to the states in return for their support of his hospitals takeover plan. The mental health sector had expected a significant package for reform. But out of the $5 billion to be rolled out to the states, only $115 million of new money has been allocated to mental health.

New York Times – New Rules Aim to Make Travel Easier for the Disabled (very US-centric for an article ostensibly about international travel!)

People with disabilities never have an easy time traveling, but a rash of recent improvements, including more wheelchair-accessible taxis and rental vehicles — and even Web sites for people with dexterity or vision problems — have made it easier.

[I don’t know what to do when I get these so I’m posting it] KTLA – Mentally Disabled Man Dumped on Skid Row – Do You Know Him?

White man in his thirties, brownish hair, prominent nose, pulls up a sleeve to show a tattoo on his right bicep. He is smiling.
White man in his thirties, brownish hair, prominent nose, pulls up a sleeve to show a tattoo on his right bicep. He is smiling.

“Jason” was left in front of the Urban Connection group home for the homeless about eight months ago by a woman he calls “Mary.” He had no identification and no social security number. The shelter has been trying to determine his identity ever since, but they’ve been having trouble because he has no identification card. The man, who is mentally handicapped, has “Jason” tattooed on his arm. He does not remember his birthday and has no idea where his family might be.