All posts by Chally

About Chally

Chally is the world's scariest feminist. She has a certain fondness for Doctor Who, cake, all things theatrical and making the world a better place. You can also find her at Zero at the Bone and Feministe.

A bit of disability humour to brighten your day

happy posts, ,

When you hear ‘disability’ and ‘joke’ in the same sentence, it’s usually not a good sign. But that’s not always the case.

I thought we could all do with a bit of a laugh and that some of you might enjoy this video. It’s a routine from the very popular Australian comedian and television presenter Adam Hills, who has an artificial leg. Hills doesn’t refer to himself as disabled, but he’s known for talking about disability issues and often having a sign language interpreter at his shows.

Transcript:
I went out with this girl once, we’d been together for a little while, and we got back to her place for the first ever time, and it was that moment of kind of sitting, you know, on the edge of a bed, and she went, ‘ooh, do you want to stay the night,’ and I went, ‘oh, yeah all right.’ She went, ‘Oh, okay, I’ll be back in a second.’ And she walked out of the room. And I sat there going, ‘awww – oh, shit. I haven’t told her. Well now what do I do?’ You know what I mean? Well I can’t wait for her to walk back in and just go, ‘look! [pretending to hold up his prosthetic] It fell off.’ I considered doing a magic trick with a blanket [pretending to flourish a blanket and reveal not having a second leg]. I sat there for ten minutes thinking a) where has she gone for ten minutes? And b) How am I gonna bring this up in conversation? What can she say to which I could naturally respond, ‘really? Well I’ve got one leg!’ [gestures in that direction] I’m not making this up, she came back in the room and went, ‘I’m really sorry, I’ve only got one pillow.’ [pauses for laughter, then repeats gesture] Ta da! She went, ‘ah, that explains it!’ ‘It explains what?’ She said, ‘I spent half an hour at dinner rubbing your foot under the table and you didn’t notice.’

[Cross-posted at Zero at the Bone.]

Gender presentation, disability and intersections

bodies, intersectionality,

A few months ago, there was a wonderful conversation in the blogosphere about gender presentation and disability. Jumping off from bfp’s what is butch? (check out the comments for some interesting disability discussion) a range of commenters and bloggers had something to say, and it evolved to have a strong disability focus. Here are extracts from some of the posts:

From cripchick’s on gender and disability:

our bodies are objects that are not supposed to belong to us and by recognizing our genders, it implies that we own our bodies, think about them, take pleasure in them. maybe this is a big jump but to me, affirming our gender also recognizes our personhood: it says we are human and have a right to not have our bodies raped, abused, sterilized, experimented on, harvested, and more…

From Wheelchair Dancer’s Butch/Femme – Crip:

My decision to wear impractical shoes is as much a consequence of me not having to walk in them as it is a decision to participate in a particular understanding of femininity. But what do you see? A sad attempt to look normal? A pair of high heels on a woman? Or something so over the top that it slides into the devotee/fetish view of disabled female sexuality? Note that this is a risk that is only present for disabled women. It’s a long way for nondisableds to go through femme to fetish. Merely presenting certain aspects of traditional femme for a queer disabled woman puts her at risk of becoming a usually straight object of the devotee community.

From Goldfish’s Gender Presentation & Disability:

Myself, I like skirts and jewellery and what my stylist friend calls romantic clothes, but I can’t be doing with discomfort and material frivolity. I can’t cope with it in terms of pain and energy levels, and I can’t afford it. So I break the rules.

How does your gender presentation interact with your disability, your sexual orientation (or lack thereof, if that’s how you frame it) and your life history?