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Guest Post: Book Review: Everything Beautiful

By Guest on 3 December, 2009

I LOVE this book. I love that the two main characters have bodies deemed unacceptable by Western standards – Dylan because he’s a wheelchair user, Riley because she’s fat – and yet are developed as a romantic and sexy pair. I love that Dylan is not a Ministering Angel Who Inspires Us All, but a complex person who’s a moody jerk a lot of the time, but charming and wickedly entertaining a lot of the rest. Howell manages to pack a good deal of wheelchair etiquette and disability awareness into the narrative, but not preachily; mostly it comes as Dylan sarcastically noting something that Riley’s never had to consider before.

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Guest Post: Disability and Aging

By Guest on 1 December, 2009

Living in our bodies is a day-by-day, minute-by-minute experience. In our experience, and the experience of our friends who are our ages or older, aging does entail additional maintenance time and energy. More small things about our bodies need attention than they did 25 years ago. We go to doctors more often. We have more routine tests. We have excellent memories, but we lose words more often than we used to.

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Guest Post: Hanging Up the Cane

By Guest on 25 November, 2009

The first time I held my cane, I cried.

It wasn’t a feeling I expected, to be honest. I’d been fired the week before from a job I enjoyed, for telling my employer I was in too much pain to stand for the entire shift, but things were coming out on my side. I had all my friends and family supporting me, and I’d found enough self-esteem to file a complaint with the provincial Human Rights Commission, alleging discrimination on the basis of disability. It was time, in my mind, to give up beating around the bush.

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Guest Post: Puppies and Pills Part 1

By Guest on 23 November, 2009

How I came to path of getting a service dog* was a long, strange journey. My experiences are my own and by no means represent the entire service dog community. My country and state laws are most likely different from some readers as well, so I’m only writing from my own perspective.s

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Guest Post: Learning to Write About Disability

By Guest on 20 November, 2009

But writing about my own disabilities is scarier for me than any coming out I’ve done before because of the way disability is viewed. I went through 5 drafts in 3 days and kept banging my head against the walls. Which told me that this is what I needed to write first.

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Guest Post: Cerebral Palsy Humor? Not so Much.

By Guest on 17 November, 2009

I was curious to see what would appear when I searched for “disabled” on the website. I found a lot of what I thought were amusing items, some with very suggestive slogans and pictures, but I laughed at them anyway. We’re aware that disability is a serious issue in our lives, but it can’t be too bad to sometimes laugh at certain things related to disability.

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Guest Post: Sex and Scoliosis

By Guest on 13 November, 2009

Many girls experience horror and anger when they find out what bracing is going to mean for their lives, and that it won’t even fix them, it will just probably keep them from getting any worse.

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Guest Post: Davros, Daleks, and Disability

By Guest on 10 November, 2009

I realized, when I read this, that I was (partially) incorrect in my original analysis, last June. What’s really promblematic about Davros is not (so much) that his “spiritual disfunction manifests as physical disfunction,” but that he diliberately creates the Daleks to be more disabled than he is. He deliberately erases their capability for empathy and compassion. He expects them to be obedient to his every command, and to be grateful to him, as their creator and their “father.” If Davros’s plans unfolded the way he dreamt them up, he’d be the most able-bodied (comparitively) “Emperor of Skaro.”

So, with Davros in the picture, the Dalek mythos only perpetuates and reinforces the hierarchy of Ability and Personhood. The more able you are, the more you’re a “real” person. If you’re disabled, your role in life is to be obediant and grateful, and the more “severe” your disability is, the more passive and grateful you’re expected to be.

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Guest Ableist Word Profile: Crutch

By Guest on 9 November, 2009

There are underlying messages within this attitude that one should rely upon the self and not be using outside help or tools to deal with problems. All of this is ableist, and falls in line with similar prejudices against medications. If you cannot support yourself, well then, there must be something morally wrong with you: this is the message of our ableist society.

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Guest Post: Disability and Asexuality

By Guest on 6 November, 2009

The stereotypes in question actually consist of a wide variety of things tossed together, some of which are in line with asexuality but many of which seem to have little to do with asexuality or in fact to be entirely opposed to it (I am interested to see how the stereotype of the disabled woman not saying no because she feels lucky anyone wants her is supposed to relate to asexuality, for instance). What they have in common, however, seems to be: denying disabled people their sexual agency and the right to make decisions or have knowledge about their own bodies and sexualities. The stereotypes about disabled people’s sexualities seem quite in line with the common tendency to consider us childlike, helpless and needing to be protected for our own good.

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