Category Archives: language

“But what do we CAAAALL them?”: The language of shackling

language, media and pop culture, social attitudes

[This has been cross-posted at Hoyden About Town.]

I don’t know who David Southwell is when he’s at home, but he’s showing his arse big-time over at his “Sub in the Pub” blog at news.com.au, a large Australia news organisation that is part of News Limited (Rupert Murdoch).

Following up on the story about the man abandoned to cool his heels on Mount Snowdon, Southwell agonises about the “Language of disability“. He mentions that someone in comments requested that journalists stop using the term “wheelchair bound” – a simple and common request any experienced writer should be well aware of. (Read more at Accessibility NZ if you’re unaware of this issue.)

But Southwell seems to decide that this is all a bit scary and difficult to understand, and drops this:

While avoiding pejorative terms is certainly desirable, I also think euphemisms such as “differently-abled” aren’t that helpful and open the whole subject to ridicule.

However if we (I mean the cliche-recyclers) take on board Paul’s point, a better term would be “wheelchair-restricted”?

Fwooooosh!

He’s completely missed the point. He’s very, very stuck in this idea that only terms referring to restriction and binding could possibly be appropriate when referring to a person with a disability. His go-to idea is one of passivity, of shackling. And when he’s told that one term is problematic, he just – looks for a synonym with the same problem, instead of addressing the problem itself.

In comments, I reply simply:

You don’t need to use terms relating to binding or restriction at all. “Person who uses a wheelchair”. “Wheelchair user” for short.

And I figured that would be the end of it. A wheelchair is a tool. A PWD with certain mobility deficits may use one to get around. The term is non-pejorative and descriptive. What’s to argue?

But no, apparently it’s not that simple in the mind of someone whose mind relentlessly associates “disability” with negative ideas. He comes back:

I might go with this, although I think it suggests there is a choice involved and it almost sounds recreational.

Unfortunately in journalese, “user” normally follows after “drug”.

What?

“Wheelchair user” no more connotes a recreational choice than “hammer user” or “computer user” does. You need to bang in a nail, you don’t happen to have a large iron hand, so you use a hammer to achieve your goal. You want to send an email, you don’t happen to have a computer chip and meatwires installed, so you use a computer to achieve your goal. You need to get around, you don’t happen to have legs that hold you up and propel you (or you have other issues like orthostatic hypotension, etc), so you use a wheelchair to achieve your goal. Why is this so difficult for some people to grok?

And why on earth, seeing the term “wheelchair user”, does someone feel the need to leap to the idea of drug abuse?

My reply:

David, your own news organisation uses “user” far more often to talk about people who use software, computers, and gadgets than to talk about drug users. There are also quite a few hits on “wheelchair user” on a news.com.au search, and no one seems to have panicked yet about your particular, and frankly rather bizarre, concern.

You don’t need to hair-tear publicly about this. Just look up a style guide. There are plenty; your own org probably has one. Here’s one option dealing specifically with disability [RTF download].

Have you had this conversation recently? Did your interlocutor(s) fail to understand the difference between tool use and restriction, hindrance, and hobbling? What’s your journalistic bugbear when it comes to reporting about people with disabilities?

Ill

101, activism, blaming, identity, intersectionality, language, mental health, , , , ,

The topic of mental illness came up again with the latest large-scale hate crime against women to make national news. It’s a nice easy narrative for George Sodini to be a psycho, to be crazy, to be mentally ill because then we don’t have to understand him. We don’t have to relate, because we’re not like that.

Thing is, we’ll never know if Sodini was mentally ill or not. We can’t tell from what he left behind, and he’s no longer around to ask. The things he wrote aren’t all that unhinged; he just took the workaday hatred of black people and women that is everywhere in our society and picked up a gun and went hunting.

And the mentally ill means violent narrative is false anyway. Mental illness correlates with an increased risk of being a victim of violent crime, not of committing it.

It’s been said before, but it bears repeating because there’s so much silence and stigma and ignorance surrounding mental illness. I’ve had kind of a lot of experience with mental illness and the mental health professions. Some of it may be triggering.

I have taken (in no particular order) Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Effexor, Serzone, Xanax, Ativan, Risperdal. I’ve self-medicated with alcohol a lot and smoked cannabis and taken LSD when I could get it. I have been diagnosed, at various times, with clinical depression, bipolar type I disorder, bipolar type II disorder, borderline personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, gender dysphoria disorder, depressive psychosis, and paranoia. I strongly suspect that I have Asperger’s Syndrome, which would explain a lot of my symptoms, behaviors, and difficulties. I have spent time in private and public psychiatric hospitals and spent years in weekly or twice-weekly therapy. I have damaged myself in ways ranging from very small — pulling on my hair repeatedly — to very serious — shooting myself in the left hand between the third and fourth metacarpal bones. I still have PTSD-like symptoms from the last and from growing up in an abusive environment, though episodes of it get farther apart as time passes. I have had suicidal thoughts that became elaborate plans. There were times that the only thing keeping me alive was someone needed to feed the cat. I am not alive for big important reasons; I am alive for small stupid reasons. I am alive because I didn’t want whoever found me to suffer the trauma of it. I have suffered delusions and intrusive thoughts and I have always had minor hallucinations (words printed on a page are red instead of black, patterns on a floor or wall shift while I look at them). I often have trouble understanding people when they talk and try to pass it off as being hard of hearing. I’m not; I hear fine. I have trouble processing auditory information and especially picking conversation out of background noise.

You’d think I was dangerous. I’m not. Really. I’m not even dangerous to me. Damaging myself — like it is for so many people who self-harm — is a way to stay alive, to cope with trauma. I have better ways to cope now and I don’t do that any more, but sometimes when I’ve had a really hard day and I hurt a lot and the noise in my head is very bad I remember how comforting it was to draw a blade across my arm, to feel the skin part, to see the blood well up, and how it made the noise go away for a while. Maybe it makes me crazy, but that is a warm fond memory for me. And it is what I needed to do when I needed to do it. I have the same memories about smoking, and I don’t do that these days either.

I’m much better now than I was. There are long periods where I don’t need psychiatric meds at all. But I am not cured and I never will be. I will always have mental illness in my life, just as I will always have fibromyalgia and physical pain. I’m back on an SNRI now and it’s helping and that’s good, because I could feel the old illness patterns coming back. Things have been bad lately with the economy. But I’ll be okay. I know how to cope with the bad things in ways that aren’t so drastic. There are people I can ask for help. I’m not alone.

Even if I am crazy.

Email Q&A: What About Womanists?

administrivia, feminism, identity, intersectionality, introspective, language, , , , , ,

We’re not even a week since the roll-out, but the response so far has been tremendous. Along with the excellent discussion in comments, we’ve gotten some really great questions, like this one (which we’ve paraphrased from the original email):

Why is the name of the blog Feminists With Disabilities? Wouldn’t it be more inclusive, especially of women of color, if the name acknowledged the womanist movement? Say, Feminists and Womanists with Disabilities?

We’ve been discussing this since we got the email, and we’ve come to a consensus that for now, we aren’t comfortable using womanist in the title of our blog. None of the current group of contributors identifies as a womanist. While we aren’t all white, those of us who are women of color identify as feminist. Those of us who are white don’t want to be disrespectful of the work womanists have done and are doing and appropriate their word for their movement created specifically in response to white privilege and oppression.

We also do not want to imply that we are authorities on womanism and that anything about womanism needs to change by including “womanists” in the title. Many of us are concerned with the historical exclusion of women with disabilities from mainstream feminism, and that exclusion is the primary focus of this website.

None of this means that we don’t welcome womanists and womanists with disabilities to join us as readers, as commenters, as guest posters, and as contributors (and if someone who did identify as a womanist did join us as a contributor we would revisit this issue). We want to create a safe space for all women here, and we do not want womanists to feel excluded; they have much to add to the conversation, and we look forward to hearing from them. We hope that FWD will be a place where inclusivity and respect are the rules rather than the exceptions.

Guest Post: Why I didn’t celebrate “World Mental Health Day”

guest post, language, media and pop culture, mental health

Everyone, please welcome our first guest poster, Arwyn of Raising My Boychick. Arwyn lives in the United States’ Pacific Northwest with The Man, the Boychick, bipolar type 2, and migraines. When the intersection of her neurology and the kyriarchal society she lives in allows, she writes feminist thoughts inspired by parenting a presumably-straight white probably-male at Raising My Boychick.

When I heard Friday night that Saturday October 10 was World Mental Health Day, I was excited: another day like Celebrate Bisexuality Day, but for us crazy folk?? Sign me up! When I Googled it, however, this is what I found:

World Health Organization:

Mental, neurological and behavioural disorders are common in all countries around the world, causing immense suffering and staggering economic and social costs. People with disorders are often subjected to social isolation, poor quality of life and higher death rates.

Bellevision Global (a parish in the United Arab Emirates — particularly look at the pictures on this site, if you are able):

Mental illness such as anxiety disorders, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, if not properly diagnosed and treated would lead to poor work performance, family disruption, and contribute greatly to the global burden of disease.

Emax Health:

[United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon] states, “Mental disorders contribute to more disease burden and disability in developing countries than any other category of non-communicable disease, yet only a small minority of people with mental disorders in these countries have access to mental health services.”

Well ain’t that just fucking cheery. Thanks ever so much for the pathologization folks; there can never be enough support for the “those crazies = horrible miserable burden on society!!1!” meme.

To be fair, there was some good coverage as well. From the World Federation for Mental Health:

“Today, we call on all governments and partners to include measures for mental health in efforts to achieve human development and respond to humanitarian crises,” Ms. Obaid said. “Mental health is central to human dignity.”

See the difference there? How the first three talk about how those people (that’s me, gentle reader!) affect the rest of us (that’s all you normal, sane, not-crazy people; you know, the ones that matter)? How they say the reason “mental illness” needs awareness is because they (still me!) are a burden, a drag, a fiscal drain? And then how the last one is based on the radical idea that, gee, we are actually people and we matter too? Tiny difference there, don’tcha think?

If you’ve been following along, you know that I’m not in the greatest head space right now — to say the least. And yet, silly me, I still expect that when a group (or a day) purports to be helping me, to be bringing awareness to my needs, I not be dehumanized, pathologized, Other-ized, and victimized once again. I expect that it be recognized that my dis-ease, my dis-ability, arises from the intersection of my being and the kyriarchal society I live in. I expect to not be confronted with still more language and images that portray me and mine as miserable, sick, taunted, shunned, hated, and ignored. (Are we those things? Yes, in this fucked up kyriarchy, we are. But we’re also joyful, healthy, embraced, befriended, loved, and celebrated, and we damn well should be portrayed that way too. The constant portrayal of us as stigmatized contributes to our stigmatization.)

So no, I did not celebrate World Mental Health Day, because it was just World Fuck Over the “Mentally Ill” Day, which makes it different from the other 364 days a year… not at all.

Wake me up when it’s World Mad Pride Day. That, I think I can get behind.

This post is being moderated by the FWD staff.

Telegram to TABs, on Spoon Theory

language

Message to TABs (Temporarily ABled[1] folk):

Spoon Theory?

It’s not yours.

It doesn’t describe the sleepy feeling you get at the end of a long day, nor the feeling you get when your kid wakes up for the third time in a night, nor the feeling you get because you went for a bike ride yesterday or are pulling shiftwork right now or feel like a weekend nap or stayed up late last night reading a book or whatever else is going on in your life.

It’s a word for people with disabilities, an oppressed group, to describe our lived experience, which is not the same as yours. Our oppressors taking our language is not ok.

Many of us know what not having a chronic illness feels like, including not-having-a-chronic-illness while parenting or exercising or pulling shiftwork, and it is nothing like this. Ordinary done-a-bit-much tiredness has nothing in common with the experience of people with genuinely limited spoons (and typically a whole other bunch of symptoms), and who are going to feel the same every single day for the foreseeable future. No.Thing.

Your co-opting of this term is NOT OK with me.

STOP

~~~
[1] I know that “temporarily able-bodied” is a problematic term, though in this post I am speaking mostly specifically of chronic illnesses like CFS, fibromyalgia, lupus, and so on. Do people have the same problem with Temporarily-ABled? I’m willing to change the language.

Cross-posted to Hoyden About Town

Disability 101: Defining Disability

101, language, , ,

Hello, everyone! I am Annaham of HamBlog, and since I’ve written a Disability 101 series of posts, I thought it would be a good idea to cross-post some of the series here.  My inspiration was piqued by the Finally Feminism 101 blog, which is brilliantly maintained by tigtog of Hoyden About Town. I hope that this series will answer some 101-ish questions about disability. My hope is that this will serve as a starting point for people (of all abilities) who wish to learn more about disability, chronic illnesses and health conditions, and the issues surrounding disability/CI/CHC terms, etiquette, and frequently-asked (and pontificated-upon) questions. (In case you’re wondering who the hell I am and/or why I am taking on this project, my bio is located here.)

If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to leave them in the comments field. Please be respectful and on-topic when commenting.
Also, please keep in mind that I do not speak for *all* PWDs and folks with chronic illnesses or health conditions in this series. It is not intended as “the” guide to 101 questions on disability; my intent is to offer (pretty subjective) answers to common questions on disability, and of course, there will be folks who disagree.

Thanks, and enjoy!

What is “disability?”

The World Health Organization defines “disability” in the following way: “Disabilities is an umbrella term, covering impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions. An impairment is a problem in body function or structure; an activity limitation is a difficulty encountered by an individual in executing a task or action; while a participation restriction is a problem experienced by an individual in involvement in life situations.”

Additionally: “[D]isability is a complex phenomenon, reflecting an interaction between features of a person’s body and features of the society in which he or she lives.” [ Source]

But aren’t we all disabled in some way?

No. This sort of “folk wisdom” implies, directly or indirectly, that mundane things—things that may be minor inconveniences (at least for some able-bodied people–those with whom this bit of “wisdom” seems to be most popular), but that are not fundamentally impairing or restrictive to one’s quality of life or participation in civic and/or private life—are disabling, when they are, in fact, not. Disability, additionally, is a term that refers to a long-term or lifelong condition.

What is “ableism?”

Ableism refers to discrimination, devaluation, misconceptions, stereotypes, and prejudice—conscious or unconscious—of and against people with disabilities, the chronically ill, and people with chronic health conditions. As a culturally-based structure that often intersects with other oppressive “isms,” systems of privilege, and “-phobias” (such as racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, white privilege, cisgendered privilege, class/economic privilege, and transphobia) ableism assumes that able-bodied people are the “norm” in society, and as a result, culture, various institutions, attitudes and social mores are formed in accordance with the needs of able-bodied people.

What is meant by the terms AB and TAB?

“AB” is an abbreviation for able-bodied; “TAB” is a slightly more to-the-point abbreviation meaning “Temporarily Able-Bodied.” TAB refers to the inevitable—namely, that most of us will face disability at some point in our lives; whether it comes sooner or later varies depending upon one’s circumstances.

Originally posted at Faces of Fibro.