It is, of course, new technology, so we’ll see what happens in the future, but check this picture from Codeman38:
Description: A screen capture of a YouTube vid showing a person rock climbing. The auto caption reads: “for doing what I mean as well as democrats”. Codeman38 has captioned it: Google auto-caption fail. What was actually said: “we’re doing rock climbing as well as table tennis.”
…and I’m going to tell you why.
Because the policing of women’s bodies, whether you are being cheeky, or saying it to a plastic doll, is not cool. It’s hurtful and not useful, and has no place in feminist discourse. Can we move past that point? Huh? That’s a pretty Kindy thing, IMNSFHO.
‘Kay.
Moving on.
*The rest of this post is going to use some harsh language that describes my experiences/anger/frustration with Anorexia and Bulimia. I am direct and vulgar and sometimes a little flippant with how I describe my past behavior, and that is how I survived it. This may be triggering to some people. I also swear. A lot.*
There is a point when you are struggling* with an eating disorder that you might find yourself thin. Perhaps painfully thin. Maybe dangerously thin. You know this. You are aware. You haven’t avoided solids for this long, or barfed up all of that dinner you were pretending to enjoy without realizing what this means to your body. You might have some misunderstandings about what your body is actually needing…but you pretty much know.
In fact, everyone knows. All anyone can fucking talk about is how good you look now that you are so skinny…but wait…you just passed so good and have moved into too skinny…(because there is never good enough…too fat or too thin you will never be in)
Seriously, girl, eat a damned burger.
Or a bacon sandwich.
Eat something.
Because, you know, it’s that easy.
In fact (shifting voices), the only thing that anyone said to me that wasn’t so fucking insulting that I didn’t want to scream was “I am not going to insult you by saying how much harm you are doing to yourself because you are a smart girl and I know you know, when you are ready, I’ll be here”.
I watched all the shockudrama’s that were meant to scare me because ZOMG my STOMACH could RUPTURE and I was DOING THIS to MYSELF!
*for shame*
I saw Tracy Gold and the mom from Family Ties and countless others on the after school specials during school and I fucking knew.
How could I not? I knew what the result was…that was the damned point.
And I knew I was sick.
I. Didn’t. Care.
And that was scarier than anything…that I felt helpless inside my own body to stop it.
Eat a fucking sandwich.
As if I wouldn’t just throw it back up.
As if that bottle of ipecac wasn’t in my glove box.
As if I wasn’t really good at tearing it into pieces to make you think I was actually eating it only to drop some and crumble some and throw the rest away…
No, I wasn’t embarrassed of letting you hear me pee…the water running was a cover for something else…
Eat a fucking sandwich.
Tumbling around inside my head…as if it never occurred to me to do.
As if I had the power to just eat that fucking sandwich.
The hurt and the denial and the lies…and shit yelling at me just didn’t help…
Because who the fuck carries sugar packets in their purse?
And do you know when that shit started?
When I was a teenager.
We shouldn’t infantilize teenagers by saying “b-b-but they don’t get that this message isn’t aimed at real people”.
Bullshit.
Teenagers are people…with feelings…
And if anyone can tell you about what it feels like to hurt because you sit outside the socially accepted norm of appearance, it is another teenager…
being told to just eat a sandwich isn’t that funny if you are dealing with body issues
and burning yourself with a curling iron because you don’t know what else to do…
Eat. A. Damn. Sandwich.
It’s not funny or witty or clever or great new empowering activism.
It’s awful.
It’s hurtful.
It’s waking up in your own bile.
And it is possibly terrifying the hell out of someone.
Unpack that one.
*I don’t like to use “struggle” any longer when discussing disability. My experience with EDs was a struggle. There is no other word in my vocabulary, which spans a few languages, to explain it. I struggled, fought, and am still not sure I have won this one.
There was no recommended reading on Friday because I forgot I hadn’t done one for the day after the Carnival. Oops!
Changing the Perception of Braille
I recently watched a Ted talk that focuses on the idea that how we feel about something is totally based on our perception. It seems to me that in ore for us to improve braille literacy, we are going to have to change people’s perceptions. Organizations like the NFB and ACB are already doing things to help change people’s attitudes towards braille, but I think we can go even further.
Many people are choosing to learn sign language because they think it’s cool. So the question is how do we make braille cool? I think we have to start with children and teens. When we’re younger, we tend to me more likely to accept change and set trends. With this in mind, I have a few ideas of how we can make braille cool in the eyes of our children, and if we can do that, then maybe that will translate to the adults in their life.
Blind Need More Access To the Written Word
I love to read, and I’ve been doing it ever since I was able. My wife is also an avid reader. But we are blind, and so are many of our friends. The organization I lead, the National Federation of the Blind of New York, is made up of blind people. Although many of us read everything we can get our hands on, we can’t get our hands on very much to read.
There are services for us, of course. Government entities and nonprofit organizations convert books into Braille, audio or digital form for our use. But only about 5 percent of all books published undergo such a conversion. The largest collection of books in Braille and audio form in the United States has, perhaps, 70,000 circulating titles in its collection. A few more selections are available as commercial audio books, but these are up to three times as expensive as print books.
I’m sure you’re thinking, how does my petting a service dog undermine his relationship with his person?
Well, it works in two ways. First off, my service dog works for me because he believes I am the most awesome person in the world and that all good things come from me. All petting, all praise, all toys, all games, his soft fluffy bed, all food, all treats – that all comes from me. Secondly, if someone other than me pets him, he starts thinking…oh, people will pet me. If people will pet me, it’s worth paying attention to people rather than my partner. If he pays attention to people rather than to me, I could have a nasty fall (among other things) – one that could injure both of us. Keep in mind when you read this that the average person who works with a service dog is more likely to be hurt, and hurt badly, by a fall. We tend to have service dogs because there is some kind of physical fragility or injury to us already, after all. When you’re dealing with guide dogs, I think the risk is even greater – a distracted guide dog might walk his person into traffic!
I. Cannot. Afford. A. Place. Alone.
My maths are simple. I have an income, which I get from the state until they figure out what sort of job I can handle with my disability. That income is all I have. Anything I might earn by teaching two hours a week (which I do) is subtracted from that income. That means that I cannot raise my income in any way. Unless, of course, I do so illegally, which would be pretty stupid considering the risk of discovery. My income is what it is and cannot be adjusted upwards. At all. Not until I get some help for my disability.
In the news:
Study Unravels Mystery of Dyslexia
New research may provide an answer as to why children with dyslexia often have difficulty hearing someone talk in a noisy room.
Dyslexia is a common, language-based learning disability that makes it difficult to read, spell, and write. It is unrelated to a person’s intelligence. Studies have also shown that patients with dyslexia can have a hard time hearing when there is a lot of background noise, but the reasons for this haven’t been exactly clear.
Now, scientists at Northwestern University say that in dyslexia, the part of the brain that helps perceive speech in a noisy environment is unable to fine-tune or sharpen the incoming signals.
Today, 20 November 2009, marks the Eleventh Annual International Transgender Day of Remembrance. It’s the day that we set aside to commemorate the lives of people murdered due to trans hate and discrimination and prejudice. This year, we know of one hundred sixty-two persons who have been killed because they were trans* or were perceived by their killers as trans*. (Link to the T-DOR 2009 materials in English at the Transgender Day of Remembrance Website.) We don’t know — can’t know — the names of everyone who has been killed.
It doesn’t matter. Every murder hurts us. Every life stolen because we — everyone outside the cis binary, whether trans or intersex or nonbinary or any or all of those (I will be using trans* as a shorthand for this) — are seen as less than is precious and irreplaceable. We mourn for those who are gone. We grieve with the people who were closest to them. (Thanks to Chally for finding Queen Emily’s post from T-DOR 2008 on How to Mourn.)
I personally am angry. All over the world, in every society, we are there and we are dying. Because we are still seen as less than, as mistakes, as inherently deceptive, as the butt of every cruel man-in-a-dress joke, as freaks. Our genitals are viewed as substandard facsimiles at best, our sexualities are commodified and sold when they are considered at all. We are discriminated against in employment and housing, in immigration and criminal justice, in airplane travel, in language. Our medical needs are routinely denied coverage by insurance providers in the United States — even those needs which would be covered, if the insured were a cis person — and can be difficult to obtain even in countries which provide health care to their citizens. Worst of all we are dying because people feel entitled to kill us. Because we are who we are, there are people who feel we deserve to die.
So I am proudly out as a trans* woman with a disability here. (There are many of us who are trans* and disabled. Our bodies are freighted with meaning.) So I am not out in other parts of my life. In those parts I have to hope I pass and fear that I won’t. I want this space to be a safe space for everyone outside the cis binary. Not just for me though I need safe spaces too. It needs to be safe for the people who aren’t comfortable being out. That means no policing of gender identities. Just as no one has to prove their disability here, no one has to prove their gender or to have a gender at all.
Please help us remember those who are gone, and help us make our parts of the world safer for those who are still here.
Welcome to the 60th Disability Blog Carnival! Thank you to Penny at Disability Studies, Temple U for continuing to host the Disability Blog Carnival.
The 61st Blog Carnival will be hosted by Alison Bergblom Johnson at her blog, Writing Mental Illness, on December 13th (she requests submissions by December 4). Here’s her official call for submissions.
First, a personal comment from me: If you’re a regular reader of FWD/Forward, you probably know that I like to quote two or so paragraphs from everything I link, so that if people are just wanting to skim quickly over them and figure out what they want to read fast, they have that option.
I’ve tried to limit that here today, for two reasons. First, there are a lot more posts (I limit my recommended reading to five links). Second, it’s really hard to find just one or two paragraphs in most of these posts to link. “Is this the best paragraph? No, wait, look, later on, this paragraph is even better!” So, shorter excerpts because otherwise I’ll be quoting whole posts because they are very powerfully written, and need to be read as a whole, I think.
First Section: Intersectionality
At Ballastexistenz, Amanda writes This is not the post I started out writing, about intersectionality and the difficulties in writing about it:
So I will continue to move through the world (and the bits of the world that are around me will affect me, and I will affect them) and write (when I can) about specific aspects of my life, all of which have something to do with this thing they call intersectionality, whether that’s the topic of the day or not. Because I don’t stop being all these different sorts of person, when I stop specifically naming them.
At Urocyon’s Meanderings, Urocyon writes Intersectionality: It’s a way of life!, about the various identities that make up her life:
This has run long and personal, but it should give a pretty good idea of how I’ve been seeing intersectionality play out. Nobody and nothing exists in a vacuum. Everyone and everything is interconnected and interdependent. If you try to look at the world through a filter of “good” vs. “bad” oppositional dualism, all kinds of categories of people are going to be “bad”–and many of the “bad” people will fit into more than one category of badness.
Wheelchair Dancer, at Wheelchair Dancer, writes: Intersectionality, which is about internet feminism (as opposed to academic feminism) and the failure of intersectionality to really work on the web:
Internet feminisms are not so much representative of the scholarly field as a whole, but localized to individual websites and specific groups of people. At first glance, these sites are seemingly able to take on a diversity of perspectives; they have a large audience and multiple contributors. Despite this variation, however, internet feminism is not so much a set of philosophical perspectives, carefully worked out in conversation with other scholars, but a group of outlooks pulled together by friends and people who hold congruent (if not similar/the same) takes on stuff. Each website — each example of internet feminism — is thus a projection of the people who run, post on, and read a given site. They are examples — exemplifications, even — of feminism but they aren’t necessarily reference points to which one can go if you need to understand feminism.
Tera at Sweet Perdition writes Sweetie, asking how her treatment would change if her gender presentation, race, or age, amongst other things, were different.
But it is not niceness. It is You don’t belong here, dressed up in the prettiest Emperor’s clothes. Your kind belong somewhere else. And I am lucky as hell to get this form, this quiet suggestion that I am in the wrong place instead of disgust or gossip or a punch in the face or attempted murder or a refusal to acknowledge me at all.
anthea at Juggling with colours and smoke writes Dyspraxia and Gender, Part I, about gender and gender identity and being dyspraxic.
I don’t quite know what being female means to me. I don’t quite know what being dyspraxic means to me. But I think they’re quite capable of being parts of me that don’t undermine the validity of the other.
Bri at Fat Lot Of Good writes fat and depressed? or just fat? or maybe just depressed?, which is about being both fat and depressed, and the assumptions people make about both:
Like just because I am have depression (even when it is under control) I need someone else to tell me what is best for me, and the fact that I am fat and depressed…well, isn’t it obvious that if I lost weight I would no longer be depressed?
No, no and NO.
pgdudda, at Warp and Weft writes Hospitals: the Intersection of GLBT and Disabled Significant Others:
My partner of 13 years was recently hospitalized. His gall bladder was removed, and he had complications that extended his stay significantly. This was a very stressful time for both of us. The stress was compounded by the fact that (a) we are a homosexual couple, and (b) I have a significant hearing impairment. I have some thoughts for hospital personnel to consider when dealing with this particular intersection of queer-and-disabled.
hkfreeman, at The Living Artist, Touch/Don’t, which uses both art and words to discuss chronic pain:
While this piece is inspired by the personal, my hope is that it generalizes well to the experience of chronic pain, and also the experience of being a woman, and perhaps even the experience of being human: specifically portraying the conflict between the need for physical connection and the need for physical safety.
Kaz wrote a guest post for us here at FWD/Forward, Disability and Asexuality, about her experiences being both asexual and being on the autism spectrum:
Talking about the intersection of asexuality and disability is pretty difficult, because “asexuality” gets another meaning in disability rights discourse: it’s used to refer to the various stereotypes about disabled people’s sexualities. People do often seem to realise that this is problematic when it’s pointed out to them. However, what not so many people realise off the bat is that it goes beyond just “problematic”.
From The Mind Campaign, Mental Health Services for Refugees and Asylum Seekers: A Messy Picture, which is about … well, mental health services for refugees and asylum seekers in the UK:
But it is the plight of people who are seeking refuge in our country which has been highlighted by two new Mind reports which were launched yesterday. The product of two years of research seeking to understand the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers who experience mental health problems, the results make for interesting reading.
Jo Tamar, at Wallaby writes about the intersectionality between caregivers and disability:
So that’s intersectionality in one sense between being a carer and being a person with a disability: it is entirely possible (and based on the statistics above, maybe even likely) to be both.
But there’s intersectionality in another sense, too. The adverse effects of caring on a carer’s health and well-being has the potential to impact the person zie cares for. So the more difficult life is for the carer, perhaps the more difficult life may be for the person zie cares for.
Second Section: “General Posts” written by people with disabilities
At Bicoastal Gimps, shesabibliophile writes Ownership, which is about how the bodies of people with disabilities are often seen by others:
I would not be exaggerating if I said I have to deal with the hijacking of my ownership almost every day. There are few people who I feel completely comfortable around and who I know will not and do not take any power away from me unintentionally or intentionally. It’s a scary world for me, for us, but this world and my happiness is something I am willing to fight for.
Alison at Refract.Me writes Ablism 101, which is about the false assumptions people make about disability:
I’m talking about ableism. Ableism in the simplest meaning are societal prejudices about people with disabilities. It takes the assumption that being able-body, having a neurotypical mindset, boundless physical and mental endurance, etc. are normal. People that don’t fall into this category are abnormal.
Ginny, at Ginny’s Thoughts and Things, writes The World of Work, about pressure for blind people to be “the best” in order to demonstrate their worth:
See, the thing is, all of my life, the message I always got was that you’ve got to be twice as good at something to even be looked at the same way, or taken as seriously as, a sighted person. Being “just good enough” well, there was no such thing, because being “just good enough” for a blind person was “not good enough” for the sighted world.
hkfreeman writes on deafness, which is about the experience of being hard of hearing:
It can be difficult to imagine what life is like with a disability. For me, it is difficult to imagine what life would be like if I had normal hearing, but I am perpetually bombarded with reminders and barbs of how I experience the world in a different way, and how that difference is seen as a lack and a burden.
meloukhia, at this ain’t living, writes Nuance and Reproductive Rights, which is about disability and abortion, and how the abortion discussion is currently framed:
Views on abortion seem to fall into two broad camps: It’s always unacceptable and morally wrong (usually because people believe that a fetus has personhood) or it’s always acceptable (and the jury seems a bit mixed on morals). That doesn’t leave room for a lot of nuance, something I note in particular whenever discussions about abortion and disability crop up.
The next few posts are all posts from FWD/Forward Contributors and were on our blog:
By Laurdhel, Law & Order: “Dignity”, Worth, and the Medical Model of Disability, which talks about abortion and disability, and challenges the view presented both in Law & Order, and in feminist responses to the L&O episode she discusses:
As a feminist, I believe that we can have the abortion-rights conversation without marginalising, othering, and disparaging people with disabilities. I believe we can talk about abortion within that broader framework of reproductive justice, and that we can confront the ableism that creeps into some abortion-rights conversations head-on. This takes effort; we must think clearly, write carefully, read closely.
By kaninchenzero, Ill, which is about perceptions of mental illness, and about assumptions we make about violence and mental health:
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
By Annaham, The Negative Side of Positive Thinking:
You’ve probably heard of positive thinking and its (supposed) benefits. You’ve also probably heard of things like The Secret, which is a self-help book and DVD (and they have other products, too, including a daily planner and something called an “affirmation journal”). For those of you who have had the good fortune to not have come into contact with The Secret, the basic premise is something that sounds pretty innocuous at first, if you don’t examine it too closely or think about it too hard: there is something called “the Law of Attraction,” which posits that the individual can attract their own good or bad circumstances in life just by thinking about them.
Oh gosh. Next time someone gives me the advice to add posts as they come in, I’m taking that advice!
I’ve really enjoyed reading all the posts at this Disability Carnival! If I had planned ahead, I could end with some way of saying “posts are great, and there’s lots of posts about disability all over the internet”, but I’ve just been kicked out of the lab I’m in and it is past my bedtime anyway. Thanks for all participants, and again to Penny for letting us host this time.
I wanted to share this Disability History Education video by the Disabled Young People’s Collective. The DYP is based in North Carolina, USA, and is made up of people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-eight. See the DYP website for more.
The video is mostly captioned, but the captions can be a bit difficult to read at times, so here’s a video description.
[A group of people sitting on stairs call out, one at a time.] The following are stereotypes of people with disabilities: special, begger, psychotic, crazy, mongoloid, lazy, needy, handicap, disgusting, retard, insane, incapable, slow, helpless.
[Written out on the screen] The following are shocking facts from disability history.
[Individuals say the following]
[On an exercise machine, a person says] Did you know that 70% of people that are blind or visually impaired are unemployed?
[A person walks up stairs then pauses to speak] Did you know that disabled people were sterilized during the eugenics movement?
[A person is watching TV and says] Did you know that disabled people were killed in the Holocaust?
[A person walks closer to the camera to say] Did you know that disabled people were required to stay inside because they were considered ugly?
[A group is sitting in a parking lot, blocking a car, which honks at them. One of them says] Did you know that Section 504 was the longest sit-in ever in a federal building?
[Standing in a doorway, a person says] Did you know that disabled people had their teeth removed, because institutions didn’t want to pay for their dental costs?
[A person using a motorised wheelchair is in a parking lot with ‘another inaccessible sidewalk’ and so moves along beside the sidewalk, saying] Did you know that 92% of parents abort children who have the possibility of having Down Syndrome?
[A person signs with speech voiceover] Did you know that students at Galludet University staged a protest by hotwiring buses to block campus gates in order to get the first Deaf President there?
You can find the words to the Self-Advocacy Rap, which is at the end of the video, in the sidebar of the YouTube page.
Thank you to @cripchick for tweeting about this video.
Codeman38 has been bringing people’s attention to the lack of accessibility features available in the rental version of Up:
However, Disney (the film’s distributor) released a special rental-only version of the DVD to the three above-mentioned rental chains, which lacks the bonus shorts from the retail DVD, the descriptive audio track, and the captions and subtitles in all three languages.
I know. It sounds utterly unbelievable– so I posted this DVD player screenshot of the rental version on Twitpic as proof. (And yes, the one menu item says “turn off closed captioning”, but that’s because I have it on by default; there’s none encoded on the disc.)
[See also Codeman38’s similar post on Accessibility Fail]
As Alena from Perspectives from a Blind Point of View puts it:
There is no excuse for this, especially for those who waited for the DVD release because they have a disability. People with disabilities shouldn’t have to pay extra to enjoy a movie, especially when the features were built in to make sure that the blind and deaf could better enjoy the film. I’d really like to know how this decision came to occur. It seems clear to me that Disney must not employ anyone with a disability in their marketing department, because if they did they would realize that this is likely to cause people to not buy the DVD, rather then increase sales.
The Consumerist reports this is a marketing decision on Disney’s part.
This leads me back into one of my ongoing (off-line) rants, which is the idea that people with disabilities are asking for some form of “special” treatment. No, they’re asking for the same thing everyone else does – to be able to rent the Newly Released Film from Blockbuster or Netflix or whatever, and enjoy it. The way they can do that is through these necessary features. They’re not “special”, they’re necessary. Just because they aren’t necessary for me doesn’t mean they aren’t necessary for other people.
This is pretty bad behaviour, and stuff that we need to be calling out.
Disney’s switchboard number is (818) 560-1000. I haven’t been able to find an email address or other contact information on this. If anyone else has any ideas, please let me know.
Today is the deadline for submissions for the Disability Carnival.
If you emailed something to carnival at disabledfeminists.com and didn’t get some variation of “I got your submission! Thank you!”, then I haven’t received it. The alternate address is anna@annaoverseas.com.
The optional theme is intersectionality. However, any posts you’ve written about disability that you’d like to see included in the Carnival are fine to submit. Also, feel free to submit posts by others that you think are good for inclusion!
I will accept anything that comes in before I wake up my time tomorrow. I don’t wake up that early. I live in Atlantic time, which is something like GMT -4.
Carnival will be posted here on November 19!
Yeah, I know that this guy’s uniform is jacked up. I know you can’t wear your collar standing up like that no matter how cold it is, and that your pockets are decorative only. Were I doing an inspection, The Lone Sailor here would probably not pass. He would be called to re-inspect later.
But I marched past a replica of this statue every day for some of the longest weeks of my life. He was a proud symbol of everything we hoped to achieve, and everything that everyone before us had achieved. It was an image we had hoped to live up to. A symbol of what it meant to be a Sailor. To wear even the lowest uniform and to even be graced the swab the decks was to be a proud member of the United States Navy, and that alone was worth singing “Anchors Aweigh” with a hoarse throat.
The Lone Sailor statue is cast from the hulls of ships long past, giving it the truth behind that sentiment. Lives lost and watery graves. Also, strength of the future. A symbol of strength that will endure the weather, a hint that from here on we would be perpetual, like the water that carries our ships.
Being a Sailor meant more to me than I ever expected, and no matter what happened since, it is something I will always carry with me. It was a part of me, and it continues to be, like that damned statue w/ his jacked up collar and his damned hands in his damned pockets. I have pride in that part of my life, no matter how it ended, no matter how it was cut short. No matter how the career I wanted was yanked out from under me and no matter how I feel betrayed by the very body that carried me through those days of training and “snow watch” at Great Lakes, I was a Sailor, it is a part of me that I treasure. It is a strength that can not be taken from me.
I hope that you get a chance to pay a thankful word to a Veteran today (or tomorrow depending on where you are). Whether a thank-you for what they have done, are doing, or will do (because, Active Duty are Veterans too), remember that their service meant something to them in some manner also. It wasn’t just a pay check or a call to duty. In some way it became a part of that person. It wasn’t just a uniform we put on or stamped dog tags. It was a part of our person. Something we will always carry, but not like a weapon or a line. It changed us. In our very inner most being, it changed us, hardened us and gave us the strength of dozens of ships to endure, even if it isn’t obvious to one who hasn’t served.
You don’t take that off.
It is cast on us, like bronze.
Cross posted at random babble…
Just a friendly reminder that it’s 9 days until we host the Disability Carnival here at FWD/Forward, so it’s 7 days until your links are due! Email them in to carnival@disabledfeminists.com. Our optional theme is Intersectionality.