Wheelchair Dancer at Feministe: On the Cover [trigger warning for discussion of violence]
Regardless of how disability plays out in Aisha’s world, the vast majority of readers of TIME live in a culture that understands disability as tragedy. As shocking. As among the worst things that can happen to you (bar death). Mainstream American culture thinks it knows disability and knows how to read it. Ms. Bieber has a history of photographing disabled bodies[. . .]But the work she does in the Real Beauty series does not come through in this photograph — perhaps because of the context and placement of the image. Here she (and or the editor) uses Aisha’s disability to trade upon the readership’s sympathies and their horror: this and other unknown kinds of disability are a direct result of the US departure from Afghanistan. This is not about Aisha; it’s about the message of the article.
Cripchick at Cripchick’s blog: tell me who i have to be to get some reciprocity?
don’t feel the way white supremacy creeps into your life and plops itself in the center?
in the last wk, white ppl have:
- told me how to rearrange my words as to be more approachable.
- made my need to have ppl of color time about them.
- asked me invasive medical questions about my body.
- thanked me over and over for teaching them about oppression.
Cara at The Curvature: Disabled Student Assaulted on School Bus; Bus Driver Watches and Doesn’t Respond [trigger warning for description and discussion of severe bullying]
Most readers here who have ever ridden a school bus will have at some point been on at least one end of bullying and harassment. Many will have at different points throughout their childhoods and adolescences acted as both bullies and victims — myself included among them. Big news stories since I stopped riding a school bus have left me with the impression that little has changed. School buses are places where bullies, harassment, and violence thrive. And as all current or past school bus passengers know, students with disabilities, particularly cognitive or intellectual disabilities, are especially vulnerable.
Daphne Merkin at the New York Times Magazine: My Life in Therapy
This imaginative position would eventually destabilize me, kicking off feelings of rage and despair that would in turn spiral down into a debilitating depression, in which I couldn’t seem to retrieve the pieces of my contemporary life. I don’t know whether this was because of the therapist’s lack of skill, some essential flaw in the psychoanalytic method or some irreparable injury done to me long ago, but the last time I engaged in this style of therapy for an extended period of time with an analyst who kept coaxing me to dredge up more and more painful, ever earlier memories, I ended up in a hospital.
William Davies King at PopMatters: In Defense of Hoarding
To be sure, a special label like compulsive hoarding seems required by many of the heart-rending cases they recount, people neck-deep in the slough of their despond, overwhelmed by more whelm than can be weighed. But sadness and dysfunction are hardly rare or new. What is new is the social imperative to ram open that front door. Bring in the wheelbarrows, the commanding case worker, and the camera—especially the camera, which enlists us all in the drive to evacuate these cloacal dwellings. Reality TV rolls up its sleeves, puts on the rubber gloves, and hoards the evidence while [authors] Frost and Steketee stand alongside the labyrinth, notepad in hand, giving that Skinnerian nod.
I read Stuff (the subject of the William Davies King review) as “beach reading” this summer, so I am somewhat puzzled by the neutral-to-negative tone of the review. I come from a family of hoarders that may as well have been described in Stuff as those families where hoarding behavior is carefully negotiated – relegated to the garage or a spare bedroom. I like that the book spoke directly to both people who engage in hoarding behaviors and their affected family members. To me, it was very humanizing and did not characterize all hoarders as lonely and disconnected.