What is Max’s impairment? What is Esther’s? And why can we recognize Max’s within five seconds of meeting her, while it takes us nearly two hours to learn–pardon the phrase–what is “wrong with” Esther?

Recommended Reading for October 20, 2009

Access is an all-consuming endeavor in a disabled person’s life. I love that the disability community learned to frame it that way: it emphasizes that the problem is not the person, their body or their condition; the problem is society’s indifference. Many accessibility solutions are structural; they require collective action — constructing spaces such that wheelchairs ...

Perhaps this is the wrong question. Instead, I propose: What is there to heal? Healing is the process of a body, having been injured in some way, doing what it takes to restore itself to normalcy. Merriam-Webster says, specifically, “to make sound or whole” and “to restore to original purity or integrity.” Take note of the words ...

I wanted to take a bit of time to highlight some awesome comments that you may have missed on last week’s posts. I originally intended to go through all the posts last week and pull up interesting comment discussions, but so much interesting comment discussion has gone down that I’m just going to highlight ...

Welcome to Ableist Word Profile, a (probably intermittent) series in which staffers will profile various ableist words, talk about how they are used, and talk about how to stop using them. Ableism is not feminism, so it’s important to talk about how to eradicate ableist language from our vocabularies. This post is marked 101, which ...

All I can think of is the complete ignorance of the experiences of families with disabilities, whose children do scream and scream and scream, or do some other harming activity, because of their disability, and their parents love them anyway. I think about how this is another episode of television that’s used a ...

*trigger warnings apply to this post: descriptions of abuse and sexual assault against women with disabilities** “This young woman has cerebral palsy, is wheelchair bound, totally dependent on carers for her personal and daily living activities, and non-verbal. Cognitively very aware, she depends ...

Recommended Reading for October 19, 2009

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 ...