Tag Archives: intersectionality

Recommended Reading for 02 September 2010

Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post and links are provided as topics of interest and exploration only. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.

Sorry for the late post, folks! Pesky little Typhoon and all!

ITWeb: 1up for gamers with disabilities

It’s hard to say if there is any disability that limits someone from gaming, according to Coe. “With so many innovative peripherals such as over-sized buttons, muscle twitch sensors, and thoughtful customisation, I think we can modify anything for anyone.”

The Living Artist: Accessibility FAIL: Ross Park Mall

17th in line, 90 minutes to go until opening. Feeling my back starting to twinge, I sat down on the floor. A minute or two later, mall security guards came over and told me I had to stand. Even when we explained that I had a back injury and couldn’t stand for very long, they cited “safety issues” and said again, I had to stand. Since I didn’t feel like getting into an argument (and possibly getting all three of us kicked out), Aiden and I left.

Think Progress: Alan Simpson Says Veterans Who Are Agent Orange Victims Are ‘Not Helping Us Save The Country’

The system that automatically awards disability benefits to some veterans because of concerns about Agent Orange seems contrary to efforts to control federal spending, the Republican co-chairman of President Barack Obama’s deficit commission said Tuesday.

Former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson’s comments came a day after The Associated Press reported that diabetes has become the most frequently compensated ailment among Vietnam veterans, even though decades of research has failed to find more than a possible link between the defoliant Agent Orange and diabetes.

“The irony (is) that the veterans who saved this country are now, in a way, not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess,” said Simpson, an Army veteran who was once chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

Rolling Around In My Head: The Battle

Three days ago we went to our local grocery, which had just opened after going through a several month closure due to renovations, and I noticed something slightly odd and yet wildly infuriating. They have 7 or 8 checkout aisles, one of which is designated as a wheelchair lane. It’s a lovely lane for me especially when I am in my power wheelchair. I’m wide, it’s wider, the lane is widest – a lovely fit wouldn’t you say. It’s so much better than what they had before. So, anyways, back to being annoyed – which through a mammoth act of will I manage NOT to be all the time. They had all the aisles open, that’s ALL of them, except the wide wheelchair aisle.

New York Times: Study Says Brain Trauma Can Mimic A.L.S.

A peer-reviewed paper to be published Wednesday in a leading journal of neuropathology, however, suggests that the demise of athletes like Gehrig and soldiers given a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, might have been catalyzed by injuries only now becoming understood: concussions and other brain trauma.

Although the paper does not discuss Gehrig specifically, its authors in interviews acknowledged the clear implication: Lou Gehrig might not have had Lou Gehrig’s disease.

If you’re on Delicious, feel free to tag entries ‘disfem’ or ‘disfeminists,’ or ‘for:feminists’ to bring them to our attention! Link recommendations can also be emailed to recreading at disabledfeminists dot com. Please note if you would like to be credited, and under what name/site.

Girls in Pants: The Very Special Lesson on How to “Draw the Chair”

Cover for "Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood" By Ann Brashares, a light orange cover with the title in bright blue, authors name at bottom, and a pair of well worn blue jeans centered over the names of several universities "Brown, RISD, University of Maryland, Williams) in the background in darker orange.Gentle Readers! It has been a long time and I know you were afraid that I had forgotten to read and review Ann Brashares’ third installment of the much beloved YA series The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants! Well, fear not! I managed to fit it in whilst chewing my way through Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series (don’t you worry, I have something for all of you on that, as well!), which is not a small feat. Sometimes it is nice to read a book that isn’t beating me about the head with an Ayn Rand-ian philosophy cudgel.

*ahem*

*stops derailing her own post*

For those of you who haven’t read The Sisterhood of the the Traveling Pants series, I can give you my brief brush up, and if you have, feel free to skip ahead to the rest of this post.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is a wonderful series about four young women: Bridget (Bee), Carmen, Lena, and Tibby, born withing seventeen days of each other. They are more than just friends, having grown up together due to their mothers being best friends, and having grown so close that they forget where one ends and the other begins. It is not uncommon to find Tibby tapping her foot on Lena’s leg or Bridget leaning her chin on Carmen’s shoulder while playing with her hair. They can tell when each other are hurting or hiding something or bubbling over with joy or exciting news. They have grown up sharing in each others’ joys, triumphs, losses, and sorrows. They have experienced growing pains and growing up as a unit and have leaned on each other for support through things like Carmen’s parent’s divorce, Tibby’s parent’s decision to have more children when she was much older, and Bridget’s mother’s suicide. Even as the other three mothers drifted apart, they seemed to hold tighter to each other Continue reading Girls in Pants: The Very Special Lesson on How to “Draw the Chair”

The “Gifted” — Who Needs Assistance When You Just Work Hard Enough?

Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, recommended to me by The Guy, my partner of several years now, whom I thought loved me, seemed innocuous enough. I thought it a simple fantasy series woven with a love story (“woven” here should read more like a nice cudgel to the head), which I was looking for. I thought it would be a nice epic fantasy, like Kushiel’s Dart, or something to sate my need for a good run of fantasy novels.

I however, didn’t heed Anna’s warning, when she asked me whywhyWHY would someone who loves me recommend a book series to me where a chicken is written in as EVIL personified (this is actually a simplification of the storyline, but it is true, nonetheless…), and as it turns out I think Anna may love me more. Who knows. Maybe I was hooked by the way the first two books ended with just the most convenient and precious heterocentric endings ever (there is one brief nod in the fourth book to homosexuality that seems it could be positive, but then it ends sadly, and seven books later there is no happy ending for this character).

The Sword of Truth series, however, does have many good qualities. It has several well written female characters whom I fell in love with, but, as I will write more about at my home blog, all seem to be written to be smitten with and to be in the service of the central protagonist, Richard Cypher/Rahl. They simply fall all over themselves to serve him, to love him, and to swear their lives to protect him with everything they have. Even if they were once evil or if they have tendencies to be evil (it’s just their way, you see, some women can’t help it), they somehow over come it because his presence is enough to ignite a spark to make them want to fight for their own lives him. I mean his cause.

But the Sword of Truth series isn’t just an innocent fantasy series. It isn’t even a series filled with tropes about women characters that I love that happens to beat me upside the head with forbidden romance and a love forbidden to procreate. It is a cautionary tale that warns of the evils of allowing communism to take over your life. This strange story of caring for your fellow man is bent into a monolithic monster of a machination that kills everything it touches. It simply asserts that you must live in misery for that is the only way that everyone can possibly meet the needs of every human evil, and makes the horrible and incorrect logical leap that religion is somehow tied to it, that this life is meaningless and that goodness can only be obtained in the hereafter. I can’t say I disagree with the atheistic themes, but really, a horse can only be beaten so many times before I glaze over and gloss over entire pages of exposition and soliloquy.

To be righteous in this world that Mr. Goodkind has created you must be willing and — key word alert here — able to fight for your own life and protect it with everything you have, up to and including killing those who would take it from you. With sword, with your bare hands, with magic if you are … gifted.

Yes, “gifted”. Being born with the ability to use and be touched by magic is considered a gift, which is not an uncommon theme in fantasy fiction and pop culture, but Goodkind takes it a step further, it seems to me. It is almost as though magic is another sense, an ability above and beyond that makes up for any other sense you may lack. Because if there is one thing that is all but lacking from this world that Mr. Goodkind has created, it is disability on the side of the bringers of good.

Even Adie, the “bone woman” (who oddly enough, having the speech pattern “I be” in the books*, is depicted as a non-white woman in the television series equivalent Legend of the Seeker even though that is now how she is described, but she is All Exotic! with Bones!), who had her vision stripped from her in her youth by a group of anti-magic zealots known as The Blood of the Fold by pouring bleach in her eyes, has learned to see. Her “gift” has enabled her to see. In fact, her vision, as is noted many times in the books, is often better than those who must rely on their ‘non-gifted’ vision.

I am going to drop the quotes from here on out, because it is getting tedious, and I think you get the point.

Adie never had to learn how to access the world around her. She never had to learn how to stumble around and feel with her other senses. She did, however, have to learn how to see with her magic, which made up for the vision which wasn’t there. This gave her the ability to be worthy, in the world that Goodkind created, to be able to fight for her life, and be allowed to live. People should just try harder, as Adie did. If you can’t get by in life, it is your own fault, and you are not contributing properly to the artwork that is the nobility of man!

You can understand why I was having a problem here.

Normally with pop-culture and fiction, there aren’t really absolutes, and I admit that there are multiple ways of interpreting things, but Goodkind has done a unique thing here: he has created a world of moral absolutes. This is right and this other things is wrong. What Richard Rahl (the protagonist) believes is right, and what he is against is wrong. There is clear good and evil, and the lines are rarely blurred. This use of a gift of magic allows people who otherwise have flaws to remain on the correct side of Richards moral compass. Richard, and Goodkind himself, could be described as Objectivists, which I think would clear up my frustrations. It should have set off alarms as soon as the philosophy lessons started to seep into my fantasy novel. Except OOPS! Mr. Goodkind says he is not a fantasy writer, merely a fiction writer he says (fuck you, fans!), so I have been wrong all along…

But Adie couldn’t be useful to the story, she couldn’t be the powerful and badass sorceress that she is depicted as being if she was indeed blind, amirite? Because if she was wasting all of her time trying to adapt to a world that was refusing to make accommodations for her she wouldn’t be able to fight for her individual life, or for Richard’s noble cause of laissez faire Capitalism freedom for all mankind (and I guess some of those womenfolk too).

The only time that her magical eyesight didn’t work was when she was faced with a woman, Jennsen, who was born without even a spark of the gift, called a “pristinely ungifted” person. She can not be touched by or interact with magic. Turns out, that Jennsen is Richard’s half sister, and her being ungifted is the bi-product of Richard’s gift. There can be only one! She has to be ungifted so that he can be gifted. It is very complicated, and there is an entire race of people on whom Adie’s magical eyesight doesn’t work! And Jennsen had to help Richard rally them up, because they were blind (oh the tropes and ableist language abound!) to evil, and their pacifist asses wouldn’t raise a finger to fight for their artwork of individual self interest.

I was just frustrated beyond all belief.

So if you want a nice stew of -ism and fuckery passed off as philosophy and disguised with characters that you will certainly love, I recommend Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series. All eleven (soon to be twelve!) books of it!

EDIT: 01 Sept: I forgot a couple of links when I finished this post. Apologies!

Recommended Reading for 30 August 2010

Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post and links are provided as topics of interest and exploration only. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.

Venus Speaks: Despair

Now, I don’t have a good history with the social security office. The two times I visited one, I was brushed off. I don’t know if they took one look at a mostly able-bodied young girl and said, hey, she must be trying to trick us, but it sure as hell felt like it – they told me that I needed to apply online, entirely online, and that they were so far booked into the future that there was just no point in scheduling. As in they refused to schedule me.

And lo, as I am filling out the disability report tonight, not only do I lose the internet and all my progress, but I just happen to notice before it goes down that you can’t apply for SSI online, you can only fill out the adult disability report, print off a few forms, and schedule an interview. You know, that interview that my local office couldn’t afford to give me.

Those Emergency Blues: The Title is About the Power

Titles, in short, are about establishing status and power. Why else worry about them? They are utterly irrelevant to actual patient care and one’s ability to do the job. Insisting on their use can create an atmosphere of professional intimidation that suppresses the free exchange of information. Health care professionals expressing power over patients is definitely not a good way to create therapeutic relationships. Implicitly saying (or believing) the title makes you a better person or supplies you with definitive or superior knowledge about patient care is dangerous as well as destructive to collaborative relationships with other health care professionals. In the end, it results in bad care of our patients, and of each other.

Pipecleaner Dreams: A Modicum of Sense

Well, at least the Academy of Arts and Sciences haven’t completely lost their minds. I was appalled when I first heard that the TV show, Family Guy, got an Emmy nod for their song, ‘Down Syndrome Girl.’

Haven’t heard it? Well, here is a sampling of the lyrics:

And though her pretty face may seem a special person’s wettest dream. […]

You must impress that ultra-boomin’, all consumin’, poorly-groomin’, Down Syndrome girl. […]

ABC News: Too Special for the Special Olympics (via Patricia E. Bauer, thanks to Nightengale for the link!)

The problem arose when Jenny’s school district entered an agreement with the Special Olympics, promising to abide by the organization’s rules. That meant no court time for Jenny, though the organization won’t say whether it’s because of the oxyen, or Simba, or both. [sic]

Ablegamers: Bungie Punishes You For Quitting Early

The fear is that disabled gamers who need to quit in the middle will be labeled as rage quitters. Certain people’s disabilities can hit at a moments notice, forcing them to quit out of a game. While according to the statement Bungie is only punishing those who habitually quit, it doesn’t discuss how they gauge that. Is that a certain percentage of total games? Frequency? What?

What has gone so wrong that it has come to this? Has Bungie exhausted all other options before walking down this path? Not really.

If you’re on Delicious, feel free to tag entries ‘disfem’ or ‘disfeminists,’ or ‘for:feminists’ to bring them to our attention! Link recommendations can also be emailed to recreading at disabledfeminists dot com. Please note if you would like to be credited, and under what name/site.

Signal Boost: Submissions Requested for the September Disability Blog Carnival

Astrid, of Astrid’s Journal, has agreed after much consideration to host the September edition of the Disability Blog Carnival, and we at FWD/Forward are enthusiastic to support that decision!

Astrid has chosen the theme “Identity”:

Think of it as broadly as you want. Posts relating to transforming identities, are of course especially welcome, as they honor both themes. Just a reminder that, even though this is a disability blog carnival, we honor intersectionality, so racial, ethnic, gender, sexual and any other type of identities also count, as long as the post is somewhat relevant to disability.

Comments can be submitted preferably here or else at the Disability Studies, Temple U. blog. The deadline for submissions will be Tuesday night, September 21 – Tuesday night your time, so don’t worry about my living in Europe. I hope to post the carnival on Friday, September 24 – whenever it suits me, my time.

We hope you will consider submitting something for the Carnival. Remember, the theme is a way to get you started, and we hope that you will interpret it to how it applies to your own situation, keeping the general spirit of intersectionality in mind.

Again, thanks to Astrid for taking this on, because without volunteers, there would be no Carnival!

Be sure, if you haven’t already, to check out the August edition of The Disability Carnival at Brilliant Mind, Broken Body, hosted by Kali.

Signal Boost! The Fight For Reproductive Justice

Some of you may know that most of us here are FWD/Forward lurk around at other places doing other things when we are not toiling on the backend here at the humble blog. I happen to spend a bit of my time writing under my actual name over at Change.org’s Women’s Rights blog as the Military Beat Girl.

Two issues involving reproductive justice have passed over my RADAR here and there, and I hope you all will humor me in bringing the issue here to you all, in the hopes that you will give them the appropriate attention, and also in hopes that you might boost them where you have the opportunity.

First: As you may have heard, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently decided to pull a Stupak and have collectively taken the decision regarding abortion out of the hands of people who may need to seek coverage in the so-called High Risk Insurance Pools.

[Action Item at the link.]

Basically, it means that, aside from a glaring disregard for women’s health, and no nod whatsoever to the fact that a woman is capable of making decisions about her health care, women who are already medically vulnerable. This rule cuts them off from receiving any abortion coverage whatsoever even if they attempt to pay for it out of their own already strapped pockets.

In short, they do not trust women.

High-risk pools are meant to provide coverage to people who have been denied insurance due to pre-existing conditions, such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, and a slew of other chronic illnesses, conditions, disabilities, or diseases. These conditions could make pregnancy potentially harmful, exacerbate the condition, or just plain more stressful to an already stressed body, or even mentally hurtful (though, Obama has made it clear that mental health does not count, eh?).

s.e. smith wrote an excellent post about high-risk pools that I recommend, if like me you don’t fully understand high-risk pools.

Second is a fight that has been dear to my heart for quite some time. It is the ban on abortions in military medical facilities.

[Action Item at the link!]

Illinois Senator Roland Burris introduced an amendment that would repeal the current ban barring women in uniform and military dependent women from procuring abortion services in military facilities, even if they pay for it with their own money except in the case of incest, rape or imminent threat to the woman’s life. The committee approved this amendment and plans to introduce it as part of the Defense Authorization Act.

Currently U.S. military women in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Djibouti, and the Republic of Korea (to name a few) are barred from getting abortions by the nature of where they were ordered to go. They are not available in military facilities except in extreme cases, and the the countries where they live have laws against them in most instances. The law discriminates against those women by first ordering them to a country where a service that is safe and legal in the U.S. is inaccessible and then denying them the care they could seek out if stationed there.

Further reading on the military abortion ban.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled reading.

Recommended Reading for 26 August 2010

Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post and links are provided as topics of interest and exploration only. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.

Westborough News: Marines shoot calendar for male breast cancer research

They are the few. The proud part has been a bit more of a struggle.

“Most guys don’t want to reach out, don’t want to tell anyone they’ve got a woman’s disease,” Pete Devereaux said yesterday as he talked with fellow male Marines who’ve been diagnosed with breast cancer.

INCITE! Blog: Reflections from Detroit: Reflections On An Opening: Disability Justice and Creating Collective Access in Detroit

We would not just think about disability as separate from class, age, race, queerness, family, children, gender, citizenship, violence, but we would understand it as intimately connected.  We would think, not just about “conference and workshop time,” but we would also think about social time and what social spaces were accessible and how we would make sure no one was isolated or left out.  Because in our movements much of the relationship building, socializing and bonding is done in very inaccessible ways in very inaccessible places—we know this all too well.

New York Times: When Battlefield Humor Backfires (Extra Trigger Warning)

And so the doctor’s determination not to lose a contest of wills undermines the opportunity to have successful discussions about treatment. The patient instantly senses that the doctor distrusts and dislikes him, and this, coupled with the patient’s lack of respect toward authority figures, leads to a rapidly deteriorating situation, often ending in a discharge against medical advice — much to the team’s relief.

NPR: Administration To Appeal Ruling in Stem-Cell Case

The Justice Department said an appeal is expected this week of the federal judge’s preliminary injunction that disrupted an entire field of science.

Judge Royce Lamberth on Monday threw the research community into disarray when he said a federal law invalidated Obama administration guidelines on human-stem-cell research. He concluded that two researchers challenging the Obama stem-cell policy stood a good chance of success as the case moved ahead in the courts.

The judge said any scientific projects using human embryos required their destruction, which flouts a longstanding federal law.

Something More Than Sides: Dear Doctor: Actually, I *Am* Sick

Let’s completely ignore the actual health concerns in exchange for shaming a young girl. Classy. And let’s not forget the fact that, were I suffering from an eating disorder, this is not the way to broach the subject. I left that appointment feeling shamed and humiliated, and with no answers.

If you’re on Delicious, feel free to tag entries ‘disfem’ or ‘disfeminists,’ or ‘for:feminists’ to bring them to our attention! Link recommendations can also be emailed to recreading at disabledfeminists dot com. Please note if you would like to be credited, and under what name/site.

Recommended Reading for 23 August 2010

Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post and links are provided as topics of interest and exploration only. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.

The Guardian’s Comment is Free: Mental disability, state power, and the capacity to decide

The judge faced a hard decision and his judgment shows the traces of his ambivalence. In the end, he ruled that Mrs A lacked the capacity to make decisions about contraception, citing as the crucial factor “the uneven relationship between Mr and Mrs A”. Although Mrs A herself indicated in court that she did not want contraceptive devices, the judge found that this decision “was not of her own free will”. But at the same time, he refused to grant the local authority the power it sought to administer contraceptive devices involuntarily. In practice, granting such a power would have authorised the police to enter her residence, sedate her if necessary and remove her to hospital for conceptive measures.

Chicago Tribune: University of Illinois opens new dorm for students with disabilities (Thank you to Lassarina for the link!)

As much as moving into Nugent Hall was a remarkable accomplishment for Rozema, it also was momentous for the U. of I. Already recognized as a front-runner in disability services for students, the U. of I. dorm will allow students with the most severe disabilities — all use motorized wheelchairs or scooters — to get the personalized care they need while being integrated with typical students.

WUSA9.com: Hearing Impaired Woman With Service Dog Told To Leave Mall

“He said dogs aren’t allowed in the mall.” Denise says she never before had a problem bringing her service dog Chloe, into the mall.

On Monday, August 9, “a security guard pulled up in his car and stopped and told us we couldn’t bring a dog in the mall.”

Denise has a cochlear implant but says she still had a hard time hearing the guard. She says she tried to explain the law and proceeded inside to shop. About 30 minutes later, she was approached again by the guard. He “demanded that we leave.”

On Saturday, it happened again in front of her daughter and her husband, Terry.

CTV News: B.C. cop who shoved disabled woman gets new assignment

VANCOUVER — A Vancouver police officer caught on video pushing a disabled woman down to the ground in one of the country’s poorest neighbourhoods has been reassigned.

The 65-second video was uploaded to the web last week and appears to show a woman trying to weave her way through three male officers on the city’s Downtown Eastside.

One of the officers then shoves the woman to the ground, before walking away. The two other officers do not intervene.

Via Change.org and from the USO: A petition to support wounded warriors as they return from war

The United States is a nation at war. Thanks to improvements in battlefield medicine and the use of body armor, men and women are surviving wounds that would have been fatal in earlier wars. While they have survived, their severe injuries have turned their lives–and the lives of their families–upside down, sometimes involving many surgeries, years of therapy and a lifetime of support.

If you’re on Delicious, feel free to tag entries ‘disfem’ or ‘disfeminists,’ or ‘for:feminists’ to bring them to our attention! Link recommendations can also be emailed to recreading at disabledfeminists dot com. Please note if you would like to be credited, and under what name/site.

I’ve Got Your More Responsible Pain Management, Right Here

Not many of you would know this but I had my first experience with acupuncture the other day.

I went to see a physical medicine doctor about a TENS unit because my current dose of my narcotic pain medication for breakthrough migraine and body pain is no longer sufficiently covering the amount of breakthrough pain I am having, and as a personal preference I have decided to seek alternative methods before I agree to increase the current dosage (which honestly, I am already trying to squeak by with as little as possible because the hospital here is so stingy with it, and I am trying to be Model Patient). The physical medicine doctor, for whom I would make up a name for him, but in all honesty, I have, currently, three Dr. Kims and two Dr. Lees  so I don’t feel the need to do so, agreed quickly to get me set up with the TENS unit. I just have to come in to see the physical therapist to try it out, and they will order it for me. In the week between, Dr. Kim asked if I would like to try acupuncture.

Now, I have a very high level of phobia surrounding needles, and the thought of acupuncture, being pins, doesn’t stray too far from that for me. This is not the first time I have been asked to try acupuncture. But Dr. Kim wasn’t pushy. He offered it casually, mentioned that he is licensed and certified, and that he could start right away, if I wanted to. He smiled in an understanding manner when I explained that I was afraid that any benefit might be canceled out by my anxiety.

He spent ten minutes calmly explaining to me a slightly different method, more commonly known to military doctors as “Battlefield Acupuncture”, where pins go in my ears and stay for a week or so, at its most basic form. I agreed to try it, not wanting to have another doctor click their tongue at me for not trying everything and not wanting to give anyone a chance to call me a drug seeker. But when I say “pins” I tell you that these tiny things felt like thumb tacks piercing my non-pierced ears, five in each ear with two in the inner part (ten total). I was instructed to sleep in a supine position, which would screw up my sleep, since I am a side sleeper. But he told me to keep them as long as I could stand them.

I lasted two nights of thrashing around. And The Guy told me he was proud of me for sticking it out that long. I felt like I was in agony the whole time. I could think of nothing else.

I have seen noticed that the military is leaning towards pushing acupuncture on troops, which I think is odd, since getting other “alternative” care (things as innocuous as chiropractic care) and getting it covered by our insurance is like getting a root canal. I believe that more options is better, but it was the framing of these alternatives that bothered me.

The first time I had heard that acupuncture was being offered to troops was in an AFN commercial. AFN is the military’s overseas entertainment network, both on television and radio. They offer commercial free programming for military families. But they have AFN sponsored spots and informercials. One of those was for acupuncture, celebrating the troops who were asking for it, choosing to treat their pain in “responsible ways”, which clearly spoke to me that people who received no help from such methods (such as I discovered I did not), or where it was not available, or who chose not to, were irresponsible for choosing narcotic pain relief methods.

And that just doesn’t sit well with me. I will defend against screeds like this writer at Forbes, who are just simply dismissive of methods that have helped actual people, because the author is deliberately dismissing their experiences. That would be like someone telling me that all chiropractors are quacks because they don’t ever help anyone, when I know for a fact that the last doctor to give me actual, long-term relief that didn’t require daily narcotic care was a chiropractor specially trained in treating patients with fibromyalgia. At the same time, however, I know that suggesting that because I use certain medication to manage my pain doesn’t make me less responsible. I am pretty sure that managing my pain makes me responsible for my pain. Certain people may not like how I am choosing to do it, but it is still up to me how I choose to do so, making it my responsibility. No one but me gets to make a moral judgment on that.

It isn’t widely available. I am fortunate, were I willing to give it another go (and possibly, I might be talked into the more traditional style). Acupuncture is widely practiced in Korea, so it is readily available. But not every military medical center is so well equipped. In fact, I think your chances of getting chiropractic care are better. They’ve hit the big ones, like Walter Reed, and it seems Fort Hood, which has a high deployment rate, has one as well. I am unclear how many other branch facilities are joining…but that is hardly accessible with so many needing it. I am also unclear if this is widely available to family members, or if this is another perk to my medical record still being messed up because of Dick Cheney’s privacy law funhouse or whatever it was that has left me listed as still active duty and of a higher rank than I actually was (and yet, with my hyphenated post-married name, which I never used while active duty…).

Often times it is being coupled with Chaplain care and yoga, which isn’t going to help everyone, and you shouldn’t be forced into one in order to get the other. Nothing adds to my needle phobia like you praying for my soul. And sometimes people with chronic pain shouldn’t be forced into certain types of exercise, which really is the Military Way, I know, but they need to understand that it can do more harm than good.

It’s a big Catch-22 of hope. I hope to see a broadening of options opened up for the masses of troops coming back from battle hurting from a decade of two wars (why, yes, I do say that a lot), or even as a way to help troops still in combat zones who have to stay and carry on. I hate to see it being set up as another way to shame people into using it if they aren’t ready to be the shiny happy Model Patient.

Recommended Reading For 12 August 2010

Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post and links are provided as topics of interest and exploration only. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.

Dancing With Pain: Practice entitlement. Because disability access is more than a physical issue (Thanks to livingartist for the link!)

I glared as I passed. I continued glaring as they served us. I also stopped eating, having lost my appetite (which seriously never, ever happens). My mom knew something was pissing me off, but I didn’t want to tell her what it was, so as to spare her feelings.

When I saw the bread assistant standing by himself on the other end of the patio, I got up and walked over to him. “What’s your name?” I asked. He told me. “It is in bad taste to mock disability and age,” I said evenly. “Yes ma’am,” he replied solemnly. I was impressed that he neither tried to deny his actions nor defend them. I walked back to the table.

WEEI: An Expert’s Guide to Telling When Players Fake Injuries

Look, I’m no medical expert. But I can spot a guy who’s faking an injury a mile away. I can tell a goldbricking slacker when I see one because… well, because I am one. You know that expression, “It takes a thief”? Well when it comes to stealing the company’s paid sick leave, I’m D.B. Cooper.

Alternet: Army Chaplain Tries to Cure PTSD With Jesus

In a nearly 11,000 word essay, “Spiritual Resiliency: Helping Troops Recover from Combat,” Command Chaplain Col. Donald W. Holdridge of the 200th Military Police Command at Fort Meade, Maryland, argues belief in Jesus Christ and Bible reading, particularly King David’s Psalms, can help cure a soldiers’ PTSD. “Combat vets need to know that most of these [PTSD symptoms] do fade in time, like scars,” writes Holdridge, a professor at the Baptist Bible College, as the Army Reserves banner hangs from the top of the Webpage. “They will always be there to some degree, but their intensity will fade. What will help them fade is the application of the principles of Scripture.”

Change.org’s Women’s Rights Blog: BPA in Plastic Blamed for Sparking Puberty in Seven-Year-Old Girls (Possible Trigger Warning for body shaming)

You’ve probably heard of BPA, or bisphenol-A, a chemical used in most plastics. BPA is synthetic estrogen, and since I’ve already mentioned that increased estrogen triggers early puberty, I think you can connect the dots here. So how much plastic do you use everyday? What food, hair products, drinks, make-up, or other items come in plastic containers? See how this might be a problem?

Philadelphia Daily News: Our famed forensic sculptor wryly reflects on a fading life

Thirty-three years after Bender, 69, sculpted his first bust of an unknown murder victim – a woman found near the airport in 1977 – he would seem to be at the top of his game: He fields calls daily relating to his work and is the subject of “The Murder Room,” a book that goes on sale next week, and an “America’s Most Wanted” tribute scheduled to air on Fox at 9 tonight.

But he’s dying of pleural mesothelioma; he lost his longtime wife, Jan, to nonsmoker’s lung cancer in April, and he has been forbidden to practice his craft by the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is overseeing his care.

If you’re on Delicious, feel free to tag entries ‘disfem’ or ‘disfeminists,’ or ‘for:feminists’ to bring them to our attention! Link recommendations can also be emailed to recreading[@]disabledfeminists[.]com