Inside the Little Plastic Castle

Last month I attended the Grounding Movements in Disability Justice panel online. It was great. The video (with ASL interpreters and a PDF transcript) is now up! It’s free! Check it out!
https://www.dustinpgibson.com/offerings/groundingmovementsindj

I was particularly impressed by Azza Altiraifi, who explained an idea capri0mni introduced me to: that various oppressive systems use disability bigotry as the lever to enforce power over oppressed people. To label someone as "disabled" is to erase their right to have control over their own life. Azza explores how this intersects with anti-Black racism in the U.S. She’s part of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think-tank:
https://americanprogress.org/about/staff/altiraifi-azza/bio/
If I were on Twitter, I’d definitely follow Azza_Alt!

There’s another panel tomorrow night, Friday, May 8th at 7:00 PM EST, on Disability Justice & COVID-19. Join the livestream by signing up at bit.ly/djgrounding

I’m so grateful that this information is available and provided in accessible ways. This is the way forward with hope: follow the ideas and leadership of Black people, who have been surviving and thriving in a system set against them for centuries.

Here’s Azza Altiraifi, copied from the transcript
( 660 words of wisdom )

cosmolinguist explores the gender pitfalls of defining a space as welcoming to "women and non-binary" people. Relevant to my interests because my wonderful comics club membership policy is "cis men have staffed the gates into comics for too long, so they're not welcome in clubMX." We've tried to express that in positive terms — here are the folks who are welcome — but given our rejection from traditional comics circles, essentially (hah!), the quoted negative definition above is what unites us.

people are doing an unreasonable thing in order to achieve a reasonable goal. I'm sure any of us could think about times in our lives that cis men were horrible to us, all the way from #EverydaySexism to actual trauma. And especially when it comes to groups for people who are queer/kinky/polyamorous/anything about sexualities and relationships, safety becomes even more important. But keeping all the cis men out isn't the way to do that. I'm not even saying "not all men," I'm saying "not only cis men." Not all predatory, boundary-crossing, consent-lacking behavior comes from them. Keeping them out is not necessary or sufficient for a space to be safe or welcoming.

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hellofriendsiminthedark precisely captures why disabling metaphor is harmful

In a world where blindness is inherently understood as a debilitating and limiting condition, "you're blind to the red flags" does mean "you're ignorant of the red flags."

In a world where sight is inherently understood to be one of many modes for gathering information, but is also understood to be neutral in value and not in and of itself individually essential in the grand scheme of gathering information and perceiving a legitimate model of the physical world, "you're blind to the red flags" would mean "you may not be able to see the red flags, but you can still intuit their existence. You can still obtain information about their presence using your other senses and other information around you, for example the ways in which the red flags interact tangibly with things you can perceive. You can still understand what a red flag would signify without having to be able to identify that specific denotation of a red flag. You may sense the effects of the red flag using the senses that actually matter in your experience of the world and thus posit their presence just the same as a metaphorically sighted person would by perceiving them through sight."

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I really loved Have Dog, Will Travel—Stephen Kuusisto ( 5 of 5 )

( excerpts )

45-minute audio of author interview with Charity Nebbe, Talk of Iowa public radio

Scores of guide-dog related posts from Kuusisto’s blog include early drafts of the book

Tactile Art -- A DeafBlind poet on art he can touch

One winter, not long ago, your parents invite you and your boys to join them at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum to visit its greenhouse. It is lovely to inhale the heavy air, which makes your lungs giddy. Smiling, you reach out—

Cacti.

So much for unfettered intercourse with nature.

As you tiptoe deeper into the garden, you find where the proper plants are and begin to examine them. There, among the pencil trees and ferns, you meet the most beautiful flowering plant.

It has a fan of smooth arching blades, and from the fist that holds this fan sprouts stems stretching out at odd angles. A matte-like human skin covers these stems, and it reminds you of a warm handshake.

Excited, you look for someone to read the label, because nothing is in Braille here. The first sighted person you find is your mother. You tug her to meet your new friend and you ask her its name. She looks and says there is no label. “Why,” she then inquires of you, “do you want to know the name of such an ugly plant?”

Taken aback, your mind slips inside its library and pulls out Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein. It is the story of a tall, loose-limbed gentleman who had been assembled in a laboratory. When he emerged into the world, however, he could find no one willing to be his friend—except for a blind man. They were engaged in a productive conversation when the blind man’s sighted family returned from their outing. Seeing the tall gentleman, they screamed.

Poor fellow, so unjustly treated! Well, you would be this plant’s friend. You decide that its name is “Frankenstein’s Handshake.”

I learned a lot from the presenters at the conference—I hope to post about that real soon now.

In the meantime, here’s what the experience was like.

The high point was volunteering.

( I like registration )

Access: physical and intellectual success & failure

( the good )

( the frustrating )

( I guess I belong here )

Back in October 2013, I had the good fortune to attend the “Disability Disclosure in/and Higher Education Conference.” It was a disability studies rock-star event: many of my favorite thinkers presented, and I learned tons of stuff. The focus was on disclosing in order to get accommodations: unusually, we examined both faculty and student experiences. An essay collection resulted from the bubbly stew of ideas, new from the University Michigan Press:

Negotiating Disability: Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, Laura T. Eisenman, James M. Jones, eds.

I sampled it via JSTOR, it’s also available on other electronic databases: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1012609341.

I was particularly delighted by the essay challenging stoicism and disability pride from Josh Lukin joshlukinworks. Josh floats in my ethereal intersection of disability studies and SF, and I first met him at WisCon. He's a wicked punster, a much-lauded teacher, and my kind of all-around intellectual. Josh rightly points out that when us social-model types push “disability pride” we can also create our own version of the “overcoming” trope we love to hate.

Essay nut graph:

begin quote
Once one realizes that one’s disability is not a moral failing, one is supposed, judging by the syllabi, books, and blog posts I have encountered, to embrace the social model of disability, become a proud activist, and write a memoir. I do have an unpublished draft of a memoir (Urgency: Growing Up with Crohn’s Disease), and I have been credited with activism in my teaching and scholarship. But the social model part and the pride part don’t work well for me, and I know from a number of students and from conversations in the disability community that I am not unique in that. So I want to consider why that might be, and how theoretical and science-fictional models offer alternative ways of being disabled–ways that are not really new discoveries on my part but that are already immanent in crip culture.
quote ends

I operate my powerchair with a joystick, like a gaming control but much sturdier, smarter, and costlier. It’s a metal post sticking out of a rubber hood. One can readily change the handle that attaches to the metal post. My joystick came with a carrot–shaped handle. I was looking for a better fit that didn’t require me to pinch my fingers. ( I didn't buy a neat one but hacked a cheap one that works well )

begin quote When disclosing to someone who is generally a positive force in my life, I personally have found it helpful to translate initial “But I wouldn’t have guessed that you have _________” or “You don’t seem like someone with _________” or “You are much too young/smart/pretty/good at things to be _____________” reactions as:

“I am trying to hard to reconcile my mostly positive impression of you with the highly negative, stigmatized (perhaps scary) perception I have of people with __________. Since I am trying to resolve this cognitive dissonance in your favor, I’m going with wishful thinking and denial.”

Yep, many people react as if denying the possibility that your brain could work differently from other people’s is a compliment to you. Because that’s how scary/negative/skewed/narrow/ableist their imagination is about people who have (whatever you have).

Then you get the people who are immediate experts on your condition because of a thing they read one time, the people who want to immediately fix everything, the people who wring their hands and want you to comfort them about the issue that you are having, the diet and healthy lifestyle police who want to figure out how getting this was all your fault for not doing everything “correctly,” the blowhard who wants everyone to be so tough they don’t need medication…a rogues’ gallery of helpiness.

Once I can parse/translate their reaction as being about them and not really being about me at all, it doesn’t feel better, but it reminds me that I’m not the one making it weird by seeking health care for a health thing. quote ends

begin quote Inclusion Daily Express saves you time while keeping you up-to-date on what people with disabilities are facing, saying and doing. Each daily edition features six or seven important disability rights stories—many you cannot find anywhere else—along with links to dozens of other articles, press releases, opinion pieces and disability columns. quote ends

sasha_feather