So it’s the time of New Year’s resolutions (and if you live in Wellington grumbling about the weather).* The newspapers didn’t have much copy over the last couple of weeks, so they were full of: “50 ways to be healthier in 2010.”

So I was delighted to see this post on The Fat Nutritionist called Don’t be Poor (and other New Year’s Resolutions):

The traditional 10 Tips for Better Health

• 1. Don’t smoke. If you can, stop. If you can’t, cut down.
• 2. Follow a balanced diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables.
• 3. Keep physically active.
• 4. Manage stress by, for example, talking things through and making time to relax.
• 5. If you drink alcohol, do so in moderation.
• 6. Cover up in the sun, and protect children from sunburn.
• 7. Practice safer sex.
• 8. Take up cancer-screening opportunities.
• 9. Be safe on the roads: follow the Highway Code.
• 10. Learn the First Aid ABCs: airways, breathing, circulation.

The social determinants 10 Tips for Better Health

• 1. Don’t be poor. If you can, stop. If you can’t, try not to be poor for long.
• 2. Don’t have poor parents.
• 3. Own a car.
• 4. Don’t work in a stressful, low-paid manual job.
• 5. Don’t live in damp, low-quality housing.
• 6. Be able to afford to go on a foreign holiday and sunbathe.
• 7. Practice not losing your job and don’t become unemployed.
• 8. Take up all benefits you are entitled to, if you are unemployed, retired or sick or disabled.
• 9. Don’t live next to a busy major road or near a polluting factory.
• 10. Learn how to fill in the complex housing benefit/asylum application forms before you become homeless and destitute.¹

[these are quoted from a wikipedia article.]

There’s a visual illustration of the same idea at the food for thought pyramid. I disagree with the proportions, but I think it’s kind of beautiful. I particularly appreciate the large space given over to luck.

Oh and if you obsess over what you eat and exercise and still get cancer - it must be your attitude. “Healthy living” has to be a goal that is always out of reach, a set of behaviours that can always be added to.

The endless health tips and New Year’s advice are about policing, and making people feel bad so they will buy products (if you stop drinking one soda a day I will gratitously link to a Sarah Haskins Video). But that’s not the only purpose they serve.

The reason for repeating over and over again that we can individually control our own health, is to hide the fact that we can’t. It is to hide the fact that collectively, societally we could do heaps to improve people’s longevity and quality of life and we don’t.

I’d make a New Year’s resolution to write more about that, but I probably wouldn’t keep it.²

1. It’s a great, but obviously incomplete list - don’t have ancestors who were colonised, be selective about the country you were born in… we could go on and on. (back)
2. For the record my New Year’s resolution is to keep up with what Joss Whedon is doing. I’m setting myself up for success. (back)

There’s something that gets bandied about a lot in workshops when people are talking to newbies. “You don’t have to kill your characters to up the stakes,” they say. “There are worse things that can happen to people than death.”

This is… well, I don’t know if it’s true, as stated. But there are certainly many things that are more fictionally interesting than death (in most cases) that one can do to one’s characters.

The art of character torture is one that all writers need to master. For those writers who wuv their characters, it can be a hard thing to force them into dangerous situations, to push them to emotional brinks, and to take away the things they love. For others of us who are more cold-hearted, character torture can be a fun way to pass the time. When I was in college, I used to spend hours with a friend of mine plotting ways we could torture our characters.

To torture your character effectively you have to really understand them. You have to know what their fears are so that you can force them to face those fears. You have to know what they love so that you can take it away. If your character has a deftly, deeply created psychology, then you can accomplish subtle and fascinating things by forcing them to face the things that they, personally, don’t want to face, instead of just forcing them to come up against the problems that scare everyone.

To use TV as an example, if you really want to torture Monk (or Felix Unger from the Odd Couple), you make him use a port-a-potty. If you really want to bother House (or Sherlock Holmes), you make him face a problem he can’t solve.

Those are big, bold characters with big, bold problems, but it applies to subtler characterization, too. It’s a little harder to find cultural touchstones to tap into here, but literature is full of moments where a character is crushed because of a seemingly small event that symbolizes a great deal more to them because of their history.

Now, if you wanted to push these characters’ buttons, you could do it with less subtle devices. They all fear death. None of them want to see their family members killed. But good characterization gives you more than one tool with which to up the stakes for your characters — not just the hammer that you can use to devastate any character, but also all the little pincers and hot irons that are tailored to your character specifically.

However, when I see this advice handed out in workshops, I usually see it being invoked in an ableist way. “Your character doesn’t have to lose his life to show he’s sacrificed to show that he’s lost something. There are other things you can do that are even worse. You can…”

And here comes the ableist parade: You could mutilate him. He could lose his arm. He could lose his legs. He could become disabled.

Now, I’m not going to argue that becoming disabled isn’t a bad thing for most characters who start out abled. Losing an ability that you used to have is no fun. But you know what it isn’t? Worse than death. Being disabled is not worse than death.

Yet I know I’ve sat in workshops where these statements were made, and I nodded along, and I probably even repeated the sentiment (hopefully not to students, but I certainly don’t remember every thing I’ve ever said in class). It wasn’t until I was sitting here, thinking about ableism, that suddenly an old piece of criticism someone gave me on a story drifted into my mind — he has to lose something, maybe you could have someone cut off his arm — that I realized: Oh, hello ableism. How are you today?

I know that writers have different techniques for writing, and so I wouldn’t submit this as being proscriptive for everyone. But I’d like to ask people, including myself, to think about what it would be like if we removed disability from the list of things that we can use to torture any generic character with, the things like death, and losing family members.

It would still be a tool we could use when we wanted to torture a character whose psychology made them specifically susceptible to fears of being disabled — doctors who pride themselves on being able to cure everything and can’t deal with their disability because it’s a constant reminder of their failure to do so (to bring us back to House), but also piano players who fear losing their manual dexterity, athletes whose careers are built on being able to run, or even just people who are really ableist.

What would it be like if disability was portrayed as something that specific people feared for specific reasons, rather than being used as something unilaterally feared and reviled?

Another progressive blogger and I have had a few discussions about how we don’t see the word “lame” as really a big deal. However, we both concluded, it wasn’t really our fight and the stakes weren’t as high for us as they are for disabled people. So, that’s fine — we decided we were willing to believe disabled people when they said the word hurt them, and stop using it on the blog, and try to stop using it in real life.

I think I’m starting to get it now, courtesy of reading this occasionally frustrating thread at Pandagon.

The Pandagon thread is a consideration of safe space, or lack thereof, and what kinds of language are legitimately policed (everyone seems to agree there should be no pejorative use of the n-word) and what kinds of language are not legitimately policed. It was really, really starting to bug me that there (and in another location where the issue had been discussed) everyone’s go-to example for hypersensitive use of language policing was the word “lame.”

“Ugh,” said the aforementioned fellow progressive blogger to me over IM when I pointed out this dynamic. “If people are going to make an example of what’s oversensitive PC policing, maybe they should gore one of our own particularly feminist oxes, rather than picking on the language sensitivities of a related but not identical out-group?”

(Yes, I just paraphrased the fuck out of fellow progressive blogger, herein called FPB for short, which is why hir dialogue suddenly started sounding like my academic writing.)

So I started in from that point. But people’s constant defenses of I! Should! Be! Able! To! Use! The! Word! Lame! kept coming thick, fast, and with ever-more-desperate indignation.

Some of it came from people who themselves identified as “lame,” and you know, I’m not going to pick on them. If they want to change the character of disability rights activism, then that’s something they certainly have the right to do, and if the consensus ever shifts, I’ll re-evaluate.

But a lot of the arguers weren’t themselves disabled people. They just really, really, really wanted to be able to use the word lame. It’s fun, after all. And colorful. And also ACCURATE!

It’s not okay to call a coward a pussy, or a bad thing gay, they argue, because there’s nothing bad about having a vagina or being homosexual. But there IS something bad about not being mobile! In fact, it’s no fun at all, just totally miserable. All other things held equal, isn’t it better to be not-lame than lame?

(Yep, I’m basically paraphrasing someone, but because these arguments are very prevalent, I don’t think it’s fair to either quote them directly or name them. My purpose here is not to shame an individual, but to describe and argue against a common attitude, even though this individual did happen to express it at a particular time that was meaningful to me.)

And you know? I think I’ve made those arguments before, though I tend to do that kind of reasoning things out in private rather than on blogs because of my beliefs about what allies should and shouldn’t do. (I do not think it is a productive ally action to complain about tiny details that the ally has no particular investment in.) Certainly, I’ve heard these arguments. Recently, I was moderating a discussion in person, and someone made the comment that “writers shouldn’t cripple themselves by…”

I caught another audience member’s wince.

“Excuse me,” I interjected, “Can you rephrase?”

The gentleman did. Later, I caught up with him at a party, and said, “Hey, thanks for taking that in stride.”

And he started to argue with me — “Well, you know, we should be able to use that metaphor, because it’s accurate, it’s not a good thing to be crippled and–”

I interrupted, “OK, but even if that’s true, we know that it’s hurting the feelings of people who are in the community. And we don’t want to do that. Right?”

He nodded. I smiled. I moved away.

But while that was the logic I was using for a long time — that it didn’t really matter what the logic behind seeing this as an insult was, or if I disagreed with that logic, I still shouldn’t be an ass by using words that a number of disability activists have made clear are hurtful and perceived as ableist — I think I get the deeper logic now. Finally.

Let’s start with that point from earlier that it DOES suck — in this society — not to have the same freedom of movement an abled person. (Although of course, here, we’re already starting in with ableist assumptions, because a big portion of the reason it sucks is because society is set up for people with bodies we consider normal.) OK, so let’s rephrase. Having functional legs is useful. Therefore, the state of having legs which are not as functional as other legs is not as nice as the state of having normally functional legs. (Again, there’s some ableism around the concept of normal, but moving on.)

But even accepting that impairment to mobility is itself a sucky thing, MAYBE DISABLED PEOPLE DO NOT APPRECIATE BEING THE CULTURAL GO-TO FOR THINGS THAT SUCK.

And maybe — since people have been historically all-too-willing to relieve disabled people of the burden of having to live through all that suckiness — just maybe disability activists know what the fuck they’re talking about when they say that the constant condensation of visible disability with “suckiness” as a metaphorical cultural touchstone has real, concrete, and evil ramifications on the lives of people with disabilities.

Just maybe.

I think I’m starting to get it.

From WPIX:

PASSAIC, N.J. (WPIX) - A police officer in New Jersey, captured on surveillance tape viciously beating a mentally ill man, has been reassigned while an investigation into the incident is underway.

Passaic cop Joseph J. Rios III, a seven-year veteran of the force, has not been charged in the May 29 attack but instead has been assigned to desk duty. [...]

Holloway, who has filed an Internal Affairs report, claims he was taking his routine walk when he was suddenly approached by Rios and another officer in a police cruiser. Holloway said he was zipping up his sweatshirt, as requested by the female officer, when Rios launched the attack. Holloway said Rios jumped out of his cruiser and threw him against a car hood for no reason.

Holloway, who reportedly suffers from schizophrenia, was arrested after the incident and charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and wandering with the intent to purchase drugs.

This video from WPIX includes footage of protesters, including an interview with a protester who claims that she was also beaten by Officer Rios a year ago.

Although the assaulted man — like nearly all of the protesters — was Black, none of the news reports I’ve seen have pointed out that these assaults have a racist and sexist aspect. But although all kinds of people are assaulted by cops, the victims in these stories seem to be disproportionately brown-skinned men (both African-American and Latino).

Here’s the footage from the security camera. It really looks like the only thing that stopped the beating from going on much longer was the arrival of more cops.

It’s extraordinary that a surveillance camera happened to be aimed at just the right spot. Without that, everyone would dismiss Holloway as a liar (after all, he’s both black and mentally disabled, plus he now has an arrest record — so that’s three strikes), and this story would never have made the news. How many of the people of color who are arrested for things like “resisting arrest” are innocent victims of police assault, who just didn’t have the luck to have a video camera capture the incident?

I also wondered, was he targeted because he is disabled? From the footage, it doesn’t seem so; there’s nothing to indicate that the cop who beat him knew he was disabled. But maybe he was targeted for his disability, and I’m just not knowledgeable enough to spot it. I certainly can’t dismiss the possibility.

(Via Radley Balko).

Ampersand and I have periodically discussed the issue of ableist language. We’d both like to do better about purging some of the words that infest our vocabulary. In particular, the word “lame” has a tendency to creep into our statements, probably because it’s part of the sort of casual geek slang we both have a tendency to use.

We’ve made a pact — my husband is in on it, too — to try to note to each other when we slip and use the word without thinking.

Lately, I’ve been trying to come up with fun replacement words, particularly because I know that then I’ll be looking forward to opportunities to replace the ableist word with something fun. Cuz I’m a word dork.

My candidates (which don’t really work) are: Xander, as in “That’s so Xander,” and “I can’t believe you would say something so Xander,” because I really dislike Xander from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Obviously, that’s too in-jokey to pass real world muster.

My other candidate comes from the nerdy front: a friend of mine was recently reading some Victorian translations of medieval texts and coming across frequent usage of the term “brast,” which means burst or shatter, often with amusing faux-archaic add-ons, such as “to-brast,” e.g. “the spear went all to-brast.” Here’s an example of the term from Spenser: “Dreadfull furies which their chains have brast.” Another similar, out-of-usage word is “frush,” and its silly add-on “to-frush.” For instance from Shakespeare, “I like thine armor well; I’ll frush it and unlock the rivets all.”

None of these are particularly good replacements, even though they amuse me. But luckily Deborah at The Hand Mirror has an admirable list:

flimsy
inadequate
insufficient
unconvincing
weak
unsatisfactory
inept
pathetic
deficient
hollow
meagre
perfunctory

So, next time you have the urge to use inept ableist language, put aside your pathetic ableism, and be deficient no more. Don’t be Xander; don’t let your vocabulary go to-brast. Find another word.

(via Shakesville)

I’m getting sick of the-popular-kids-are-better-at-geek-stuff-than-the-geeks trope, which stinks of noblesse oblige. And there are a zillion other things wrong here. But I’ll still be giving this show a try, because I’m that much of a sucker for anything resembling a musical.

But about that preview: Note the unwritten rule in TV that it’s okay to cast a fat actress if she’s black (and especially if she’s black and sings). On the one hand, of course it’s great that some talented fat black actresses are getting work. On the other hand, these actresses are often typecast as sassy, strong-willed types.

I’d rather see fat black women cast in the wide variety of roles white thin men are cast in — when, for example, will we see a fat black female captain of a starship, playing gravitas instead of sass?

ETA: And also, what’s with the kid in the wheelchair? Is it even a speaking role? If it is, you’d never know it from this preview.

It seems to me I’ve seen this a few times — the character of the high school loser in a wheelchair, whose primary narrative purpose — other than being an icon of loserness — is to establish the evilness of the people who reject the kid in the wheelchair, and/or to establish the openminded goodness of the thin, good-looking protagonists who befriend wheelchair loser. (Examples: Heathers, Adams Family Values, Wicked.)¹

Diversity consists of real parts, not just tokenism. Given how very rare characters in wheelchairs are, it’s a shame that a high proportion are done badly.

And why are the thin, ablebodied, pretty, white people always the leads? It’s like, it’s okay to have a bit of diversity in a friend group, so long as we remember who’s really important.

(Via Roz Kaveney — congrats on the agent, Roz! — and a hip tip-with-a-quip ripped from the lip of Kip.)

1. At least the part in Wicked is a speaking, and singing, part, and there’s a bit more to the character. But I want to vomit every time I hear the able-bodied guy blow the wheelchair girl’s mind by suggesting that she can dance — it’s played as if she’s spent her entire life waiting for some able-bodied guy to legitimize her by finding her attractive. As if no one in a wheelchair ever knew that she could dance before the ablebodied came along to let them know. (back)

From The Independent:

Disparaging comments by adults about a children’s presenter have led to an angry backlash in support of Cerrie Burnell, the 29-year-old CBeebies host who was born missing the lower section of her right arm. One man said that he would stop his daughter from watching the BBC children’s channel because Burnell would give his child nightmares.

Parents even called the broadcaster to complain…  some of the vitriolic comments on the “Grown Up” section of the channel’s website were so nasty that they had to be removed.

“Is it just me, or does anyone else think the new woman presenter on CBeebies may scare the kids because of her disability?” wrote one adult on the CBeebies website. Other adults claimed that their children were asking difficult questions as a result.

Children asking questions! Horrible, horrible! It must be stopped!

There is some good news here: Many other parents have Burnell’s back.

…other parents and carers labelled the remarks as disgraceful, writing in support of Burnell and setting up a “fight disability prejudice” page on the social networking site Facebook. [...]
Burnell, who described her first television presenting role as a “dream job”, has also appeared in EastEnders and Holby City and has been feted for performances in the theatre while also worked as a teaching assistant at a special needs school in London. She also has a four-year-old child. “I think the negative comments from those few parents are indicative of a wider problem of disabled representation in the media as a whole, which is why it’s so important for there to be more disabled role models in every area of the media,” she said in response yesterday. [...]

“In some way it is a pretty sad commentary on the way society is now and that both parents and children see few examples of disabled people. The sooner children are exposed to disability in mainstream education the better,” said Mark Shrimpton at Radar, the UK’s largest disability campaigning organisation.

Even if a child is disturbed by seeing Burnell’s arm, so what? It’s up to the parents to explain to the child that all people are different — not up to the BBC to fire their host so that parents are spared having to parent their children.

That said, I think we know the core issue here isn’t frightened children — it’s prejudiced adults. As one disabled child care worker said in the comments to the article, “I found the children, once they’d asked about my arm, quickly moved on and became more helpful and considerate of my disability… Some of the adults I have encountered however have been downright rude.”

Thanks to Elkins for pointing this out to me. Elkins also recommends reading the comments at The Independent, “both for outrage and reassurance,” and adds that “The original comments on the CBeebies forums have all now been deleted. I guess that makes sense on a forum that little kids might read, but it’s somewhat of a disappointment.”

Joe Clark argues that the only way we’re going to get good captioning of online videos is if government steps in and regulates. Agree or disagree, it’s an interesting essay about a problem that — frankly — I haven’t thought about before.

Via Clark’s essay, I came across captioningsucks.com. I’ve never thought about how much captions suck, but they really do. Why aren’t they done in a decent font? It doesn’t seem like it should be that difficult to accomplish.

I’d tentatively favor government-mandated standards for captioning. I’d certainly favor legislation requiring videos produced by large companies to include good-quality captioning; for more garage-band productions, I don’t think I’d favor a mandate, but I would favor the government funding some resources to make captioning easy to accomplish even for folks with limited budgets and skills.

Another of my fumbling attempts to write about disability:

I have disabling depression. When I’m not medicated, I have constant panic attacks. Leaving the house is an enormous effort. This wasn’t always true — I have had problems with depression all my life, but acute problems that lasted a limited amount of time turned into chronic problems with the same degree of seriousness a couple years ago. I put up with it for about a year and a half before seeking medical treatment.

When I am medicated with a low daily dose of Prozac, I have occasional panic attacks, but I can control them with the use of Xanax. I take half the lowest prescribed dose of Xanax about once a week. Xanax can be an addictive medication, but to be honest, I don’t much like its effects — I certainly wouldn’t pursue them when I wasn’t having a panic attack. When I am having a panic attack, I need the medication to allow me to do even simple tasks. When I’m not having a panic attack, the effects of Xanax hold no interest for me.

I have a few problems getting medical treatment. Most major of these, at the moment, is that my number one trigger for a panic attack is a doctor’s office. I take Xanax before I go in, but my heart still races, and my blood pressure goes very high. My blood pressure is on the high side of normal when I am not in a doctor’s office, or when I have been seeing one doctor long enough to start to feel comfortable with her (which takes a long time).

Unfortunately for me, I’m in a phase of my life where I’m moving a lot, so I don’t have the luxury of having a single doctor for a long period of time. That means, every time I go into a physician, I have a bad panic attack. I tell the doctors in advance that this will happen, and that the high blood pressure is transitory. But, often, they don’t believe me. My very anxiety — the panic attack which is causing the high blood pressure — provides grounds for their disbelief. If I am anxious, then I am insane. If I am panicking, I am incapable of logical thought. I must be unable to tell them the truth.

The last time I went in to the doctor, it was to see a gynecologist for a genital cyst. I had never seen this woman before. She condescended to me; she tried to change me off of the established medical treatment I had established with my last long-term gynecologist; she tried to put me on a medication which is not indicated for me, and which (as I established with my last long-term gynecologist) would involve putting me at risk. When I told her that I had an established treatment plan, she was dismissive. She also manhandled my genitals in a way that was unpleasant — not abusive, but problematic for me.

I am afraid of doctors like her. She was in a relatively powerless position — the cyst resolved on its own — but I am afraid of what will happen if I am dependent on their treatment.

At the moment, I am dependent on someone’s treatment. I need to refill the prescriptions for my psychiatric medications. I’m terrified to be this dependent. I tried to take myself off of the prozac, to see if I could survive without it — once the medication had a chance to work its way out of my system, my worst symptoms recurred. It will take time for me to build back up to therapeutic levels, but the experience confirmed for me that simply ending my treatment is not an acceptable choice for me right now.

I need prozac to help me express the person I am, the person I always was, the person who can leave the house when I choose to. I need Xanax to control the rare, but existent, panic attacks which I have on prozac. These two medications have been successful for me, at resolving my symptoms.

I am terrified that my next doctor will refuse to give them to me. I am terrified that I will run into some philosophical objection on their part - particularly in regard to the Xanax. They’ll decide I don’t really need it, or that the risk of dependency is too great. They won’t listen to my experience with these symptoms, or my knowledge of myself. They’ll look at the person who is panicking, who is afraid of their power, and decide that I am incapable of logical thought.

I have an appointment to see someone tomorrow morning, and I am relatively sure that by the end of the appointment, I will be greatly relieved. She will probably listen to me when I tell her that I already have a successful course of treatment.

If she does refuse to help me, I can make an appointment with another physician. But given my unfortunate reaction to doctor’s offices (which makes this whole thing much worse and more complicated, I confess), every new appointment will be very difficult for me to make, and means another day lost to a panic attack. Insurance complications make this more difficult, since we have to pre-verify appointments with any physician. Seeing a new doctor is not an easy or simple thing.

In the end, even if the process is hard, I am sure that I’ll have my refills. I will have what I need to continue being a functional person. But right now I feel helpless.

And it reminds me of how lucky I am to be able to navigate the system in the ways that I can — without my spouse’s help, I’m sure that I would have less ability (and certainly less ease) to get the treatment I need. I have insurance, and class privilege, and other things. Still, in this particular way, I have experience with some kinds of disability, and I am terrified by the systemic barriers that surround it.

A friend of mine who was recently diagnosed with a very bad spinal arthritis that makes it impossible for her to carry things, or remain in one position very long, was telling me recently that she finds it very difficult to accept that there are things she can’t do anymore, because it reminds her of her vulnerability. That’s the terrifying thing here, being vulnerable, because someone else’s momentary callousness or willingness to put primacy on their preconceptions could have a major effect on lives beyond them.

Commenters, please respect the personal nature of this post.

Hiya everyone! Remember me? I haven’t been blogging much in past months — just rather random posts at my own blog — but I’m hoping to get back to writing and participating here again. Starting with this latest, crossposted.

About a month ago ABC news’ correspondent Jake Tapper reported on John McCain’s choice to not use computers. Barack Obama’s campaign had just released an ad criticizing McCain for being out of touch in a number of ways, including his self-confessed computer “illiteracy.”

Tapper explains for us, though:

Assuredly McCain isn’t comfortable talking about this — and the McCain campaign discouraged me from writing about this — but the reason the aged Arizonan doesn’t use a computer or send e-mail is because of his war wounds.

I realize some of the nastier liberals in the blogosphere will see this as McCain once again “playing the POW card,” but it’s simply a fact: typing on a regular keyboard for any sustained period of time bothers McCain physically.

He can type, he occasionally does type, but in general, the injuries he sustained as a POW — ones that make it impossible for him to raise his arms high enough to comb his hair — mean that small tasks make his shoulders ache, so he tries to avoid any repetitive exercise.

Again, it’s not that he can’t type, he just by habit, avoids when he can, repetitive exercise involving his arms. He does if he has to, as with handshaking or autographs.

Now, I have no doubt it’s true that McCain’s injuries affect him enough that typing causes chronic pain that the man would rather avoid. And I’ve also no doubt he has minions who can and should do many of the computer-related tasks of a busy U.S. Senator and presidential candidate.

But Tapper explicitly claims McCains lack of computer use is not a choice and is because of physical impairment:

It’s certainly possible that the Obama campaign did not know this, since McCain makes it sound in interviews as if this is a matter of choice, not discomfort because of his war wounds.

So, McCain is not computer illiterate, though he did once say he was. (That’s okay. I know a few septuagenarians on a steep computer learning curve.) And he can type, he knows how and can physically do so, Tapper says. It’s just so uncomfortable that he chooses not– no, wait. It’s not a matter of choice. His discomfort means he cannot.

Except that is total crap.

Plenty of us on the intertubes manage to tap something out now and then without full use (or any use) of our fingers, hands or arms. There’s voice recognition software and even free software that allows the somewhat tedious-but-effective typing with a mouse instead of a QWERTY board. I used the latter for a while last year and didn’t even need to sell one of my many cars or houses to make it happen.

Here’s my point: October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month. One of our presidential candidates has significant physical impairments that, according to Tapper, his own campaign claims are the reason he cannot readily use a computer. Of the 56 million Americans with disabilities, about 65% of disabled adults are unemployed.

Let me say that again. 65% of disabled Americans. Conservatively, that’s 6 out of 10 disabled adults without a job. Compare that to the national rate of unemployment, currently freaking everyone out at a whopping 6.1%.

The rate of unemployed disabled Americans has remained virtually unchanged since WWII, so you might say that it’s an issue needing knowledgeable and committed public officials addressing it. And McCain either does not know that physical disability is not an excuse for not using a computer, or he does not care if he is perpetuating the stereotype that disability makes a person incapable of a basic skill needed for employment in today’s workforce.

Here’s a one-minute YouTube video, with in-screen captioning and open audio description, on the topic:

Brief description of video: Karl Rove, McCain campaign advisor, states for a FOX News interview that McCain can’t use a computer because of his war injuries. His voice and the audio description continue as a number of disabled people, with prosthetic limbs, amputated stumps, and mouth pointers type at computer keyboards. A final collage of these computer users includes an image of FDR in his wheelchair, then fades into a photo of Obama and chants of “Yes, we can!”

From an article in The Boston Globe, by S. I. Rosenbaum:

SOMERVILLE - Here is Bonnie Denis: pierced and tattooed and dreadlocked, balancing on a pair of custom-painted, raspberry-pink crutches.

Here is Bonnie Denis’s right foot: small and calloused and square, the arch bent outward, toes overlapping each other like windblown trees.

When she walks, it feels “like there are a bunch of knives stabbing me,” she said.

So about three years ago, after a host of surgeries and years using a wheelchair, Denis, 30, made a decision.

The foot was coming off. She would find a doctor to amputate it.

But it was not that simple.

Doctor after doctor turned her away. The foot was “healthy,” they said. The tissue was alive; blood circulated through it. Amputation was not absolutely necessary.

Stories like this make me feel very libertarian. It’s her body, dammit! This — doctors who don’t seem to believe that people with disabilities may have some idea of what’s best for their own bodies — seems to me a pretty common theme in writing by and about disabled folks.

There’s more at the Globe. Bonnie Denis did eventually find a doctor who is willing to help her, you’ll be glad to hear. I also liked the bit about zombie bones.

Overwhelmingly sad news today: Harriet McBryde Johnson has died at age 50.

Image description: The photo shows Johnson in a flowered-print navy dress looking toward the camera. She sits in her wheelchair, though the image is a close-up focusing on her and not the chair. Johnson leans forward, right elbow on knee, chin in right hand. She’s a middle-aged white woman with dark hair in a very long braid trailing over her shoulder and into her lap. She’s not quite smiling, but looking interestedly back at you.

The Post and Courier of Charleston, SC, provides a preliminary notice, with a more formal obituary expected soon (the NYT will have something too, I hear):

Harriet McBryde Johnson, a well-known Charleston disability and civil rights attorney, died Wednesday.

“She worked yesterday. It’s a shock to everybody,” said friend and attorney Susan Dunn.

She was born July 8, 1957, and had been a Charleston resident since age 10.

She told The Post and Courier that she became an attorney because her disability-rights work had taught her something about the impact of law on how people live. . . .

Johnson, who was born with a neuromuscular disease, drew national attention for her opposition to “the charity mentality” and “pity-based tactics” of the annual Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethon. Lewis told the Chicago Tribune he had no intention of making peace with opponents such as Johnson. He likened the idea of meeting with them to entertaining Hezbollah or insurgents in Iraq.

The protests started after Lewis wrote a 1990 Parade magazine article in which he imagined being disabled. Among his conclusions, “I realize that my life IS half, so I must learn to do things halfway. I just have to learn to try to be good at being half a person.”

Some of Johnson’s writings:

Unspeakable Conversations in The New York Times, February 16, 2003 — The magazine cover story featuring her debate with Peter Singer on disability and personhood.

The Disability Gulag in the NYT, November 23, 2003 — On escaping the institutionalization that threatens so many disabled people.

As New Mobility’s Person of the Year in 2004, article by disability activist Mike Ervin

The Way We Live Now: Stairway to Justice in the NYT, May 30, 2004 — On the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Tennessee v. Lane.

Overlooked in the Shadows in the Washington Post, March 25, 2005 — Harriet on Terri Schiavo. (Same article also published at Slate and in audio at NPR)

Too Late To Die Young: Nearly True Tales From a Life, her memoir, published in 2005. Reviewed by Ragged Edge, excerpted in AARP Magazine, and included in a roundup of memoirs by disabled women at Disability World.

Accidents of Nature, her youth fiction book about a sheltered 17-year old girl with cerebral palsy who attends a summer “Crip Camp” and confronts how her physical differences and the accompanying ableism affect her interactions in the world. She and a friend also confront the ableism itself.

Speaking on video about Medical Ethics at Insights TV for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The first section at the link is “Perspectives on Antisemitism,” with Harriet McBryde Johnson directly below as part of the “Medical Ethics” section. Clicking on the link by Harriet’s photo and below the headline introducing her brings a pop-up window that includes a full transcript. Here’s the direct link to that window and transcript.

Wheelchair Unbound in the NYT, April 23, 2006 — Johnson writes about speaking at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Alas for Tiny Tim, He Became a Christmas Cliché in the NYT, December 25, 2006

A Step-by-Step Guide to Organizing a Protest Against the Jerry Lewis Telethon at disability activist Laura Hershey’s site Crip Commentary

13 Questions at BBC’s Ouch! on May 12, 2008

The Gimp Parade has an index label just for Johnson, and Barry has discussed her writing a number of times at Alas, A Blog.

More links posted as available.

Update: There are links to blog tributes in the comments below, as well as this more complete (and more ableist in language) obit in the Charleston Post and Courier.

Friends of Johnson have created this website dedicated to her life and memory.

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade

(Not yet proofread; please bear with me.)

For me, one of the most striking things about pregnancy has been how pregnancy affects embodiment. In particular, I’m referring to how societal interactions and structures make affect social psychology and social interaction. One of the things I’ve noticed in the last few months of my pregnancy is the tendency for people to move over when I walk by them.

I first noticed this among men, especially younger men. It was almost like they would jump out of my way when they saw me coming. Some were clearly being gracious and definitely trying to be polite and considerate, and others looked almost scared, as if I was going to go into labor on the spot. What was fairly consistent was a lack of verbal interaction or sustained eye contact. Older men (those who seem to be over 50), have had very different reactions. They tend to hold doors, make more eye contact, and even strike up conversations. I’ve notice a little bit of difference in relation to ethnicity. Since I live in a neighborhood with many immigrants and different racial groups, I have day to day interactions with many men from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. In my own experience, both Latino and West African men (not African American, but West Africans) are much more likely to have to smiling, friendly, excited reaction. It seems that American born men (or those who are heavily assimilated), regardless, of race are more likely to jump out of the way and avoid eye contact. It is possible that many Latin American and West African cultures are very pronatalist that men view pregnant women in different ways than American men.¹

As for women, it took much longer for women to do the move over thing. I’ve only noticed women moving over in the past few weeks when my stomach has been huge² My experience has been that women are less likely than men to give this pregnant woman extra physical space. When women do move out of the way, it feels different. It rarely feels like their scared, but I do get a sense of pity from some of the women who move over. For most of the women who have a noticeable reaction to my pregnant body, their physical reaction is not really one of distancing themselves. They tend to try to do helpful things like hold the elevator, and then ask the programmed questions like: “When are you due?” “What are you having, boy or girl³?” Women, especially older women, may offer their own personal stories. Although I’ve also had some elderly and young women, act in a way that I interpreted as rude. For example, I’ve had a few cases of elderly women rushing to get ahead of me in line, which I would generally ignore if I wasn’t pregnant. I think there is an interesting conflict between women who are slowed because they are pregnant and women who are slowed because they are older. In terms, of ethnicity I haven’t noticed many differences. The Latinas in my neighborhood tend to have the most favorable reactions, but I felt that I had more pleasant interactions with Latinas before I was pregnant, so it is hard to know how much pregnancy has changed my interactions. I know I’ve had several cases of women speaking to me in Spanish about the babies, and I speak enough Spanish to communicate a little. I’m not comfortable generalizing about racial or ethnic differences in women in relation to moving over, but I think there are other race/class/gender differences in how women react to pregnant bodies or the idea of pregnancy.

The other factor that seems to influence how men and women react to my pregnant body in public interactions is the whether or not I’m alone, with a woman, or with a man. When I’m with my husband, I don’t get as many move over reactions from anybody, male or female. Moving over seems to happen more when I’m with women or, especially, when I’m by myself. I think when I’m with a man, who appears to be my partner, people think I have someone to “take care of me,” so they don’t feel compelled to respond.

From a social psychological perspective, this has made me very aware of my pregnant body. I rarely forget about being pregnant when I’m out in public. Of course, the smiles and other reactions make a big difference in how I interact, but the one that I really notice most is the move over reaction. That reaction has made me a little more sensitive to people with visible, physical disabilities. I don’t see pregnancy as a disability, but I think there are similarities in how people reaction to disabled bodies and pregnant bodies. Moving over is definitely one thing both groups have in common. I can see how people in each group can have their sense of self altered by these repeated move over interactions.

1. I know in my partner’s culture–Nigerian, Igbo–there is a special word that means “mother of twins.” I’ve been called that by almost everybody in the family, male or female, and the connotation is very positive. (back)
2. Remember I’m carrying twins, and right now my belly is bigger than almost any woman I know who has had a baby, so I have wondered if the reactions of other women would be different if my stomach was a more typical size. (back)
3. The question about gender take on another dimension when the person asking finds out that you are having twins. People get really excited, and the most common question I’ve gotten is, “Do twins run in your family?” (back)

This is an image from the Icarus Project, a radical mental health support network. I saw it when it was reprinted in a local zine (more on that later): You can find a larger version here.

[Image description: It's a poster headed taking care of the basics. It is divided into 5 parts: eating, sleep and rest, exercise, schedule and herbs, meds etc. Each has a cartoon drawing, half with people who are doing things in a way that is portrayed as unhelpful, the other half with people who are doing things in a way that is portrayed as helpful.]

I wish I was disappointed; I wish I expected more of so-called radical organizations. But no, when trying to illustrate unhelpful eating patterns for depression they show a fat person eating a burger and fries, and they contrast this with thin people eating a home cooked meal served by a woman (the headline is my alternative title for the Eating Well illustration).

The illustration is not radical. Fat-hatred is not radical. Food-hatred is not radical. People can pretend that their disgust at a burger and fries* comes from their dislike of multi-national corporations. But their disgust at a fat body is in plain view.

* Which as far as meals when you’re depressed go seems pretty good to me. It has protein, carbohydrates and fat. It will fuel your body.

Did you know that Dorothea Lange, famed Depression-era photographer, had polio and that her experience with disability informed her work?

Ms. CripChick presents the latest Disability Blog Carnival on Disability Culture and Identity: “Here They Come!”

“I think it was perhaps the most important thing that happened to me. It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, humiliated me, all those things at once. I’ve never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it.”
—Dorothea Lange on disability

Over 40 bloggers weigh in on how the shared history, struggle, and culture of disability inform personal and group identity. This is an impressive collection of varied explanations on how what is viewed as a deficit by mainstream culture can be a binding force and a cause for celebration. Go and read.

Image description: The icon above, provided by CripChick, is a color image of a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo with the words “DISABILITY BLOG CARNIVAL” in bold black type across the painting. The image is a close-up of Frida in her wheelchair from the 1951 painting “Self-Portrait with Portrait of Dr. Farill” described in detail in both English and Spanish here.

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade

Wheelchair Dancer wrote an excellent critique of the ableism in my last post on shades of grey in activism.

The whole thing is below, but you should also check it and her other works out on her blog, Wheelchair Dancer.

On Making Argument: Disability and Language.

We all use disablist or ableist metaphorical language, and I bet most of us say something that is potentially offensive every day: we might be blind to this, deaf to that, pass disabled vehicles, chat about being paralyzed in a situation, etc., etc. I’m often uncomfortable with it — I never use the moron or cretin words — but, honesty here, I do say idiot. I never say, “that’s lame;” I almost never say blind, deaf, paralyzed, cripple, but I occasionally I find myself saying, “that’s dumb,” with full negative rhetorical force. Most of the time, if I slip up the non-disableds I’m with don’t notice; however, the disableds get it, call me on it, and we talk.

If you are feeling a little bit of resistance, here, I’d ask you to think about it. If perhaps what I am saying feels like a burden — too much to take on? a restriction on your carefree speech? — perhaps that feeling can also serve as an indicator of how pervasive and thus important the issue is. As a community, we’ve accepted that commonly used words can be slurs, and as a rule, we avoid them, hopefully in the name of principle, but sometimes only in the name of civility. Do you go around using derivatives of the b*ch word? If you do, I bet you check which community you are in…. Same thing for the N word. These days, depending on your age, you might say something is retarded or spastic, but you probably never say that it’s gay.

I’d like to suggest that society as a whole has not paid the same kind of attention to disabled people’s concerns about language. By not paying attention to the literal value, the very real substantive, physical, psychological, sensory, and emotional experiences that come with these linguistic moves, we have created a negative rhetorical climate. In this world, it is too easy for feminists and people of colour to base their claims on argumentative strategies that depend, as their signature moves, on marginalizing the experience of disabled people and on disparaging their appearance and bodies.

Much of the blogosphere discourse of the previous weeks has studied the relationships between race, (white) feminism and feminists, and WOC bloggers. To me, the intellectual takeaway has been an emerging understanding of how, in conversation, notions of appropriation, citation, ironization, and metaphorization can be deployed as strategies of legitimation and exclusion. And, as a result, I question how “oppressed, minoritized” groups differentiate themselves from other groups in order to seek justice and claim authority. Must we always define ourselves in opposition and distance to a minoritized and oppressed group that can be perceived as even more unsavory than the one from which one currently speaks?

As I watched the discussion about who among the feminist and WOC bloggers has power and authority and how that is achieved, I began to recognise a new power dynamic both on the internet and in the world at large. Feminism takes on misogyny. The WOC have been engaging feminism. But from my point of view, a wide variety of powerful feminist and anti-racist discourse is predicated on negative disability stereotyping. There’s a kind of hierarchy here: the lack of awareness about disability, disability culture and identity, and our civil rights movement has resulted in a kind of domino effect where disability images are the metaphor of last resort: the bottom, the worst. Disability language has about it a kind of untouchable quality — as if the horror and weakness of a disabled body were the one true, reliable thing, a touchstone to which we can turn when we know we can’t use misogynistic or racist language. When we engage in these kinds of argumentative strategies, we exclude a whole population of people whose histories are intricately bound up with ours. When we deploy these kinds of strategies to underscore the value of our own existence in the world, we reaffirm and strengthen the systems of oppression that motivated us to speak out in the first place.

Some background and ground rules. Though I am using Mandolin’s post in detail, I will be referring to her throughout as “the writer.” This is because I am not interested in making an anti-Mandolin conversation. I wish to begin a conversation about disability, language, authority, and power. Mandolin’s post just got me started.

Organizational strategy. That was the theory and conclusions. In the rest of the post are some explanations of how I got there. I’d like to go about this two ways: first talk about details of the post and then talk about implications.

Part 1: Details

But more on the systemic level. We cut off our own feet. If we can’t acknowledge we’re all trapped in racist and sexist systems, systems which compromise our most purely intended actions, systems that prescribe our choices and make us choose between lesser evils… what can we fight?

We commonly talk about us “handicapping” ourselves in a given situation. Here, the writer takes a more literal approach: we become double BKAs (below the knee amputees). This, in itself, might be a small oversight, except that the image of the amputation as a self-inflicted injury is troubling. It is even disturbing because it reaffirms the idea that disabled people are trapped, paralyzed (by their own doing or perhaps not) and helpless — in this case before the forces of evil oppressive systems.

Yes, I know, images and language like this are so routine that they are almost invisible. But that doesn’t make it acceptable. Language and its ideas still have effects. In this case, they are part of a system of images that the writer has begun to use whenever she needs to talk about a powerless situation in the identity and cultural politics wars. The image is not hers to begin with, but she takes it on and takes it over in a title and in the post that follows that title. And then, the same image shows up in, here, in the Grey Activism thread. It’s almost as if amputation of the legs is this writer’s way of indicating the victimization of a well-intentioned person who then becomes helpless either in the face of critical discourse or in the face of discourse systems that have power to wreak havoc on an innocent speaker.

The second detail is an example of how, once it becomes acceptable to take small images in brief words and phrase, it becomes possible to make huge paragraphs:

There’s a personality disorder called Borderline Personality Disorder in which sufferers have a great deal of difficulty understanding ambiguity. They tend to view themselves and others as either entirely good or entirely bad, a switch that will flip with great regularity. On a good day, they are all good. On a bad one, they are the worst person who ever lived. If you give them something they like, you’re an angel; if you speak a harsh word, you’re an evil person conspiring against them.

I tend to drive some of our legalistic commenters here crazy…

This is an awfully generalized description of Borderline Personality Disorder. Short on factual information, it relies on the safety of the You and Them dichotomy: You and those awful Them. And it highlights Their irrationality, Their craziness, Their suffering. The suffering thing is a key point. To use such language is to imply that people are prone to their diagnosis, stripped, in some ways of their personhood — to the point that they can become THEM, a safely otherable pile of flesh. The disability civil rights movement has worked years to educate people on language like this. We don’t “suffer” with our disabilities; we are not our medical diagnoses. To reduce us to our diagnoses is to suggest that there is a fundamental binary of human existence: able-bodied and not. And those who are not, suffer. And it offers an understanding of disability that is wholly medical and awful. There is no natural physical variation, no understanding of how environment and culture contribute to the understanding of disability; there is only the awfulness of BPD. BTW: there’s a tremendous amount of dispute in disability communities about how diagnoses like this are formed. It’s not like irrationality is objective. It’s not like, medically speaking, you do these things and BOOM! BPD.

Essentially, this is a coercive argument by analogy that is successful because of the awful image of BPD it uses. It kind of runs like this. BPD is bad. People who have it aren’t like you and me — they’re irrational. Crazy. And when we do these kinds of things — “trying to define THAT person as evil for THIS compromised act and making that declaration of good or evil a single, solid, reified thing” — we are exhibiting the behaviours of someone with BPD. So, don’t do them. You wouldn’t want to be seen as having BPD, now, would you?

And what to make of the writer’s very next sentence where she declares that she drives people crazy? If you don’t acknowledge the power of the words you wield, the border line between the real and the figurative is very porous.

OK. Enough. I’ve spent so much time on the literal value of the metaphorical details and figurative language because I think not recognizing the literalness of all of this is critical to the next move.

Part 2: Implications

The most important things to me here are one: the fact that one of the people posited throughout the post — the poor liberal who in trying to do good and be complex makes a couple of mistakes — ends up helpless before the dysfunctionality of the politics of the system. And two: the fact that, by the end of the post that person is represented as a double BKA with BPD: a double below the knee amputee with borderline personality disorder. A wacky, helpless, and perhaps dangerously irrational, disabled person. The details may seem small when looked at individually, but that final image is extraordinarily undermining of the disability civil rights movement and of modern progressive understandings of disabled people’s place in society.

Relying on the figurative value of disability metaphors tends to render disabled people invisible; it cuts us out of the conversation. And we are a part of those communities — a necessary part. Disability IS a feminist issue and vice versa (think choice, think end of life, think pre-natal testing, think any part of body autonomy). The constructions and experiences of disability in a divergence of racial and ethnic communities are important to us — for the disability civil rights movement is mainly white. We who are feminist, of colour, and of disability are critical to the conversation, but, to quote Vicki Lewis, we disabled folk are not your metaphor.

And we do experience the exclusion from the conversation in many of the same ways discussed over and over again in the past weeks. Personally, I get tired of trying to bring the disability angle to the table — others I know do, too. As a movement, in our daily lives, and even as a scholarly field in the hallowed halls of academia, disability and disabled people have yet to be recognized as full participants in the conversations about intersecting identities, power, the body, etc. etc.

In the disability movement, we often talk about interdependence and the way all humans are dependent, in some ways, on each other. We use these terms as a way of countering the very material point that disabled people are dependent, non contributing burdens on society, and we use it to challenge the narratives of able-bodied American self-sufficiency. I can’t speak for a very diverse movement, but, to me, one of the signature disability moves is to look for a collaboration that acknowledges the interdependence of all peoples while respecting and valuing their differences. There is no logical need for one of us to leverage off the other: collaboration not competition floats more boats on a rising tide.

So, the next time you need to make an argument about the value of your particular minoritized group, its place in society and culture, its history, etc., I’d ask you to look down and check whose broken back (metaphorically speaking, of course) you are standing on.

Some of my response to the email where she was kind enough to send me this is below the fold.
Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Bérubé at Crooked Timber has a good and fairly long post comparing the disability policies of Clinton, Obama and McCain. Kathy at The G Spot nutshells for us:

– Hillary Clinton’s disability policy? Very, very good.

– Barack Obama’s disability policy? Even better!

– John McCain’s disability policy? Complete and utter craptastic-ness.

Both Michael’s and Kathy’s posts are excellent and well worth reading in full.

I did wonder if some disability activists wouldn’t look at the candidates in terms of “right to die” laws and find McCain to be better on that issue than the two Democrats. (Although I don’t know if any of the three have specifically spoken about that issue.)

A bit from Michael’s post:

And I have to admit that I’ve been mightily vexed by [...] the phenomenon of the avoidance of disability qua disability. It’s as if we Americans have been talking about disability all our lives, as Molière’s M. Jourdain has been speaking in prose, without realizing it. Remember that debate about SCHIP? You know, the one we lost on Bush’s veto? What the hell was that about? It was about disability, folks – about children suffering catastrophic illnesses and traumatic injuries for which their parents couldn’t (and their parents’ dastardly, moustache-twirling health-insurance providers wouldn’t) provide. Vets returning from Iraq with PTSD or TBI (post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury) and being warehoused and/or underserved and/or neglected by VA hospitals? Uh, well, once again, here we’re talking about disability. Why in the world do we frame these things as matters of “health” or “employment” or “veterans’ benefits,” when doing so prevents us from realizing that we’re all touching different appendages of the 8000-pound elephant in the room? The subject is disability, people. It’s about our common frailty and vulnerability. Get used to it.

The newest Make/Shift has a great interview with Mia Mingus, a “twenty-seven year old queer, disabled, Korean transracial adoptee” who is the co-director of Reproductive Justice Now!. Mingus’ interview is excellent and covers a lot of ground.

The whole interview isn’t available online, but Aaminah Hernández quotes a passage:

… I was taught to claim my body as a girl, female, woman, but not as a disabled person. When it came to my disability, my parents looked to doctors, health-care providers, medical experts, and brace makers. I was not the expert on my body; they were. No one ever connected that my experiences with teh medical industrial complex as a disabled child would ultimately discourage me from seeking medical services (reproductive or not) in the future. Or that standing in my underwear in front of male doctors as they studied me was no different from standing in my underwear in front of any old men as they studied me.

For years I wore a brace on my right leg. I had some that went from my foot to my knee and some that went all the way up to my hip. My braces were made of plastic and/or fiberglass. In the Virgin Islands Caribbean weather, they itched, pinched my skin, and gave me painful blisters. When I wore them, I could hear horrible brace makers’ voices in my head: ‘that’s an ugly walk,’ ‘walk down the hallway again - and this time, try to make it prettier,’ ‘don’t worry, you’ll be able to hide the brace under your clothes - boys won’t even know it’s there.’

The invasion of my body at such a young age by people who never engaged with me about what I felt being told that my body was ‘wrong’ and ’something to fix’ over and over again…The ownership and entitlement of the medical industrial complex of my disabled body is, in my mind, no worse than the ownership and entitlement of the system of white supremacy of my body of color, or the ownership of the system of male supremacy of my female body. In fact, they are so connected and mutually interdependent that they are impossible to separate…

… The way in which I was receiving care was not about actually caring for who I was, but about making me fit into the mythical idea of ‘normal’ - and of course it was assumed that being ‘normal’ is what I wanted. I think one of the key issues for me around receiving medical care is that it is already working from a paradigm of ableism that pathologizes bodies. It’s not to say that all medicine is bad, but more that the particular way that I got treated as a disabled woman of color was about ‘fixing’ my body, as measured against an ableist (racist, sexist, heterosexist, etcetera) standard of what was ‘right.’”

The interviewer was Irina Contreras.

(Watch the ad before reading further if you prefer to avoid “spoilers”).

Read the rest of this entry »

From the Sacramento Bee:

Older, sicker patients could be allowed to die in order to save the lives of patients more likely to survive a massive disaster, bioterror attack or influenza pandemic in California.

It’s not how nurses and doctors are accustomed to doing things, nor how Californians expect to be treated. But it is part of a sweeping statewide plan being praised for its breadth, even as it rankles providers who will have to carry it out.

The new “surge capacity guidelines” released by the state Department of Public Health, depict a post-disaster health care environment that looks and feels nothing like the system most Californians depend on.

It provides for scenarios in which patients could be herded into school gymnasiums for life-saving care or animal doctors could stitch up the human wounded and set their broken bones.

The 1,900-page document lays the practical – and ethical – groundwork for local and county health departments, hospitals, emergency responders and any able-bodied health care worker likely to be called upon in a catastrophe.

Striking in its specificity and its frank focus on the need to suspend or flex established laws and to ration health care, the plan is being hailed as a model for the rest of the nation.

You really need to read the whole thing to get a sense of how the plan would simultaneously limit patient protections and provide freer access to care.

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade