9:56pm December 20, 2011

“

Removing ableism isn’t about changing lots and lots of words around. It’s not about creating the ultimate ideology and shoving it down people’s throats until your “anti-ableist” crap starts twisting around to result in damage or death to actual disabled people. It’s not about creating new “models” of disability, even if those are sometimes helpful on a really simplistic level.

It’s about really and truly and fully valuing us as equals within the human race, and going from there. And believe me truly getting what that entails is a lifelong process. Because if people saw us as equals already then most of what we believe and do, not just about disabled people but about all people, would be changed on levels that few of us can even begin to imagine.

And it can’t just be segmented off into doing this for one group of people, because how societies treat disabled people are tangled up in knots with how we treat all other people, oppressed or not, and because disabled people also face oppression in other areas. Most people seem to veer off from this part into memorizing a bunch of “social justice” ideologies and jargon for each oppressed group. Please don’t. Ideologies will never solve oppression, they just twist it into new forms.

”

Amanda (via goldenheartedrose)

#no seriously if you haven’t read at least some of Amanda Baggs’ writing WHAT ARE YOU DOING YOU ARE MISSING OUT GO GO

(via cool-schmool)

yeah, i’m about done with a disability culture in which people who have very different disabilities condescend to me how i need to have more “imagination” in how i see my own disabilities and how my own needs have to be subsumed under an umbrella that is failing me and a lot of other people. i deleted my initial reply to the post but i’m just feeling more and more pissed off the more i think about it. 

Truth. A lot of disability spaces are very single issue and lack nuance. But I’m rather critical of equality language. Right, you can’t segment disability activism from other issues, but I think we should be careful not to rely on assimilationist, monolithic narratives of “the human race.” We don’t need to deny our powerful differences in order to address the ways in which some groups are failing us.

It’s a very weird and surreal experience to read something and be thinking “Yeah that’s right, yeah that’s right… whoa. You mean that was meant in disagreement to me?  Wow that’s weird, because I agree with most of it.”

I’m starting to guess my words must have been similar to the words of people whose opinions ranged from different to mine, to the total opposite to mine.  And were then taken to mean the same thing as all these other people’s words (possibly in a “last straw” situation).   Because I can’t make sense of it otherwise.  I mean I don’t expect  agreement from everyone, but I know something’s wrong when I agree with someone’s words but their words are phrased in terms of disagreement with mine.  

So some responses to different pieces of this. 

I am not part of a disability culture, let alone one that believes in doing the things described.  I have been incredibly alienated by pretty much every variant on disability culture that I’ve ever encountered, and my writing isn’t meant to be an addition onto someone else’s culture, disability or otherwise. 

When I talk about equality, I’m talking about all people having equal value. Not at all anything remotely about being the same, forcing everyone to smush themselves into one dominant culture, or any of that crap.  I’m not part of that culture myself and have no wish to be, and think our differences cultural and otherwise are incredibly important. I tried to convey that but seem to have failed.  I’m not “relying on assimilationist narratives”, I’m a writer with serious language limitations (invisible in my better writing but very much there, just not in the places people normally look for them – see this post for more details) trying to convey stuff that’s inherently impossible even for people with better language skills to convey in language.   I think that one was the only part that actively pisses me off.  Not that I think it’s at all intentional (and probably couldn’t have been avoided) but still an infuriating situation.  This is something where I had two choices – use the exact words I used or no words at all.  To convey something so utterly and completely different from “denying our powerful differences” you can’t even imagine.  And I chose to use the words I had because I thought what was behind them was that important and then someone thinks I said that horrible idea because I used words like “equality”. (See, again, what I linked to above. Really. Because this is why I originally wrote it.)  Gives me very little hope of ever communicating certain things. Ever.

(In fact my language problems are a double edged sword, they allow me to see outside of language better than most people but simultaneously make my chances of using language to point at it successfully much lower.)

I never meant that any particular person’s needs had to be subsumed under any particular umbrella.  Some of the things that I’m writing about, I’ve literally never in my life seen anyone write about.  So they are also not meant to be some kind of addons to mainstream “disability culture” (or any other) including whatever umbrella they like to put people under, because I don’t think that would work out well for anyone involved. 

When it comes to imagination, it’s complicated. 

In some areas I think we all lack sufficient imagination to predict certain things and would argue with anyone who thinks otherwise.  If you think you can absolutely predict how things will play out in a less ableist society then I disagree because I think nobody has that ability. 

In other areas I’m talking about specific kinds of lapses in imagination.  And there – I am really, very sorry that I made it sound like you don’t know your own limitations.  I was sloppy and unclear:  I was trying to reference a lot of specific people I’ve had specific, detailed conversations with over the years, none of who had thought past a really simplistic idea of what ableism meant and what removing it meant.  Many of them did have impairments similar to mine, and were actively surprised to think of other angles than the standard “remove obvious barriers” thing. 

(Although – we don’t know each other.  People have to know me very well before they get a full picture of what impairments I do and don’t have, past and present.  I don’t (and, language-wise, couldn’t if I wanted) discuss all of them all of the time, so, not knowing each other, I don’t see how either of us could know what ones the other had.  The most you could know is that yours are unlike ones I’ve specifically discussed in your presence.)

Again, I’m really sorry I conveyed that you just hadn’t imagined enough or something.  I didn’t think to explicitly limit things to people I’d had conversations with about these issues.

Also a couple dynamics that affect my writing a LOT so I’m including them in case they make other things more obvious:

1.  I don’t know and can’t predict what my readers can be expected to know.  This can result in both too much and not enough information. Too much looks condescending. Too little looks confusing (and may also look condescending depending on what’s being left out). 

2.  I have some serious language problems. I can’t fully describe them.  But one thing that happens is I have to grab pieces of language I’ve seen before to try to approximate stuff.  People often expect a word or phrase to be attached to a whole string of ideas. When for me it usually isn’t.  This post goes into lots and lots more detail, was written ages ago after some miscommunication of similar nature.

ETA:  GACK. I don’t know how I got “don’t know your own limitations”. That was some kind of phrase-bank mishap. I meant that I didn’t mean to make it sound like you just need more imagination in how you see your own disabilities. Fuck, I’m not good at this today.  Anyway I don’t think I know you – and I was talking about people I do know.

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