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4:38pm July 12, 2013

What’s FWD?

josiahd:

It sounds awful but I don’t know what it is.


Feminists With Disabilities. A group blog. Actually a mixed bag between really interesting stuff, and a lot of WTF as well.

But it had a lot of attitudes I hadn’t seen yet in disability communities before then, and was blindsided by. But that are almost normal on tumblr.

Its “ableist word profiles” were, perhaps unwittingly, a big influence on the whole idea that ableism is about what words you use. And said that words like lame and scab (as in the union term) were ableist, and any other words whose origin could even remotely be traced to disability.

It was also the first place I saw a really concentrated group of people who decided that THE disability rights perspective on mental illness is that psychiatry is almost always right, and to think otherwise is to be ableist. Like I’d seen that attitude in the consumer community before, but there used to be more acknowledgement of student viewpoints between consumers, survivors, and ex patients. (Abbreviated c/s/x.) Despite what some people from there told me about their direct experiences, the attitude promoted there was closer to c/c/c. (Of the three, I’m closer to anything-but-c, so I noticed big time how weird that was.  Especially because I’d rarely heard ableism discussed in quite that manner in pure-c communities before.)

There’s a lot of things quite common in tumblr that I never saw in my life until FWD. Some of them were good. Some of them appeared good at the time, but I now regret that idea. Some of them were just pure WTF from the start.

I think a lot of ideology was formed there that didn’t always look like ideology until you saw it spread everywhere.

Also a lot of autistic people found their commenting rules, both spoken and unspoken, quite difficult. I think I was given more of a pass than some people. Because name recognition. But lots weren’t as lucky. And there was emphasis on certain social skills, without anyone naming it, that people found very difficult to cope with.

Anyway you can read it for yourself. Do a web search until you find the blog. It stopped after a certain, pre planned date.  But the archive still exists.