7:23pm July 13, 2013

➸ "You don't need this junk. You need a cat.": What's FWD?

youneedacat:

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….

“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.”

OMG… this! - there was some good stuff there, but there was also a sense that something was majorly “off" and I wasn’t able to put into words what it was. But this explains so much.

It was like “disability rights and respect" except not actually if it meant redefining or discussing what being disabled is actually like. Or what (mentally) disabled people need. Something horribly static about it.

And it wasn’t just limited to mental disabilities either.

So “Disability rights, unless it’s your right to change the systems you’re stuck in in a major way"

Which isn’t disability rights at all.

Yes. Often it felt rather flat, ideological, and paint by numbers. Like a lot of stuff you see around tumblr. I find it disturbing when stuff like that doesn’t have enough…life, I guess…to it. Too much abstract ideology, not enough three dimensional people’s experience.

At the time, that had some interesting novelty value to it, but that has long since worn off.

The worst part is I think they were seriously trying to address disability issues. But they couldn’t address them as well as they wanted. Because the disability experience is about being alive, is three dimensional and constantly changing.

Since it was a group blog, though, it really varied by person. Some stuff was really thought provoking. Some stuff read like a dry textbook chapter. Some stuff was trying hard, but so far off the mark that it scares me that anyone takes it seriously, then or now.

But it was definitely the mental illness stuff that bothered me the most. It set the stage for a lot of what has followed afterwards.

The most common viewpoint seemed to be that mental illness was just like physical illness, and that taking a highly medicalized viewpoint towards it was a step forward. Even when the “mental illness” was simply a name psychiatry had slapped onto a long standing pattern of destructive, or non-standard, or bothersome to psychiatrists, thinking and behavior, like many of the personality disorders. (All if which were equally valid in the eyes of people who thought this way.)
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Notes: