as small as a world and as large as alone

7:53am July 25, 2014

soilrockslove:

a-spoon-is-born:

soilrockslove:

portmanteaurian:

I’m skeptical about the idea that people can appropriate disabled experiences in the same way they can culture

Like…if you experience something that is similar to my experiences, and that is similarly debilitating

I don’t care if you have the same Disability Label I do, we still have a bond there.

Especially for psychiatric stuff, where diagnosis is mostly just based on identifying a collection of symptoms? If you have one less symptom than you need to earn the label, it doesn’t make the symptoms you DO have any less real

Clatterbane:

#seriously  #also they’re generally shit at recognizing patterns  #and applying appropriate labels  

And besides all that - if you have certain experiences, you have those experiences.  There’s no way you can be “appropriating” them.  They are happening to you and you can talk about them.

And if certain ways disabled people make their lives better also help you - it’s ok to do them!

(Of course there are ways of being a dick when talking about disability, and it’s better if people avoid being a dick.  But that’s a separate issue)

I really don’t understand this at all, is it in response to a specific situation that I’m unaware of?

When I think of the appropriation of disability experiences, I’m thinking of stuff like abled  musicians or dancers using mobility aids like crutches or wheelchairs to invoke othering and horror, or narratives from disabled people being rewritten or processed by abled people for an abled audience for “inspiration” purposes, or abled people using the words of one disabled person against (to silence or refute) other disabled people.

All those things cause harm.

If we’re talking about this at an individual interpersonal level, if someone sees something I write or we’re having a meatspace conversation, and I talk about something I experience and they say “me too, and your coping mechanisms would help me too”, then that’s 100% fine.

But if the response is something like, “well I experience this too and I’m not disabled, therefore neither are you”, then THAT is harm (ableism). But not necessarily appropriation.

Appropriation would be if someone who is abled, say, pretended to have a disability for a year as an “experiment”, and then made a career out of explaining to abled people what it’s like to be disabled. And say they wrote a book about it, and people buy that and believe that more/over the ACTUAL experiences of disabled people. That is massively harmful, AND appropriation.

I mean, when talking about “appropriation” it means that someone with power over you takes your story or your image or your identity and misrepresents it (or in some way falsely claims it as their own) to a larger audience that THEY have access to, and that you do not (or you are seen as ‘too biased’ because your experience IS authentic, as horrible as that is).

In other words, that ^ is how people can appropriate disabled experiences that same way they can culture.

Oh yeah, this is a response to several specific things that have been happening.

Everything you said above makes sense.  And Slashmarks has useful commentary too.

But recently people have been arguing that using interaction badges (those colored things that let people know if you are up for talking to people or not) at *any* Con except Autreat would be some sort of appropriation. >.<

Or getting into elaborate and sharp-edged discussions over who is “allowed” to use AAC or a walker or glasses.

And I’ve been seeing several blogs I follow getting questions from nervous young people who have ADHD or Anxiety or think they are Autistic but don’t have a diagnosis, asking if it is ok if they talk about their own stimming.

And none of those examples are *actually* appropriation.  But still the word gets used. >.<  And having that level of fear and hostility around people who are just trying to figure out what their disability needs are doesn’t help anyone.

Yes, exactly, that.

And it really doesn’t help that the word ‘appropriation’ gives it this sound of legitimacy, so that people who know what actual appropriation is, respond to these descriptions with some level of skepticism, like “well appropriation is a real thing and we have to be careful of it and here’s how it would work if it was really appropriation, and etc.”  When… that’s not what’s going on here.  Real appropriation was never on the table, was never what was happening, was only a specter used to make anti-disabled witch-hunts, the old kind, the kind we’re used to, the kind where people are trying to root out 'fakers’, sound more legitimate.

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