Inside the Little Plastic Castle

thanks to Susan & Teddy Fitzmaurice, with grants from a wide variety of folks, ADA 30 - Michigan is a festival of disability voices. They're currently at week 4 of 9. Until 27 September, you can attend their daily free programming, mostly 2pm CDT (1900 UTC).

These are all virtual events. Closed captioning and ASL interpretation will be available for all. Audio description will be added for primarily visual events. There is no cost to participate. But you will need to register at Eventbrite to get a password

registration link is labeled "Eventbrite" at the home page[1]

https://mi-ada.org

Don't let "Michigan" stop you: program includes items of world-wide interest, such as personal narratives, advocacy strategies for IEPs, history lecture, accessible movement and dance, films, and much more!

I particularly recommend today's session with Tom Olin, Photojournalist of the disability movement. He was there for the noisy disability activism in the US, for the last 40 years. (24 August 1900 UTC)

Too many to list them all; this one looks great

True Inclusion is Revolutionary: Disability Inclusive & Accessible Organizing Practices

Learn with member Dessa Cosma how Detroit Disability Power is mobilizing Detroit’s disability community to fight for inclusion, rights, and respect, alongside and included with mainstream activists and protesters fighting for justice. (3 Sept 2020 1900 UTC)

[1] home page is also the landing page for all events, with a single link via workshop title. Very accessible information design -- thanks to Susan's lived experience with intellectual disability.

The HIV Crisis In The Deaf Community

This excellent article highlights big troubles.

https://intomore.com/into/a-sign-of-trouble-the-hiv-crisis-in-the-deaf-community/f8ff168f3766425d

Just one story:

A gay Deaf man new to DC attempts to set up an interpreted appoint at a queer friendly clinic; after waiting for 45 minutes he's escorted to a room with a video relay interpreter:

begin quote

All I wanted to do was to set up an appointment at a later date with the doctor and a live ASL interpreter. That’s all I want.

She looked at the note, smiled, and wrote, “We don’t do that here. ASL interpreters are expensive. This is a cheaper alternative.”

I looked at the note, shook my head, “No.” I got the feeling that this was not going to be a “Deaf-friendly” nor “Deaf accessible” and got up and started to leave when she grabbed my arm. I looked at her quizzically with her writing furiously on the note. She wrote, “You do qualify for our services but you have to understand, we can’t afford it.”

I looked at her disappointedly and wrote: “I find it ironic that the HIV-positive community is knowledgeable with the ADA law and uses it to the betterment for the community and yet can’t provide for their own.”

quote ends

Some context: Since Washington DC is home to Gallaudet University, they have a very large and skilled interpreter workforce. ( Two videos with ASL, captions, and audio )

I just turned away a door-to-door salesman.

Not surprising

He was selling the Bible.

As you do.

The Bible on DVD in American Sign Language.

boggle

What were the chances that a Deaf, ASL-using, Christian would answer the door?

I didn't tell him he'd hit upon a queer hearing former interpreter secular Jew

I was perplexed when I saw the title of the WisCon31 panel I eventually moderated on Monday AM: But the Master Has a Black & Decker Cordless Drill. How can we question literary standards that support the patriarchy/establishment/Man without ending up suppressing critical judgment, and while maintaining a common critical language? with Catherynne M. Valente, Micole Iris Sudberg, and Jennifer Dunne and myself as moderator

I recognized the title as a play on Audre Lorde's mind-opening essay, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." (It appears in Lorde's collection Sister Outsider, as well as the anthology This Bridge Called My Back). In hopes of understanding how to frame the discussion, I reread the essay. In four pithy pages, Lorde calls white feminists to account for excluding black and lesbian women from the panel at a 1979 conference.

But her essay goes much further, challenging feminists to recognize that women don't come in tidy one-issue slices, that we are interdependent beings who must cherish our multiplicity as our strength.

begin quote For difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways to actively “be” in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters. quote ends

As a well-read white daughter of the ruling class, the importance of difference and interdependence had been mostly theoretical. The truth of Lorde's passionately expressed opinion became clear to me when I became visibly disabled in 1993. Suddenly others could see only one possible me--a stereotype with no relation whatsoever to my life, my opinions, my goals. I no longer "looked like a feminist."

I was bummed that the title of Lorde's essay was well-known enough for a play on words, but the substance seemed unrelated to the panel's description. As moderator, I had some discretion in how the conversation would unfold.

Still and yet I didn't think it through. Even though I had Lorde's tools, and some experience using them, I didn't use my power to challenge this cultural appropriation. I could have said, "Nope! Ain't doing that panel. It's based on a misunderstanding of one of our fundamental theorists' ideas, and it just shouldn't be here."

Fortunately, the blogger I know only as BGF at And we shall march points out how infuriating it is that a WisCon panel would appropriate Lorde's rhetoric for a discussion that didn't address race, difference, or "the courage to act where there are no charters."

Thank you BGF for showing me another way to recognize my racism.