Patrice Jetter is a force of nature. She’s joyous in her clothes and her hobbies (sewing, painting, model railroading) and her confidence in small acts of kindness. She found love with Garry Wickham and they want to marry. They can’t afford to because they’re both disabled. Marriage would end their access to US Federal health insurance and income support.
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laceblade would undoubtedly say, This shit is wrong!
kestrell introduced me to "exo-cortex," a handy term to cover any external device that augments our sometimes-iffy human brain function. The initial exo-cortex was probably the sand-clock. Pen and paper is generally reliable, as long as one doesn't leave them somewhere. (Yesterday I lost track of both my keys and my debit card. Got 'em both back.) More recently, I've used Palm devices (in particular, my late lamented AlphaSmart DANA) and now an iPod touch and cellphone. begin quote Self-efficacy is different than self-confidence or self-esteem. It is not a personality trait, or a set of general beliefs about oneself. Rather, it is a subjective expectation of how likely you are to succeed at some specified goal. quote ends
begin quote But one of the advantages of comics is that you're drawing frame after frame after frame, so almost in the background scenes you can create this atmosphere that's following the reader around, that doesn't necessarily relate to the foreground action but is somehow always present. For example, the way the buildings look—I can show that over and over again in the background, so in some ways I think you can really put the reader in that place, just with all these repeated images. If there's mud in the background, you can show that in every frame, so the mud is following the reader around. If you're a prose writer, really what you're doing is just mentioning it once, you're not going to keep mentioning it ever few lines—"and by the way, it was really muddy." So it's this constant reminder of what the place looks like. quote ends
coffeeandink's Ablism: Comment policy clarification. I think the ground is being made ready to address some of the deeper issues: interdependence, disability hierarchies, the tyranny of "normal."
/rss to the end and click the "Add Feed" button.
begin quote It’s not okay to call a coward a pussy, or a bad thing gay, they argue, because there’s nothing bad about having a vagina or being homosexual. But there IS something bad about not being mobile! In fact, it’s no fun at all, just totally miserable. All other things held equal, isn’t it better to be not-lame than lame?
[... snip ...]
But even accepting that impairment to mobility is itself a sucky thing, MAYBE DISABLED PEOPLE DO NOT APPRECIATE BEING THE CULTURAL GO-TO FOR THINGS THAT SUCK. quote ends
sasha_feather proposed reclaiming "crutch" as a positive metaphor, like "tool" or "scaffold."![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
sophy for telling me about it.
If a constituency is perceived to define rights claims for "special accommodation" around individual medical conditions, then that group could be said to be self-serving and narcissistic — hardly the best climate in which to mount a social movement.
As I read (and teach) new scholarship on disability studies I see the same rhetorical sleights of hand being used to deconstruct ableist ideology without much critical reflection on the assumptions that underlie this endeavor. Siebers' book is a caution about how easily academic discourse produces the illness it seeks to cure. "We" all agree that the medicalization of the body has been harmful to persons with disabilities. "We" all agree that this model locates the "problem" in the impairment and not in the social and cultural barriers to full participation in social polity. "We" all agree that ideological state apparatuses reinscribe power on the body and render them docile. But as Siebers points out, the social model, by focusing on the social meanings of disability tends to dismiss the body as a kind of empty code of signifiers. That is small comfort for a person experiencing chronic pain or receiving dirty looks when boarding a bus or being denied access to a job, courtroom, or medical insurance.
One thing to keep in mind regarding a request for reasonable accommodation is that the accommodation does not have to be tied to the substantially limited major life activity that established that the employee has a disability. For example, a person with cancer may establish that she has a disability because she is substantially limited in normal cell growth, which is listed as a major life activity under the “bodily functions” category in the Amendments Act. However, her accommodation request is related to fatigue and nausea resulting from her medical treatment. Once the employee establishes that she has a disability, then the employer must consider providing accommodations for any limitations she has as a result of her impairment, not just the limitation that established her disability.
branchandroot