BADD

Blogging Against Disablism Day is coming up. Watch this space on May 1st.

Promises and Trust, Words and Linguistics

Following my previous post, I very much appreciated metal sunflower's response:

This is an open letter, and if I thought that it would be welcome, I’d have started it with the words “Dear Incurable Hippy”. But if I’m angry with people, the last thing I want is for them to be civil without saying anything helpful. So I’m not going to do it here.

What I would like to say is that the Sheffield Fems as a group have been wrong, and have done wrong, and that I, personally, have done wrong. And for all of that, I am sorry.

I don’t want to try to offer any glib explanations.

I have been wrong. I haven’t done enough. I saw your post last time you publicly showed how angry you were. I saw it and brought it up at a meeting and asked that something be done about it. I didn’t follow up on it. I should have done. I should have kept asking, and kept looking for different venues, and kept insisting that we did something about the pub, and I didn’t do any of those things. I don’t hold the Sheffield Fems email account, and I used that as an excuse to distance myself from it, and from you.

I am very, very sorry.

As of yet, we haven’t had to pay for the use of the room in the University Arms. But that doesn’t make it right. I can’t - and wouldn’t - argue with any other point you make. You’re right. And it’s my fault as much as - if not more so - than anybody else. Because I was the one who first saw the post you wrote last time, and I didn’t do enough for you.

Although I can see that by now, it’s unlikely you’d ever want to associate with me (or with the fems in general), I would like to promise you that this time, I won’t let it rest. As I should have done the first time, I consider myself warned. I am ashamed of myself.

I have been ablist. You’d think I’d know better. I will try my hardest to make up for that, and make sure that I don’t do it again.

I hope you can accept this as a sincere apology, but I understand if you can’t. Either way, and regardless of whether we ever meet (although I hope that we do, one day), I wish you well.

I appreciate her sincerity and determination, however belated. In the most recent Sheffield Fems minutes, they say,

2. We're having another crack at looking into moving the meetings. Any suggestions more than welcome... we need somewhere with a private room we can book long term, that's accessible by all, is central and is free/ really really cheep! This is a difficult list of requirement to meet so please suggestions!!!

It's certainly less enthusiastic, but hopefully there is determination which is not shining through!

When I thanked metal sunflower for her acknowledgement and apology, I did so because I was genuinely moved by her post, and I was appreciative of it. I also felt vulnerable - did I dare believe they'd sort this out? Did I dare thank them in advance?

I really, really hope that a premature gratitude doesn't make me look a fool. I want them to sort this out for other women to be able to join them, should they want to. I want my words and experiences to have got through. I really, really hope they sort this out with the urgency it deserves.

---

In other news, because of the snow I am tempted to remain in my latibule during my succisive hours, to avoid labascating on the ice and requiring an odynometer.

Thankfully I am not too much of a philargyrist, during this credit crunch, though I could do with a few quid I have to admit. I wonder if pound coins are plenispheres? In any case, I don't addecimate, which must save me a few bob, though doubtless provokes theomeny. And no amount of veteratorian pleas from the numerous charities who are writing to me at the moment will allow me to give them any more.

I wonder if the current economic situation is essomenic, or whether it will improve, or indeed worsen?

In penarious matters, I could do with stocking up, certainly. I won't be behaving pamphagously unless I do. I am not nequient in cooking, so can rustle up a nice meal, but fresh ingredients would be a bonus. Let's hope there is no hirculation or other pomarious problems when I need to buy fruit. Ruriculous people may be able to advise.

I keep meaning to do an ipsographic podcast for this blog, but haven't done it yet. I do hope this is not boreism.

You, too, should save the words.

Sheffield Fems and Inaccessibility

Last November I wrote a post about my local 'feminist' group and their meetings being held upstairs in a building without a lift.

I was told that they had discussed the issues but didn't want to meet somewhere that would alienate non-students. Other than that, I have seen the agenda and minutes for each subsequent meeting, and it has not been mentioned.

They also wrote a post on their blog about it. The post is copied below, and my comments are in bold italic

We are still trying to find a new place to meet that has disabled access. Currently we meet upstairs in the University Arms which has no disabled access at all, although we keep being told they are working on it! (Personally I think they need a good kick up the arse on this because they’re been saying that for a while now and nothing has changed!!!)

Is it the pub that needs a kick up the arse? Or the customers who continue to use it?

However there are certain limitation on where we can meet as well…

A lot places charge to book rooms which we just can’t afford! Any fundrising we do we want to be using for campaigns and charities not just on booking a room (and some of them are really expensive)

They are now paying to use the inaccessible room, which makes me wonder about the above point.

It has been suggested several times that we use the Student’s Union building. We are a university group so would be entitled to book rooms, but we are also open to none student and the union building is not open to the public in the evenings (it is possible to sign people in) and we don’t want to alienate none students either! There maybe the possibility of booking Coffee Revolution, but this again does require that it ‘makes money’ and if that means that we have to guarantee a certain amount of sales this could be a problem (I’m going to investigate this)

It is possible for non-students to be signed in. It is not possible for people who can't climb stairs to climb stairs. Who's being alienated?

So we need to find somewhere free, but we would also, ideally like to find somewhere with a more relaxed atmosphere as we have found that this results in more welcoming and relaxed meetings, which is important to us. Particularly when we have new members or are discussing sensitive issues we have found that atmosphere is important and sterile meetings rooms can be rather intimidating. Equally we do need a private room. For a while we met in the downstairs bar area of the University Arms and found that we weren’t able to have open discussions and debate or even hear each other half the time!

How great is an excluding, exclusive atmosphere? How relaxed is that?

This is an issue that is discussed fairly regularly in meetings but one we are yet to resolve! Trying to find the balance of a venue that is accesible and welcoming to all and will not take all our money is really not as easy as it should be. Please let us know if you have suggestions either through the website or through email (I shall apologies in a advance if I forget to the reply to emails, I have a mind like a sieve! I do read all the emails and all points are taken on board, but sometimes I forget to reply. *Sorry*) and feel free to contact the University Arms and tell them to hurry up with the disabled access!

I don't know whether to be reassured that it is discussed regularly. It is virtually never on the agenda or in the minutes. What does that say about the discussion? And if it's discussed that regularly, why hasn't something been done?

You can't put all the blame on the venue you choose to use. You choose to use it!

I am beyond being diplomatic about this. I think it's shit, frankly.

And then tonight I got an email from them with the following sentence in it:

We talked extensively about the pros and cons of all the suggestions made and tried to find the most inclusive solution that meets the needs of as many as possible

Sounds promising? Nope. They're talking about men. You've got to be inclusive of non-students (of which I am one), and men. But disabled women, nope. No hope.

It takes a rich man to pour such scorn on the poor

by Matthew Norman.

As the disability defiant Churchill would agree, an army must carry its wounded

Please don't take this the wrong way, by reading into it any witless cockney rhyming slang intent that isn't there, but the man behind this new assault on our benefit-dependent poor would appear to be a total investment banker.

Perhaps I do David Freud, architect of the White Paper on welfare reform, a disservice. Maybe, during all his years raising £50bn for the likes of Railtrack and EuroDisney, Mr Freud sat up night after night with the ProPlus, studying the issue until dawn broke over a lavish home far removed, we may guess, from the sink estates he claims he wants to salvage from workless despair.

And yet, by his own words, it seems not. "I didn't know anything about welfare when I started," he told The Daily Telegraph in February, "but that may have been an advantage... In a funny way, the solution was obvious." The special hilarity here, apart from the notion of any obvious answer to so ferociously complex a social conundrum, is how long he took to travel from absolute ignorance to omniscience.

Hired by the Works and Pensions Secretary James Purnell to address this small matter, it took him – wait for it now; just wait for it – three weeks to research and write his initial report. Admittedly by New Labour policy-creation standards, this is hardly a rush job. But by any more conventional measure, 21 days is on the brisk side for so monumental an intellectual challenge.

Still, let's not fall into that very trap by rushing to judge Mr Freud as a man prone to the lure of the simplistic. Indeed, writing in yesterday's Times, he touched impressively on the thinking behind the wizard wheeze of forcing long-term incapacity benefit claimants back to work. "Some of our greatest national heroes suffered from disabilities," he explained, "from Nelson with his lost eye to Churchill with his 'Black Dog' depression, to the physicist Stephen Hawking..."

So there it is. Should you happen to be one of history's greatest maritime warriors, or suited to safeguarding the country from Nazi tyranny while moonlighting as a Nobel literature Laureate, or the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics with rare insight into cosmology and quantum gravity, you really have no excuse for allowing a disability to keep you marooned on the sofa watching Jeremy Kyle.

It's the rest I worry about. For every Churchill manqué, Nelson wannabe and putative Prof Hawking, there may possibly (I haven't spent three weeks on this, so excuse the caution) be others who aren't up to much on the work front. They might suffer from crippling back pain, arthritis, or agoraphobia. Plagued by chronic depression, but denied the spur of having Hitler's army poised across the Channel, they might lack the motivation to clean offices or ask "fries with that?" in return for the minimum wage.

Or they might simply be too battered and bruised by the confidence-sapping, skills-denying residue of a shameful apology for an education to care less. Inevitably a portion of the millions subsisting on a benefit designed to make the unemployment figures more palatable are, to borrow from Mr Purnell, playing the system. And while we might argue whether their reluctance to work makes them lazy or inadequate, we surely agree that they are the walking (or slouching) wounded too; and that, as that champion of disability-defiance Winston Churchill would agree, an army must always carry its wounded.

This, it seems to me, is the crux of the debate. To Mr Freud it may be about gaining the entrée into the peerage or quangocracy men with untold bonus millions tucked away often crave. For Mr Purnell, who mollifies on the record while briefing the papers off it that he's one tough muthah with one gigantic cudgel, it's presumably about ingratiating himself with the Sun and Daily Mail with his summer 2011 leadership campaign in mind. For some of us, however, it's about clinging to what vestiges of a civilised society remain to us.

The fact that nothing significant will change – that this Bill will have its teeth filed down to the stumps by that gallant cabal of backbenchers who remember why they joined the Labour party in the first place – is not the point. Nothing important will change because in this area nothing ever does. Soon after taking power, in the week he chartered a 747 to Seattle for £700,000, Mr Tony Blair floated the intention to trim "workshy" single mothers' benefits by £11 per week. He earned a few nice headlines, and the reflex disgust from the centre-left that was also mother's milk to him, but the political price of such malevolence was too high, and the proposal was quietly buried.

This latest sub-Thatcherite, far right-wing political posturing may come loosely disguised in the raggedy cloak of stick-and-carrot philanthropy, but it would come at a higher price still. The wilful stupidity of the timing, with at least a million poorly paid jobs about to vanish, needn't detain us. The concept of punishing the poor for receiving the assistance that is their right, by making them dig the gardens of the better off, feels like a pastiche of the vindictive nihilism of the rock-breaking Alabama chain gang.

What stinks worse than the idea is the tone. From the pious, cruel-to-be-kind brayings of the Freud-Purnell pantomime donkey, every word emanating from the rear end, they seem confused into thinking that the jobless have a lesser stake in this society than the employed, and believe in the deserving and undeserving poor. To watch a minister with a plumply padded pension and a free widescreen telly and, of all creatures, an investment banker threaten those on £69 per week is to observe the unspeakable in pursuit of the unemployable.

The only way to address the syndrome of long-term dependency is through education. It requires massive, sustained public investment in buildings, equipment and, above all, teachers, and knowing that's not going to happen either the grown-up government accepts, as an unavoidable fee for a moderately civilised democracy, that some people will take liberties to secure as much each week as Mr Freud might spend on a bottle of claret, if he was pulling his horns in.

In the absence of schooling worthy of a developed nation, you turn a blind eye to the alleged scroungers not only because the risk of denying the more deserving their dignity is truly unthinkable, but because the lazy and above all the children of the lazy deserve some dignity too. What you don't do is further stigmatise the poor, the sick, the illiterate, the weak, the befuddled and the inadequate for the delight of tabloid editors.

"Love and work, work and love... that is all there is," said Sigmund Freud, and in a utopian world all of us would have oodles of both. Back in the world as it is, meanwhile, another of his quotes comes to mind. "If you can't do it, give it up!" he said. It's advice James Purnell would have done well to consider before unleashing Siggy's great grandson on his three-week crash course in welfare reform.

DAN Press Release

DISABLED PEOPLES' DIRECT ACTION NETWORK

PRESS RELEASE (3/12/2008)

DISABLED PEOPLE TAKE DIRECT ACTION IN CENTRAL LONDON TO PROTEST AND DRAW
ATTENTION TO NEW BENEFIT HARASSMENT

Instead of celebrating the International day of Disabled People today, we -
and our supporters - are in central London protesting against the
government's
"Employment Support Allowance" (ESA) and "Work Capability Assessment" (WCA)
which are replacing "Incapacity Benefit" (IB). This punitive economic attack
will hit thousands of the poorest in society, forcing them further into
poverty and a discriminatory job market, while thousands more are losing
their jobs due to the deepening recession.

A DAN spokesperson said: "If the government were sincere in their attempts
to help Disabled Claimants, they wouldn't be cutting benefits or adding new
hoops in the process. They would target discriminatory employers and fully
appreciate the difficulties those with Invisible and Fluctuating conditions
will have in the job market. This is a cynical exercise designed to move the
goal-posts in assessments and ensure that many will no longer qualify for
the benefits they have been legitimately receiving."

* Political and media spin - suggesting there has been significant
increases in Incapacity Benefit claims - is misleading. The DWP confirms
there has actually been a drop in IB claims since 2000.

* A much higher percentage of Disabled People than previously are now living
in the community and claiming benefits, rather than being institutionalised.

* A long hours / short breaks culture (instead of providing flexi-time or
work from home) makes it harder for Disabled People and those with medical
conditions to cope with employment.

* There is a lack of access to meaningful education and training for
Disabled People, leading to a lack of qualifications, job skills and
therefore decent jobs with adequate incomes.

* ESA and the WCA is an even more punitive benefit and assessment than the
previous procedure (IB). Claimants who fail the new assessment will lose
entitlement to Disability Living Allowance (DLA) as well as ESA.

Access to Feminism

Among the many words which I may use to define myself, two key ones are feminist and disabled.

You wouldn't think these two identities are mutually exclusive, they certainly shouldn't be. Feminists, fighting for equality and justice for women, include black women, lesbians, refugee women, disabled women, don't they?

Some references:
Feminism, Gender & Disability:

. Non-disabled feminists continue to treat disability as a
side issue, an optional extra and in no way part of the so-called mainstream
academic or political debates. The disabled people's movement - while
many and sometimes the majority of its activists are women - is still
informed by political and theoretical debates which strangely sideline
women's experiences and issues.

[...]

A failure to understand the social model of disability lies at the heart of the
dominant reaction to the situation where children are having to provide
support to their disabled parent. Challenging the medical model of
disability and the dominant concepts of independence and dependence can
help us to promote disabled women's human and civil rights.

[...]

As Liz Crow writes in Encounters with Strangers, we need to put back the
experience of impairment into our politics. We need to write about,
research and analyse the personal experience of our bodies and our minds
for if we don’t impose our own definitions and perspectives then the non-
disabled world will continue to do it for us in ways which alienate and
disempower us.

Feminist Disability Studies:

The author discusses shortcomings in the women's therapy community's response to disabled women and suggests some analysis of the phenomenon of what she calls the "active unwillingness to know."

[...]

DePauw reflects on the often misunderstood and ignored intersection of gender and disability, an intersection she sees as a "final frontier." Feminist issues often have revolved around the female body and the exploitation of it; when disability issues are raised, it can work to disrupt and complicate issues of exploitation and control of female bodies and identity.

[...]

The feminist movement is not sufficiently conscious of its own "ableism." Feminists who criticize the traditional sex roles of wife and mother are insensitive to the fact that women with disabilities are taught that they are asexual, as oppressive a message as that conveyed by heterosexism. What is more, feminism's strategy of complete separation from patriarchal society ignores the fact that women with disabilities experience constant and tangible barriers such as physical inaccessibility. The writer suggests that women with and without disabilities need to communicate, so that a new critical feminist anthropology can be engendered; an anthropology that will take not only gender into account, but also sickness, disability, and age as powerful shapers of self and society.

[...]

This paper analyses how disability informs and complicates gender identity for women with disabilities and demonstrates that disability is a feminist issue. The first section underscores the dual silence of women with disabilities who remain largely unheard of, both in feminist literature and in the disability rights movement.

[...]

The second section of this paper suggests possible points of entry into several debates within feminist literature that would be broadened or transformed by a disability perspective. Issues of reproductive rights, control of women's bodies, newborn's right to treatment, the construction of gender as informed by disability, and sexual representations are among the issues analyzed.

[...]

the last section of this paper analyzes various strategies for change, including standpoint or minority models and strategies within feminist thought that may be useful or emancipatory for women with disabilities.

[...]

how applying a “disability lens” and reflecting the values and vision of disability feminism can help us bring the voices and visions of disabled women and girls to the policy arena and to feminist research, policy and advocacy agendas.

[...]

feminist critical analysis does not usually recognize disability as a category of otherness (as it does with race, class, and gender) unless the study specifically states this focus.

[...]

an articulation of feminist Disability Studies as a “major critical subgenre within feminism.” She asserts that feminist Disability Studies can be located in the broader area of identity politics if discourses of the body marked as deviant are included.

[...]

Feminist disability theory augments the terms and confronts the limits of the ways we understand human diversity, the materiality of the body, multiculturalism, and the social formations that interpret bodily differences. The essay asserts that integrating disability as a category of analysis and a system of representation deepens, expands, and challenges feminist theory. To elaborate on these premises, the essay discusses four fundamental and interpenetrating domains of feminist theory: representation, the body, identity, and activism, suggesting some critical inquiries that considering disability can generate within these theoretical arenas.

[...]

[Feminist disability studies] situates the disability experience in the context of rights and exclusions. It aspires to retrieve dismissed voices and misrepresented experiences. It helps us understand the intricate relation between bodies and selves. It illuminates the social processes of identity formation. It aims to denaturalize disability. In short, feminist disability studies reimagines disability.”

[...]

The nature of the problems faced by disabled women are such that they need to be addressed by both the feminist and disability movements. But the fact is that they remain invisible within the women's movement at large.

[...]

The author examines disability from the perspective of disabled women. She focuses on the social model of disability rather than a medical model and asserts that disability is another form of oppression experienced by women. She argues that disabled women have been excluded from both the women's movement, which is oriented toward non-disabled women, and from the disability rights movement, which is oriented toward disabled men. Using the history of black feminism, the author argues for a reframing of the analysis in which to explore the simultaneous experiences of gender and disability.

[...]

Disabled women activists have, however, been equally critical of the failure of mainstream feminism to recognise the disability perspective.

[...]

the incompleteness of feminism without the inclusion of a disability perspective.

[...]

The author discusses her anger and frustration with feminism in two ways: first, that disability is generally invisible from feminism's mainstream agenda, and second, that when disability is a subject of research by feminists, the researchers objectify disabled people so that the research is alienated from their experiences rather than attempting to understand the experiences of disabled women.

[...]

[she] calls on nondisabled as well as disabled researchers to continue to study the ways in which the nondisabled society oppresses its members with disabilities. Lastly, she argues that disability research is of great importance in the general understanding of the perpetuation of inequalities in society.

[...]

leading activists explore the ways feminism can and must acknowledge disabled women for the benefit of all. Revealing the ways in which disabled women have been rendered nearly invisible, it shatters received feminist wisdom on a wide range of core issues. Offering cogent evidence of the many ways in which disabled women's experiences would revitalize feminism today, Encounters with Strangers makes an invaluable contribution to a more inclusive understanding of disability rights, outlining how new and vital alliances may be achieved.

[...]

Unfortunately, little research has been conducted on this issue as it effects the lives of women with disabilities, which may reflect the belief that the lived experiences of many women with disabilities are not important nor perceived as valid by mainstream researchers.

[...]

It is part of my work as a nondisabled feminist to interrogate my own ablism and to look for the opportunities disability analysis provides for fuller theorizing and activism.

[...]

Disabled women's issues, experiences, and embodiments have been misunderstood, if not largely ignored, by feminist as well as mainstream disability theorists.

[...]

Beginning as separate enterprises that followed activist and scholarly paths, gender and disability studies have reached a point where they can move beyond their boundaries for a common landscape to inspire new areas of inquiry.

[...]

the cross section of oppressions that is created when a woman is black or a lesbian is much more mediated than the cross section of oppressions created when a woman is also disabled.

[...]

one of first articles reporting on the exclusion of women with disabilities from the “mainstream” women’s movement,

[...]

feminist critiques of these norms have virtually ignored the pressures on women who do not have full use of their bodies.

[...]

by arguing that the myth of bodily perfection and appearance norms which deny the experiences of disabled women contribute to the denial of disability and therefore are oppressive.

[...]

One group, however, continues to remains mostly invisible in feminist research; disabled women. Disabled and non-disabled feminists have expressed their deep concerns that the voices of disabled women have been missing in most feminist texts so their lives are unknown, their contributions unrecognized and the effects of social discrimination and inequality in their lives ignored.

[...]

We need a feminist theory of disability, both because 16 percent of women are disabled, and because the oppression of disabled people is closely linked to the cultural oppression of the body. Disability is not a biological given; like gender, it is socially constructed from biological reality. Our culture idealizes the body and demands that we control it. Thus, although most people will be disabled at some time in their lives, the disabled are made "the other," who symbolize failure of control and the threat of pain, limitation, dependency, and death. If disabled people and their knowledge were fully integrated into society, everyone's relation to her/his real body would be liberated.

[...]

feminist theory has neglected to incorporate the perspectives and experiences of women with disabilities, and that these perspectives must be included in future discussions of feminist ethics, the body, and the social critique of the medical model.

Disability is a feminist issue:

Disability Rights are a feminist issue because women know what it’s like to be infantalized and treated as lesser people. And we should know damn by well that it isn’t right. Not for us, and not for anybody.

See also Domestic violence and disabled women.

Okay, so that's a lot of quotes but you get the point. Feminism needs to integrate disability politics, needs to embrace disabled women and our experiences, to be fully feminist. Excluding disabled women from feminist academia, analysis, activism and community not only is crap for the disabled woman, it prevents feminism from becoming all it needs to be to liberate women.

I am drawn to blog about this because of a recent experience with a local feminist group. They appear radical, have done some great actions and one woman I have had contact with who is involved in this group is a vocal advocate for women.

I am on their email update list and recently enquired if there was a lift at the venue because they meet upstairs, as there was an upcoming meeting I was considering attending.

I got a reply saying that no, there wasn't a lift. They kept asking the pub to provide one. She asked whether I had any suggestions for alternative, accessible venues.

I replied to that email with several suggestions, and questions to find out more about the group so I could see if I could come up with any further ideas to make the meetings accessible to physically disabled women.

I had no reply to that email. I don't think she liked my suggestions because she had originally said they were not keen to sacrifice the atmosphere of where they already meet, whereas to make the meetings accessible would mean to meet elsewhere. Given that the venue is inaccessible, and they don't want to meet elsewhere, what suggestion could I possibly make that would seem acceptable?

Of course, as I never received a reply I can only speculate on why my suggestions (which she had requested!) and questions were ignored.

Then later I received an email with minutes of their latest meeting. There was no mention in the minutes of accessible venues at all. This showed me just how little Sheffield Fems seem to care about allowing physically disabled women to become involved in their feminism.

I felt dejected and totally invisible. It is not good enough for women who are supposed to be fighting for women to not even acknowledge this huge issue.

Sometimes I can do stairs, sometimes I can't. That isn't the point. Which women are they empowering? Which women are they supporting? Which women are they liberating?

Not me.



NaBloPoMo