the more i sit in your meetings
participate in your organizations
wake up next to you
shake hands with you, make deals with you
love you

the more i become an expert

in your don’t knows

like

you don’t know how to sit in a circle
so you plant yourself
in the middle

you don’t know who you are
instead you imitate my hair my clothes my art my food
my tongue my skin color,
even my soap operas

and it must be that no one has ever taught you
how to use a library card
because you don’t know how clueless you look
expecting your earnesty
to be compensation for my time

by now i am an over-qualified over-educated expert in the field of your don’t knows
where’s my degree? my big house? my fancy research job?
i’ve earned it

let me guess
you don’t know..

i’ve been wanting to talk with others about gender and disability but have been very uncomfortable with writing things as i’m not a gender scholar (damn you academic industrial complex!) BFP’s recent post, what is butch?, is pushing me forward and i’m hoping that this can be a place where we can talk about gender x disability x queerness x everything.

in the comment section of that post, BFP tells another person she reads me as a total femme. i don’t know if other people would be as delighted as i was but my natural reaction was the immense need to take that as a compliment— with disability being understood as such an asexual thing, no one ever affirms me even having gender. the traditional disability narrative puts me in this place of being something else: that if gender was a binary, i’d be in a third gender realm. (my friend mia has the perfect example of this, bathroom symbols that have the man, woman, and then wheelchair*). our bodies are objects that are not supposed to belong to us and by recognizing our genders, it implies that we own our bodies, think about them, take pleasure in them. maybe this is a big jump but to me, affirming our gender also recognizes our personhood: it says we are human and have a right to not have our bodies raped, abused, sterilized, experimented on, harvested, and more… 

it’s only recently that i’ve been thinking about gender presentation. maybe this is because i finally have a PA who knows that part of her job is being patient in helping me try different outfits and that if i don’t like the way something looks, i should take it off. if i want to see if a fedora, vest, dress pants combo looks good, i can.  if i want to stand in a dressing room and try on every piece of lingerie in the store, i can. a lot of disabled people don’t get to do that, especially with so many of us living in institutions, having unpaid caregivers, experiencing days when we are in total pain or lack energy, etc. there needs to be a word for disabled people taking part in intentional, pleasurable gender play in their own way. part of the oppression we face is being asexualized, otherized and denied gender identity so playing with gender and demanding respect for our identities is resistance and a refusal to accept that ableist narrative…

i don’t know that i’m femme, butch, etc, i just know that i like to play with roles and gender. for me, the word to describe this gender play or personal recognition of identity i’ve been having lately is cripchick. cripchicks (or gimpgirls) are fierce, strong disabled women who interact with the world on their terms. when i am cutting up a tshirt everyone is wearing so it looks good on me, that’s my way of being a cripchick. lately i get a lot of pleasure in mixing up disability with a fierce femme show so i am insistent on that tee looking good on me, even if i do it in a way that traditional femmes may not. as cripchicks, we’re dealing with issues that force us to create our own relationships with gender presentation but we do it and feel good about it.

do you know how powerful that is? for disabled women (w/ all disabilities), what does gender look like for you?  am i wrong here?

*sidenote about bathrooms. i think the wheelchair accessibility/bathroom safety connection is totally powerful and love places that have a single stall gender neutral bathroom where people are safe. that’s not what i mean with the example mentioned above about third gender.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the strategies the disability community has used in responding to the movie Tropic Thunder. I wanted to wait until the initial media coverage passed so this conversation could be held more internally and not distract from the message we were putting out there.

The amazing Jess Hoffman from Makeshift magazine was recently a guest blogger at Feministe (h/t to Sudy) and has been writing a lot about capitalism and feminism. In part of Jess’ last post, she built on the words of Sister Lorde, Moraga, Anzaldua, and others to talk about why intersectionality was needed in feminist communities. Jess pointed out that this intersectional analysis created by radical women of color has often been misinterpreted and stolen by feminists to say something along the lines of “because *some* women have multiple identities, we need to address their experience” instead of “all systems of power are linked and a multiple-issue analysis is the only way to defeat oppression”.

Excerpt:

So it’s not just that some individual people experience multiple forms of oppression, or even that all people have some kind of personal relationship with all systems of oppression… but also that the systems of power themselves—racism, economic hierarchy, sexism, heteronormativity, ableism, etc.—are working together.

Included in our activism against ableism and the use of the r-word in Tropic Thunder have been statements from disability organizations and disability activists along the lines of “People can’t say this word or that word (insert racist remark) but they can still say the r word!”, “Disability is the last frontier!”, “When making Tropic Thunder, Dreamworks brought in African American consultants to make sure the movie wasn’t offensive—where were the disability consultants?”

Though I think I know what this feeling is based on—the frusteration of ableism not being addressed as oppression in activist communities and mainstream society—I believe this short-term strategy or sentiment absolutely cannot be a part of our activism. Not only does this strategy alienate disabled people who have multiple identities but it does nothing to address oppression. When we say these kinds of things, it says that we believe racism, heterosexism, sexism, etc are personal conflicts that happens between people (and that we’ve overcome!), not institutions in which our soicety is based upon. It ignores families being ripped apart by ICE raids, trans women of color being killed everyday, and the ever-growing prison industrial complex.

One leader in the disability community rightfully pointed out the need to stick with the issue of the r-word and not swamping it with 17 other disability issues. I agreed with him, afterall, our society and movement have a history of silencing people with intellectual disabilities. But still, why weren’t the other connections made? How come we chose not to talk about all of the other horrible imagery (particularly against Asian-Pacific Islander folks)? Some responses I’ve seen to this question have been that it is more strategic. Is it really strategic in the long run and if we decide that it is— strategic for who?

I believe our activism has to be bigger than our own oppression but if you want, let’s talk about strategies for our movement. I believe it IS strategic to talk about other systems of oppressions—how else can we expect to have the system of oppression we face as disabled people recognized? How can we even go into social justice work uwilling to talk about the privileges we have?

This can’t be done in a superficial, let’s-high-five-Dr.-King way. What good is our activism, anyways, if it’s based on the backs of others?

comment #163 from Feministe on appropriation and the rest of this bullshit:

Ah, let us all remember March 2008: when white people discovered immigrant women. Congratulations.

–Sickle

I’m not sure if this is the most intelligent way to state this, but I love love love love love [add a few more, maybe 10, for effect] Sudy.  She created a videoblog on all the unbelievable things often found in the feminist blogosphere. It is a must-see.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8UEGMvuxGc&rel=1]