Scaffolding

I have been thinking about bodies this summer, specifically my own, and the extraordinary privilege I enjoy of being very able-bodied.

I've been house-painting every spare moment, with the help of many wonderful friends.  There is scaffolding on two sides of my perched-atop-a-Wellington-hill whare, to make it possible to reach the many, many oddly shaped bits.  Of all my friends, I've been nearly the only one comfortable on every level of the scaffolding.  Some friends have struggled with heights, some with the contortions required of their backs to access lower bits, some have been unable to move between areas because it would require balance they do not have.

And I've not just been comfortable, I've been playing on the scaffolding, climbing all over it like a monkey, moving from the roof of my house to the ground via swinging on bars and shinnying up and down supports.  It's been almost as much fun as being evicted from Kew Gardens for excessively high tree climbing.

Midst the fun has been the sobering noticing that for some of my friends, helping me has been painful,  and they have needed to be careful with how long they spend.

And then two weeks ago, for the third time in my adult life, I was hit by a car while cycling, and taken to hospital via ambulance for tests because of the impact on my body.  I spent hours in a neck brace, staring at the ceiling, because there was the possibility of spine damage due to where I'd been hit.

I am terrified of hospitals, medical interventions, needles and blood.  So terrified I have been fainting since I was 19 - in plays, movies, doctor's surgeries, during conversations with friends, when I cut myself while cooking.  So this was pretty scary, as was being strapped to a stretcher while they measured different indicators of bodily wellbeing.

After discovering no internal organs were damaged and no bones broken - "just" extensive soft tissue damage - I was sent home, to bed, for a week.  Now I'm up and trying to go about regular living for me, and I can't, it still hurts too much.  I'm trying to cycle and I'm scared of being hit again, wincing away from traffic.  I'm having flashbacks of hitting the car, and lying on the road, being told not to move, and all the smells, sights, noises I experienced from that prone position.  I can't carry anything heavier than a couple of books.  The house painting is stalled for now.

My body feels violate-able, and I'm in near constant pain, and I hate it.

Yet this and my scaffolding reminder of my typically privileged experience of my body is timely.  Not because I think it means I understand what it might be like to be unable to bend my back at all, or need a chair to help me move around, or need assistance to wash and make food and get into and out of bed.  But because it helps remind me that my usual experience IS a privilege, which I hope helps remind me to not make assumptions about other people's lives.

Mojo Mathers pays for being deaf

Quick hit - this is disgusting. Even Stuff is being deluged with comments highly critical of Lockwood Smith's decision to make Mojo Mathers pay out of her own budget in order to be able to participate in Parliament (the electronic note-taking equipment she needs, as a deaf person, costs $30,000).

It gets worse though - apparently Lockwood would make sure someone with a physical impairment who needed wheelchair accessibility was able to participate fully, out of Parliament's budget.

So it's only an issue if you've got a certain kind of physical impairment then. Or perhaps if you come from a certain kind of political party?

Lockwood, look it up - discrimination on the grounds of disability is clearly prohibited under the Human Rights Act. Not only is this blatantly unfair, it's surely not even legal.

What a marvellous way to ensure people with impairments are even less likely to attempt to participate as representatives (you know, aside from managing generic discrimination and blocks to participation, lower average incomes if you're able to find work, accessibility issues in joining and being involved in political parties, the whole world being set up with non-disabled people in mind.....)

Decolonise Your Minds: marginalised gendered People of Colour DECOLONISATION hui

Decolonise Your Minds: marginalised gendered People of Colour DECOLONISATION hui

Sat 4th - Sun 5th Feb 2012
Tamaki Makaurau (Ponsonby Community Centre)
(Auckland, New Zealand)

$20 waged/ $10 unwaged, or whatever you can afford

The People of Colour Decol Hui is a two day celebration of Decolonisation, Feminism and Anti-Racism, for POC/indigenous feminists and activists, all mixed up with DIY workshops, skill share and talks.

The People of Colour Decol Hui is for marginalised gendered people of colour; including women, transfolk, intersex, genderqueers, wimmin (etc)- of marginalised cultures, indigenous and ethnic minorities in Aotearoa.

Examining the inherent power dynamics interwoven into our lives, connections between racism, sexism, colonisation, classism and other oppressions, and working in predominantly pakeha activist scenes... and how these things affect us and the feminist/ social justice/ peace/ revolutionary/creative work we do.

The weekend will be grounded around those main themes. There will be spaces for discusions to happen.

We hope that this gathering will enable us to share some experiences and tools for critiquing, challenging, and overcoming these oppressions.

There will be discussion forums, workshops and skill shares.

For more information see here

Lose the language. Now.

Cross posted



This post is my contribution to Blogging against disabilism day.

I've noticed, not so much at In a Strange Land, but sometimes in comments, and more frequently in comments at The Hand Mirror, and very, very frequently elsewhere in the NZ blogosphere, 'ableist' language. That is, language that uses disabilities to disparage something. Very, very simple stuff, like saying that something is lame, or that someone had a bit of a spas / spaz.

Just.Don't.Do.It.

Here's why. (This is very much Disabilism 101 - old, old news to people who work with these issues all the time, but evidently, not much known elsewhere.)

You can say that x is bad just by saying, "X is bad." But another way to say it is to compare x to something (which is also perceived is bad). So, "X is lame" carries that same connotation i.e that "X is bad." The two statements are equivalent. And from there, it's just a short step to: "Lame is bad. You are lame. You are bad bad bad."

Sure, you can pick apart the language logic, and point out that of course, being lame is not something that people normally welcome, that being less than able bodied in any way is not desirable. And really, that's all that you are saying.

Whatever. The point is, you are using language that describes the way that living breathing thinking feeling human beings are, language that describes integral parts of their everyday reality, and using that language to say that some other totally unrelated thing is bad. What people with disabilities hear, and what I hear too, is language that mocks and denigrates them. It's all so very negative, so very disempowering for people with disabilities, and yet it is so easy to avoid.

So lose it. Make the effort and find another word. Here's some that you can use:

flimsy
inadequate
insufficient
unconvincing
weak
unsatisfactory
inept
pathetic
deficient
hollow
meagre
perfunctory

And instead of knocking people who have cerebal palsy, which is a heart breaking condition, by saying that you, or someone else, threw a spaz, what about talking about having a wee tanty. It carries exactly the same connotations.

English is a very rich language. Next time, instead of plumbing only the depths of disabilism, that is, language and behaviours that deny the humanity of people with disabilities, make a little effort, try being just a bit sensitive, and mine the rich resources of English instead.