Raging Man-Hater

orinfear:

Let’s talk about disability in media, and about how sensationalizing members of a social class is not the same as representing them decently.

There’s this trend in media which basically tells its audience that disabled people are only worth something if they gain a superpower from it.

• Raymond Babbit from Rainman 
• Duddits from Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher
• Professor Charles Xavier in Marvel Comics
• Sherlock Holmes (esp. in BBC Sherlock)
• Sheldon Cooper in “The Big Bang Theory”
• Barbara Gordon in the recently altered DCU

I am over disabled people being made special in order to appear in stories.

I want stories about disabled heroes, mind you, but I don’t want them to have some kind of power that other people don’t. Disability does not mean “give me something to make up for it”. Disability is not something to be made up for and that is exactly what current and past media has told us. It has said we are not worth looking at as humans, because either our problems are so great that our narrative function is to be an inspiration, or our problems don’t matter because we are too smart to talk to people.

And yes, super intelligence is a superpower. It is another way to make disabled people Not Like Everyone Else. Benevolent ableism is still ableism. Stratifying people is the exact opposite of normalizing them.

Disabled people are not all sensational; they are human and alive and they go to school and het drunk and make bad decisions and fall in love and have adventures and we try and we fail all—just like Your Regular Person.

Strange, isn’t it?

(Source: queerliterarysuperhero)

roidescoeurs:

I’m gonna say a thing, okay

If you ever tell a disabled person, “you know, you were given these other traits for a reason!!!!” you need to go sit in a corner and think about what you just did.

Disability is not a failing that someone has to recover from; it is not a shortcoming that begets an “at least” or a “well thankfully.”

Being disabled means being human, like everyone else, and disabled people probably never asked you what about them makes them redeemable.

(Source: queerliterarysuperhero)

I went to a performance called Not By Bread Alone, which was put on by a cast of all Deaf-Blind actors and their interpreters. @lowereastlife hooked me up with tickets, and I liked the show until I heard the director talk about it in the discussion panel.

Basically (very, very basically), the show was problematic because it perpetuated the PWD pity trope. I didn’t mind so much because I thought that it was entirely generated by the cast, so I wasn’t going to hate on the way PWD choose to represent themselves (plus it was technically really well-done, at least from the able-bodied viewer’s perspective). 

But then someone from the audience asked the (sighted, hearing, seemed otherwise able-bodied AND ABLEIST) director a question about why the show focused so much on the supposed isolation of Deaf-Blind people and didn’t represent them in any other way and her response was, DIRECT QUOTE, “This is not a commercial for Deaf-Blind people.”

Okay lady, fuck you. You’re going to put on this show and market it as A Representation of the Deaf-Blind Experience, but you’re going to hide behind the “I write what I know and this is what the people in the cast experienced.” You’re not going to take ANY RESPONSIBILITY for how this representation might reflect on the general Deaf-Blind and PWD community because it’s Your Art and you’re going to do it the way you want to??

Ugh stfu

A fellow staff member refers to something as “retarded” …

studentleaderproblems:

…during a training on diversity and inclusion.

 Uh-uh, I think you missed the point.

 THE R-WORD, IT IS FOLLOWING ME. People keep using it inappropriately around me and it makes me so uncomfortable. I try to (nicely!) call people out but sometimes it’s people who already know they’re doing it or it’s a family member who is older than I am, etc.

FYI, I have a cousin with intellectual and physical disabilities… it hurts to hear people describe things as “retarded,” especially when that leads to her doing it because she hears it so much.

(Source: )