Recently in Disability Rights Category

This has made me pretty damn angry. A 17 year-old british girl with 'mild learning difficulties' has been told that she and her fiance will only be allowed a few hours with her newborn before it is taken into care because she is 'unfit to be a mother' due to her disability. Nobody seems to have considered the father in this case, who seems to be loyal to his fiancee and would help bring up the child. Can you imagine this would be happening if it were the male partner who had the learning disability? Anyway, the couple have been forced to go on the run from social workers who would charge them with kidnapping their OWN newborn if she disappeared after it was born.

"Last night, Miss Robertson, who has mild learning difficulties, said:

'I have been out of my mind with worry about my unborn baby being taken away.
'Although Ben isn't born yet, I already love my baby and know I will be a good mum. Mark and I talk to him inside me every day and tell him we love him.

'We've already bought him clothes and my cousin, who recently had a baby, has handed down a beautiful crib for him.

'But social workers aren't even giving me a chance to be a mum. It's as if social workers are trying to rule my life and I just couldn't take the pressure from them any more.'

Mr McDougall, an artist, said they had made their decision after seeing minutes of a meeting this week where social workers claimed their baby could suffer 'emotional harm' if left with Miss Robertson - an allegation they say is 'ridiculous'.

Note: I'm not a disability expert, I do not mean to be offensive to disabled persons, I just wish to highlight how being a woman and being disabled intersect and what happens at that intersection. Perhaps someone else has a better perspective than me and I invite them to comment/post.

Upon reading portions of the Illinois Parental Notice of Abortion Act, I found some interesting ways in which the law and society views pregnant girls as well as disabled women. And it looks like in the case of women, you are guilty of a disability until proven abled (unless you're married, which magically makes you abled). Let's look at this closer.

In light of all the disability issues recently, and inspired by katemoore's beautiful entry prior to this, I thought I would share my own experiences of how living with a disability has influenced my feminism.

I am very new to disability rights activism, and still learning. It is very probable that I will say something that goes against key ideas in the field, or that is deeply problematic in some way - which is why this is nothing but a very personal (and difficult to write) post. This is how the form of feminism I practice has departed from some norms and developed in unusual ways because of my disability.

I have lived for many years now with a mild form of epilepsy (a seizure disorder); mild enough that I don't have seizures on a regular basis, but serious enough that I am severely limited in what I can do without risking a seizure. I also have terrible migraines, which basically all adds up to my brain being a total mess.

First of all, a housekeeping note: This post is filed under "Random." Why? There isn't a category even remotely related to disability rights. This, in a very comprehensive and well-populated category system that has room for such pressing issues of intersectionality like "Hungover Feminist Weekly Report." Fix this. (Editors Note: There is now a disability rights category available for Community Posts)

--

Now then. I am a feminist, and I have a disability (Asperger's syndrome, for those who are wondering. Yes, it is diagnosed. Those who would like to tell me about how this isn't a real disability and/or how I am just using it as an excuse can kindly go fuck themselves.) I believe these two things are related. Here's how.

First of all, I would not wish my disability on my worst enemy. I want to stress this. This is not a fuzzy, happy post about how my disability has helped me see things in a new light. People without it really can't grasp how bored and how lonely it makes you, and how pointless it makes your life. It's spending days talking to no one, counting hours and trying to eke out a few spare jolts of dopamine; it's feeling like a mushroom growing in some forgotten corner, whose only contribution to the world is a carbon footprint. It's walking around town and seeing tens of thousands of people and knowing that, deep down, you're not like them at all, could never relate to them, and none of it was your choice. 

But it does other things, too. When you grow up without friends, you grow up without being inducted into a lot of our society's gender roles. I never got the script that said "Hi, you're a woman, and you just got interpellated! Now you have to love scrapbooking, watching Grey's Anatomy, reading Cosmo and baking cookies with pretty pink ribbons for your man, who will be provided for you if you do exactly what we say and don't pay any attention to those who don't." This isn't to say that I don't have any of this residue on me -- you'd have to be completely cut off from all contact with anybody, ever, starting from birth -- but it's a lot of distance.

An interesting disability issue came up with Abigail Breslin's casting as Helen Keller in the upcoming Broadway revival of The Miracle Worker. Advocates such as Sharon Jones of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts have protested, pointing out that an actor from their community should have been considered. The producer of the show, David Richenthal, explains that to secure the financial backing, the show needed a recognizable star. Anything else, he said, would have been "financially irresponsible." Still, this demonstrates some circular reasoning common in acting circles - if disabled actors are never considered for recognizable roles, how will they ever become recognizable themselves? 

This brought up in interesting discussion at Jezebel, wherein Anna North talks about how uncomfortable she is with able-bodied actors portraying people with disabilities, particularly mental disabilities. I have to agree. For a while there, playing someone with a disability on film became an Oscar bait, and I find that idea incredibly exploitative. Similarly, I don't like the implication that disabled actors are only good at portraying their own disabilities. The goal isn't for deaf actors to play deaf characters. The goal is for deaf actors and other disabled actors to play a range of characters, not necessarily related to their disability.  

This same issue came up a few weeks ago on the casting of an able-bodied person to play a deaf character in Off-Broadway production The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and the same excuses were given. But to say that there aren't recognizable actors with disabilities is just disingenuous. Take Marlee Matliin. Matlin is an Oscar-winning actress that has (gasp) actually played roles that do not hinge entirely on her being deaf. My favourite of these is her portrayal of Joey Lucas, a bad-ass political operative on "West Wing." Lucas easily bests the most over-confident of Bartlett's staff time and time again. She is witty as hell, smart as a whip, a recurring romantic interest in the show. She is all of these things, and she is deaf. Not because of being deaf, not despite of being deaf. 

Able-bodied actors playing disabled characters remind me of nothing so much as white actors playing black characters in blackface in the early days of the film industry. People with disabilities continually being marginalized to the point where they're not even considered to play people with disabilities is pathetic in and of itself, but though a deaf and blind actor playing Helen Keller would be great, it wouldn't be as much of a victory for disability advocacy as it would if disable actors were considered for roles that didn't hinge on their disabilities. The world I live in does not look like Hollywood's version of it, where people with disabilities only factor into life when they have some sort of tragic (or comedic, in some sick situations) value, so I don't see why we continue to make films that only feature able-bodied (skinny, white, etc etc etc) characters. I would love to see people with disabilities occupy the same playing field without being defined by their disabilities, in acting as well as the rest of society.