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meredyd's picture

silencing and self-definition

This relates some to what Prof Dalke mentions above, but reading Davis's article, I was most intrigued by the parts in which he speaks about the formation of the idea of disability as something to be fixed or cured. The voices who are making these decisions are of course the people with the most institutional power (i.e, people who fit society's construct of "normal"), but the social definitions should really be made by people whose life experience is what's under debate (Mairs, for example). I'm interested to learn more about how people of various disabilities self-define - the deaf community, for one, and the concept of Capital-D-Deaf Culture vs. the societal idea of making deaf people hear, etc.

I'm also randomly reminded of a piece I read in TIME (?) a while ago about a man with autism who was an activist against Autism Speaks because of the way the way they treated actual autistics (really poorly). Kind of hilarious to see in a magazine that tends to sensationalize and silence anyone who is remotely outside the "norm", but there you go.

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