Disability

Due to popular demand, I'm sharing the link to the store for my non-profit with hand-made, fair trade goods. 100% of the profits go toward community development.

http://profugomarket.storenvy.com/

Love and warmth,

Rebca

For my paper I want to focus on the intersection of fat and disability. For my main text I want to use Disability gets fat. I want to first go through the connotations of the words fat and disabled and how both of those terms are generally accepted as negative. I also want look at the similarties of social stigma. I want to question what it means to be disabled by fatness and how being fat is viewed as an easily cured disease. Im thinking about including feminism if I could see the essay that was in Kristin's book about disability and feminism in order to show that interesction becuase I think being a fat and a woman brings different issues to light than being a man. 

Intersectionality is all over Good Kings, Bad Kings. From Joanne, who has a lot of class privilege but gained that through being disabled to Jimmy, who does not have very much class privilege at all and is a person of color, but is able-bodied. In fact, one of the major intersections that I noticed was between class, ability, and agency. bridgetmartha mentioned age as something that forced dependency for the youths in ILLC. Class is another aspect that forces that dependency, however. For example, Brendan is trapped in his home (when he visits his family) because they live in an apartment on the 3rd floor that is not wheelchair accessible at all. He mentions his brothers or sisters have to carry him up and down the stairs and they don't always want to.

I think I would like to do an ethnographic account of the die-in/march happening at Bryn Mawr's campus and on the Main Line on Monday versus the marches happening in Philadelphia. I will be taking notes, pictures, and videos to document this experience. I believe that I could do a close reading of how the Main Line residents react, who the march is made up of, how accessible/inaccessible these protests are. I would like to look at how these experiences affect the construction of students at Bryn Mawr's identities (both students of color and white students) I think that this semester campus environment has shaped how many students interact in the contact zones of our classrooms and living environments.

I watched a Spoken Word performance called "God is Gay." It is a poem about the hypocrisy of religious people who say hateful things about gay people. The person who wrote the poem is a white cis male christian gay man. I'd be interested in looking closely at this poem along with an essay from "Queer Religion" which is a book written by Donald Boisvert. I'm hoping to find an essay that features somebody not as privileged, in order to talk about how power and privilege (probably drawing from the essay that Riva ewrote to talk about power) change how people deal with intersectional identities. 

For my intersectionality paper, I am strongly compelled to discuss the relationship between disability, class, and representation, specifically focusing on the story of Mary from the Mutter museum.

Mary was a little person of low income, as we can assume from that fact that she was found in a house of prostitution. Not only was Mary's body was taken and put on display without consent, but her baby's body as well. Mary's low status and physical abnormality somehow allows the Mutter and its audience to view her as an object unworthy of respect.

#lasthurrah

The intersection of disability and age came through repeatedly during my reading of Good Kings Bad Kings in terms of the dichotomy between childhood and adulthood for the residents. For starters, there are the technical ways that age shapes the residents' lives as far as legality goes. Some are wards of the state, so they receive no say in being placed there; additionally, because of the regulation that people with certain disabilities are still legally minors untill age 22 instead of 18, there were diversified ages of those living at ILLC. Conversely, disability complexifies one of the major themes of anyone in the young adult age group--living independently.

For my intersectionality essay, I’d like to do a close reading of a couple episodes of The L Word, in order to look at how the character of Bette grapples with her many, complicated identities—and, in turn, how the media represents intersectional characters. Bette is a very proud and vocal lesbian, as well as a biracial (often white-passing), upper-class, able-bodied individual. The relationship between these identities really come into play when she and her partner, Tina (who is white), decide to have a child. The couple argue over whether or not it makes sense to use an African-American donor, if Tina is carrying the child (Bette argues that it is, because that way, the baby would look like both of them).

Mad at ILLC: Reading Nussbaum's Good Kings Bad Kings through Margaret Price

Margaret Price’s Mad at School looks into the ways academic spaces fail to include or support “neuroatypicality.” She looks not only into the traditionally assumed aspects of academia – writing papers, doing assignments, going to class – but also at spaces integral to success in academia but outside of that: “kairotic spaces.” She defines “kairotic space” as “less formal, often unnoticed, areas of academe where knowledge is produced and power is exchanged” (60) and describes it as characterized by things like a “real-time unfolding of events” and “impromptu communication that is required or encouraged” (61).