In this post, I want to highlight a quote from Riva Lehrer's Golem Girl:

I love Golem Girl since I feel that everyone with a disability can relate. It is often a joke among my disabled friends that someone misread the instructions when we were built. In my case, somebody skipped a step completely. When we walk, think, or breathe, it feels like we live in someone else’s world. When Riva Lehrer said that all Golems make the journey from the “It” to the “I,” it seemed like something was missing. The monster-making process is the fault of society. When people see things differently from them, they tend to be afraid. Many of the legends of monsters came from: the first mermaids were squid. The mythology explains why many conditions take their name from mythical creatures. However, society does not also perceive disabled folks as equally monstrous.

     This week I had some wonderful opportunities to bring concepts from our class into other classes, so want to use this post to share some of those cross-disciplinary reflections. In the class "Social Change: Institutions and Organizations" (with Professor Shannan Hayes, who is so amazing), we recently read sections of Foucault's Dicsipline and Punishment  and Security, Terriroty, Population. Among other arguments, Foucault discusses a shift of the ruling class: a shift from ruling over territory to ruling over populations in the form of biopower, or government involvement in the "private sector" such as influencing our food, sexuality, habits, and health.

DREDF, California Now Accepting Applications to Compensate Sterilization Survivors

Sara Luterman, "Love on the Spectrum" is Kind, but Unrepresentative

Ava Rigelhaupt, "Love on the Spectrum:" What the Show Got Right and Where It Can Improve

There was a quote in the "Three Generations of Imbeciles are Enough" chapter of Neilson's work that made me reflect on a point made in class last week. It reads: "The warehousing of those considered deviant in one way or another, combined with the threat of sterilization, policed behaviors and literally controlled the reproduction of social norms." Something we have seen a lot in modern and past politics is the disenfranchisement of Black and Brown people, of the disabled population, and of other hard-working citizens. For example, legislation preventing some disabled citizens from voting, voting laws including ID laws, in addition to blatant gerrymandering to prevent the majority from gaining their deserved power and voice.

The NPR podcast about the sterilization of women covers a lot of horrifying stuff. I am aware of the inhumane practices of mental asylums back in the day, since I did an internship last summer doing research on the racist practices in asylums in the pre-Civil War era. Patients were often isolated from others and physically constricted using straps and other tools, and the patients who experienced the worst treatment were those in public asylums that were overcrowded and underfunded. But I didn't know about the practice of sterilization in asylums, though, unfortunately, it doesn't surprise me at this point.

The poem that we read by Molly McCully Brown was very moving. The poem subtly highlights the terrible conditions that people who lived in the colony had to endure. If the outside had the bare minimum of decoration and upkeep, there is no question that nobody should have lived inside that establishment. This poem serves a noble cause: even if the buildings are gone, due to digital archiving, this poem will preserve a piece of history so that we hopefully learn to never treat people different from you as castaways. I also hope that there are other antidotes surrounding these types of institution are preserved. As I foreshadowed, the perspective of the poem hides a truth about today. The author of the poem was born in a time where she couldn’t be sent to the colony.

This is actually a post for last weeks (first week of Feb), but the post never got published somehow. Sorry for the delay.

While speaking and reading about immigration to the US from Ellis Island and determinants of immigration restrictions, I thought of how this historical filtration impacts the structure of the US today. Using the imagery of a filter or funnel, people with undesirable bodies and minds were turned away from the border and marked as unworthy of fitting into the “American ideal.” This effectively “weeded” out large populations of disabled people, racially, socially, economically diverse people. It built the foundations of a socially constructed “American-Dream” ideal which is built on desirable genetic traits and maximum economic productivity.