The film Deaf Jam shows the coherence of death culture. One part of the film that I felt was particularly powerful was when the deaf girl felt the need to speak at the end of the performance in order to show people that deaf individuals can speak. In this situation, she was highlighting a stereotype held by the public and using her art to transform the notion of deaf individuals. In addition, by watching a movie that almost completely lacked spoken dialogue, I feel that I enhanced my understanding of death culture and enhanced my ability to appreciate other aspects of sign language such as the way that body language helps add additional meaning to the signed words.

Dance is an art form centered on coordinated movement. The socially held ideal of graceful movement in dance suggests that a physically disabled person may be unable to engage in this form of movement, but dance is a form of free expression and there is no right or wrong way to do it. At Axis Dance workshops, disabled individuals are able to use their bodies to perform skillful dances. What makes the studio truly unique is its engagement of both so called “able bodied” as well as disabled individuals. This integration of the disability community helps inspire an art form that shows that a person is not limited by their disability or disease.

I think one of the most complicating factors in the Kupper questions is the complex evolving wavefront between disabled and nondisabled.  There are tons of folks who don't identify as disabled when they certainly could, and their attitude toward any aspiring disability culture is important and complicating.  Second, our definitions of disability change over time.  Twenty years anxiety disorders likely would not have been considered disabilities, and twenty five years ago AIDS as a disability was a very hotly contested subject.  Third, people enter and depart the world of disability with some frequency for lots of different reasons.  All of these reasons create a crazy frothy dynamic that is hard to represent or coalesce in a group culture or group consciousness.  Perhaps these factors d

After these readings, I felt that I had a better understanding of what Disability Culture could mean, with several different new perspectives.  For one, I felt that Kuppers' introduction explored one aspect of (what can be called) Disability Culture, which is to say multiple disabled people and bodies creating and engaging a space -- in this case, for dance and for exercise.  As someone who's previously studied a lot of psychology, I think exploring the group dynamics of a) people within one specific disability spectrum coming together, and b) people of mixed disabilities coming together.

I've been meditating on a phrase that Petra Kupper said in her introduction to Disability Culture and Community Performance - that her dance class is a "labratory for disability culture." The gathering of marginalized folks creates a microcosm of cultural ways-of-connecting (through speech, visuality and performance, art practices, and more). I find the question "what is disability culture" very difficult to answer. On the one hand, I do identify as someone on the spectrum of disability, so I should be able to answer this right?

When reading Kuppers's introduction around disability culture, the portion that I had the most questions about, and that I'm most interested in discussing concerned the intersection of disability and performance. Kuppers begins the piece with a discussion of disability and dance, which opens up into a larger observation of disability culture as something that is performed or enacted. I think the idea of performance is often equated with acting or with lack of truth, but in actuality, Kuppers's language of performativity mirrors discussions in gender studies contexts, which define the term more as the notion that identity is enacted in a particular societal context rather than essential to the person.

Disability culture encompasses such a wide variety of so many different types of art in part because of the incredible diversity of experiences in the disabled community. Disability identity can apply to so many people with vastly different experiences due to the nature of their disabilities. As a result, the disabled community as an entity can appear somewhat disjointed or split into smaller identity groups. Kuppers notes some more broadly unifying qualities of disability culture. The culture stems from a place of encouragement and love and often challenges conceptions of normality. From the excerpt, it seems that most of Kuppers’ understanding of disability culture comes from experiences of physical disabilities, particularly those that affect mobility.

When Petra Kuppers asks, "What is disability culture?" I do not think she expects a clear, succinct definition or answer. Culture is something that is always difficult to define, no matter what group is being considered. It is something that is constantly evolving and changing in time, never resting on just one idea or one characteristic. Kuppers says "To me, disability culture is not a thing, but a process. Boundaries, norms, belongings: disability cultural environments can suspend a whole slew of rules, try to undo the history of exclusions that many of its members have experienced when they have heard or felt ‘you shouldn’t be like this.’" (4).

Though this video is from a few weeks ago, I had a dream about it last night! The Loud Hands Project is part of an advocacy effort for Autistic folks; this YouTube video democratized the process of disability and community. This relates to our conversation in class about how the internet and technological boom within the past two decades has done wonders for people with disabilities.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/blind-sight-seeing.html

I'm writing this blog post after reading a NYT article from Feb 28, 2018 titled: How to Really See a Blind Person (link posted above). Snyder, the author, was blinded by an explosive while serving in Afghanistan. He writes about his experience with blindness and compares it to his life before he lost his vision. Snyder talks about how he’s able to "rationalize" his blindness because he lost his vision in service for others. This made me wonder how he would feel if he were born without sight. I wonder how readers of this article who were born blind would feel about this line.