https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYfKHVdmjzQ

PORTRAITS OF DISABILITY AND DIFFERENCE

Writing Seminar 118, Fall 2026                                              Prof. Kristin Lindgren

Tuesday/Thursday 2:30-4 PM                                                klindgre@haverford.edu

KINSC East Wing E115                                                         office hours by appointment                                                                                                                                                 

COURSE DESCRIPTION                      

I watched in my language and then what is stimming. As the video on what is stimmimg progressed I feel like Amythest started talking about what "in my language" was saying just by accident. She mentions how doctors chatagorize all stimming as the same but how to her there is clear meaning, a comprehensive language to those who speak it. I feel like this fact is obvious to people who know and care about autistic people, it's an easy language to learn when you respect it as communication. I also feel like it's honestly something neurotypical people could benefit from learning. This box of normative behavior and cummunication is limiting to them too, even if its less harmful. Like maybe instead of yelling when you got mad you rocked or engaged in some other form of sensory comforting?

One of my favorite poem's of hers was the Beighton hyper mobility scale because I read the poem before any others and actually even the tile of the book or poem and I immediately knew what she was talking about. It was a funny little moment of connection. I excitedly flipped back to the title page of the book and saw hyper mobility and then flipped back to the poem and saw the title and just felt a bit more excited to read through the rest of the poems. I wanted to see where our experiences overlapped and how they differed. In what tiny moments we were the same.

my little haiku from class:

Rabid raccoons, semi

trucks, ice picks and base ball bats.

Why am I attacked?

For recognizing wholness they did a great job of keeping the people interviewed human and takled about all diffrent aspects of their lives, big plus for not desexualizing any of them too. Throughout the movie we see Judy and other organizers make sure that everyone is listened to and has a chance to add to the landmark decisions being made, highlighting both leadership of the most impacted and collective liberation.They brought up intermovement dependance by giving credit to the unions and the Black panthers who where involved with making the protests possible. For intersectionality they did talk a little bit about the intersection of disability and being a white woman but not so much disability and blackness or queerness.

The idea that people are not entitled to able bodiedness has been a slightly mind boggling concept. At first I felt myself push back against it, this famous person isn't entitled because he wants a cure, that's not entitlement. But the more I think about it the more I see what Clare means. I think the  push back came from my belief that people deserve care, treatment, medicine, however those things are not a cure. Those things often can't return a person to the before, they cannot create a 'normal' bodymind for someone who never had one in the first place. Expecting them to, demanding to be made 'normal', to be saved from disability, without acknowledging how normal existing with that disability actuall is, is kind of entitled.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u9ONO_du0vetRJQ6X_Nlr-nlsXwn5wLn2EO3lZ6xyAQ/edit?usp=sharing 

One of the things that has been raised in multiple readings that I want to think about is the definition of disability, who gets to define disability, and whether disability even needs a definition, or is it about self-identification. All of the readings so far have defined disability or an idea of how social constructs and debate influence the definition of disability, but none of them have been the same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn77mEpSUfE
This clip is from the original season 1 of the TV show "Daredevil". In the scene, Daredevil is waking up from a fight where he got majorly injured, and doesn't know where he is. This adds to the rhetoric of realism, as Daredevil reacts to anyone else who doesn't know where they are, and acts like a real person, despite his superhuman abilities. This shows how all disabled people are normal, and just like able-bodied people, which somewhat resists the idea of the super-crip. But also, the reactions from the person he is talking to sounds like pity, although it is more due to his injuries than to his blindness.