"But that won't fly in [high school/college/the working world/etc...]!"

When people have somewhat unusual methods of ... doing anything, really, there are often authority figures who will try to stop it with the excuse that it won't fly in some other context, so it needs to be stopped in this one, too.

It's bullshit.

First, different contexts are different. A K-12 classroom is not a university classroom is not a construction site is not a factory floor is not an online chatroom is not a floor full of cubicles is not a ballroom. Just because I shouldn't waltz on a construction site, that doesn't mean you should tell me not to waltz in a ballroom because it wouldn't fly on a construction site. Just because some people will (incorrectly) assume my iso headphones (noise reduction, but not cancelling or music) mean I'm not paying attention, that doesn't mean I shouldn't wear them on a factory floor or at a construction site. It doesn't actually mean I should skip them at school or in an office, either. It's an assistive tool for sensory processing issues, and willful continued misinterpretations once I explain that to you once are not my problem.

Second, the context you cite may well consider the unusual method a non-issue. Some people like to tell me that being nonbinary might sound cool on the internet, but at work no one would tolerate that. They're just wrong. I use "they/them" pronouns and either "Mx." or no honorific at all as a teacher. I do the same as a graduate student. I get asked about it on occasion, but it's a non-issue. Your statement that it won't fly in [insert other context here] may well just be wrong. Others would like to tell me that sitting on the floor or under tables won't be tolerated later, so kids with disabilities need to be table-ready as a first priority, ahead of things like getting communication supports. I sit under an actual literal table when I have to go into the lab in graduate school. No one cares.

Third, even if the people in this other context have an issue, have you considered the possibility that they're wrong to do so? The administrators at a university where I studied abroad were of the opinion that I shouldn't come, because "people like that shouldn't be in college." (People like that meant autistic people, in this case.) I feel OK assuming just about any specific autistic trait they took issue with was a cover for them not wanting autistic students at all. Or a rock climbing instructor takes an issue with flapping (without letting go of the person on the wall!) and being left-handed. They're just wrong. Why are you backing up their wrong-ness?

Different environments have different expectations for actual reasons, they might not have the expectations you'd think they have, and other people are just as capable of having bullshit expectations as we are. "That wouldn't fly at work, so I'm not letting it fly in my classroom" is not a good argument. 

Language choices and history

Yeah, yeah, I know, I've talked about this before. Assuming I caught all my prior posts, this is the sixteenth time I've talked about language choices for autism, though this one isn't quite the same as the others. It’s coming as the result of a good discussion that helped me clarify thoughts I'd been having rather than the result of someone insisting my language choice is wrong because they were taught so.

So: I hate being called “differently abled.” It feels euphemistic to me, like we can’t admit to the fact that I’m disabled. I also hate being called a “person with autism.” Even being called “on the spectrum” rankles, and not just because I think the idea of autism as a spectrum gets used to reduce everything into a spectrum of “less autistic” to “more autistic” and also “higher functioning” to “lower functioning,” with these two incoherent concepts also being considered to be the same[i]. It’s also the way the term has been used. It’s a sort of (very recent) usage history that makes me extra wary of “on the spectrum.”

And history is the key to my current thoughts. Every way I can think of to identify myself as Autistic or as Queer has history. Usually as a slur, in the case of Queer identity - Queer itself is an example of this. “Autistic” as noun? It’s part of the dehumanizing nonsense that got person-first language started in the first place.

Person-first language, or “person with autism”? Yeah, it started in a good place, where people with disabilities, mostly intellectual or developmental disabilities, decided that they wanted that language to emphasize their personhood. Professionals were (frankly often still are) forgetting that we’re people. Said professionals picked up the language. They didn’t pick up the intent: remember that we’re people. At least in the case of autism, and probably for other disabilities, they picked up a completely different idea: that the autism or other disability is somehow separable from the person, and there’s a “normal” person underneath. That’s a history I want nothing to do with – don’t call me a person with autism. Also, if you need a language construction to remember that I’m human I don’t want you anywhere near me. I don’t. I’m not sorry.

“Differently abled”? Technically true, I guess. It’s another one where there may have been good intentions originally – recognizing that we have abilities that typical people may not have access to, and that this can be a direct result of our disabilities. (Or, or different abilities?) It gets used as as a way to ignore the realities of disability, of access barriers, and sometimes of the reality that there are things we just can’t do.

“On the spectrum”? It’s been touted as a compromise solution to this language debate. Mostly by professionals who think “person on the spectrum” is less euphemistic than “person with autism” and by people “on the spectrum” who are willing to be tokenized, as far as I can tell. It’s not only unclear (there are many spectrums), but also still a person-first construction. That’s not a compromise! But folks insist it is one.

“Aspergers” or any variation thereof? 1) False. Literally does not apply. 2) When it was a diagnosis in the DSM, it was frequently applied to mean “high functioning” or to avoid scaring people with the “autism” label. It ties in with aspie supremacy, and that can kill. No way. That’s not just a history I don’t like. That’s a present I find morally reprehensible.

Now, I need to find a way to talk about who I am, what my experiences are as an Autistic person. I need to use language that will be understood. Making up new words is a valid option. It’s where new language comes from. I use plenty of words that were created in my community. But take a look at the history behind some of the words I said I have issues with. Some of them started in my community, or communities like mine. Then they got picked up by folks who want to pretend that the difference isn't quite real, isn't important, or can somehow be separated from the person (maybe needs to be in order for the person to count as a Real Person.) Even language that could be good has this happen. Then there’s the reclaimed slurs. (A lot of the language around Queerness is of the reclaimed slur type.) Just about all the language has problems of this sort. At this point, reasonable people can reach different preferences based on which bad history, which bad associations, which ones are we going to tolerate or reclaim for the sake of being understood?

Now, I am of the "queer as in fuck you" school of thought for most of my divergences[ii]. Disability is a word that scares people. “Good intentions” behind folks saying they don't see me as autistic, or as disabled are an indicator of how much disability is seen as a Bad Thing. Making people face the scary concept is actually an argument for using capitalized, identity first Disabled and Autistic in my case. Folks can sit with that particular discomfort, and if they tell me they don't see me that way or I shouldn't call myself that, they're getting asked 1) why they think their idea of me trumps my own, and 2) why they think they know better than I do what I should be called. If my identity is so uncomfortable for them that this is taken as attacking, we’ve got a big problem.

---

[i] That would totally be enough for me to hate being called “on the spectrum,” though.

[ii] This includes my actually being Queer, just to be clear.

"Locker room talk", "vulgarity", and sexual assault.

Heads up that I'll be talking about sexual assault. Most of the thoughts I'm expressing are things I've heard elsewhere, but not necessarily combined in the way I'm doing and I unfortunately don't remember my sources. Also note that my position on the Trumpster fire, though not stated on this blog before now as far as I know, has been "As a queer disabled Jew descended from Holocaust survivors, I am concerned by these patterns" for some time. Also part of my position is: "Knocking down one figurehead of these patterns doesn't undo them, but letting one such figurehead become the most visible figure of a country makes the patterns get much worse, very quickly."


I've seen quite a few articles floating around that talk about the Trumpster fire's latest comments as "vulgar," rather than as "bragging about sexual assault." Let's start off with thing the first: he's bragging about sexual assault. I've also heard about it getting defended as locker room talk, and typical of men. (Also something men will sometimes try to include queer women in, because apparently the fact that someone likes women means that they would go in for their objectification and the glorification of their assault?)

And I am, in fact, well aware that not all men would commit any sort of sexual assault. (I'm also aware that quite a few will admit to having done so as long as you only describe the act and don't call it what it is.) Want to know who doesn't realize that? The men who assault think that all men actually do so, and just avoid getting caught/in trouble for it. So when someone tells me that these sorts of statements are normal locker room talk, I have to come to one of two conclusions:

1. They're one of the ones who would (or has) assaulted.
2. They can't tell the difference between speaking about consensual acts in a vulgar way and speaking about assault in a vulgar way.
1. Or they don't care about that difference? That's not better though.

Similarly, when someone tells me that all men are like this in private, that all men will "take advantage" if they get you alone, or anything similar ... if it's not about the vulgarity, option 2 (or 2.1) isn't really there. I have to conclude that they have, or would, assault. They're telling me something about themselves -- if you claim every member of a group does X, and you're a member of that group, you claim to do X. That logic doesn't depend on what X is.

And if someone tells me this is normal, that all men speak like this in private, they don't get to turn around and claim that not all men are like this should I take precautions. They also get to cope if I take those precautions specifically about and around them -- see the logic in the last paragraph.

On another note, I've heard the idea that groping is "less serious," "not really assault," or "not a big deal." I can't speak personally to less vs. more serious, because groping is the only kind of assault I've experienced, and only once. ("Lucky" me. And the fact that this really is lucky is seriously messed up.) From a more general perspective, though, I'm fairly sure it's a bad idea to compare which kinds of assault are more or less traumatizing. It definitely is really assault. Our judicial system is similarly terrible about caring, and similarly tends to blame the victim if a report even happens, and it's really assault. It's a person touching or grabbing you in a sexual way, without consent. (I never reported mine. The study abroad program I was on at the time had been attempting to have me sent home related to my disability, and I sure as heck wasn't about to give them a safety issue as ammunition.) 

And then there's "not a big deal." It is, or it should be, but sometimes it doesn't get to be. People who've been through a lot of trauma sometimes ... adjust ... their ideas of what counts, or of how bad the things they've been through really are. It's not usually conscious, or intentional, but it's a thing that happens. I think it's part of our tendency to "norm" on our own experiences. (Another example of this sort of norming would be my reaction to being unable to speak. I pretty much don't care, it's just another day ending in -y. This is apparently unusual.) Growing accustomed to something in this way doesn't make it OK, if it's something that wasn't OK before. But it definitely means that things which are, in fact, a big deal don't always get to register as such. 

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Why don't you just make your own? WE'RE TRYING!

All too often, when people talk or write about representation in fiction, the responses we get are somewhere in the area of, "So write your own stories." We do! Getting them published and disseminated is the hard part, because mainstream publishers (and film companies, etc) in the USA and probably a good chunk of Europe too are of the opinion that the default person we can all relate to is the cisgender straight white vaguely Christian abled man. Any deviations from this supposed everyman occupy the difference slot. (You mean you have/are that too? Yes, that too.)

So we wind up crowdfunding our anthologies, or self-publishing, or making our own publishing companies, or one of any number of things, if we get our stories out at all. Autonomous Press exists. I have stories on Amazon. Kickstarter and Indiegogo often have crowdfunding going on for anthologies by and for marginalized folks. I'm actually thinking of, and supporting, one in particular as I write this post: Hidden Youth: Speculative Stories of Marginalized Youth has a Kickstarter active at the moment, with about a week left. I would love to see more people supporting it because I want to read the book. (I pledged for copies of both books, since this is the second in a series.)

I would also love to reach the point where stories about disabled people, people of color, queer people, women, and especially people who are more than one of the above are not shunted to the side with "write your own!" followed by "those stories don't sell," where we get these anthologies without needing to make Kickstarters and Indiegogos and found our own companies just to see ourselves in fiction. (I love the idea and reality of us having our own media companies and collectives. I do not love the idea that us having our own media companies and collectives is the only way we can get representation.)

But right now, crowdfunding is where we seem to be at. (Also Star Wars, since the leads for The Force Awakens are a white woman and a black man, and it grossed great. There isn't actually evidence for the idea that stories about anyone besides the supposed everyman don't sell. It's just a convenient lie for folks who are used to being represented and don't get why we're all up in arms about not getting stories where we're the heroes.) So if you want to get to read and watch these stories, please, do support them when you come across them and can do so. Hidden Youth: Speculative Stories of Marginalized Youth has about a week left on its Kickstarter and I want those books. 

神经多样性及跨文化交际 (Neurodiversity and Cross-Cultural Communication)

Written in April 2014 and then not published because ??? I think I wanted to work on this more but it's been sitting so here it is.

So I found out that on Wednesday a professor from Beijing's Foreign Language University is coming to talk to us about cross-cultural communication. And I just finished reading Thomas Orwen's thesis which suggests cross-cultural communication as a good approach for interactions between autistic people and allistic people (non-autistic people, though he uses "neurotypicals" for this meaning.) So I wrote a thing. Poke me and maybe I'll even remember to translate it into English.

人们一听到跨文化交际就会想到不同民族的跨文化交际，而不是只有民族才有文化区别。残疾人有残疾人文化（奚）。个别残疾也会有自己的文化，即聋文化（沈; Ladd），盲文化（French），聋盲文化（Saeed et al）,及自闭症者文化（Davidson; Robertson及Ne'eman）。每一种残疾人文化都有自己的特点：聋哑人有自己的语言，从语言对思想的深刻影响可以意识到手语在聋哑人文化的核心性。盲目人在沟通中注重非可视的信息。聋盲文化把聋文化及盲文化的一些特点混在一起，也有自己的特色。

自闭症者文化呢？自闭症者使用语言的方式跟神经正常的人使用语言的方式有区。我们的感觉统合及风格也跟神经正常的人有区别（Baggs）。这样的特征感知也不是自闭症者特有的区别：自闭症成年人提出的神经多样性(Singer)表明：公众对世界、自己的环境的感知不同，学习风格（思想风格）有很多种（胡)。自闭症者之间的沟通及特有的神经共同当自闭症者文化的来源，从文化的来源可以开始理解文化的特征（奚）。具体地谈，自闭症者的文化比神经正常支配性社会愿意接受重复行为，即扑棱手；也更愿意接受沟通的不同方式，即打字、选图片、和打说手语。而且，自闭症文化更注重认知通达性，为了提高通达性愿意把要求介绍的过具体和少用比喻或者介绍所有用上的比喻。面对面交流的时候，自闭症者注意：如果认识一个人，千万不应该把“肢体语言”的信息放在话的上面。这样的思路跟神经正常社会的思路差不多是反响的：人们说自己从别人的肢体语言意识到了谎话是平常发现的情况，而自闭症者没有说谎话的时候容易被这样认为。另外，在自闭症者文化里，话不一定有别的意思：“我现在不想跟你说话”没有“我不喜欢你”的意思。我们明白：对自闭症者来说，交流需要华很多能力，有时候不想跟别人说话。用目光接触没有的问题也不表明尊重情况：只有必着别人用目光接触才算是不尊重别人(Orwen; Davidson; Robertson及Ne'eman)。

在这样的背景下，容易问：跨文化交际的方式在神经正常的人跟神经岔开的人交流有没有效(Orwen)？至少，在神经多样性的问题上跨文化交际的思路值得考虑。

奚从清， 林清和， 沈赓方.残疾人社会学. 华夏出版社, 1993.

沈玉林. "论聋文化与聋教育."现代特殊教育1 (2002): 1-9.

胡壮麟. "从多元符号学到多元智能." 外语与翻译 14.4 (2008): 1-8.

Davidson, Joyce. "Autistic culture online: virtual communication and cultural expression on the spectrum." Social & Cultural Geography 9.7 (2008): 791-806.

French, Sally. "The wind gets in my way." Disability discourse (1999): 21-27.

Ladd, Paddy. Understanding deaf culture: In search of deafhood. Multilingual Matters, 2003.

Orwen, Thomas. "Autreat and Autscape: Informing and Challenging the Neurotypical Will and Ability to Include." Thesis. Bergen University College, 2013.

Robertson, Scott M.,及 Ari D. Ne'eman. "Autistic Acceptance, the College Campus, and Technology: Growth of Neurodiversity in Society and Academia."Disability Studies Quarterly 28.4 (2008).

Saeed, Shakeel R., Richard T. Ramsden, and Patrick R. Axon. "Cochlear implantation in the deaf-blind." Otology & Neurotology 19.6 (1998): 774-777.

Singer, Judy. Odd People In: The Birth of Community Amongst People On the "Autism Spectrum" Diss. University of Technology, 1998.

注释：神经多样性(neurodiversity)的思想里的两个单词词是我自己翻译的，不一定是完美的翻译：“神经正常（的）”(neurotypical)和“神经岔开（的）”(neurodivergent)。

自闭症者文化的一些内容也是从自己的经历而学的。

Multicultural Psychology Post on Health (care) Disparities

This was a discussion board post for my Multicultural Psychology class. The topic was culture and health, and the chapter focused pretty heavily on health disparities and health care disparities. We're supposed to write at least 600 words and cite at least 5 research sources outside the textbook per discussion, though I usually (as here) will be making at least one of those citations in my responses to other students. (So, uh, professor? If you do a plagiarism check, yes I am the math TA in your class. Congratulations on finding my blog.)

Chapter 8 discussed culture and health. Part of the chapter is on health (care) disparities. Health disparities are the different rates of being healthy or sick (or having specific conditions) between groups, while health care disparities are the differences in treatment and in access to treatment (Mio, Barker, & Tumambing 2012). These two disparities can not be reasonably separated, as receiving poor care (or no care) can lead people to try to deal with health problems on their own and mistrust doctors, which in turn rather definitively leads to not accessing health care. I know that past healthcare experiences have influenced my decisions to (not) seek care for illness or injury. After I had a doctor explain that my injury (which I had already said was a month prior) could not be a broken foot because for a broken foot to appear as it did on the MRI, the injury would need to be about a month old, my trust definitely decreased. It was, in fact, a broken foot. I suspect he couldn't believe a person would be able to walk on a broken foot for a month. Another doctor taking my inability to assign a number to my pain to mean I wasn't in pain decreased my trust further. The only pain scale I've ever found that I could comprehend is based on behavioral cues, and since I'm fairly sure walking on a broken foot isn't supposed to be 2/10 on any pain scale, I can't exactly use that scale at the doctor's office. There are many who believe that autistic people have a reduced sensitivity to pain or don't feel pain as well, which really doesn't help when I'm trying to seek treatment for issues where pain is a symptom. Fitting that particular stereotype only makes getting medical treatment harder (Allely 2013), and I expect the experience is similar for other groups who are often assumed to feel less pain.

Mio et. al. give multiple examples of people of color receiving care later or receiving less treatment than white people in the chapter, both in personal stories and in statistics (2012). Racism has historically played a role in treatment, and knowledge of this racism plays a role in the decision to seek care or not (Bhopal 1998). Similar forces are in play for people living in poverty, who may choose to delay care due to an inability to pay for it or wait until they are in need of the emergency room because the ER (theoretically) can not turn them away entirely. Interestingly, decreased utilization of healthcare by those of lower socioeconomic status holds even when they have health insurance (Fiscella, Franks, Gold, & Clancy 2000).

In terms of the choice to attempt access to health care or not to make the attempt, historical and current racism play a significant role for many people of color. Medical and scientific racism, such as that which was partially involved in eugenics and in experiments like the Tuskegee syphilis study, led to continuing mistrust of the medical system. In addition, research on health care disparities has often framed the problem as lying within cultural choices of the marginalized group, which does little to create trust (Bhopal 1998).

In connection to these issues, I look back at the concept of imposed etics: “imposition of an outsider's worldview on a different culture” (Mio, Barker, & Tumambing 2012, p. 64). There really are differences in (attempted and successful) health care utilization between marginalized groups and privileged groups. However, in assuming this is because marginalized people culturally don't care about their health or don't believe that modern medicine can be effective at what it claims it can do, researchers are imposing their worldview and ideas of what reasons for action make sense on members of other cultures who have other worldviews! I know that as an Autistic person, I absolutely care about my health, including my mental health. I also totally believe the analysis suggesting that autistic people who are referred to interventions earlier and who received applied behavioral analysis are more likely to achieve the “optimal outcome” of losing their diagnosis (Orinstein et. al. 2014). I just don't care. No amount of evidence that an intervention can “help” me achieve a goal I don't have and rather explicitly reject is going to convince me to pursue that intervention, because it isn't evidence that the intervention can help me reach goals I do have. In fact, the imposed etic where outsiders presume my ideal outcome for mental health care is to stop being autistic, or at least act less autistic, contributes to my reluctance to pursue any mental health care. Even therapy meant for issues comparatively unrelated to autism gets sidetracked by this assumption, and also by assumptions about what it means to be mentally healthy that may not apply given that my natural cognitive styles are, by definition, not standard.

References

Allely, C. S. (2013). Pain sensitivity and observer perception of pain in individuals with autistic spectrum disorder. The Scientific World Journal, 2013(2013), 1-20.

Bhopal, R. (1998). Spectre of racism in health and health care: lessons from history and the United States. British Medical Journal, 316(7149), 1970-1973.

Fiscella, K., Franks, P., Gold, M. R., & Clancy, C. M. (2000). Inequality in quality: addressing socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic disparities in health care. Jama, 283(19), 2579-2584.

Mio, J. S., Barker, L. A., & Tumambing, J. S. (2012). Multicultural psychology: Understanding Our Diverse Communities (3rd ed.) New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Orinstein, A. J., Helt, M., Troyb, E., Tyson, K. E., Barton, M. L., Eigsti, I. M., ... & Fein, D. A. (2014). Intervention for optimal outcome in children and adolescents with a history of autism. Journal of developmental and behavioral pediatrics: JDBP, 35(4), 247-256.

Computers and Writing Session D5, Friday May 29 3:00-4:15pm, Disability and Universal Access.

I attended the Computers and Writing conference at University of Wisconsin-Stout. One of the panels where I took pretty good notes was session D5, Friday May 29 3:00-4:15pm, Disability and Universal Access. I'm now posting my write-up of the panel and my notes. 

Here's the nicer write-up, which I also added to the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative's Wiki. Maybe someone else will edit it with additional information, so that may not remain the same as what's below.

This panel began with Steven Hammer of Saint Joseph's University presenting on “The Sounds of Access: Disability, Art, and Open Source DIT (do-it-together) Interventions.” Hammer's presentation is concerned with Western art history and multimedia writing's tendency to ignore the perspectives and contributions of disabled people, and with the tendency towards a deficit model. He notes that after a diagnosis, there is a prognosis, which rather than simply describing what life will or could be like, it uses a presumed (and now unavailable) norm as a basis and describes how life will be different from that norm due to the diagnosis.

He suggests, rather than asking about how only certain people with certain diagnoses have bodies which are failing or considering how all bodies will eventually fail, asking “how are you failing right now?” He proposes that we consider the medicines we are taking to keep our bodies running every day.

With this question, however, Hammer mentions the risk that people will presume their experiences of bodily failure is equivalent to that of people with disabilities, who face oppression and marginalization based on their abilities in addition to the primarily practical concerns of keeping their bodyminds running.

Hammer then spoke about projects done together which use open source and glitch-theory methods to increase the accessibility of artistic production. One such project was his work on instruments for Arduino.

Hammer also drew a connection between Alexei Kruchenykh's idea of developing a language with no fixed meanings and his communication with his son, where the sounds are not words and the meanings might change from day to day.

After Hammer's talk, Samuel Harvey from Saint Cloud State University spoke on “Autism, Neurodiversity, and Identity Formation Through the Internet.” Harvey's talk covered the history of work on identity formation and on theory of mind, including the relations of these issues to autistic people. Noting that work on identity formation presumes that identity formation rests upon social interaction and the ability to understand what others are thinking (Theory of Mind,) and that autism comes with difficulties in social interaction, he asks what this would mean for identity formation in autistic people.

From there, he continues on to enthymemic dehumanization of people, particularly autistic people, where statements about identity formation, humanity, and theory of mind are made which logically lead to (never explicitly stated) denial of identity or humanity to marginalized people. The two primary examples Harvey notes are: 1) If identity formation depends on an understanding of what others think, or a theory of mind, and autistic people lack a theory of mind, then autistic people would be unable to develop an identity, and 2) If theory of mind is innate to humans, and certain groups are found not to have a theory of mind, that members of those groups are not human.

Harvey also notes issues with the current methods of testing theory of mind, primarily the Sally-Anne test, in that passing these tests depends on linguistic ability and upon cultural factors. He finds that rather than being innate to humans, theory of mind is innate to dominant groups, who use it as a tool of oppression to rob people of identity, agency, and personhood.

The third planned speaker for the panel, Annika Konrad of University of Wisconsin-- Madison, did not appear to speak on “Visually Communicating Visual Impairments.”

Liberty Kohn of Winona State University spoke third, on “Sound Pedagogy: Sound Art as Rhetoric, Poetic, and a Voice in the Composition Classroom.” He explored audio assignments, noting that while it is common to assign students to read multiple kinds of media, if students are not also writing multiple kinds of media they are not participating in a fully multimedia experience. He spoke about meta-language, and having students make versions of audio both including and excluding the meta-language in their assignments, and of the rhetoric of these choices.

In addition, he covered the idea of teaching non-musicians to produce audio in the classroom, as audio assignments are currently primarily the domain of people whose areas of study relate directly to audio. 

___________________________________________________________________________

Now for the less polished notes I took during the session:

Session D5: Friday May 29, 2015, 3:00-4:15, Disability and Universal Access themed panel.

Steven Hammer, “The Sounds of Access: Disability, Art, and Open Source DIT (do-it-together) Interventions”

Diagnosis, puts a thing on us.

Prognosis. Based on knowing that a person has a given thing. “What's life like based on what it could have been before.”

What does “no significant development” mean?

Asks, “How can we get beyond a deficit model?”

Amundon, 2000 “normal/abnormal is the basis of the deficit model.”

“human variation rather than pathology” Reid & Valle, 2004.

“[the] non-neutrality of techno-social artifacts and contexts... they are embedded... theya re not sterile, they're imperfect...” Cates 2014.

“from temporarily able bodies to always-already malfunctioning bodies” is on the presentation and he said it and I think that's original wording to Hammer. Also I like this wording.

Asking “how are you failing right now?” rather than the thought of this as “someday” your body will fail, think about the medicines you're taking.

Of course, we need to make sure people aren't concluding that they belong in disabled people's spaces because they have a headache or some such because that'd be fucked up.

Draws a parallel between Alexei Kruchenykh's idea of developing a language with no fixed meanings and his communication with his son, where the sounds are not words and the meanings might change from day to day.

The world is built for people who have an identity that is fucking fictional!

Samuel Harvey, “Autism, Neurodiversity, and Identity Formation Through the Internet”

Henderson, Davidson, Hemsworth, and Edwards 504?? Something Sam's citing.

“If identity is formed through communicating with others, and autistic people struggle with communicating with others...” [Ask Sam if I can see his slides after?]

Samuel brings up the possibility of written language as a discourse where autistic people could develop their identities.

Davidson 796. “NT conversations have a very fast-paces rhythym...”

Erikson+Cohen=> identity is formed by having a theory of mind.

First two publications of theory of mind, the titles are Does the X have a “Theory of Mind”?, with Chimpanzee and then Autistic Child. Erm erm erm.

Enthymemic dehumanization, leads to Autistic people not being able to have identities because we lack a theory of mind... yup.

Theory of mind innate in humans, bunch of folks don't, therefore those groups aren't human.

Yeargeau+Heilker state that autistic people have our own rhetoric and language, oh hey, that fucks up our test results in the area of language.

Halle and Tager Flusberg (2003), Lohman and Tomasello (2003) as cited in Miller.

Folks like to claim that language has no impact on the results of the test, which 1) Wrong, and 2) claims the test is arhetorical.

Tons of other factors wind up actually messing with theory of mind results. Whoops. Cultural stuff, socioeconomic stuff, linguistic stuff, and also quite a few kinds of neurodivergence.

Theory of mind is (maybe) innate in dominant groups, used to fuck over the disadvantaged groups.

“Theory of mind is innate in dominant groups, it is a tool of oppression meant to rob people (mostly autistics) of identity, agency, and even personhood.”

Harvey thinks theory of mind is a theory of the minds of dominant group members. That is, the folks who have a theory of mind don't actually have it about members of the groups said to “lack” a theory of mind.

Some Updates

I've been keeping up with the poems for National Poetry Writing Month, but for a variety of reasons not all of them are going to make it to the blog, at least not immediately.

Some of the ones about communication (plus some about communication that are already here) are being tentatively saved for... some sort of longer writing piece or series of them about communication and how it interacts with a lot of stuff for me.

Some of the ones about neurodivergence are being tentatively saved for submission to places like Barking Sycamores. A lot of literary places ask that pieces be either previously unpublished or, if posted on a blog, temporarily not on the blog for some period of time after they post it, so I'm waiting while I figure out which ones will go there.

Some of them were handwritten and aren't actually typed yet.

I found out that a friend of mine is doing a fieldwork project in his disability studies program that I really, really want to cite once it's done.

I got sick. (Sniffle, cough, whine.) It made me miss a tournament (more whining.)

I'm presenting at my university's graduate conference about disability and engineering stuff next weekend and need to write my paper for it. I can totally do this- I just need to sit down and do it. While I could wing this talk, I don't think I should.

I got nominated for a Diversity Award at my university and found out that I'm getting it, which is also cool. The stuff that the head of the multicultural center seemed to be focused on (how I'm "changing the culture in the math department") isn't what I'm really focused on, so I wasn't sure. The reason I'm not as focused on the math department is that while I'm sure there are changes in the department culture happening because of me... I don't feel like I'm having to do that much of the legwork for those changes. I'm fairly sure that I'm the first AAC user, full or part time, that most of the department has interacted with, but people have handled it great. They wait for me to type what I need to type, keep quiet while the iPad talks, read what I wrote when I'm doing it with handwriting, all that good stuff.

No one took issue with the fact that I'd start typing sometimes while they were still talking (since I don't have speak as I type on, I'd consider this equivalent to thinking about an oral response while they're still speaking, approximately.) Which the state director for Best Buddies did take issue with. (I don't actually like Best Buddies, even a little, and am a touch embarrassed to admit my affiliation because my experience has been so... helpy helpers who help and don't trust people with disabilities to know what we need, but I have been with my school's chapter a bit this year trying to get it so that a college student with an intellectual or developmental disability can register as a college buddy without having to lie about their disability status. I plan to leave as soon as this is fixed, though. )

Fiction and Representation (For Me)

After many, many years of being asked to visualize things and never being able to do it, and not forming pictures of characters or places in my head as I read, and never being able to accurately guess what a place actually looks like based on floor plans, I have reached the conclusion that I don't have a minds eye. (I reached the conclusion a while ago, so this isn't new, but it's relevant to the slightly unusual way I interact with representation in fiction.)

In fact, not only do I not come up with a mental image of a character as I read, but I also don't really remember the details of how a character is described as looking. (For similar reasons, I don't pay much attention to those details while I'm writing, which I'm working on because I know representation matters to people in all the ways they can interact with the information, and if I don't provide descriptions that show otherwise, people are going to assume all my characters are cisgender heterosexual able white people.)

One example I like to use for this is Hermione. The book descriptions of Hermione could be describing me, and I didn't realize this. After I saw the first movie, with Emma Watson as Hermione, while they were still trying to give her actual frizzy hair, I picked up on the bit where Hermione is a character who looks like me, but that didn't make Emma's Hermione take over the non-existent slot for my mental picture of Hermione. It didn't make me take over the non-existent slot either, because that slot doesn't exist. (Also, the book version of Hermione and I are fairly similar, personality-wise, which is the way that I can understand and interact with.)

For me, the non-existence of mental images for characters means that I personally don't much care what a character looks like. I care about it for the people who'll notice and care because they have minds eyes like that, and I care about it some (still not much) in movies because the pictures are given to me, but as far as making me feel represented goes, it really doesn't matter what the character looks like. I need characters who act like me, whether or not they look anything like me.

Give me characters who are awkward even when it isn't cute. Give me characters who avoid shopping because it's loud and bright. Give me characters whose interests don't line up with the idea of "geek" or "jock" or "creative type" or any of those, but have a mix from all. Give me characters who are good, really good, at some of the things they like but have to work hard to even manage "not terrible" for some of the others. Give me characters who act like me, with personalities like mine.

The physical descriptions matter for the people who can translate those to images, but that's not me and it will probably never be me. 

"Class" Discussion.

Over my winter break, I worked on a syllabus for a disability studies class aimed at engineering students, meant for the special section that the Society For Disability Studies is putting into one of their upcoming issues. (At least, I think that's how the section is working.)

I was talking to a professor in the school of education at my university (I have contacts in my university now! Yay!) We got to talking about books and reading, because her specialty is with English and I'm a bookworm. Somehow or other, the fact that she really liked the short story Harrison Bergeron came up. At this point, I mentioned that in one of the weeks of that syllabus I made, there are only two "readings." One is Harrison Bergeron, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut. The other is Fixed, a documentary about the science and fiction of human enhancement.

I wound up lending her my DVD of Fixed because she said it sounded interesting, and I left her with the question of why she thinks I'd put those two readings together. Now I'm opening it up here: anyone familiar with both pieces have any ideas on how they could work together in a class discussion? It doesn't need to be the same reasons/ways I have (note that I haven't said what those are anyways.) I'm curious, because I suspect that there's way more possibilities than the ones I've got.

Autistic Person Included is a Headline Because Reasons

Note: This is satire, or something like it. Also, yes, I use sie/sier/sier's as my pronouns when I'm writing about myself in third person. Everything else feels wrong saying it about myself, though other people saying it is usually not an issue. Now that this has been established, we continue!

The local woman's ultimate frisbee team looks and plays much like any other, but looks can be deceiving. You see, one member of the team is autistic, and we're therefore going to cite completely irrelevant and quite possibly deceptive information about the prevalence of autism in children, because of course this team member is actually a child despite sier status as a graduate student and teaching assistant.

Despite sier oh so inspiring struggles living while Autistic in an ableist society, sier teammates say sie is just a regular member of the team. "If sie weren't so open about it, we would never have guessed," one woman said, neglecting to mention just how little she actually knew about the developmental disability.

And yet, something must be different about this team, or the Autistic member, or the teammates treatment of sier. Otherwise, this wouldn't be news. We're pretty sure this is a feel good piece where the team is trying to demonstrate that they don't suck by acting like nothing whatsoever is different about their interactions with a disabled teammate. Because ignoring the reality of a teammate's disability is obviously the best way to make sier feel included.

Now that we are four paragraphs in, we're going to say that despite sier autism (which actually doesn't make it harder for sier to play ultimate,) Alyssa is a typical member of the team, and sier placement has nothing to do with autism. "Alyssa earned sier spot on the team fair and square," the captain noted, neglecting to mention that there aren't actually try-outs.

And now, in the final paragraph, we have some short comment from Alyssa sierself. "How is this news? This is my fourth year on this team, people." Clearly, Alyssa's impairments leave sier unable to understand that a feel-good piece on including a poor disabled person on a team is always news.