Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

sanguinity / sanguinarysanguinity recently reposted Chrystos' "Those tears," and it got me thinking about how differently derailing and appropriation plays out when it comes to the quest for accessibility. In disabled spaces, of course derailing and outsider claims of authenticity & knowledge happen. "I'm myopic so I understand blindness," "Oh, I get obsessive compulsive as well, I totally have to check that the oven is turned off before I can leave the house," "Man, my boss was a jerk today, and I am so out of spoons," "I'm sore from typing I totally get it," "I'm such a napper; I totally get CFIDS," "I just love signing, we should talk so I can show you how much I've learned!"

(The management refuses to state how many of these she personally has said on the grounds that doing so will incriminate her.)

(Also I am not intending to disability police with those quotations. PWD can say those exact same words, and if somebody says they have a disability than they do. My concern is not with trying to police people who say they are disabled, but with people who will willingly say they are not at all disabled but also insist that the general wear and tear of being a human being in the world makes them completely understand what it is to be disabled.)

But the weird thing about disability is that because of the very nature of human bodies, their frailty that makes some people choose to use the label "TAB", meaning the "Temporarily Able-Bodied" when referring to people who do not have disabilities, it means that in some senses the outsider intrusions can actually be useful. Whenever upper management breaks a leg, offices suddenly start seeing automatic door opener buttons and cleared paths to elevators. When entitled brogrammers get sore hands and have to take a break from mousing, they often become more respectful of the need to use alternative input devices (except for those who are privileged enough they can afford to hire typists and think everyone else with RSI should do the same grr argh). When I had a vitreous detachment bad enough to impress my optometrist but still a normal side effect of aging, I started to appreciate the difference between correctable and uncorrectable vision problems in a way that walking around without my glasses could never explain to me (because I can always just put them back on).

Of course, it can go the other way. "Well, I had the flu, and I still came to work [EDITOR'S NOTE: oh please no!], so I don't see why you can't work with CFIDS." "I broke both my legs and still never needed a seat on the bus, so I don't see why you need one." "I can get around my house with my glasses off, so why do you need a dog to get to work?" Not all people are willing to put any effort into empathy.

But still, I see how that outsider invasion can have some utility when it comes to disability, in a way that doesn't apply when you are talking about, say, white women inserting themselves into spaces for women of color, or cis straight folks inserting themselves into queer spaces. In a disability space you can potentially draw on that claim that human physical frailty creates connection in order to push (temporarily) able-bodied folks to change their physical spaces. They still might be invading spaces which ought to be safe spaces for PWD, but some utility can be found for that. Meanwhile, if I, as a white woman, insert myself into a WOC space, I don't see how the women of color can extract any utility from my invasion.

This is me thinking aloud, and I'm not sure my thoughts have boiled into anything useful as yet.

Amy Stern (bigbrotherreads) has let me be a guest blogger on her blog YA Subscription, and I started off my contributions there with a post on Francesca Lia Block's Dangerous Angels quintet. I talk about feminism, race, sexuality, and intersectionality, and I'm surprised by how much I liked the books on reread.

(I sent the post to Amy a while ago, and reading it now for the first time in ages I am embarrassed to see how many typos that are in it; I thought I proofread that thing about 17 times. But such is the blogosphere.)

Anyway, please, go over there, contribute to the conversation!

On another note, I feel like Kristin Cashore has joined the ranks of bloggers such as Ta Nahesi Coates and Slacktivist who are just too smart and useful to miss. It feels somehow dirty to say that about someone who is a friend, but I think it's true.

A friend to whom I will refer as Jules Léotard recently pointed me towards this lengthy video which is the product of Focus on the Family's "True Tolerance" program.

Direct URL / Video in accessible player


The video points parents towards the stealthy methods those "sneaky" homosexual activists are using to get into the schools, such as devious, wicked anti-bullying campaigns. (The fact that 23.2% of students who have been bullied at school because someone perceived them to be queer attempt suicide is apparently irrelevant to these people, who provide a [PDF] "model anti-bullying policy" which is not intended to prohibit expression of religious, philosophical, or political views. Presumably including "you're going to hell for being gay.")

Anyway, their list of [PDF] devious homosexual agenda books you might find in your school makes me sad, because the only thing in there that counts as fantasy or science fiction is Uncle Bobby's Wedding. Is that really the state of homosexual agenda children's and YA books in F&SF? Hero, Cycler, and some albeit adorable queer guinea pigs? (I'm exaggerating. Somewhat.)

It doesn't work that way in my mind, where I forget that Tally Youngblood never hooked up with Shay; that it was just subtext in King of Shadows; that none of those gay best friends in paranormal romances are the main characters. This is a good time of year to remind myself that for all I am used to seeing the intense social conservativism in fantasy, I mustn't discount the strong strain of it in science fiction.

Also a good time of year to make the time to read Ash. *goes to request from interlibrary loan*

I have 60 words in which to review a lengthy YA book which includes, in passing, hateful language which is totally in character for the protagonist (e.g. "fags," "spazzes in helmets"). The language is condemned neither by the text nor by any of the other characters; in fact, no attention is called to it at all within the text.

What I'm finding most problematic about this is not how to write the review. That's easy: I have 60 words, which means I tack on "bigoted" to one of my mentions of "the protagonist", which is about all I can do. No, what I'm finding most problematic is that this wouldn't have been an issue for me if the protagonist had been equally briefly and casually fatphobic, because I so take that for granted that I would have cringed and moved on. What's surprising in this book is that I don't actually expect over language of this sort to make it to the editing process without some kind of textual self-awareness being added. (I certainly am not surprised to find homophobia or ableism in contemporary YA, but more of the systemic kind, and not this sort.)

I know some people could make the same post and turn it into a judgment on the publishing industry for self-censorship, but I'm not one of them. I do think that language helps shape thought, and I think a raised eyebrow from another character or from the narrative voice could have clued in even the less aware reader that yes, the protagonist said "fags," and maybe that language is worth a second thought. I find it much more problematic that fatphobia is much more often treated with the same casual disregard this text gave to homophobia and ableism.



(Yes, I acknowledge that children's and young adult literature comprise a corpus created by adults for a group of readers who don't have control over their own literature and that we use their literature as a teaching tool. Like Nodelman, I find this both problematic and necessary.)

I am thrilled that my frequent co-conspirator/co-author Rebecca Rabinowitz has started blogging over at diceytillerman (RSS). I'm sure that blog will be a great place to get more of Rebecca's insights about children's literature, especially focused through the lenses of queer theory and fat politics.