hommage à snootsifus snax?

jk je vais utiliser tumblr à mauvais escient pour des réflexions académiques – si qqn lit qqc que j’ai écrit et c’est pas exactement ça, s’il te plaît dire qqc

[ostolero]

“I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, into a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly. Their reaction seems to me in direct proportion to the sense of feeling cheated of the advantages which accrue to white people in a white society. There’s an element, it has always seemed to me, of bewilderment and complaint. Now that may sound very harsh, but the gay world as such is no more prepared to accept black people than anywhere else in society. It’s a very hermetically sealed world with very unattractive features, including racism.”

— James Baldwin, from a 1984 interview given with Richard Goldstein, in the Village Voice

[scarecrowsaliva]

because so many people missed the point of this on the original posts notes,

James Baldwin (a gay human rights activist and author of the 50s and 60s) was pointing out that communities that are minorities are still part of the larger population and are still going to fall into oppressive beliefs within their communities and as a white queer person it is extremely important to make sure your acceptance includes BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of color), do not make excuses to deny anyone the right to live as they are when you cry about your own discrimination.

community and solidarity is the only right answer.

[the-haiku-bot]

community and

solidarity is the

only right answer.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[marauders4evr]

The thing that abled people who advocate for the disabled community don’t get is that there are times when disabilities/accommodations clash. Horribly.

Like I spent years having to come up with a solution to get therapy dogs into a series of residence halls. Why years? Because we had to decide who got to stay and who got to leave: the people who needed therapy dogs or the people with severe allergies to animals. Who got the alternative housing? 

Things like fidget toys might seem great for some disabled people but having them in the room could be distracting/overstimulating for others. The same goes with stimming. It can’t be helped but neither can the anxiety that another person in the room feels as they watch/hear it. Additionally, something like a weighted blanket might immediately calm one kid down and send the other one into a panic attack due to the claustrophobia it causes. (*Points to myself*)

Every Metro bus in New York City has a series of seats at the front that can be lifted up to accommodate people in wheelchairs but if I’m in one of those spots then someone with a cane/walker has to journey even further to sit down.

The flashing lights of a fire alarm are there to help deaf/hearing impaired but if they’re not properly timed, they can also cause a person to have a seizure.

The worst part about all of these is that there is rarely a concrete solution that makes everyone happy/safe. And I’m not here to offer any because I don’t know them. I’m just here to remind you all that as you’re taking your education/health classes, as you’re reading your textbooks, as you’re preparing to go be an advocate, just remember that there is rarely ever such a thing as a one-size-fits-all solution to advocacy and that something you do that can help one disabled person might actually hinder another.

Food for thought.

[tikkunolamorgtfo]

I have heard this referred to by some in the disability advocacy profession as “duelling disabilities” and it’s definitely something I wish people would be more mindful of when discussing accessibility.

[startledoctopus]

another useful term is “competing access needs” or incompatible access needs.

[startledoctopus]

i just came across the term “access friction” that was coined as an extension of the “competing access needs” to remove the idea of competition, winning and losing

Access Friction Explained - Calling Up Justice!

Calling Up Justice is creating a resource on access frictions because there are multiple meanings and applications of the term. Access frict

[kelpforestdwellers]

This is also one of several good reasons the phrase ‘fully accessible’ means nothing without further context. Your venue is fully accessible? To whom?

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

Reblogging this version for the excellent turn of phrase, and the link that goes with it.

Also, while I was reading this, a slogan popped into my head:

The best accessibility is flexibility.

[hersaffroneyeballs]

“The ultimate consolidation of whiteness as a cultural identity, however, occurred through violence: the slave patrols. The patrols were composed of conscripted poor whites to form an intermediary control stratum between the colony and its black labor force. (Allen,251) Their task was to stop runaways, and disrupt any signs of association or social autonomy among the Africans. In short order, patrol suppression of anything that might signify black bond-laborer autonomy received the approbation of the colonial elite as a discovery of a threat. The poorer whites thus gained inclusion in the colonial society from which they had previously been marginalized. (Stampp, 214; Genovese, 135) Patrol violence made the colony’s original paranoia seem real, gave it assurance that its enslavement of the Africans was justified, and gave concrete expression to the white sense of threat. In order to further enhance their social inclusion, the patrols soon engaged in gratuitous violence against the black bond-laborers, representing it as actual suppression of rebellion. The sense of social inclusion thus fostered, in the context of the indispensibility of a control stratum to control the African bond-laborers, marks the inception of a bargain between classes in the English settlements. It is here, at the beginning, that the historical tendency among US workers to prioritize white solidarity over class solidarity finds its inception. It emerged from the cycle of paranoia, enslavement, social categorization, and violence toward the Africans that unified the English around a sense of white identity; it would later emerge as a class collaboration in subsequent forms of racialization. (Martinot 2003a, 68) Overall, violence, paranoia, and social solidarity constituted a self-generating cycle. Social paranoia necessitates defensive solidarity; defensive consensus requires violence to neutralize the perceived threat; the violence not only makes the original paranoia seem real, but creates more palpable resistance on the part of those it subjugates, and thus greater fear among the dominant, calling for greater solidarity and violence. Whiteness as a social identity emerged from this cycle. The culture of whiteness, the criminality of its oppressive violence, its psychology of fear and endless defensive solidarity then served to mitigate white society’s internal class contradictions and conflicts. The operation of this cycle of threat (paranoia), a demand for social allegiance, and gratuitous violence is evident throughout US history. Jim Crow demonized black men as assault-prone, against which segregation was proclaimed a defense, and for which mob murder was ritualized to legitimize that paranoid assessment and provide a sense of white belonging. (Hale) In the present era, even as mild a corrective of past discrimination as “affirmative action” was greeted with “they want to take over everything” by a populist movement whose slogan about “reverse discrimination” did endless conceptual violence to the idea of equality, and whose harassment of black people on formerly “white” jobs made even partial programs ineffective. In the present invasion and occupation of Iraq, the first step was to invent a threat (WMDs) and, following the invasion, call for solidarity to “support the troops;” subsequently, the US military destroyed entire towns and decimated neighborhoods in Iraq because it could say that Iraqis who were attacking Americans. What this culture of whiteness must seek to disguise from itself, however, is its dependence on black people, because it is through their continual racialization that whites racialize themselves as white. That is, early plantation capitalist dependence on black labor got transformed into a cultural and identity dependence (through the invention of “race”) that threads itself through all US history. White identity finds its center in black people, and not in itself. It obsessively suppresses black political autonomy and community economic self-determination in order to maintain control over that external source of its own identity. The continual impoverishment of black people to render them economically and politically dependent on white society is the first exigency of white racialized identity; hence, the white necessity to dismantle affirmative action.”

— Steve Martinot, “The Question of Fascism in the U.S.”

[sneetsnortsnax]

Just towards the end of the first half of her first chapter in Bodyminds Reimagined, Sami Schalk cleanly and cohesively explains how disability and race are inherently interconnected. This is something that Siebers attempts to do but does not adequately do in his book Disability Theory. Siebers argues that disability is the blueprint for all other forms of discrimination. Schalk rejects this and says that while disability discrimination greatly informs other forms of discrimination, Sieber’s argument is too neat. Racial discrimination did not evolve from disability discrimination, but rather the two have developed alongside each other in recent (hundreds of years) history that doesn’t erase the fact that disability discrimination can be considered much older. What she doesn’t state explicitly (at least as I understand it, I should go back and confirm) is that a pre-racism society no longer exist (has been transformed) so we can’t actually call disability or race an older category in any meaningful way.

So, like, I should go ahead and write a quick summary of what Schalk explains buuuut I think I am getting some ideas of what it means to be a US American scholar in Europe/France trying to discuss race in a place where I’m told repeatedly my conceptions of race are too foreign (and yet I see the same consequence of race-based discrimination in France 🤔). Like there’s an ever-growing body of research on discrimination and identity in the US and I have greater linguistic access to it than most French scholars do.

Also I don’t think Siebers was ever content with his idea of disability as the basis of all discrimination because he only formed the shell of the argument, introduced it through the occasional sentence. I read it as a call to other authors to engage with it, prove it one way or the other (or more likely, find where it’s true and where it’s false).

[sneetsnortsnax]

In Disability Aesthetics, Siebers discusses the idea of the public and how it defines construction of group identity (p 107, ch Trauma Art). He discusses how in the early 1900s, Gabriel Tarde defined the public as a newer collective group that was made possible by the printing press in the 1600s, but that its power and scope was greatly expanded by the advent of the railroad and the telegraph. And with the advent of other forms of connection?

Earlier in this section (p 106), he speaks to Émile Durkheim’s idea of collective representation, part of his contribution to the idea of ritual, which aims towards social cohesion.

Collective Representations: a symbol that represents or works to create/construct part of the identity of a cultural group, for Durkheim, disguised as sacred ideas (but I can see how this idea can be expanded beyond the sacred)

Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner - also important in culture studies

Siebers writes that they « revived the study of ritual for our day » and now ritual is…

Ritual: the concretization of meaning, its display

Meaning: something which is intentionally conveyed (abstract)

Symbolic Action: actions that have a cultural meaning outside of their physical function

[sneetsnortsnax]

Siebers discusses Le Corbusier multiple times, including his idea of the standard body, the body that is (was, will continue to be, is no longer, etc.) used to design space and I think this is something I need to look into more

I know this is discussed in Disability Aesthetics, but I also think it is in Disability Theory? We shall see

[librarycards]

hi!! people probably ask this you a lot, sorry but i'm very new to anti psychiatry and wanted to know if you had any recs on where should i start. i've read a couple of articles people have recommended to me but i am not from the us and the cultural difference is hard to assimilate sometimes

I do get it often! Consider this a master list (I'm going to link it on my blog also) of my recommended readings on the subjects of bodymind noncompliance, broadly speaking.

Tags:

antipsychiatry

disability

ableism

madness

psychiatry

antipsychiatry

saneism

fatphobia

intersex

pathologization

disorderly eating

relationships

parenting

world healing

Readings & recs:

Intros:

intro to critical disability/Mad studies

intro to transMadness / my transMad scholarship

intro to transMadness - simple language version

introductory works on audio/video

intro to CDS/CMS w/ Mad Studies reader link

queercrip / transMad feminist poetry venues

medical fatphobia

can i be an anti-psych/abolitionist /clinician? masterpost

reading "the right to maim" (jasbir puar)

Misc:

the strawmanning of the "social model" + actual facts

the rhizomatic model of disability

why you shouldn't say "go to therapy"

the false dichotomy of "self harm" and "medical necessity"

supporting someone during a manic episode

writing/creating through brain fog

ideas and questions for assessing a therapist

supporting a newly-out trans loved one

testing & trusting your reality

critiques of Mad in America

why "disorderly eating" vs. "eating disorder"?

should I do therapy?

why CBT sucks: lived experience edition

Books, Papers, Resources

coping with chronic pain

the bodymind

poetry & essays about bodies

fatness & transfem/TMA subjectivity

anti-functioning labels

nonfiction about autism

books about autism

non-garbage books with mentally ill protagonists

antipsychiatry novels

living with suicide bereavement

madness & the prison industrial complex

finding an abolitionist therapist/psych practioner

youth liberation/children's rights readings

why CBT sucks

I'll try to add to this centralized list moving forward. hope you find something useful here!

[disabled-dippy]

My Disability Studies professor said something that I think was very good and explains a lot about professional attitudes toward people with disabilities. This is what she said:

“We [people with disabilities] are the last thing on the HR discrimination list. Companies always list things like, ‘we eliminate discrimination on the basis of gender, race, religion, nationality, identity… oh, and disability.’ It’s just tacked on at the end. The others are mostly about being nice, respectful, and treating people equally. Not discriminating against people with disabilities is more complicated. You need to change your environment, code, the way you design things. You actually need to make changes, and most companies do not want to do that.”

I thought this was a really good insight. We’re often thought about last, if we’re thought about at all. Accommodating us takes effort and a lot of people just don’t want to make the effort.

[identitty-dickruption]

“just don’t use your mobility aid for the job interview”

you do realise some of us need our aids to function, right?

if you need your mobility aid in order to do your job, an employer very much can go “wait a second, you didn’t need that when we interviewed you, what’s changed?”. I’m thinking here about the case study in crip spacetime (2024) of an employee who had a HR rep use a 3 minute youtube video of said employee doing a task to prove that they didn’t need workplace accommodations

if you need a mobility aid you will at some point need to reveal to your employer that you are disabled and you still have to worry about the repercussions of that. like. that’s objectively true. hello.

avoiding disability discrimination is not a matter of Just Act Abled At All Times. lol. but thanks for the tip I guess

[sneetsnortsnax]

Biopolitics

Foucault and Agamben

Biopolitics is the way the state governs the biology and biological affairs of its citizens including public and private health (topics such as reproduction, sexuality, and marriage are part of this domain). Biopolitics is based on the idea that a state must regulate life to continue to exist.

So, I’ve been working on a simple definition of biopolitics (and biopower) and I’m reading this article by Sergei Prozorov (When did biopolitics begin? Actuality and potentiality in historical events - 2022 European Journal of Social Theory) which does a pretty good job of summarizing the different dates/eras proposed by Foucault and Agamben (& some others) and why there are different propositions.

But. I wish there was a definition of biopolitics. I get what biopolitics is, that’s not the issue. The issue is quickly and simply summarizing it so it can be understood without relying on other, similarly specific terms.

But anyways I think it’s worth noting here that Agamben proposes biopolitics as at least as old as the sovereign exception and therefore sovereign power, but he usually traces this back to Greece, but Prozorov notes that sovereign power is much older than generally discussed. I’m thinking about Gilgamesh and how sovereign power is presented as so familiar – it’s like it has existed for as long as memory. And that’s our oldest written story. Idk about oral history. I hear some are at least 40000 years old and even verified by western science™️ but idk about the role of sovereignty.

I do wonder about the relationship between sovereign and divine power but I know that’s a whole field or several of philosophy.

I do like the idea that biopolitics has always been part of power. It makes sense. I like how Agamben (and then Prozorov) frame it as having been marginal, a comparatively minimal part of politics that has become much more important in the past couple hundred years.

Others who discuss biopolitics:

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

Roberto Esposito

Mika Ojakangas

[sneetsnortsnax]

Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School

Also a touch of Marxism and Hegelian Philosophy

An abbreviated definition

Critical Theory: it comes from the Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School: an institute at the University of Frankfurt am Main 1923-1933, Columbia University until 1949, and back in Frankfurt afterwards

Why the move? A lot of thinkers recruited in 1930 fled the rise of the 3rd Reich

Goal of the Frankfurt School: to develop a theory of society based on Marxism and Hegelian philosophy

Marxism - a theory that combines three fields of study:

Physical anthropology

Theory of History

Economic/Political program

Marx combined theory with reality - he said we explain the world to plan something better and he made his work incredibly interdisciplinary

Basically it was a critique of philosophy for being too removed – also a time to take everything already developed in philosophy and turn it into practice

Hegelian Philosophy: the philosophy developed from the works of Hegel, looking a lot at History and Logic

German Idealism: a project to resolve all the questions of philosophy (Logic, Metaphysics, Culture, Art, Law, History, and more)

Metaphysics: the First Causes of Things and Nature of Being

First Causes of Things: the origins and original causes of everything/each thing

Critical Theory:

• developed a lot from the works of Freud and Marx

• has the goal of understanding and transforming society

• is interdisciplinary – it’s the (a) meeting point of philosophy and the social sciences

• has always had the goal of emancipation

• has continued to develop beyond the Frankfurt School

Major figures of the Frankfurt School

Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1968)

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) (2nd gen)

[sneetsnortsnax]

Structuralism – a first attempt at a definition

Structuralism is based on the idea of structures – societal structures

It posits that nothing in a society can be understood purely on its own because it’s part of a system that intersects with other systems

Structuralism comes from a linguistic theory

Language is composed of words which are a process composed of two parts: that which evokes the idea (the word/sound/shape/mark) and the idea which is evoked (the meaning)

Society has three parts:

concrete reality (like words)

abstract ideas about reality (like meaning)

mediating third order

Structuralists:

Émile Durkheim

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Ferdinand de Saussure

Louis Althusser

Roland Barthes

[sneetsnortsnax]

The Final Frontier in “unquestioned inferiority”

Disability Theory - Tobin Siebers (6)

Okay short post, I don’t agree that disability is the most unquestioned marker of inferiority in the US. I think it is easy to claim as disability is sooo rarely discussed (maybe even most often discussed by comparing other socio-cultural identities to disability to denigrate them) that it must be the least privileged in discussion. But. But, I think there are other unquestioned inferiority identities in the US that have a similar status. I’m thinking specifically of American Indian (using the gov term specifically and consciously), undocumented immigrant of color without fluent or semi-fluent English, but these are just two. I hesitate on trans identity as it has been pathologized as white but it is clearly at a similar level, as well as Black identity (but this is because of weird mixed backhanded acceptance and integration that is unequal in its manifestation).

Okay those are messy, half-formed thoughts and all this is really to say:

A hierarchy of oppression based on identity serves to validate need for social change but at the same time serves to reduce solidarity by making inequality a competition. Reinforce solidarity by comparisons rather than contrasts.

And also I get where Siebers is coming from if we think about some specific disabilities – retard (specifically using the slur) is really an unquestioned inferiority identifier. It might just not be so low nothing else can compare.

[sneetsnortsnax]

the instability of disability as an identity (5)

Disability Theory - Tobin Siebers

So Siebers mentions in the intro that disability is a less stable category than other socio-cultural identities, notably gender, race, sexuality, nation, and class.

He says that he will not wake up in the morning as a Black woman (as he is a white man), but he could wake up a quadriplegic.

I would argue that this is a flawed argument.

Gender is subject to change and is socially constructed – one’s gender can and does change even if the name one gives it never does. Choosing woman, which I will assume is a very unlikely gender identifier for Siebers, does not actually prove that this identity will never change, even overnight.

Race is socially constructed. He may never be Black, but is his type of whiteness stable (thinking of Irish, Jewish, West Asian, Italian, etc.) or is he the “best” kind of white (e.g. Scandinavian – as mentioned by Isabel Wilkerson in Caste) that could always achieve a new level of whiteness?

Sexuality is mutable and it changes at least once in everyone’s lives: puberty. But it changes as well in response to stress, trauma, and other factors. I believe Siebers meant sexual orientation, but that is also not a clean-cut, fixed identity.

Nation. Let’s take this from a US-centric perspective. Nation is a more stable identity for white US citizens with multi-generational citizenship than it is for anyone else in the country. Deportation has been going on for a long time in the US, and immigration for longer. Nation can be precarious and complex. I can see how one could construct an argument that it is more fixed than disability, but this just isn’t the case for so many people in the US and across the world. Hell, I’m an immigrant in France and the meaning of my nationality is actually changing as international policy changes. Probably not a lot and probably not in ways that impact me, but still.

Class. It is always possible to move down in class. It is sometimes possible to move up in class. These can happen over time or in a moment. Some elements of class are more stable than others. But going from non-disabled to disabled is a class change.

Sieber’s isn’t wrong, per say, but this argument feels a little weak to me.

[sneetsnortsnax]

the ideology of ability

Tobin Siebers - Disability Theory 2008

The ideology of disability is, simply put, that human value is determined by ability

to add another layer, it sets general able-bodiedness and non-disabledness as the baseline for human, but argues also that the more able one is (beyond the baseline able-bodied, general competence), the more value one has

this theory is seen in practice in the ideas of savants, exceptionalism, the trolly problem, and others that compare individuals based on what they do

I’m including Sieber’s list-definition of this ideology, found on pages 10-11), because I think it’s good to read with this in mind

• Ability is the ideological baseline by which humanness is determined. The lesser the ability, the lesser the human being.

• The ideology of ability simultaneously banishes disability and turns it into a principle of exclusion.

• Ability is the supreme indicator of value when judging human actions, conditions, thoughts, goals, intentions, and desires.

• If one is able-bodied, one is not really aware of the body. One feels the body only when something goes wrong with it.

• The able body has a great capacity for self-transformation. It can be trained to do almost anything; it adjusts to new situations. The disabled body is limited in what it can do and what it can be trained to do. It experiences new situations as obstacles.

• Disability is always individual, a property of one body, not a feature common to all human beings, while ability defines a feature essential to the human species.

• Disability can be overcome through will power or acts of the imagination. It is not real but imaginary.

• "Disability's no big deal," as Mark O'Brien writes in his poem, "Walkers" (1997>36).

• It is better to be dead than disabled.

• Nondisabled people have the right to choose when to be able-bodied. Disabled people must try to be as able-bodied as possible all the time.

• Overcoming a disability is an event to be celebrated. It is an ability in itself to be able to overcome disability.

• The value of a human life arises as a question only when a person is disabled. Disabled people are worth less than nondisabled people, and the difference is counted in dollars and cents.

• Disabilities are the gateway to special abilities. Turn disability to an advantage.

• Loss of ability translates into loss of sociability. People with disabilities are bitter, angry, self-pitying, or selfish. Because they cannot see beyond their own pain, they lose the ability to consider the feelings of other people. Disability makes narcissists of us all.

• People who wish to identify as disabled are psychologically damaged. If they could think of themselves as able-bodied, they would be healthier and happier.

[sneetsnortsnax]

pain and the ideology of ability as defined by Tobin Siebers in Disability Theory (2008)

so Siebers explains this ideology as “the idea that the able body defines the baseline of humanness” (159)

we can kinda say this as “a human is an able-bodied, neurotypical person with no illness”

I’m thinking about a post I see every so often that talks about how the normal amount of pain to feel every day is no pain

this poses chronic pain as aberrant, aka my body is not a standard human body but a damaged one because I’ve known very few days without pain in the last 15 or so years, more than half of my life

I used that post to motivate myself to seek medical care for my injuries (lol it didn’t work when I actually went to the doctor)

this idea is rooted in the medical model of disability, where my pain is a problem to be solved (well, not solved bc that would require medical attention outside of what capitalism provides, but theoretically solved)

and I sure as hell would like medical attention for my chronic injuries

but they don’t make me a “qualified” human – they don’t touch my humanness at all

(not talking about other disabilities here bc I’m just thinking about this theory and that post about pain and the use of the word normal)

[sneetsnortsnax]

ableism / validisme (ou capacisme)

I’m definitely not the first to be thinking about this, but because I don’t know who is working on it I’m writing without adequate citations.

As I’ve been spending more time in French crip spaces and preparing to write my memoire, I’ve been thinking again about the terms we use for disability and anti-disability sentiment.

I dislike ableist less than I dislike able-bodied, as I dislike validiste less than I dislike valide. However, I still am not content with either term.

I propose the term “handiphobic” and “handiphobe,” which I believe to have already seen, either on tumblr or in an academic text elsewhere.

I came to these after considering the social model of disability that frames disability as a problem of access, and not as a problem of capacity (to choose a word that translates directly into French). But a term like “accessist” / “accèsiste” doesn’t feel specific enough. There are many components of identity that limit access and, after all, the subject here is the constructed class of disability.

On provocation – I wanted a term that wasn’t defanged. I think naming the hate, the discrimination, the disliked nature of the identity lends power to the fight against it (this could easily have a citation). Handicap is disfavored in the US, but it’s the popular term in France. Due to the societal exclusion, I believe the French handi/handicap•é•e remains provocative enough.

To sign off as I began,

handiphobia / handiphobie

[sneetsnortsnax]

oh whew I actually looked it up and handiphobie is like a thing in French I had just been hearing validisme instead but we can stop with that now (maybe still considering the place of valide / invalide when discussing people with sustained war injuries and people without and that specific discrimination).

new project: better terms for personne en situation de handicap, personne pas en situation de handicap