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A year and a half after Britney Spears was released from her conservatorship, the way we view and talk about mental illness is regressing.

The people who want Britney to stop "embarrassing herself" online when she posts dancing videos or scantily clad photos only see her as sick, not as a woman who may be trying to reclaim her personal expression after spending 13 years under the total control of others. In fact, given the reaction to her freely expressing herself, it's clear that people view a noncompliant woman as unhealthy, and neurodivergence itself as embarrassing. They wanted to "free" Britney, but only the version of her that they felt was palatable to them.

A person with mental illnesses shouldn't have to measure up to arbitrary standards of respectability in order to deserve empathy. So what if she's mad? It doesn't make her any less deserving of freedom.

What Britney deserves is to be fully and openly mad and whatever else, instead of having to live with people casting their own projections of who they want her to be. She doesn't deserve to have her behaviour constantly dissected just because she's in the public eye.

#the excerpts are towards the end of the article #its a good read #britney spears #m #articles i read

Articles I read in May 2022

I normally don't do this, but since I have been working full time on my thesis, I read a lot of articles, so I thought I do a wrap up of those aswell. The theme of the articles is witch hunts and the historiography of witchcraft, as my thesis is on a witch trial. All the articles I found on jstor (and I will link the website), the majority are in English but I'll also include those written in Italian.

The Pursuit of Reality: Recent Research into the History of Witchcraft by Malcolm Gaskill

The Historiography of European Witchcraft: Progress and Prospects by E. William Monter

The European Witch Craze of the 14th to 17th Centuries: A Sociologist's Perspective by Nachman Ben-Yehuda

Who Were the Witches? The Social Roles of the Accused in the European Witch Trials by Richard A. Horsley

Witchcraft, Female Aggression, and Power in the Early Modern Community by Edward Bever

Witchcraft Prosecutions and the Decline of Magic by Edward Bever

The Invisible Men: The Historial and The Male Witch by Lara Apps and Andrew Gow (This is the first chapter of the book Male Witches In Early Modern Europe, I ended up reading the whole book, all the chapters are present on jstor, but I will link only this one. For those interested the book is composed by five chapters plus the introduction and conclusion)

La stregoneria. Confessioni e accuse, nell'analisi di storici e antropologi di Mary Douglas Reviewed by Michela Pereira

Ancora a Proposito di Streghe by Michaela Valente

The full list of books I read this month and their reviews is here

Across the world, people are disabled in vast numbers by war, occupation, and imperial violence. How can disability justice confront the U.S

(article from sept '22)

[Jasbir K. Puar] further distinguishes between disability and debility: disability might be a political-relational identity, while debility is a process. One is debilitated by repeated exposure to harm and violence – a wearing-down of the body and mind throughout one’s life. This could look like the mercury accumulating in the bodies of Indigenous peoples whose water source has been polluted, or panic attacks due to daily encounters with racism in education, health care, and justice systems. What this tells us, Puar says, is that “it can be productive for the settler colonial state to keep some populations alive but in a space of continual, perpetual injury.” And the scale of debility is enormous: in 2016, the World Health Organization estimated that as part of the Syrian war, 30,000 Syrians were being injured each month.

“Disability,” Puar continues, “becomes the [way] institutions exceptionalize injury or the non-capacitation of a body.” This means that institutions view disability as something out of the ordinary instead of the inevitable outcome of living under oppressive conditions, and they place onus on the individual for being disabled, rather than on these oppressive systems for disabling the individual.

Though a minority of disabled people live in the Global North – the wealthy, imperialist countries like the United States, Canada, and those in Western Europe – Puar notes that Global North disability rights advocacy tends to focus on disabled people attaining equality more than halting and holding accountable the systems that produce disability throughout the rest of the world. She writes that disability rights advocacy asserts “that disability should be reclaimed as a valuable difference […] through rights, visibility, and empowerment discourses […] rather than addressing how much debilitation is caused by global injustices and the war machines of colonialism, occupation, and U.S. imperialism.”

In other words, Global North disability rights appeal to the state to protect mostly white and wealthy disabled people. But Puar reminds us that disability and disablement can be a purposeful goal of the state. In contrast, a disability justice framework helps us understand that the safety of some disabled people in the Global North must not come at the expense or production of disabled people in the Global South. Disability justice, a movement founded by racialized people, explicitly denounces imperialism and recognizes that, in the words of disability justice collective Sins Invalid, “Disabled people of the global majority – Black and brown people – share common ground confronting and subverting colonial powers in our struggle for life and justice.”

#the article does talk of palestine and mass disabling by israel hence why i found it topical #there was too much to quote #disability justice #palestine #m #articles i read