CONNIE PANZARINO at a pride march in Boston circa 1990
[ID: Connie is marching along in her sip 'n' puff (SNP) wheelchair. She is wearing a patterned poncho and sporting a green felt party crown on her head. She styles a pair of wire-rimmed glasses with her slicked back hair. She is smiling. Attached to the back of her wheelchair is a large green cardboard poster that reads "Trached Dykes Eat Pussy Without Comin' Up For Air!" followed by a pink upside-down triangle with a stick figure person in a wheelchair at the centre (a symbol for disabled women)].
the cyborg & the crip by Alison Kafer
[ID: “Trached dykes eat pussy without coming up for air.” Connie Panzarino, a longtime disability activist and out lesbian, would attach this sign to her wheelchair during Pride marches in Boston in the early 1990s. Shockingly explicit, her sign refuses to cast technology as cold, distancing, or disembodied/disembodying, presenting it instead as a source and site of embodied pleasure.
“Trach” is an abbreviation of tracheotomy, a medical procedure in which a breathing tube is inserted directly into the trachea, bypassing the mouth and nose. Someone with a trach, then, can, in effect, breathe through her throat, freeing her mouth for other activities (another version of this sign is “Trached dykes french kiss without coming up for air”). From a cyborgian perspective, this sign is brilliantly provocative and productive. It draws on the pervasive idea that adaptive technologies grant superior abilities,not merely replacing a lost capacity but enhancing it, yet it does so in a highly subversive way. The message here isn’t about blending in, about passing as normal or hypernormal, but about publicly announcing the viability of a queer disabled location. It’s disnormalizing, adamantly refusing compulsory heterosexuality, compulsory able bodiedness, and homonormativity. As Corbett O’Toole argues, it challenges the perceived passivity of disabled women, presenting them as actively pleasuring their partners, thereby graphically refuting stereotypes linking physical disability with nonsexuality.]
how many times do i have to tell people. psychiatric institutions do not exist to protect mentally ill people. they exist to separate us from society and torture us into complicity. most people i have met in psych hospitals lie their way out. because there is no other way out. they don't help us there. some people find it beneficial, but most don't.
also, not everyone there even "belongs" there! i met someone who went to the ER for a headache and ended up in the psych ward! another person came in for an anxiety attack mistaken for a heart attack and got put in the psych ward. i was involuntarily admitted because they thought i tried to kill myself when i didn't! i had only told my doctor i was struggling with drinking and wanted to make sure i didn't need detox. and when i got there, they forced me to go cold turkey from all my medication (including the ones for my chronic illnesses!). i was stuck in bed for days, and this was then used against me as proof that i needed to be there!
(by "belong" i mean according to the actual written standards for hosptialization. i don't think anyone "belongs" in a psych ward)
these places are not safe. they were a compromise the ruling class made after people started realizing asylums were abusing, torturing, and effectively kidnapping women. they didn't stop doing that. they just made it look like they did. they convinced everyone that it was different this time.
a cage made of gold is still a fucking cage. (disclaimer: this is US-based experiences, i do not claim to speak for people in other countries)
This is Rosemary Kennedy. She's about twenty years old in this photo. Three years before this picture was taken, she attended her first formal dance. Three years after it was taken, a neurologist who had never held a scalpel in his life sat beside her in an operating room and asked her to sing "God Bless America" while a surgeon pushed a blade into her brain.
She sang it.
Then she stopped singing. She stopped talking. She stopped being Rosemary.
She was twenty-three.
Her name was Rose Marie Kennedy. Third child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. Sister to a future president, a future senator, and the future founder of the Special Olympics. She had a mild intellectual disability. She could read and write at about a fourth-grade level, keep a diary, do multiplication, hold conversations, and travel across Europe. In May 1938 she curtsied before King George VI at Buckingham Palace. She tripped slightly. The family called it a triumph.
She wrote to her father in 1940: "Darling Daddy... I am so fond of you. And I love you so very much."
By her early twenties, Rosemary was having seizures and mood swings. Rages that scared the nuns at her convent school. She was sneaking out at night. Her father, Joe Kennedy, wasn't worried about her health. He was worried about headlines. He had sons to put in office. A daughter who might get pregnant or cause a scandal was a threat to the brand he was building.
So Joe found Walter Freeman.
Freeman was the most famous lobotomy advocate in America. Yale-trained neurologist. No surgical credentials. He'd read about a Portuguese doctor named Egas Moniz who was cutting nerve fibers in patients' brains, and Freeman had decided to bring the technique to America and turn it into a mass operation. He renamed it "lobotomy." By 1941, he and his partner Dr. James Watts had performed about two hundred of them.
In November 1941, Joe Kennedy brought Rosemary to George Washington University Hospital. He didn't tell his wife.
Here is what happened next, according to Watts's own account given to journalist Ronald Kessler and published in The Sins of the Father (1996).
Rosemary was awake. Mildly sedated but conscious. Watts cut through the top of her skull. Small incisions, about an inch on each side. He pushed an instrument into her frontal lobes. He described it later as looking like a butter knife. He swept it back and forth, severing white matter.
While Watts cut, Freeman talked to her. He asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer. She recited it. He asked her to sing. She sang. He asked her to count backward.
They decided how deep to cut based on how she responded.
When her words turned to mumbling, they kept going. When the mumbling collapsed into silence, they stopped. That was the endpoint. The moment her voice disappeared was the moment they decided they'd cut enough.
She came out of that room unable to speak. Unable to walk without help. Incontinent. Her left arm paralyzed. The cognitive capacity of a two-year-old. She was twenty-three years old and she would stay that way for sixty-three more years.
The family told people she'd gone to become a kindergarten teacher.
Her father built a private cottage on the grounds of a Catholic care facility in Jefferson, Wisconsin, called St. Coletta. Two nuns, Sister Margaret Ann and Sister Leona, became her world. They cared for her every single day for decades while the Kennedy dynasty played out on television screens across America.
Joe Kennedy never visited her. Not once. He died in 1969 without ever going to Wisconsin.
Rose Kennedy didn't see her daughter for twenty years.
The family kept the lobotomy secret for forty-six years. In 1962, Rosemary's sister Eunice published an article admitting Rosemary had an intellectual disability. She didn't mention the surgery. That didn't come out until 1987, when historian Doris Kearns Goodwin published The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.
But Eunice didn't just break the silence. She built something.
Camp Shriver, 1962. Her Maryland farm. Kids with intellectual disabilities swimming and running and competing because Eunice remembered what her sister was like before that operating room.
July 20, 1968. Soldier Field. Chicago. One thousand athletes. The first Special Olympics.
Today it serves six million athletes in over 200 countries.
JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act on October 31, 1963. It was the last law he ever signed. Twenty-two days later he was dead.
Walter Freeman performed about 3,500 lobotomies across 23 states. An estimated 490 of his patients died. He was banned from operating in 1967 after a woman died during her third lobotomy at his hands. Egas Moniz still has his Nobel Prize. Every petition to revoke it has been denied.
Rosemary Kennedy died on January 7, 2005. She was eighty-six. She spent sixty-three years in that cottage in Wisconsin because her father wanted a quiet daughter and a doctor promised him one.
Nobody asked her.
The Sick History. Medicine. Monsters. Death.
Full story with complete sourcing
The instrument looked like a butter knife. That’s not a metaphor or a storytelling flourish that’s the description the surgeon himself…
I'm not sure whether this is primarily a rant or a warning or a PSA, but one thing I've been seeing a lot of in the summer courses I'm teaching is conspiratorial thinking that flies, bafflingly, in the face of the facts.
My students (presuming this isn't an LLM thing that I haven't figured out yet) will often write, in the style of a YouTube clickbait headline, about how sad it is that so many voices are LOST TO HISTORY because NO ONE THOUGHT THEM WORTHY OF RECORDING.
And, like, on the one hand, yeah, probably 99.9% of humanity throughout history has gone through life without having their voices directly recorded. And the whole "Can the Subaltern Speak?" question is a good one to wrestle with. (I read Spivak in a 2nd-year undergrad history course. I am not making my students do the same thing because I suspect they would riot.) What baffles and confuses me is that they will write this... while reading carefully curated -- thank you very much -- sources about the very people whose experiences are allegedly LOST TO HISTORY FOREVER. We even get some firsthand accounts. And I wish I could figure out why I can assign a whole bunch of sources about the lives of marginalized people (queer, disabled, female, trans, enslaved, etc.) and still get responses about TRAGICALLY, SUCH PEOPLE'S STORIES WERE NOT WRITTEN DOWN. What do they think they're reading? Why doesn't it count if it's assigned rather than passing organically before their eyes in some other way?
I saw you're posts on jestercore and I'm a little confused on what you mean
I like clowns and jesters because there silly, cute, and in some cases make good horror icons but I'm not from any physically marginalized group as far as I know and I could pass for a conventionaly attractive person. But I don't want to accidentally discriminate because I like jesters and cark circus themes, are there any good resources to educate myself ?
Hello! My issue with the recent reclamation of jestercore, clowncore and otherwise circuscore is that it often fails to recognize the roots circuses had in human trafficking, racism, ableism, and the exploitation of marginalized peoples.
Cara Reedy discusses this in her video essay "Being a Little Person in America: We're Still Treated as less than Human"
Aubrey Smalls discusses what the Greatest Showman left out
Article: Race and Spectacle in the Circuses of Gilded Age America by Jacob Dorman
Clowns are still Racist: How Blackface Minstrelsy Shaped the American Circus
The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public by Susan M. Scweik
Understand that those bright colours, silly and cute aesthetics, whimsical themes and costumes were calculated tools. They allowed circuses and freak shows to feel lighthearted and "just in jest" while actively harming and exploiting those on stage. The belief that those involved were part of the joke and not forced into their roles by a society that criminalized them allowed the audience to separate themselves from their hate. Please look into these resources, and know that is so much more documentation on this!!
Judy Heumann passed away today. She was an amazing disability advocate who was on the forefront of disability activism for literally decades. She founded Disabled in Action, lobbied for independent living for disabled people, partipated in the longest sit in of a federal building in the United States with the 504 sit in, worked with multiple presidential administrations to improve disability rights, and so much more. I cannot stress how much she did for disabled people and how much she'll be missed. May her memory be a blessing.
[image description: a black and white photo of Judy Heumann during the 504 protests in 1977. She has short hair and glasses and is wearing a "Sign 504" sticker on her jacket. She is speaking into a microphone]
