#simi linton

[lesbianboyfriend]

Does the identical housing of patient, the adjective, and patient, the noun, conflate the two meanings? Did their conceptual relationship initially determine their uniform casing?

…The homonymic patient/patient, is, I think, not coincidental or irrelevant. The noun patient is a role designation that is always relational. A patient is understood to belong to a doctor or other health care professional, or more generally to an institution. As a noun, patient is a neutral description of the role of "one who receives medical attention, care, or treatment" (American Heritage Dictionary 1992). The adjective patient moves beyond the noun's neutral designation to describe a person who is capable of "bearing or enduring pain, difficulty, provocation, or annoyance with calmness" as well as "tolerant ... persevering ... constant …. not hasty" (American Heritage Dictionary 1992). The "good" patient is one who does not challenge the authority of the practitioner or institution and who complies with the regimen set out by the expert, in other words a patient. Disabled people, who have often spent a great deal of time as patients, discuss the ways that we have been socialized in the medical culture to be compliant, and that has often undermined our ability to challenge authority or to function autonomously. Further, the description of disabled people as patients in situations where we are not, reinforces these ideas.

“Reassigning Meaning”, Simi Linton

[medica-pseudoacademica]

The decision to assign medical meanings to disability has had many and varied consequences for disabled people. One clear benefit has been the medical treatments that have increased the well-being and vitality of many disabled people, indeed have saved people’s lives. Ongoing attention by the medical profession to the health and well-being of people with disabilities and to prevention of disease and impairments is critical. Yet, along with these benefits, there are enormous negative consequences [...] Briefly, the medicalization of disability casts human variation as deviance from the norm, as pathological condition, as deficit, and, significantly, as an individual burden and personal tragedy. Society, in agreeing to assign medical meaning to disability, colludes to keep the issue within the purview of the medical establishment, to keep it a personal matter and “treat” the condition and the person with the condition rather than “treating” the social processes and policies that constrict disabled people’s lives. The disability studies’ and disability rights movement’s position is critical of the domination of the medical definition and views it as a major stumbling block to the reinterpretation of disability as a political category and to the social changes that could follow such a shift.

- Simi Linton, “Reassigning Meaning” in The Disability Studies Reader (2006) (link)

[selfession8nenes-blog]

Simi Linton accepted my friend request on Facebook a week ago and I finally sent her a message after making my professors read it and I AM STILL FREAKING OUT I CAN'T HANDLE IT HOLY SHIT

[mfg]

No matter how one feels about the war in Iraq, the women and men who served honored their commitments and sacrificed in the name of our country. They are, for now, wounded warriors, as the web site "The Wounded Warriors Project" calls them. After the war fades from view, though, and all the prostheses have been fitted and the VA support groups disbanded, they will become disabled citizens, subject to the definitions and constraints that come with that territory. The medical advances [relative to in prior wars' mortality rates] have given them life and, for many of the disabled men and women, an unprecedented level of functioning and comfort. The teams of researchers and practitioners who have contributed to these interventions have done amazing work and are to be commended. Yet when these veterans go to get jobs, return to school, or live in the community, the work of the disability rights movement is what will sustain them.

Linton, Simi. My Body Politic: A Memoir. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2006. 242. Print.

A problem I see with the "Wounded Warrior" concept is that it creates yet another stratification for the "deserving disabled." The wounded warrior is essentially a subclass of an already protected class, subject to all the protections afforded the parent class (the disabled). This may seem a semantic point to raise, but statutorily and socially, it is very meaningful.

To create laws affecting change and protections for, specifically, wounded warriors, leaves out the rest of the disabled people. When we effectively remove wounded warriors from the pool of people with disabilities, this divides them from others with disabilities, and enforces that protections afforded wounded warriors are due to their service and not as protections that should be afforded anyone with a disability.

Eventually, as Linton points out, the fervor around the wounded warrior movement will fade; but the laws created around this social fiction, and the damage done to those left on the other side of this fabricated divide, will remain. These wounded warriors of today will be like every other disabled person twenty, thirty years from now. But they will not likely have the PR campaigns and awareness marketing that afford them the modest services they receive.

Support for the disability rights movement should not segregate the deserving from the unfortunate, yet undeserving. Support for wounded warriors should integrate them within the disability rights movement, not set them aside.

[mfg]

Once inside [after surmounting an accessibility obstacle], we might register a complaint about the entrance, but the proprietor sees us already in there and will be more complacent about building a ramp. It is a kind of "passing" - taking on the burden of keeping up with the majority without making demands for change

Linton, Simi. My Body Politic: A Memoir. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2006. 183. Print.

I might change the language to 'without making demands on privilege', but this passage portrays the issue of passing, and the complacency of privilege, very well. Linton continues saying:

We "passers" fool the public into thinking disability is an individual thing, a matter of personal fortitude and courage. It fuels the myth of "overcoming," and it compromises others' rights. (Linton 183)

Further, while discussing how a motorized wheelchair had some benefits, she dismantles the public reliance on donations and research and cures and technology to defer systemic improvements:

It is not simply new technologies that will improve people's lives. For instance, before the ADA went into effect there were rarely curb cuts on city streets... The curb cut requires no advanced technology; it probably could have existed from the minute curbs were invented... Without them though [my motorized wheelchair] would be just a hunk of metal, all charged up with nowhere to go. [It] didn't liberate me, any more than the birth control pill or the washing machine liberated women. These are useful tools, but the tools only work for us when broader, more systemic change occurs.

In my case, as an epileptic, I am not liberated by anti-epilepsy drugs; since I can never plan to be seizure free, and know another seizure is always lurking, its important to state that all the medicine and research in the world can improve the quality of my life, but it does not make me independent. "Awareness" should be dedicated to forging relationships that make my dependencies diffuse so they cannot be leveraged against me.

Further, big medicine is no friend; they send massive invoices off to debt collectors at the first wrinkle in payment. They is a huge power disparity between health professionals and the people in their care. Why would I want "awareness" to benefit them, or mitigate their risks? Why should my body, my story, my struggle be used to pad their margins with money donated by people who care about me when they exploit my illness?

[mfg]

The message I read in this action is: You are just like everyone else, but only as long as you hide or minimize your disability

Re: getting taken out of your wheel chair, and carried, and social perception that it sends a message that you are just like everyone else.

Linton, Simi. My Body Politic: A Memoir. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2006. 168. Print.

[mfg]

In the early hours and days after a spinal cord injury, the usual question the family asks the doctor is will she/he live? Then, once that is clear, the question is, "Will she ever walk?" It is totally understandable that families and friends ask that, and fear the answer is no - for so many reasons, not the least of which is that they probably never knew anyone who has a good life that didn't include walking. But my sister saw me, saw the wheelchair, and felt optimistic about my life in a way that it would take others around me several years to feel. [My sister] hated seeing me in pain or scared, but she could imagine me in this life and for her is wasn't a compromised life.

Linton, Simi. My Body Politic: A Memoir. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2006. 99. Print.

She goes on to speak of her sister's book, No Apologies: Making it with a Disability, a book where her sister "interviewed disabled people and compiled that material into a beautful book filled with pictures and words of people often not seen or heard from (Linton 99)."

This passage really holds for me one of the secrets behind the marginalization of people with disabilities; our society hides them away from itself. Society, like some third grade kid who just met someone who's different, insulates itself and secrets away the people with differences, and pats itself on the back for 'awareness' of an illness, a concept which centers itself on the person who is aware and not the person with the disability.

Having epilepsy - an invisible disability when it isn't debilitating - I am not visible to society generally as a person with a disability (PWD). Nonetheless, November is Epilepsy Awareness Month; the drive for awareness among the nondisabled makes me ask the following questions:

How can society be aware of what it means to be living with a disability, when PWDs are taught from the start that they should shape their objectives around what nondisabled people value?

Does awareness actually inform society of what PWD value, or reduce PWDs to a list of symptoms and a couple token inspirational people?

When society donates money to expensive cures, but not money to medical care or reworking a capitalist system designed to derive profit from healthy people, how exactly does awareness improve the quality of life of PWDs?

[mfg]

Yet the error [rehabilitation professionals] made was to speak for disabled people, which undermined the autonomy they claimed to promote. The doctors who ran these institutions were almost exclusively male and nondisabled, and they set out to define for the public what disabled people needed and wanted. In those years, rehabilitation professionals tended to call all disabled people "patients," whether we were in their care or not. That designation was replaced in the '80s by the term "consumers," as in consumers of their medical services. That has not changed; it is still as if our only identity is in relationship to them.

Linton, Simi. My Body Politic: A Memoir. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2006. 82. Print.