Saturday Slumgullion #9

• Poetry! DisPoet's latest entry on Sheila Black is another of the infreqent but thoughtful offerings on disability in poetry. And Penny Richards at Disability Studies, Temple U offers a very Scottish poem by Violet Kennedy-Erskine Jacob about a disabled WWI veteran.

• Ballastexistenz writes a long but brilliant critique of therapy and how it stigmatizes the individual's behavior while ignoring the politics involved. Her post relates to class, race and gender as easily as to autism, I believe. An excerpt to entice:

This is one reason I don’t fit in in support group atmospheres. I have zero interest in sitting around serenely saying “I have a great deal of anger issues over what I perceive to sort of be a return to previous ideas about something that looks a bit like eugenics” or something. And I can’t even begin to count the amount of times that someone has completely disregarded what I or someone else has to say, only to focus on the fact that we sound too “angry” — an accusation which can be brought on not only by being angry, but by talking about things that make them angry.

In the autistic community, this often takes the form of autistic people lecturing each other about social skills and the proper ways to do things. Because we’re already presumed deficient in “social skills” (which tend to mean, in these contexts, adhering to white middle-class therapy-culture social norms) it becomes easy to lecture us on the fact that nobody will ever listen to us until we communicate in a way that’s not only thoroughly unnatural to us (more so than language is already to many of us, while those who cannot use language at any particular moment are seen as even more vile in their/our means of communication), but based on an arbitrary set of social norms.

• Less serious a topic, I'm going to all my rock concerts with Leonardo DiCaprio from now on.
  

• Wheelchair Dancer ruminates on technique when dancing with a chair and nondisabled folks dancing with a chair.
  

• Operation Eden catalogs the extreme mental health problems in Katrina, one year later.
  

• A question I'm hoping someone can answer: A report on escaped Ohio inmate John Parsons recites his history of legal problems (italics mine):

Parsons was later indicted on four counts of aggravated murder; one count each of aggravated robbery, tampering with evidence and having a weapon while under disability; and two counts of grand theft.

Eh? What does this mean? Exactly what is the poor man "under"? Any ideas?

• The NYT writes on "Breaking the Biology Barrier," otherwise known as getting paid leave when adopting a child. If paid leave for childbirth is about the woman being temporarily disabled, then adopting mothers don't qualify, but if it's about adjusting to new parenthood, then they would -- and all male parents, as well.
  

• And last but never least, Ouch! Podcast #6, always silly, and including their trademark quiz "Vegetable, vegetable, or vegetable?"