Finding the language, making the connection

I've written in the past about being a disabled person before disability studies provided a real forum for discussing social issues about living with a disability. When there were no other disabled girls in my high school and only black studies or women's studies to use as models of systematic and group oppression, and when there were no books available on disability from a social model perspective, I was the kid applying these other theories to disability in my high school and college papers.

Some instructors accepted this, some didn't or tried to lead me back to the "real topic." My immediate family were able to see much of what I did, but I didn't have the language then to really discuss it with them. If I recall correctly, the tabloid paper version of the Ragged Edge -- known as The Disability Rag then -- was my only proof as an isolated teen that my experiences and the socio-political connections I was making about group oppression weren't all in my head.

There's a discussion going on over at Alas, A Blog that reminds me a lot of all this, though the topic is sexual abuse of men or boys and how their experiences do and do not fit into the feminist analysis of sexual abuse and violence. Richard Jeffrey Newman, the author of the post in question at Alas writes what I think is a thoughtful, sensitive and brave piece about his experiences of sexual abuse as a child and where the experiences of men like him can be discussed when the discourse of feminism on the topic is rightfully focused on how men and our patriarchal culture abuse women and girls.

I don't want to talk about sexual abuse here, exactly -- though I will note that there's an article in a recent hard copy of New Mobility that specifically talks about disabled men's problems with abuse, sexual and otherwise. Unfortunately, that particular article isn't available online. (Anyone wanting further info on it can email me, if they wish.)

I'm struck by some of what Newman says about the failure of feminism to "fit" or accommodate his experiences of child sexual abuse as a man. Similar to what I've said about myself above, Newman used feminist theory and writing to articulate his experiences:

Indeed, feminism has been central to the way I understand the world since my late teens-early twenties, when reading Adrienne Rich’s On Lies, Secrets and Silence was the only thing that convinced me I wasn’t crazy (a few years later it was Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse).

Upon reading Adrienne Rich's feminist book at age 19, Newman recalls:

I don’t know why, but those words pushed a button somewhere in me, and I began to ask—in fact, I actually heard a voice in my head asking—"But what about me? What about what happened to me?"

I remember this sensation of finding the common thread in books about minority oppression and recognizing that they both did and did not speak about my life. There was an excitement, both intellectual and deeply personal, mixed with a bewildered disappointment that what was so obvious a connection to me was nowhere actually in print. The writings by black folks and feminists about their social exclusion and oppression made complete sense and I recognized so much of my own experiences and yet disabled girls were nowhere included as a topic of these common experiences. Disability was invisible as a minority or oppressed category and my individual story wasn't explicitly seen mirrored anywhere. I was grateful for what I had found, but still felt isolated and excluded.

Newman's experienced isolation from the heart of feminist discussions of sexual abuse extended to the use of the pronoun "she":

Nonetheless, the paradox was silencing, so silencing, in fact, that a few years later—and this was after I’d started telling people I’d been abused—in a training session at a different when day camp, when the male session leader told us he was going to use “she” as the generic pronoun referring to kids who might choose to tell us they’d been sexually abused, I found myself unable to confront him about the way that choice rendered me and my experience, not to mention the experiences of the other men and, perhaps more importantly, the boys at the camp who’d had the same experience, invisible. Yes, part of why I didn’t speak up had to do both with the very public nature of the forum I’d be speaking in and the adversarial nature of what I’d be saying, but I also couldn’t speak up because I didn’t have the words, the conceptual vocabulary not only to say “This isn’t fair,” but also to point out that boys’ experience of abuse, my experience of abuse, needed to be understood on its own terms and not as a perhaps anomolous subset of the experience of girls; and one reason I did not have that vocabulary was that it was not to be found in the feminism I’d been reading.

Again, I recognize the strange sensation of having the conversation so unjustly pass him by, like a bus slowing down to pick up passengers along a road, but failing to see you as you hurry to get onboard too. (Or, perhaps even more aptly, the bus lacks accommodation to even let "your kind" get on.) The crowd moves on without you and your search for the many little connections that make up the whole of your humanity suffers another small blow. The haunting part is the uncertainty that can taint the sense of connectivity in personal experience to that particular larger whole. For me as a disabled woman, my sense of womanhood has in the past been damaged by the inability of feminism (and sometimes, individual feminists) to accommodate disability and its contingent experiences into discussions and actions of feminism.

And yet. I find my heart hardened a bit to any complaint from a man about the use of feminine pronouns as exclusionary. This is not to say I don't see the problem Newman explains of his gender being specifically excluded from full participation in feminist discussions of sexual abuse. And I recognize that specific exclusion feels as isolating for Newman as it has for me in other contexts. Rather, my allegiances are divided here, which I also find disturbing.

Women the world over and throughout time have found masculine pronouns exclusionary of their experiences, even -- and especially -- in the most sacred of texts and associations. After all, God is traditionally "he." I have my full share of rage about the continued use of masculine pronouns used generally. Feminism is supposed to be something of an antidote to that. So, how much can feminism be expected to accommodate Newman and other men as victims of sexual abuse in theory or active practice? How to make room for them in what would seem to be the obvious forum for their experiences of abuse by men and the patriarchal structures that deny them another forum to fully express their pain?

And to the extent that male sexual abuse victims will always be partly isolated from the full embrace of the feminist community because their gender is not central to the purpose of feminism, what does this disconnect say about the quest for disabled women to be embraced by the causes and understanding of feminism? Or latino women? Or transgender folks?

On the surface, it doesn't seem like there should be any conflict between feminism and the needs of disabled women as a group, but the rhetoric of feminist reproductive "choice" does not currently include a full understanding or support of how disabled and other minority women experience this choice differently in our society. More broadly, "choice" for feminism and most other liberal groups includes the "right to die," which fails completely to account for the very real dangers (and, in fact, experiences) for many disabled people of being coerced to die.

If feminist discussions of sexual abuse necessarily focus on female experiences, to what extent is the failure to help or support male victims a flaw of feminism? Can it be expected to find a way to better accommodate these men, or would that make feminism something else entirely? Is feminism compatible with the general range of needs of disabled women? If it isn't able to accommodate the meanings of choice when applied to the disability experience, that surely is a failure of feminism to embrace disabled women. So, what does that mean?

Acknowledging that he is writing in feminist space at Alas, Newman says (italic emphasis is his):

I do not believe that feminist discourse is a place where male survivors ought to expect either to speak or to be heard in a way that places our experience at the center of whatever is being discussed.

Is Newman sadly correct? Is not being the center but simply being marginally included enough for abuse victims, disabled women, transgender feminists, and other minorities to whom feminism would seem obligated to serve? What do you think?