What would that look like?

In the recent discussion of Aimee Mullins in Sports Illustrated, Sara, Trin and I have been debating Mullins' portrayal in that mag, and the portrayal of amputees and disabled people, generally, by the media. In the sidebar at right I've got a category for analysis of media coverage of disability, Wheelchair Dancer frequently looks at NYT coverage (examples of that here, here, and here), and there's a thoughtful discussion at Medical Humanities Blog, also about a woman amputee excelling in her career.

So, what would positive media coverage of Aimee Mullins, specifically, look like? How would someone laud her successes without putting her on the supercrip pedestal or fetishizing her amputated limbs either textually or with photos? Here are a couple alternatives to the SI story's sexualized supercrip slant:

• Photographer Lynn Johnson offers twelve photos of Mullins' life -- athletic, personal, typical and extraordinary in so many ways.


• The Women's Sports Foundation, where Mullins is currently serving as president, interviews her about athletic training, being a role model, advice for disabled girls, runway modeling and changing attitudes.

And here is Petra Kuppers on "Addenda? Contemporary Cyborgs and the Mediation of Embodiment" where she specifically analyzes a fashion photo of Mullins wearing those old-fashioned wooden prosthetics she briefly mentions in the SI article. It's a complex look at disability, feminism, Mullins' agency or complicity with the image, "false consciousness" and media portrayal both of disability and femininity. I'm too short on time and energy just now to write about it, but it's right on topic here.

Visual description: There are three photos here. The first is one of Lynn Johnson's collection on Mullins and is in black and white. Mullins stands in her athletic uniform and high tech racing prosthetics on a race track facing a woman holding a microphone and two men with tv cameras on their shoulders. This is a media interview at the 1996 Paralympics in Atlanta.

The second photo is the fashion art pic Kuppers analyzes and this is her thorough description: "The large colour photo presents Mullins sittting on the floor, her head in her hand in a defeated or melancholic position. She appears squeezed into the frame, contained by the photo’s borders. The colours of the image are brown and beige, earthy, taking up the blond of Mullins’ wild hair and echoed in the make-up. Mullins is wearing various stiff items of clothing, all of which extend out of the photo frame. The clothes are referenced in the accompanying text, in accordance with the generic conventions of fashion photography. The comprise of: a calico-coloured skirt skeleton reminiscent of whalebone crinoline underskirts (crinolin [sic] frame, for hire from Angels and Bermans) and a textured close-fitting top (suede T-Shirt by Alexander McQueen) to which shoulder ornaments are attached that look like wooden filigree Japanese or Spanish fans (wooden fan jacket, by Givenchy Haute Couture). She is also wearing artificial ‘mannequin’ lower legs (not referenced as ‘model’s own’ in the picture blurb, but extensively discussed in the Press). The legs look old and stained, and while one foot with coloured toenails is visible in the frame, the other reaches out to frame-left."

The final photo is Mullins running full-out on a beach with the ocean and blue sky behind her. She's heading down the beach away from the camera and appears to be wearing the exact black bra top and string bikini bottom she wears in the posed studio photo topping the SI article -- that much-discussed other photo.

Frida Kahlo -- Celebrating the 100th anniversary of her birth

Artist Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907, in Mexico City, Mexico, to a Mexican Indian and Spanish mother and Hungarian Jewish father. She died at age 47, on July 13, 1954, but she is, quite possibly, the most world-famous disabled woman living or dead. Her art is her fame, as well as her relationship with fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera and her communist politics. Deeply personal, her art is filled with imagery of impairment and physical pain.

There are indications that in addition to childhood polio, a devastatingly injurious tram accident at age 18, and the loss of a limb in her later years, Kahlo was born with some spinal condition such as spina bifida.

Along with the paintings shown here, I've got a collection of links more interesting than anything I can write about Kahlo:

Her paintings are catalogued and described fairly well (in both English and Spanish) here, as part of an excellent site all about Kahlo, her life and her work.

This article, "The Trouble with Frida Kahlo" by Stephanie Mencimer, published in 2002 in Washington Monthly explores how Kahlo -- and all female artists -- needed to have a tragic or sensational personal story to enter the male canon. Mencimer's analysis begs for a disability studies rebuttal, particularly comments like this:

Some feminist art historians have struggled against such reworkings of women artists, but Kahlo's pop-culture mania revives it with a vengeance. Kahlo certainly facilitated this process by painting herself as the quietly suffering female. In every possible sense, the mass-culture Kahlo embodies that now-poisonous term: victimhood. She was the victim of patriarchal culture, victim of an unfaithful husband, and simply the victim of a horrific accident. But that's probably one reason why she's so popular. "People like to see women as victims," says Mary Garrard, a professor of art history at American University.

And this:

Many of her surgeries may have been unnecessary. Even Herrera notes, "If Frida's physical problems had been as grave as she made out, she would never have been able to translate them into art." Kahlo's close friend, the famous doctor Leo Eloesser, believed that she used her many surgeries to get attention from people, particularly from Rivera. There's no doubt that she was obsessed with him in a way that should make feminists cringe. She also made several suicide attempts and spent much of her adult life addicted to drugs and alcohol.

Though the article is well worth a read for it's look at how Kahlo's inability to bear children is widely interpreted as a tragedy when she may well not have seen it as such. And for when Mencimer notes this:

One wonders what the postal service was thinking when it put Kahlo on a stamp. "Visas are denied to [foreign] artists with Frida Kahlo's politics," notes Chadwick.

Here is, I think, a more developed and disability-studies-friendly analysis of Kahlo's self-portraiture. (That's a link to the main page of a Frida site. Check out the sidebar feature labeled "Frida and her obsession of self-portraits.")

For true disability studies analyses of the 2002 film Frida, starring Salma Hayek, read Marta Russell's CounterPunch review and a wonderful discussion between Harilyn Rousso and Simi Linton at DisabilityWorld. Both movie reviews note the obliteration of any depiction of Kahlo's childhood polio and it's early effects, with the tram accident framed instead as the life-altering tragedy to her physical health. Also, her recovery from that accident is made complete in the film so that a tango between Kahlo and another woman is not complicated by what would have been an interesting limp. The Rousso-Linton discussion ranges beyond the movie itself to look at use of the word "cripple," sexuality, and class and disability.

Rousso says:

Remember the scene in the garden where she's sitting in her wheelchair a few months after the accident? To me, this is the quintessential stereotype about the person who is in an accident or illness--that their main desire, preoccupation is to be able to walk again. She is sitting in the garden, her parents arrive and she gets up out of the wheelchair, takes her first steps and suddenly becomes almost nondisabled.... I found it shocking when we finally do see her using a wheelchair in an ongoing way, which is about an hour and a half into the film. We are given no sense of the progression of her disability. Until then, her disability was not shown as affecting her daily life. It was shown as affecting her painting - both her decision to paint and at least some of the content of her paintings, but not the details of her life. She was by and large portrayed as a "non-disabled disabled women." Then suddenly well into the film she is shown as quite significantly disabled.

Here's a link about Liz Crow's short experimental drama Frida Kahlo's Corset. "Corset" refers to the orthopedic back braces Kahlo wore because of her impairments.

From a 2005 exhibition, here's the Kahlo site for the Tate Modern Art Museum in London.

Finally, this PBS site on the film The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo includes five of Kahlo's works of art made into image maps with additional info available to mouse rollover.

Links lead to visual descriptions in English and Spanish: The four paintings in this post are The Broken Column (1944), Tree of Hope, Remain Strong (1946), Henry Ford Hospital (1942) and Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill (1951).

Thanks to Penny for the heads-up on Frida's birthday.

Not "legless": Ten pairs of legs!

There's been a discussion making the rounds on feminist blogs about a recent Sports Illustrated story on Aimee Mullins, double-amputee athlete, actor, model, most current President of the Women's Sports Foundation and apparently also one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World. The SI story uses the "supercrip" stereotype to hype Mullins considerable accomplishments with a lede that first lists her successes and then sets her up on that unreachable pedestal:

Her accomplishments are each impressive enough on their own, but when you take into account that she's done it all on silicone and titanium legs, she's just making the rest of us look bad.

Accompanying the text are several photos -- one, thankfully, showing her actually competing athletically -- with the most prominent pic being the topic of bloggy discussion. Here it is, at left. It's a full body black-and-white shot of Mullins in profile, positioned on all fours as if at the starting blocks for a foot race. She's wearing high-tech, below-the-knee prosthetics, a black bra and string bikini bottoms, with a wind machine swirling her hair in the air. She's not on a race track. This is a posed publicity shot.

Now, I do hesitate to just post this photo, but as it happens, Mullins is already the number one Google image search leading to my site, for a magazine cover photo she modeled years ago and which I never did actually post here -- only linked to prior to now. But, what the hell, this is that photo too:

Photo description: It's a magazine cover with the bold capitalized words "DAZED" across the top and a background of all white. Mullins wears form-fitting athletic pants and studio lighting accentuates the curve of her buttocks. She's got the high-tech prosthetics that look much like wide flat metal hooks, and she's not wearing anything else. She's turned away from the camera enough that her upraised left arm allows her to peek over her bicep at the camera and her left breast is in provocative profile. At knee height, down by her prosthetics, runs the capitalized text "Fashionable?" though the word is split on either side of her body so it could also read "Fashion Able?"

This is the photo The Gimp Parade routinely gets 100 hits/day for. Well, it competes for most hits with this photo of Marine Lance Corporal James Blake Miller, taken about a year ago in Fallujah (make of that what you will):

Visual description: Taken by Luis Sinco for The LA Times, it's a head shot of Miller, wearing a desert camouflage-colored helmet, face smudged with camouflage war paint, eyes staring tiredly, and a cigarette hanging from his lips. Smoke swirls around his face. The news story, linked just above, explains why this photo has been dubbed "Marlboro Man."

I posted a link to it for Memorial Day, 2006, when I was noting that the war continues to disable people and leave them, both here and in Iraq, with less than they had before. This pic is a sort of porn too really, you know.

Anyway, here are links to discussion at IBTP, Bastante Already, Fetch Me My Axe, and Trinity at The Strangest Alchemy, here and again here. To skip the PhD version, just read Trin's first link, and maybe the one at FMMA. The feminist tension throughout these posts seems to be basically one of radical feminist privileging of a strictly feminist media analysis over one that would be more of a disability-feminist analysis.

Sara of Moving Right Along comments at IBTP:

It is my fond wish that amputees be seen as just another flavor of ordinary, not extraordinary or freakish just because we don’t have all our original body parts, so ordinary that people don’t even blink when they see us coming. If we could achieve this, it would make our lives easier and richer because we could spend less of our precious, irreplaceable lives fending off other people’s projections and could instead just get on with it all. And getting images of us out there in mainstream publications showing various among us doing ordinary or extraordinary mainstream things that would be just as ordinary or extraordinary for anyone else, things like competing in sporting events like ordinary folk, even being extremely successful at it as some people are, is definitely one very good way to go about this. It is!

However, pornification does not equal normalization.

Even more to the point, in a later comment, Sara adds:

... I have to say that I pay as little attention to acrotomophiliacs (the fetishists you mention) as I possibly can. My introduction to them was via a year-2000 article on apotemnophilia (no longer available online without a subscription) which I found at the Atlantic Monthly website in 2003. This article was the first thing listed in response to an AltaVista search I’d run as my first step doing research to determine whether I’d rather have my leg off or die of cancer that year, which doctors had concluded by then were my only two immediate choices.

Fortunately, my second result sent me to a prosthetics site showing a young woman who’d just climbed a mountain in her prosthetic leg. The blurb about her didn’t focus on her ass and say whether she’d ever modeled.

Living as a woman, sexual objectification and obligatory attempted submission to fuckability/worth standards are implied, no matter what. The objectification I experience as an amputee is distinct from the objectification I experience as a woman in that it is not always sexual. For clarification of what I’m talking about, please see these posts:
Talking Points: An Object Lesson at my site

and these posts and their comments from the last Disability Carnival:
Disabled Performing Pioneers by Marcy at Dirty Laundry
and
Disability and Media by Daniel at Medical Humanities Blog

Whether we are talking objectifying amputees and other putatively or definitely disabled folks, women or men or children, sexually or otherwise, the problem is the same: people not seeing other people as people first but as objects and symbols they then have to be re-taught are human. I expect Twisty would say it all happens because of the dominance engine that fuels the patriarchy, though I also expect she’d put it better.

You might think it’s only bad when you’re being sexually pornographied. However, there are lots of ways to demean people by objectifying them. Consider this: Yesterday, in walking from my car to the post office, maybe half a block, I had two perfect strangers come up to me and basically tell me I was a brave woman for leaving my house. One came up from behind asking “How’s the leg working out for you?” (And I was wearing really cute shoes!) The other one told me right to my face, with tears in her eyes — you know, instead of “Hi, how are you?” — “You’re a brave woman!”

This kind of thing happens to me everywhere I walk. I would find it inhibiting if I weren’t already so shopworn.

When I was young, I couldn’t leave the house without being pestered by some man about my tits and my ass. Now I can’t leave my house without being congratulated for my [projected] courage by complete strangers.

The objectification escalates. And it’s all the same dynamic, even when it’s not strictly sexual.

Mainly, I wanted to put Sara's remarks in gimp context, so they wouldn't surrender to the archival oblivion at Twisty's. Trin takes issue with other IBTP commenters who suggest photos of Mullins in SI would be better if she were au naturel, that is sans prosthetics:

Heaven forbid your assistive technology make you hot. It's supposed to look all klunky and weird and alien so we can pity you. Didn't you get the rulebook?

Personally, I'd love to see Sara and Trin hash this out as two disabled women (though I know Sara cringes a bit with that identification) who seem to disagree. My guess is that they don't so much disagree as they see different aspects of the radical feminist analysis that need to be emphasized from a disability perspective.

My perspective: Mullins appears to be the amputee soft-porn that causes most people to show up at this blog, and I suspect they're not hanging around to read the latest on Kevorkian or the anniversary of the Olmstead decision. And blogging ego aside, I do have a problem with that.

On the content of the SI article itself, this is what really caught my eye:

[Mullins] owns 10 different sets of prosthetic legs, from her titanium sprinting legs ("my brother calls them my 'robo-cop legs,'" she laughs) to the intricately carved ashwood museum pieces she once modeled in a fashion show for designer Alexander McQueen.

Share the irony with me: I recently commented on something written by a woman temporarily using crutches and wheelchair who repeatedly referred to her "life without legs." And here's Mullins, a double-amputee who talks about her ten different pair.

I also want to know how she accumulated her legs. Do they all work? Are some spares or gifts because of her relative fame? How many, on any given day, might be useful enough that she decide between them? At one point I owned as many as four wheelchairs and scooters. I think there are three around here just now, but I'm sitting in the only one that is suitable for anything but an emergency. The one in the garage (bought around 1990) may not work at all, and the one in the basement (Quickie manual, circa 1985) would cause me great pain and discomfort if an emergency arose and I found I needed to use it, though it would get me from here to the can.

Are Mullin's ten pair extravagance or simply spare parts, like mine? And is there anyone in the world who can claim more pairs of legs than her? I mean, there are lifetime amputees who've never had a single prosthesis or wheeled chair. Does Mullins have crutches and chairs, as well? That would be the story here for me. Well, unless we can just talk about an impressive woman with many accomplishments, without the supercrip theme.

Life without legs

A commentary in the recent Minnesota Women's Press by Ka Vang on being temporarily disabled is entitled "Life without legs" and refers to said "leglessness" within the brief text at least three times. Vang's temporary disability is not actual leglessness (not that there's anything wrong with that, eh?) but the inability to walk unaided:

For the last month I have been walking with the help of crutches, a wheelchair and cast. Being temporarily disabled gave me the opportunity to experience life from the perspective of a woman without legs.

It's not that I don't understand the radical rethinking sudden physical impairment can have on a person's sense of self and body. I understand how the sudden inability to walk around easily like you did, say, last week, can be psychologically experienced as "losing your legs." It can even be a humorous over-dramatization that helps a person to cope. Black humor and all that. But, really, the temporary need to use crutches and a wheelchair does not merit a headline and many references to "life without legs."

Is that how Vang sees people who have less temporary needs for crutches and wheelchairs -- as missing body parts simply because those parts don't work at optimum levels? It feels like an erasure of reality on several levels.

Vang does have some valuable insights, the sort of "Oh! Duh!" realizations impairment offers most people if they experience it and reflect on it in a larger context. And that's nice to see:

I work as a diversity director for a higher education system. Diversity is my life and passion, so I thought I understood everything that there was about diversity groups. I was wrong. About three weeks into my life without legs I had an epiphany. People who are enabled have accommodations every day. For example, when we have a meeting, everyone is seated around a table. We are seated on chairs because standing for an hour-long meeting is just too much for a person who has legs. The legs get tired, so enabled people are accommodated by having chairs to sit on. Another example: When people with good vision enter a dark room we can't see because there is no light. So we turn on the lights. We are making an accommodation with the lights so we can see in dark places. A person in a wheelchair would not need a chair. A person who could not see would not need lights. We, enabled people, give ourselves accommodations every day. Why can't we give accommodations to those who have a disability?

Just another five weeks to go before I can walk without a cast. Although life without legs was extremely difficult, I feel it made me a better person.

I just wish she didn't feel the need to amputate her limbs (and by extension, the limbs of the rest of us who don't walk on our own) to have this epiphany.

h/t Mark at Norwegianity

Movie review: Emmanuel's Gift

I didn't expect to like this 2005 documentary, the story of Ghanaian Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah, born without a tibia in his right leg and one of the two million people in his country living as a second class citizen.

Why did I dread watching this flick? Yeboah "overcomes adversity." That tired inspirational trope that dominates stories of disabled people's lives. He rides a bicycle across Ghana. I've never really understood athletic endeavors meant to be attention-getters for some cause. Go pound some nails instead, okay? Do some activity with actual value beyond it's celebrity. And the film is narrated by Oprah Winfrey, who has never before uttered the words "disability rights," though she has no problem exploring the medical aspects and social misfortunes of impairment. Oh, Winfrey's had guests who happen to discuss ableism and crip rights -- Chris and Dana Reeve (to some degree) and William H. Macy* (eloquently) are celebrity examples. Never once did I see her take that bait and follow the thread of social injustice or call for people to demand change.

So I had reservations aplenty.

But here's the thing: In Ghana, where an astounding one in ten citizens have some sort of disability, infanticide of visibly disabled infants is common. If they aren't killed or hidden away shamefully, disabled Ghanaians become beggars on the street. That is the range of options.

So a guy with one working leg riding a bicycle across the nation -- 380 miles -- and calling for disability rights and opportunities had an incredible impact on a society that thought it had everyone in their rightful place.

When Yeboah was born, his father saw him and promptly abandoned the family. His mother was encouraged to kill her son, but instead she sent him to school and taught him he deserved all the privileges and opportunities nondisabled people have. When Yeboah had trouble getting the other schoolkids to let him play with them, he ingeniously saved his money (no easy feat) and bought his own soccer ball -- a rare commodity. The price of playing with it was letting Yeboah join in the game using his one full-grown leg and crutches.

With his mother ill and medical bills to pay, young Yeboah shined shoes for money. He left his village and family behind to go to Accra, the nation's capital, to earn $2 per day shining shoes instead of just $1 per day back home. So, he's a teenage boy on crutches shining shoes far from home to support his family -- mom and two younger siblings, I believe. Yet after his mom dies and he applies to the Californian Challenged Athletes Foundation (CAF), he asks not for cash but for a bicycle because he's thinking big. He wants all Ghanians to see that disabled people can do more than be street beggars.

Yeboah's bike ride makes him a national hero and celebrity. The film follows his visit to America, where he competes in some athletic events and decides on amputation of his limb so he can wear a prosthesis. He returns home without his crutches, but with political momentum. We see him meeting with tribal chiefs, disabled beggars whom he encourages to reach for more, and most poignantly, the father who abandoned him.

The film's slick editing interferes with the story, but the celebrity created by Yeboah's bike ride forces public officials to reconsider national disability policy and respond, as one canny bureaucrat notes, that ''we may have underestimated the urgency of the matter." Returning to the United States, Yeboah meets with fellow Ghanaian and then-U.N. President Kofi Annan, and also receives grant money for his goals of helping other disabled Ghanaians and starting a wheelchair basketball team for the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing.

In a historic meeting at King's Palace in Kibi, Ghana, where because of superstition and stigma no disabled person has ever before been invited, King Osagyefuo praises Yeboah and throws his support as leader of 2.5 million people in Eastern Ghana behind efforts to improve the lives of disabled citizens. Says King Osagyefuo:

“The society and country are not set up to take care of handicapped people. Emmanuel has tenacity, endurance and he has a strong heart to do the things that he is doing and to use what he has done as an example for other disabled people. We will support him and tell the government that they are also part of us—they may be physically challenged, but mentally and intellectually they are the same as us.”

The King's statements are nothing short of revolutionary in a culture where disability is commonly believed to be the karmic result of immorality.

Yeboah hopes to become a member of the Ghana Parliament one day. In the meantime, he's married -- to a nondisabled Ghanaian woman, which is apparently a feat of disability acceptance in itself due to cultural stigmas -- and has a daughter. The film fails to show these last and most ordinary achievements in his life, but Yeboah's story shines through any directorial shortcomings to show what a single person can achieve when he is taught his own self-worth.

------------------------------------

* IIRC, Macy appeared on Oprah after the release of Door to Door, his award-winning made-for-tv true story of Bill Porter, a man with cerebral palsy who confounded all expectations by becoming a top door-to-door salesman. Macy had become a national ambassador for United Cerebral Palsy and when prompted by Oprah about his volunteer position he spoke eloquently and at length specifically about disability prejudice and discrimination.

Cross-posted at Echidne of the Snakes

Will her leg fall off?

Story here.

Excerpt:

An online gambling site is inviting macabre bets on whether Heather Mills' prosthetic leg will fall off during her participation in US television show Dancing with the Stars.

The Antigua-based Bodog.com is inviting punters to lay money on whether Mills, the estranged wife of Sir Paul McCartney who lost her leg in a 1993 traffic accident, would suffer a mishap in the show.

The site made a "no" outcome the heavy favourite, and said Mills's leg "must fall off, not be purposely taken off, during a dance routine for all 'yes' wagers to be graded a win".

Via Ouch!

Heather Mills takes to the dance floor

If, like me, you have a sordid fascination with tedious reality TV, you should know that the new season of the American version of Dancing with the Stars will include Heather Mills as one of the contestants battling for the award of best celebrity ballroom dancer. Best known as Paul McCartney's estranged wife (is the divorce final yet?), Mills is also a UN Goodwill Ambassador and an international spokesperson for the banning of landmines. Her left leg was amputated below the knee after being hit by a police motorcycle in 1993, and if you've seen Dancing with the Stars in the past, it's clear that the rigorous competition will be affected by whatever accommodations she needs to make to perform what are, in ballroom competition circles, some very precisely regimented moves.

Like her famous husband, Mills is British. And Britain TV's portrayal of the many variations of physical difference and disability appears much more frequent and sophisticated than American TV. I think it's pretty fantastic that someone with a well-known mobility impairment has been cast on an American show where the competition focuses on beautiful movement. At the very least, the conversation around her ability to compete, dance beautifully, and perform required steps that may be much more difficult with a prosthetic leg will be interesting to follow. The season begins March 19 on ABC.

One of the perks. . .

of having a disability -- some specific impairment (take your pick) -- is that you get to say original, thought-provoking things like this:

I love my feet. I have always loved my feet, no matter how many or which ones I had at any given moment. . .

Read the whole thing, by Sara at Moving Right Along.

Saturday Slumgullion #20

Three Guardian articles from the last two weeks -- 1) Identity crisis: Is the disability movement headed in the wrong direction? 2) Disabling the past: A look at the Middle Ages 3) The closed ward: The illogical world inside a psychiatric ward

The New York Times article, "Wanting babies like themselves, some parents choose genetic defects," looks at preimplantation genetic diagnoses that is used to favor embryos with specific disabilities. While the article itself isn't exactly even-handed or disability-positive, the comments following it are simply hostile toward disability -- genetic defectives, in the article.

New York's North Country Public Radio has a "People First" Readers and Writers on the Air series, a more literary continuation of their award-winning "Disability Matters" series from last year that included interviews and documentaries about the lives of disabled folk. Check out the audio archives with Stephen Kuusisto and Reynolds Price. Upcoming programs feature Nancy Mairs, Temple Grandin and Michael Berube.

The Hamilton Spectator article "Poisoned Lives" reports on the radioactive land Navajo's on a Utah reservation call home:

In every corner of the reservation, sandy mill tailings and chunks of ore, squared off nicely by blasting, were left unattended at old mines and mills, free for the taking. They were fashioned into bread ovens, cisterns, foundations, fireplaces, floors and walls.

Navajo families occupied radioactive dwellings for decades, unaware of the risks.

Over the years, federal and tribal officials stumbled across at least 70 such homes, records show. The total number is unknown because authorities made no serious effort to learn the full extent of the problem or to warn all those potentially affected.

The November issue of Perspectives Online, the online journal for the American Historical Association, includes a forum on disability history.

Stuart Hughes, BBC producer and blogger at Beyond Northern Iraq, who lost a leg while covering the war in Iraq is the subject of the BBC News article "Bionic man."

Autism Diva on the recent Newsweek cover story on autism.

Carnival round-up:

Deadline for the next Disability Carnival is Monday, December 11. The carnival will be up at Planet of the Blind on Thursday, December 14.

The latest Carnival of Feminists is up at Diary of a Freak Magnet.

Grand Rounds

Change of Shift

International Day of Disabled 2006

December 3 -- today -- is the International Day for Disabled Persons as declared by the United Nations some years ago. At the very least, the declaration obligates countries and organizations around the world to take note once a year of the state of disabled persons in their midst. Here's a sample of that news:

From The Jerusalem Post: Disabled Arabs suffer extreme difficulties. Most notably, the women, of course:

Arab males with disabilities face extreme difficulties, the study reported, but women with disabilities are socially isolated, unable to marry and, in many cases, confined to the home by their own sense of shame, social pressure and the family's reluctance to be seen with them in public.

"Some of the women with disabilities are illiterate, which limits their access to information and increases their dependence on relatives.

Among Beduin women in the Negev who have disabilities, the situation is even bleaker," said the report.

"The situation with disabled women in the Arab sector disturbed me every time it came up," Avital Sandler-Loeff, who authored the report along with Yiffat Shahak, told The Jerusalem Post in an interview. "Women with disabilities are forced to stay at home and are really not involved at all in the community," she said.

A little less balanced report (italics mine):

Arab children more likely to be disabled

The proportion of children in Israel's Arab community who are blind, deaf or have physical or developmental disabilities is double that of the Jewish population, according to the first report on disabilities in the Arab population in Israel. The report is being released today by the Joint Distribution Committee-Israel in honor of International Day for Persons with Disabilities today. The authors attribute the high incidence of disability to the high rate of inbreeding, genetic diseases, childbearing at an advanced age and a high incidence of accidents.

"Inhuman treatment" of the disabled in rural India:

Girdher says, cases of physical abuse of the disabled are rampant in rural area citing cases where a visually challenged girl was raped in Dahod and another woman with visual impairment in the same district was rejected by her physically challenged fiance.

Also, chaining physically challenged people is common in Unjha and Makhtupur, says Girdher adding that in some other areas like Chandroda, polio patients are called “mastans” and revered by family with the belief that the person has absorbed all the ill fate of the family through his disability. “During our study, we have also come across a number of mentally challenged people who have been abandoned by families near Piradata Mazar in Mehsana district.” These are made to take mud baths by the people of the mazaar, he says. “After a thorough situation assessment in districts of Gandhinagar, Anand, Banaskantha, Sabarkantha, Mehsana, Anand, Baroda, Katch and Surendranagar, we realised that while on one hand there is very low level of awareness regarding issues pertaining to disability among both the civil society and the health workers, on the other hand, stigma attached to disability is proving a great hindrance in their rehabilitation. For many, disability is only orthopaedic. They are not aware of other forms,” he says.

Angola's Social Welfare minister pledges to help disabled folks reach fuller partnership in society. This could be a news report from the U.S. or anywhere, but it's not easy to find Angolan news on the disabled. Also, Malta.

In Islamabad, Pakistan, a reporter gamely notes that this year's International Day theme is "E-Accessibility," which is certainly important for any person to be part of this global society, but it also highlights the enormous disparities when life is so direly about survival for so many disabled people around the world. Likewise, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia:

E-Accessibility is the theme for IDDP 2006 but here in Malaysia, if the disabled simply have basic accessibility, they will be genuinely delighted and the nation will be one step closer to eventually being a developed country.

A Kuwaiti report on governmental observance of the day reveals typical tensions between focus on charity and a more evolved understanding of what disabled people need from their communities.

In a poignant report on war-caused brutalities and disability in Sierra Leone, a Reuters report shows the connection between violence and disenfranchisement from society:

When Bambay Sawaneh came face to face with the man who had ordered rebel fighters to cut off both his forearms three years earlier, he asked a baying crowd not to lynch his attacker.

"I told the people if they kill him it will not make my hands come back," said Sawaneh, who recognised the man during a physiotherapy session to help him use prosthetic limbs in Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown.

In what became a trade-mark mutilation during the country's 1991-2002 war, the rebels first tried to cut off the then 15-year-old Sawaneh's arms with an axe. But the blade was too blunt to cut through the flesh and bone, so they resorted to using cutlasses -- local parlance for machetes.

"I have forgiven him," Sawaneh, now 22, said of the man he once swore to kill, wiping sweat from his brow with his left stump after a bible class in the steamy coastal city.

Thousands like Sawaneh have learned to come to terms with the horrific acts inflicted on them and their families by the notorious Revolutionary United Front rebels, who financed their campaign of murder, rape and mutilation partly by the trade in gems that inspired Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

The Christian magazine Inspire talks about some success in changing attitudes in the Middle East and North Africa.

In Goa, India, an article on how attitudes yet need to change.

The Palestine News Network reports on the toll the ongoing struggle with the state of Israel puts on people living in the Gaza Strip:

And one is hard pressed to find a Palestinian man without a limp, or a bullet or shrapnel lodged somewhere in his body, or an arm that was broken and pushed back into the socket without medical care. And then there are the generation whose bodies were stiffened and twisted in their formative years. Although functional, there are those who after spending their “seventeenth year in a cupboard” in Israeli prison as an Aida Refugee Camp man did, do not move properly and are in constant discomfort.

The Rehabilitation Sector of the Union of NGOs issued its annual statement on Saturday. “The disabled Palestinians affected by such circumstances is the largest of all other sectors. More than 6,000 of the Palestinians injured during this Intifada are suffering from a disability.”

Lest we think the disability divide is mainly in developing countries, Canada's Toronto Star reports on "frightening gaps" in the quest to make disabled people more equal in society:

This week, the Ontario Association of Food Banks reported that people with disabilities, who represent 12.4 per cent of Canada's population, make up more than 20 per cent of those who need their services.

Not surprising perhaps when you consider that the employment rate for people with disabilities is about half that of their non-disabled peers, another frightening gap.

An excellent report from Jakarta, Indonesia, discusses the link between disability and poverty:

The World Bank estimates that 10-12 percent of the world's population, or over 600 million people, have some form of disability. Some 80 percent of them are living in poor countries (WHO, 2006).

People with disabilities are highly over-represented among the poor; about 82 percent of them live below the poverty line. They have varying access to networks and resources and economic power. Their disabilities don't only affect them, but also their families, social networks and their general environment.

Poverty is considered both a cause and a consequence of disability. Poverty is a cause of disability because the poor often lack resources to prevent malnutrition, and access to adequate health services that may prevent disabilities. Poverty is a consequence of disability since people with disabilities often lack access to education, health services and income generating activities and are often deprived of social and economic rights. It is estimated that only 2 percent of people with disabilities enjoy adequate access to basic needs. These factors contribute to high levels of vulnerability and social exclusion, and preserve the vicious circle between disability, vulnerability and poverty.

In Beirut, Lebanon, planned celebrations were cancelled because of the "volatile situation there," but discussion of the social vs. the medical model of disability was nevertheless discussed, as well as the war's impact on disability:

The World Health Organization asserts that 10 percent of Lebanese are disabled. Additionally, 83 percent of all disabled are unemployed - almost five times more than the able-bodied rate. Six hundred were disabled in this past summer's war, and since the cessation of hostilities cluster bombs have disabled a further 150 civilians and continue to mutilate the limbs of more.

"Is it too much to ask to go to school, work and live a dignified life?" Laqqis asks. "I know that there are too many problems to worry about in the government but we shouldn't always be pushed to the end."

Disabled folks participated in a Lebanese marathon Sunday and said it was an example of social equality that they were part of the event.

In Cyprus, disabled people staged a protest to demand their rights:

The Cyprus Paraplegic Organisation yesterday held a demonstration outside the House of Representatives in protest against what they say is the failure of the state to recognise their rights and needs.

“Instead of celebrating International Day of Disabled Persons on December 3, we have decided this year to go ahead with this symbolic demonstration to express our displeasure at the way people with heavy disabilities are treated by the government and the Parliament,” read an announcement issued by the Organisation.

According to the announcement, Parliament had rejected all of the organisation’s suggestions during the recent alteration of the Law for Public Benefits and Services, while the government has repeatedly ignored disabled people’s problems.

As for the United States, I couldn't find any actual formal celebrations or reports about this being a UN-declared day for disabled persons. Just a governmental press release sent out in advance.

On feet and feminism

Lacking originality today, I point you toward the excellent writing of Sara at Moving Right Along, who uses the meme "Five things feminism has given me" to explore being a woman with a transfemoral amputation in these modern times. (I've got that right, don't I, Sara? Transfemoral?)

Here's a teaser:

Human bodies sometimes experience catastrophic changes. When a woman's body changes irrevocably so that she can no longer don the appropriate costume, for example, when she has to give up a foot, she is expected to fight this with every fiber of her being. She is not expected to fight losing the foot nearly as much as she is expected to fight appearing to have lost a foot. And usually she wants to. No one wants to be discounted.

A woman patient of my prosthetist's former employer was a bilateral trans-tibial amputee who couldn't imagine wearing anything but high heeled shoes, and so her only prosthetics bore feet and ankles made to accommodate heels with "life-like" foam covers. She was considered "marvelous" for not giving in to disfigurement. Without knowing her, I considered her story insane. Yet I understand why she would want to hold onto this. Those heels are her signature, her identity. I can see how that can come to be in our culture, and how devastating it would be for most women to give that up.

Also check out Sara's thoughtful comment to my post on Tammy Duckworth and a discussion on hairy legs over at Toad in the Hole.