Butch/Femme -- Crip

To offer my voice in this important conversation, I want to write my personal resistance to both of these labels and to suggest how disability complicates them as defining personal categories.

Bfp begins by wondering where she is on the butch-femme spectrum. Cripchick continues by observing how disability and sexuality are so publicly invisible that even getting to these terms is hard. She adds the terms cripchicks and gimpgirls into the conversation of gender presentation, explicitly recognizing disability as a primary and defining force.

I don't have identifying terminology to add -- though I wish there were a more hip word for somewhat middle-aged bisexual disabled women like me. My goal here is to look a little at my body and my experiences in being read by others. I am talking about how I am read and not how I would define myself, how *I* would identify, because I don't actually know how I would choose to describe myself in the terms of this conversation.

The more complicated theoretical expositions of who we are as women and as queer women in particular recognize that binaries tend to produce alienating discourses of authenticity. If you are not one, you must be the other -- and to be one, you must be ..... But even the more complicated expositions of who we are as women also day after day, time after time, explicitly refuse to recognize the force and the power of disability.

Disability and feminism should go hand in hand. Disability should be an explicit part of gender and queer studies. But even in the hallowed halls of academia and, yes, out here in the wild web blogosphere, disability is only a small part of the conversation, a small part of posts on feminism, gender, and sexuality. It is something the cripchicks and gimpgirls (relishes the words, rolls them around her tongue) repeatedly have to bring to the conversation. And, yes, we do tire of being the voices of "but wait, disability ...." But unless we speak of our experience, the conversation will fail us and, ultimately, you.

When we got into it, the last two women with whom I almost had sexual relationships told me that they read me as butch. Theoretically speaking, it is a little perverse to argue from the point of view of how someone reads me rather than saying I explicitly identify as butch (or not). But I choose to do so because this particular approach shows how disability complicates what we think we know about possible identities.

Behind that word for them was my fascination with my own body, with its muscles, and with its physical strengths. That's something a lot of queer women notice about me, and it is the source of many jokes among my friends. I say queer women, because the straight ones in my life are usually too shy to comment on it. But also behind that word for the two women in question was my active enjoyment of my physicality. I love the power of my body; I flex my muscles, I pat them in public (sorry peeps, I really do; I love them). Yeah, it's funny. Yeah, it's sexy. But for the purposes of this conversation, I wonder about that understanding.

To say that it is "butch" to somehow forefront muscularity and physicality strikes me as an interesting insight into how we approach understanding conventional femininity. It is to say that somehow conventional femininity does not explicitly prioritize the tendons, sinews, muscles, and bones of its female bodies. But how can you have breasts, vaginas, tummies, and asses without the underlying structure of your body? Is it to say that somehow conventional femininity is only the visible surface of the body. Is it to say that femme is the performance of the hyper surface -- the explicit recognition and enhancement of aspects of conventional femininity? And that butch is somehow the recognition and acceptance of the deeper muscular structures of the body?

If this is what it means to be butch, then, I suppose, that even in my 5 inch heels, even in my see-through mesh dresses, I am butch. But I also think that disability skews -- I almost wrote queers; I so wanted to write queers -- disability skews that particular assessment of these aspects of my butchness.

Scenes from my life.

You see me on the street. I'm wearing a low cut tank top. Your attention is caught by my ripped back muscles. I turn towards you, flex my arms, and push away. You think:

1. Oh, what an athlete. Wow! Sexy.
   
2. It's a pity that she's in that chair. Such a strong upper body must compensate for her legs.
   
3. She should cover herself up a bit.
   
4. Ugh, and you look in other direction.
   

You see me in the cafe. I'm wearing the same low cut tank top. I admire my arms. Sip my coffee. Look at my arms again, stroke them, and smile a long smile at you. You

1. Smile back and ask if I need help or anything?
2. Panic. Fuck. Did she just ... flirt with me? Shit.
3. Pretend you didn't see, turn, and leave.
   
4. Smile and come right over.
   

You see me in the audience at a dance performance. I'm wearing a mesh dress, pointy heeled boots, and something in between to make it decent. Every muscle in my arms and back is visible; the curve of my breasts rises out of the baggy over-dress; my body gleams through the sheen of the blue mesh. Wizard pushes me into the space. You

1. Wonder if I feel sad watching all those beautiful dancers, given that I can't move.
2. Wonder if I am for real. Disabled people don't dress or look like THAT.
3. Wonder about what Wizard is doing with a woman like me.
   
4. Wonder what it would be like to fuck me.

OK. So, I am imagining the viewer's responses. But these are moments from my life of last week. No, you don't get to ask what happened next. And in each vignette, I really think that the question of whether you see me as butch or femme doesn't really happen unless you integrate or get past the disability question. And what about my choices and my perspectives?

My muscles are as they are because I use a chair and because I dance. Because they are a direct consequence of my disabled life, I would argue that you would have to think twice before you interpret them and my enjoyment of them as part of a butch identity.

My decision to wear impractical shoes is as much a consequence of me not having to walk in them as it is a decision to participate in a particular understanding of femininity. But what do you see? A sad attempt to look normal? A pair of high heels on a woman? Or something so over the top that it slides into the devotee/fetish view of disabled female sexuality? Note that this is a risk that is only present for disabled women. It's a long way for nondisableds to go through femme to fetish. Merely presenting certain aspects of traditional femme for a queer disabled woman puts her at risk of becoming a usually straight object of the devotee community.

Would you recognize it if I made a pass at you? To see it, you would have to acknowledge an awful lot. You would have to understand that disabled people have sexuality, that it can be a queer sexuality, and that I am looking at YOU.

A while back in this post, I spoke of bones and muscle. I'd like to go back to that place. I am drawn there as a dancer and as a sexual person. The bones of my body hold true for me; my muscles are what my body has given me. So even when my joints are unstable and my muscles torque and spasm, I recognize in these places parts of my deepest self. I strive to hold on to these selfs in every day life and in dance. I strive to bring them to the street and to the stage. Does desiring muscle and bone make me butch and deny me femme as positions from which I can navigate the world?

This, I think, is crip, is gimp. It is an understanding of the sexuality of the deepest and rawest parts of the body -- it is not so much a focus on gender presentation and on responses to gendered roles. It is an answer to the call of the fibres, the sinews, the fluids, and the infinite structure of the bones.

Windshield Writing

I have decided that going to the grocery store or, better, seeing me at the grocery store provokes/exposes the weirdest things in people. I don't know quite to make of these; I can't decide whether I feel weirdly cared for or whether I am mildly annoyed. Sometimes, it's hard to differentiate charity from grace. Do you have to go with the object itself and try to forget the intention?

I'm out shopping for some odds and ends (as one does), but I buy more than I am expecting to (as one can do). I ask for help out to the car. So far, so good. But when the hyper cool guy and I reach my car, there is a brochure stuck on my driverside front window. I'm expecting something about an event, a party, some music, an action/protest .... I'm ready, you know? But no. My leaflet is a brochure about Enviromental Traveling Companions. If you don't know this organization, check them out. This is from their website:

Environmental Traveling Companions (ETC) opens the beauty and challenge of outdoor adventures to people with special needs. Every year over 2,000 people of all abilities join us to raft whitewater rivers, ski across alpine meadows, sea kayak the waters of the Golden Gate and sleep beneath the open sky. ETC trips enable participants to access the wilderness, gain environmental awareness, and share the adventure. We invite you to join us on a trip. Groups and individuals of all abilities are welcome to participate in our sea kayaking, rafting and cross-country skiing programs.

Way cool. Definitely worth knowing about. Definitely worth trying out.

But who left it on my car? The brochure that I received was not new; it had been around for a while; it was slightly worn at the edges. Someone had been keeping it around for a reason -- a participant? A volunteer? A donor? Why me and not the other disabled cars? I look around. No, no one else has one. Does someone know me and my car? If you are reading ... thank you! Err. Do introduce yourself before leaving stuff on my windshield; your friendly gesture is a little disconcerting.

And then, there's the taking it the wrong way. "Oh," says the person with my goods, "is that your group outing?" I explain. But apparently not well enough. "It's still kinda group home, though, just leaving it there." I don't know where to turn. In truth, I do feel like it is somewhat de-individuating and homogenizing, even though I am sure the person meant well. But I also suspect that "group home," here, is meant to denote cognitive/developmental disability. Is this code for "retard?" I don't feel like tackling the whole prejudice thing; I duck the battle, smile, agree, watch him load my car, and wish I could have done better.

I go to the grocery store. This time when I return to my car, there are a bunch of Obama leaflets on my windshield. I look around. No, no one else has them. And, yes, it's the same guy helping me out. He's all cool. No, "group home" comments this time. It's all "was I involved in the campaign?" He looks disappointed as I explain that I am an alien with no voting rights. Shock. Here I am -- a black person who didn't vote. I want to turn his words around. I want to find a way to make some sting come his way. We live in a society where citizenship is frequently, but not always the case. But I can't find a way to do it without repeating the same nastiness. I can't exactly say, "It's kind of "retarded" of you to assume that I a) can vote and b) would vote for Obama, you know." I don't feel like tackling the whole prejudice thing; I duck the battle, smile, agree, watch him load my car, and wish I could have done better.

I go to the grocery store, and people leave stuff on my car. Who *are* you people? Umm. Thanks for the information, sort of. I'd like to come and go as I please.

Pleos, Robots, Landmines, and Humans

I wasn't into the electronic pet thing. I wasn't. After all, I have a cat. A demanding, very present feline. Who needs a Furby, Tamagotchi or whatever? Then, I met Pleo. I want a pleo (Yeah, I know Ugobe went bankrupt). I seriously want a pleo. I don't quite understand it; I have pets, I have teddy bears, stuffed animals, etc. I don't have dolls; I don't anthropomorphize too much. And I still want a damn stupid toy dinosaur. I don't even have dinosaur crazes like most of today's kids.... In fact, I've been surprised at how popular dinosaurs are with kids and at the frightening amount of factual information they know (much of which reminds me that I haven't kept up with the advances in science).

Anyway, my desire to bond with this thing, apart from demonstrating my occasional susceptibility to consumerist urges, got me thinking about how people, disabled and not, bond with technology. This article (I've been meaning to write about for, literally, years) is kinda neat, fun, and really relevant for people with disabilities. As John Hockenberry once pointed out: we can teach the world how to live with technology. (No, I don't like his puppetry idea, model, or language -- but that's for later). Back to the WSJ piece on robots.

The most effective way to find and destroy a land mine is to step on it.

This has bad results, of course, if you're a human. But not so much if you're a robot and have as many legs as a centipede sticking out from your body. That's why Mark Tilden, a robotics physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, built something like that. At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield.

Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly.

The human in command of the exercise, however -- an Army colonel -- blew a fuse.

The colonel ordered the test stopped.

Why? asked Tilden. What's wrong?

The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg.

This test, he charged, was inhumane.

A number of people write about the relations of humans and technology -- the people at MIT -- Sherry Turkle, et al ... including the disability community's own Kestrell (nice piece in the recent Turkle volume, Kestrell! Way to go!) -- are at the heart of a relatively new field of study. The disabled community, however, has lived at the edge of scholarship. MIT and the field of disability studies are places that acknowledge how crippled experience can change the future of technological humanistic studies.

In the meantime, however, I will settle for my dinosaur that walks, that mewls, sits, stands, has reflexes does tricks...

Passing Strange

My grandparents were the first people I knew who died.

My grandmother died at home from a gangrenous ulcer; she had had a leg amputated earlier in life and decided that she couldn't learn to live with a second amputation. That meant, however, she had to die with gangrene. I don't remember much about how it was for her. My parents spoke in hushed tones. There was a vicious argument about whether or not she had had enough morphine or whether someone had "helped" her on her way with too much morphine. All the relatives involved looked angry and pained. I understood that this was their way of releasing that pain and that the truth of it did not matter. Nana was gone. My father told me a story about Nana falling asleep and passing easily. I believed him.

My granddad died in hospital; he drowned slowly and painfully from congestive heart failure. I visited him shortly before his death. Every breath he took was agony; there was definitely not enough pain relief. "I'm dying," he said. "I don't know," I said, willfully interpreting it as a question. "I hope not." I should have said something different.

My granddad was a gentle man with old fashioned ideas about masculinity. He worked the railroads, rising from digger to signal man. In his spare time, he told me that he tried to make it big in boxing. It turned out that he sucked at boxing. "But," he reminisced, "your Nana used to make me feel like a man, make me feel I could take the hits." I regret to this day that I did not say something along the lines of "You are brave enough, man enough, to do this." As it happened, the rest of my family were visiting him at the time. "We had just popped down for a kit-kat," said my father, once more spinning me a believable tale. "He saw that we were gone and thought that this was the time to do it. He had the courage to pop-off." I focused on the repeated word -- he didn't notice -- Granddad was dead.

My third encounter with death stings yet too bitterly for this blog. Suffice it to say I failed my friend.

I am not yet ready to write the full story of where I have been the past couple of weeks, but I am back to blogging.

Blogging Break

Been/Going offline for an extended period -- horrible family emergency.

I can't write/think now. I've made some awful slip ups in the past couple of days.

Some awful things have happened, too -- not that I've done these particular ones.

Some things you cannot take back. Some things cannot be fixed. Some things you wish you had never seen or heard about.

Some things you can only witness.

Fear is a huge stumbling block to human decency.

When looking for your center, all you have is yourself.

We can never overcome the past; we can only choose the suitcase we put it in as we drag it, stumblingly, into the present and the future.

Dove AD revisited.

A commenter reading this post has let me know that this is not a genuine Dove advert. The maker of the clip has claimed it as her own work. How was I wrong?

I looked for signs that this was genuine by looking at the Dove site. Not all the videos from their ad campaigns are available and the creator hadn't claimed her work at the time I wrote my post.

This changes the conversation a little. And in some interesting ways. Some thoughts. My remarks about the campaign stand. But beyond the fact that the maker of the video subscribes to some seriously ugly stereotypes (she thinks this is a positive representation of disability), the question for me is: what is it about the Dove Campaign that makes it possible for this piece of work to be so easily seen as part of the Dove tradition? What is it about the representation of disability in the media in general that makes this so easily seen as part of a continuum?

The Halt, The Lame, The Blind

Who are the halt in that infamous trio? Seriously. I've never really known how to differentiate them from the lame and the blind? And what can't they do, exactly -- because, you know, disability is only written in the negative. Is it a mobility impairment? Isn't that covered by lame? And those halt. Are they stopping or stopped? Just what does it mean to be halt? I've always wanted to know because the halt seem to have been put in a class of their own.

I know about the word's roots in its stoppedness and can see a flicker of that in its pronunciation. I know that halt, lame, limpy .... all part of the same thing. I hear the dead tones. The implied stop of disability. As I say it in my mind, I see and hear the sounds rise up in an arch and fall slowly, only to be stopped, flat. I recognize the biblical dimension of the threesome, and I know the negative value of crippledom in some forms of Christianity. But none of that tells me who the halt and their gimpy companions are in the secular world today.

A New York Times article from 1887 suggests that the halt, lame, and blind are evidence of the United Kingdom's emigration policy (capitalization as is):

THE LAME, HALT, AND BLIND; SENT BY ENGLAND TO BURDEN THE UNITED STATES. PROOFS THAT IT IS A PART OF ENGLAND'S POLICY TO GET RID ONLY OF THE DECREPIT--A SAMPLE EMIGRATION AGENT--PUBLIC FUNDS GIVEN BY LAW TO ASSIST THE WORK.

Ahh. That explains how I ended up here. Good to know! Time is equally as helpful -- note the addition of the female!! As if you couldn't be lame, halt, blind, and female (capitalization as is):

THE DRAFT The Lame, the Halt, THe Blind & the Female A long-standing criticism of the Selective Service System is that it unduly favors the college student, who can almost always escape military service if he stays in school long enough—and thereafter is usually qualified to enter a draft-proof profession. In response to such complaints, Congress last June knocked out deferments for nearly all graduate students, excepting only those going into medicine, dentistry and related fields, as well as the ministry.

Gender seems to be really important in identifying the halt, lame, and blind. This site quotes a Mark Twain Letter on his visit to a "blind asylum:"

I don't mind blind boys - they ought all to be blind, for that matter - and deaf and dumb, and lame and halt and paralyzed, and shaken up by earthquakes and struck by lightning - just to make them behave themselves, you know - but I felt so sorry for those girls. They could not see the sun, or the moon, or the ocean, the green trees, or the flowers, the gilded clouds or the rainbow - they could not even see the faces they loved. It were better to be dead and buried. They seemed to be happy, but I could not understand how they managed to come at it.

Frankly, I am a little shocked by this. Could Mark Twain really have thought this way? I know it makes sense in the times, in the context. It sits alongside the discussions we have about Twain and racism. But somehow, it's so blatant, so non-fictional and just a little bit, well, shocking: Disability as a punishment for rambunctious boys while girls fit into the Mary Ingalls slot (yeah, I know. Twain couldn't have read Little House on the Prairie when he wrote this).

I notice, though, that the halt never travel alone; they are always with the lame and the blind. In a discussion of how disability gets tied up with metaphors for generally bad, Mary Johnson sees the same mob quality of this trio: "Reporters sometimes, trying to be too clever by half (now what does THAT expression come from?), will sometimes refer to people with disabilities en masse as "the halt, the lame and the blind." Whoever they are -- the street cleaners: "REVIEWING THE STREET-CLEANERS.; THE LAME, HALT, AND BLIND UNDERGOING INSPECTION" (NYT) -- the halt, lame, and blind travel together.

Together, forever.

Be that journey to the voting polls -- where, apparently, the halt, lame, and blind helped bring Hitler to power (this link is to google news archive search) -- or to the gas chambers. The content providers don't allow free access to the old papers, but this is what I can make out from the excerpts provided. The halt, lame, and blind seem also to be responsible for President Obama's election (warning: link is to generally offensive material. It is a commenter on a newspaper article in the Denver Post).

You have elected a man with no experience whatsoever, but one hell of an agenda. You have elected a man who has long associated with some of the most radical people in America. ... They know only the reflection of their left wing ideas as they face the mirror every morning. And most of them have no knowledge of the real world. Those and the blind, the halt, and the lame-brained elected this charming but dangerous man. And there will be blood.

As offensive as the commentator is, I am interested to note that he tries to remove the redundancy of halt and lame by making it "lame-brained." Not that it is any better. Will there be blood? I don't know. Probably not in the sense that the commentator means it. At least, I hope not. More likely, if the Community Choice Act doesn't pass, the blood in the streets will be ours. GO ADAPT.

Blogging Against Disablism Day happened again this year - thank you, Goldfish! Hundreds (almost literally) of bloggers wrote passionately about their experiences and thoughts. What happens next? How will the halt, lame, and blind leap off the internet and out into the world? How will the change desired by every poster happen? Writing is one thing? Enabling others to listen, understand, and act is another.

The halt, the lame, the blind? We are they, I suppose. We even have our own (yes, it is in those awful senses) song, courtesy of Stephen Sondheim. And yet I feel dissatisfied. When I type "radical disability" into google, the search engine asks, "Did I mean medical disability?" No. I didn't. I type in "blind halt lame -jesus;" did you mean "blind help me -jesus" is the google response. Oh, google. The search engine displays the "did you mean" feature when it is convinced that it could help you get better search results -- link to google video on the feature. Usually, google shows that suggestion when you make a spelling mistake; here, however, it corrects my brain mistake. From typo to braino.

Google serves as a bellwether of cultural ideas. Using search volume patterns, google and its algorithms think they know a lot about what its users are looking for. That google thinks "help" is what is needed (of a divine or other nature) shows how deeply ingrained those cultural stereotypes are and how far we have to go.

The halt, the lame, the blind? They've been making negative news forever. The halt, the lame, the blind? We must stumble on together.

Piss On Pity

How I wish I'd made up that phrase. It's just so raw and pithy. How it stands up to the telethon and to all of those who would patronize, denigrate, and otherwise unload their prejudice on disabled people. As it is, however, Johnny Crescendo seems to be its originator; my 10 cents of verbal fame will have to wait for a more inspired day. In the meantime, onto the topic of my 2009 BADD post.

So, OK. No. No pity. No need to get your juices going, the tearducts flowing. No pity. And certainly not sympathy. Not at least as we most frequently and colloquially use it: a kind of sad feeling to express how you are affected (moved, even -- link to Goldfish's post on Susan Boyle) by the sorrow, suffering, and affliction of a disabled person. No. Not sympathy or pity. I'mfunnytoo has a great post for BADD on not assuming. No, don't do that either.

But what about empathy, you say? That's a good thing, right? That just means "feel with," "understand," "see from your point of view?" Empathy: the idea that you can understand, get, feel with, etc. someone else's feelings.

Be careful with that whole empathy thing, I say. It's not just about you walking a mile in my shoes. The risk comes with how you get there, how you shoehorn yourself into those objects of art and how you tie the laces.

As I see it, there are two approaches, two kinds of empathy. The OED describes the first as "[t]he power of projecting one's personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation" (subscription only). It's a risky approach, because the more you project your personality into whatever, the more likely it is that the "fully comprehending" part will fail. In other words, if you put yourself in my shoes, you have done nothing more than put yourself in my shoes. You are still yourself, with all your graces and flaws. Shoes don't make the person. Lord knows, I've tried buying myself a pair of shoes for every different/possible imagining of myself; it just doesn't work: personhood isn't born in footwear.

Oh, what, you totally identify? No, please don't. Get outta ma junk. Eeeuw. Identifying with me, with my disability doesn't do it, either. Mostly for the same reasons. You identify -- but is that because you see me or is it because you blend and thereby erase me into some extended version of you? In which direction is the movement?

That last phrase is important to me. Because other descriptions of empathy mention vicarious experience. This one is from Merriam Webster: "the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner..." As I see it -- yeah, I know. It's not how it's usually done. As I see it, the idea of vicarious experience takes you from you to me. There's no projection or identification or putting of self in shoes. There's an idea of experience -- imaginative participation in, imaginatively realized.

Let me break it down a little. At first glance, it looks like a finicky line and useless distinction. After all, imaginatively living something vicariously doesn't half run the risk of allowing the imaginer to imagine unrestrictedly with all that ableist baggage running amok. No. My version of vicarious experience has a little more action and a little less self.

You wanna know? Really? You wanna know? Get yourself in touch with a disabled colleague. What? No one? For real? How about a family member? Come on. Seriously? OK, then. How about you sign yourself up for some kind of awareness/diversity training.

STOP. No! Geez Louise (whoever she may be!) Not the kind where you sit in a wheelchair, tie a bandanna around your head, and wear earplugs all at once for a day. That's the same kind of thing. That's you running around without the skills to live, without the awareness of the history and culture, that's YOU running around in YOUR self-built nightmare. That's not the world we live in. Disability is so inaccessible? (chokes). Oh, the irony. Oh, the goddam bitter irony. (breathes).

Disability, as we know it, is inaccessible to you because you -- yes, you -- cannot see it; you can only see you; your underdeveloped empathy is the source of this block.

You wanna know?

Get out of your head; get with a real disabled person.

You are not honouring us with your imaginations.

If your job is to write a story about disability, listen to what that person says -- write it. Don't change a word.

BUT also do your research. That's one person's experience; how does it fit with other people's experience?

If your job is to work with a disabled client, let them set the terms. Truly, they will always know their disability better than you.

If you are on the street and you see a disabled person coming towards you; look her in the eye as you speak to her.

Make someone's acquaintance. Walk alongside her -- she'll wear her shoes, you can wear yours. Together, you can piss on the pity of others. You don't have to take their crap.

I wish I had the power to coin slogans and catchphrases. If I did, I would probably work on Madison Avenue (location of many ad offices). Piss on Pity. By all means. Excrete on Empathy? no. Evacuate Empathy? Probably not. Except when you take yourself, your fears, your prejudices, your shit out of the picture.



post contains a picture of a small pile of some of my shoes.