Too Much To Look At? Move and Touch It Instead

The house is apparently done. We go to final inspections next week for the certificate of occupancy. Frankly, I am nervous -- not about the inspections, but about what life will be like after we move in. It's a different part of town -- well, actually, it's the "out in the country" part: no more walking into downtown. I think I can live with the fact that I will have to drive 15 minutes to get to a restaurant, coffee shop, etc. I am just a little scared that I can't live *in* or *with* the house.

Why, I wonder, as I listen to NPR before my first cup of coffee, does the economy rely so much on housing starts? It's not the UK: there are plenty of existing houses. Plenty of physical places to live (unless you live in, say, the Bay Area, for one); should we always prioritize sales of existing stock over housing starts? Is there something societal I am missing about the value of new homes vs secondhand homes? As the mortgage crisis has unfolded, I have become acutely aware of how much more than a place to live a house might actually be.

For some, houses were status symbols; for others, they were a "dream coming true" moment of the American narrative. A fair number of people -- not everyone -- bought one house and then another, a bigger, more luxurious, posher one. And then, they bought investment properties and/or weekend places. I heard people talking about "their place in the..." in such unlikely places as doctors' offices or on the bus. The definition of a "starter" home was one that, 10 years ago, I would have called a luxury property.

The reality of the so-called housing ladder (as people in Britain call it) seemed to be one of rungs stretching endlessly into the stratosphere. Cuz no one takes ladders down, right? If you could get yourself onto the ladder, you'd be OK. And for oh-so-many others, that's how it was. The laxity in process and regulation meant they had a shot at getting their feet onto the housing ladder. They worked hard, saw a chance, took their shot, and got screwed.

Houses are such symbols, monuments to hopes, desires, and images of ourselves. We have to pass a number of such statements on the way home, and I feel pretty confident in reading them. What I don't know is whether or how people, including us, will read our place. I don't know how to read it myself. You see, we went with a remodel, that turned out to be a gut. But we kept the same footprint of the original 70's place. The front of the house is non-descript because all the action is in the view at the back. The "cleverness" of our architecture is that it creates a relationship between the outside world and the interior of the house and that it offers several different spaces with different emotional perspectives on that relationship; all of which are linked by pathways that move you around and through the space. None of this is visible from the front. There's no statement; it's a grey painted 70's house with wood siding.

And yet. Post here includes a picture of the house from underneath, looking up towards the right hand side. You can see the old oak tree that dominates the view from inside. The house cups the tree, protecting it. The upper and lower decks are visible. It's a grey overcast day, but the foliage is moist and green. There's construction trash on the ground.

And yet, we did think it was important to create a work of art (that's one of the reasons I am so uncertain about how it will be to live there). We have a work of art that is delicate, exquisite. What will happen when someone bumps her chair into the wall or someone else starts leaving piles of shit everywhere and still someone else vomits, craps, and pisses outside the litterbox?

Design should be functional, but life tends to be hard on that. Spilled coffee, piles of mail, magazines, books, CD's, pizza, wheelchair parts, bike parts, ... bad aim from all humans and the cat.... whew. I wouldn't want to be my house!

And so it is that our house comes to be part of a different kind of architecture. I've found it in a couple of locations so far -- not that we have any of this; it's a kind of philosophy of design. In the work of touchy-feely design, the architects have "a specific orientation toward haptic design [interact with via touch rather than switches, keys, etc.: WCD], objects and spaces, investigating how the built environment can offer bodies more heightened sensory experiences or “sensory conversations.” What does that mean?

Trigger point mouldings: "rounded fibrous plaster forms that can be integrated into a wall surface. As suggestive protrusions, the mouldings encourage heightened, physical interactions between bodies and architectural surfaces, and suggest that buildings can perform, or intimate towards the necessary work of massage therapists. Heating elements inserted into the backs of the plaster protrusions warm the forms to body temperature and assist in muscle tension relief. As warmed wall areas, the protrusions create a gentle threshold between body and building."

Or Found Space tiles: "these tiles are made using the found spaces between bodies and architectural surfaces, and turned into positive forms. The design process is incidental; the forms happen, they aren't sculpted or orchestrated. The resulting tiles are a formal hybrid between two very necessary and basic architectural elements, the body and the wall. Part body and part wall, the tiles echo the presence of a person, a posture, and literally reach-out to be touched. What these tiles give is a reference to the human body, embedded in a building material. The tiles encourage direct physical interaction; through touching and leaning, bodies find new niches for support, undulating folds and protrusions for resting, stimulating pressure points, or simply "fitting" like a garment - a new-found intimacy."

We've created a house that is designed for interaction and movement. It's not quite like any of these things, but it does raise questions of how we move around a space and what we see and feel when we get there. Our house isn't about the poshness of any of the fittings or the countertops, etc. It is about how we move and thus how we live.

A while ago, there was a significant amount of comment about the way the new Cooper Union Building was being used. The Union building is cool. Just way cool. Check out these pix by Trevor Patt. And this ride down the building -- definitely not designed for that purpose. But it is a building. Art is for interaction. And so is architecture (via the fun folks at Curbed).

Hopefully, as we/I zip up and down the ramp, round the poles, across the deck, through the different spaces is a place that creates new experiences for body and mind. We will inhabit the space, yes, but ultimately, I think we will come to appreciate the different places that are possible in this house.

Post concludes with an image taken from inside the house, looking to the right at the same tree from the previous picture. The deck is visible.

Diagnosis Of A Faun

The last lines are killer:

“This isn’t a cure,” Mr. Mozgala said. “I’m always going to have cerebral palsy.”

But now he doesn’t feel so enslaved by it.

Closes mouth. Well, this really is a time for talking about disability and dance. Now, we have this piece of "high class" reporting on an actual person with a disability who will be making his dance debut, and, yes, the culprit is the New York Times. The article title is "Learning His Body, Learning to Dance," but the title on the html tab in my browser is "Overcoming Cerebral Palsy, Gregg..." And that knowing little piece tells all.

From the very beginning, you know the article is going to be a problem in oh-so-many ways:

Gregg Mozgala, a 31-year-old actor with cerebral palsy, had 12 years of physical therapy while he was growing up. But in the last eight months, a determined choreographer with an unconventional résumé has done what all those therapists could not: She has dramatically changed the way Mr. Mozgala walks.

Determined outsider triumphs over mainstream medical, using a disabled artist as her protege/experiment. If not dance as therapy, the therapeutic effects of dance. Those are the storylines here; not Mr. Mozgala or even the piece itself -- which, btw, I hope to see in June if not in December. So, here, we go.

Mozgala does not gain much space in the article except as a medical project with a weird gait: his CP has "caused him to walk for most of his life like 'a human velociraptor,' as he put it: up on his toes, lower extremities turned in, seesawing from side to side to maintain balance." In fact, we don't hear much about his acting career; he's more of a specimen. Once, we've got the details of an enslaving CP out the way; the whole thing starts out with an outside: a choreographer who has done with with nontraditional dancers (my phrase) -- the article's author, Neil Genzlinger says "outside normal dance parameters. She sees Mozgala and is "inspired." Yeah. That thing.

We don't hear much about the piece: "The piece has antecedents in “Afternoon of a Faun,” the Nijinsky ballet. Mr. Mozgala plays a 5,000-year-old Faun who turns up in a modern-day hospital as the work explores the intersection of science and art." A disabled dancer shows up in a modern day hospital? Exploring the intersection that he is currently experiencing? And make no bones about it, he is represented in this report as a medical project. The choreographer reports back to a high profile rheumatologist at HSS; rheumatologist says that though the shake it and dance treatment may not work for everyone, the choreographer's work (not the dancer's work) does demonstrate the newish concept of neuroplasticity. Oh Sigh.

It turns out, from the video, that Mozgala is a beautiful mover. But you wouldn't know that from the article; Genzlinger's focus is on the therapeutic value of dance. Does this man have an artistic bone in his body? A single mover's movement? An artist's eye? If he does, you wouldn't know that from his writing here.

The doctor has the last word: “'It’s not over,' he said. 'There’s always a chance to change. You should not — you dare not — give up.'" And so it is that Mr. Mozgala goes from "falling with style" to, if he concentrates, passing. Don't get me wrong; that's a beautiful thing: it's nice to have options and really powerful to know your body can grow and change. In the past year, I have worked my ass off and have seen the progress afforded me by neuroplasticity. But the medical model of disability isn't always right about these things -- and not giving up can take many forms. Simply getting out of bed can be an act of resistance.

And beyond all that, I fail to see why the medical model should have the last word here in a piece that should have been about the art of the dance.

A Language of Moving

The recent tsunami of non-disabled actors pushing wheelchairs around (Danny in CSI: NY? That Glee thing? -- Awful) has prompted me to think about how you might describe moving around in your wheelchair. I can't erase the image of their panicked repeated pushing at the wheel from my inner eye. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I suppose I hope that by beginning a language of moving, I might be able to communicate that using a wheelchair has modes. That wheels have their own, rich vocabulary. That wheels are an experience in themselves.

The other day, I said to the guy in the store something about running and getting it. His response was, "Well, you won't run." True enough, but I am using the same language to describe some of my movements. Running, for example, is only partly about the speed; it is also about the intentions and emotions that come with it: a sense of joy and freedom, a sense of stress and behindness, a devotion to the regularity of the strokes (kinda like counting steps), a deep pleasure in the potential of the body, etc. So, there's term #1. Running: a mode of travel not dependent on feet.

Walking can be like running, but I like to think about walking as having some additional non-ped features: walking as a mode of exploring the world, thinking, as a daily and purely functional way to navigate the world. Walking is the thing you do, functionally, to cross a room and, epistemologically, to ground yourself in daily experience; a larger post of mine on walking is here.

In addition to modes of moving, the Glee pushers remind me to talk about *how* I move the wheel and not just the way in which I move. We tend to talk casually about the "push" or the "stroke," but I think those things are literal expressions of ways of striking the wheel. I can stroke the wheel with my fingers -- it's a sexy feeling. And when I do it, I feel every last ridge of the tyre as it passes under my fingers. My fingers are the things to watch; they love and caress the wheel as it rolls underneath my hands.

I can push the wheel: I use a different part of my hand to push and that registers deeply with me in contrast to, for example, turning back and pulling the wheel. When I push, I feel the force ride up through my body as my shoulder push down and out. It's a move of power, yes, but it is also a move that looks for the momentum of the chair. *I* emerge from the push. It's a move that suggests a butterfly coming out of its chrysalis; instead, my body picks up the forward movement and together we ride the power out into the world.

I can pull with force -- a movement that is initiated deep in my core -- or I can pull with my hands and feel the wheel ride through my third finger. I pull bending my body down; I think about the curve of my back. I feel the power rise; I pull. Or I just flatten the palm of my hand on the wheel, curve my fingers under, and pull.

Like many other wheelers, I more often than not have my hands on the wheel and not the rims; I have wheelers hands. And despite all the work that people have done with me for my shoulders, I still use the wheel. (Sigh). And I differentiate pulling from yanking, for example. I pull for strength, but yank, perhaps for speed or frustration. I pull with and for length; yanks, by contrast, are short.

Pushing. Pulling. Yanking. Slamming (yeah, slam dancing is old, but the wheelchair version...?). Twisting. Turning. Rolling. No matter how I move, I have to trust my chair -- know how to judge the effect of a pull on different terrains, on different surfaces. I have to know what impact my hands and fingers are having on the tires. I have to understand how a chair moves and what my weight does to that movement.

I don't think this way every moment of everyday. Most of the power that generates movement -- most pushes or pulls -- are what a dancer might call pedestrian movement. But this language and these ways of initiating movement cannot be learned overnight -- they can't be crammed from some kind of primer -- they are the product of a true partnership of body and chair.

Victim Art

The LA Times Blog asks whether this is art:

In the U.K. next month, a dance artist who has epilepsy will attempt to induce a seizure on stage. Rita Marcalo has stopped taking her medication ahead of the event at the Bradford Playhouse, according to the BBC News. "If she has a seizure, an alarm will sound and the audience will be invited to film on their mobile phones," said the report.

And the writer, David Ng, goes on to link Ms. Marcalo's performance to the debate about "victim art," illness, disability, and other kinds of so-called imperfect bodies on stage. If you don't know the whole saga, the victim art thing started with a New Yorker reviewer, Arlene Croce, who once famously would not go to see a piece by Bill T. Jones (it dealt with HIV/AIDS and dying) and then reviewed it anyway. A summary of her essay is here.

Croce's "review" was controversial; she took a lot of heat for her outspoken prejudice. But she expressed the contemporary opinion of a good number of critics and artists in various fields of performance. She gave voice to a kind cultural fear that, for the most part, has passed, but remains in the reluctance of audiences and critics to, say, come to see a physically integrated dance company or watch fat or older dancers.

Though Ng links to Joyce Carol Oates' lengthy and brilliant response (it is such a piece of its era), he also stacks the debate by quoting some of Croce's hardest lines, because to him, her perspective seems "surprisingly relevant today:"

In her 1994 article, Croce wrote that "the cultivation of victimhood by institutions devoted to the care of art is a menace to all art forms, particularly performing-art forms."

She also blasts audiences who would want to attend such a performance: "Instead of compassion, these performers induce, and even invite, a cozy kind of complicity. When a victim artist finds his or her public, a perfect, mutually manipulative union is formed which no critic may put asunder."

I'm not sure what I think. I don't know whether I would go to see such a performance. I don't know whether I would call it art. I do think that inviting someone to film you at your most vulnerable moments is a gutsy statement of human vulnerability. And it forces me to think about what I call art.

Usually, I think of art as being the result/product/performance of a skill that is not commonly shared among people. Marcalo asks us to watch a moment of absolute lack of control. Usually, art is in the execution of the extraordinary -- a painting, an image, a photograph, the playing of a piece of music -- we are asked to watch a moment of incredible consciousness and intention. Marcalo strips that down. The way her body will move in the grip of a seizure may well be extraordinary, but it will also not be intended or conscious. Marcalo's very idea makes me think. And think and think.

If we believe in Marcalo's work as a piece of successful and provocative art, she will have succeeded in reversing (if only for a moment) some of the oldest understandings of art and performance. She wouldn't be the first, of course, to tackle notions of control, superlative execution, and extraordinary humanness. But her performance would rank alongside the work of, say, menstruation artists and Tracey Emin's 2000 Turner Prize winning bed sheets. The things that differentiate Marcalo from the others are her desire for the audience to create the static record of her seizure: the image, the record, the prize-winning piece that is something an audience member creates. And then, there's the disability thing.

Is disability any more or less controversial than menstruation? It seems so. I would argue that if you can accept shit, menstrual blood, and other kinds of bodily effluvia, you can probably deal with a seizure. The human body is a work of art; we like watching it compete in athletics and sport. We like it, when we make love to it or when we are made love to. Why can't we watch it in performance of disability?

Hip Update

A couple of days ago, I was out with a wheeling friend talking about ... well, you know ... is there anything else to talk about right now? No, of course, not. We were talking about Glee. Snarkily (I love her), she asked, "What self-respecting wheelie does wheelies with tip bars on?" I touch my wheels. "The whole point is that you learn not to fall on your head."

She has a point about anti-tips and wheelie functionality. Unless you have a sport-specific fifth wheel, anti-tips aren't terribly functional for moving around. They prevent you from falling backwards, yes, but the tiny wheels aren't really designed to carry your weight or absorb any torque (Wizard and I once talked about popping my wheels off and wheelie-ing down the aisle of an airplane in order to avoid using an aisle chair). If you are using a wheelie in every day life to hop a curb or go downhill or down a flight of stairs (still haven't got this one quite right), you don't want anti tips on; you can't get the height and range of motion to clear the curb. And in the case of the stairs, they will wreck your balance and make your wheelbase too long to be on a given step. Dangerous.

I was thinking this through and popped a wheelie as a way of feeling out how an anti-tip would block me. (Dancers like to think physically.) Instead of just flopping back down with gravity, I randomly tried to control the way down, to return so slowly that I was just barely moving and saw the light. You probably all know this and do it every day in everything you do. And you'd think that after a year of intense physical therapy and rehabilitative exercise -- yes, it's just a week shy of the one year anniversary of my hip surgery -- that I would get the point. Well, no. Apparently not.

I'm so excited about this -- it will totally change my experience of movement and, in particular, my push. It will give my chair a different kind of momentum, too. I can't wait to see if this will become my regular way of moving through the world, something I retain only for dance, or if it is something I totally misunderstood about what they are saying and what my body is doing.

the hip surgery

A year ago, I underwent surgery for a hip femoro-acetabular impingement, a torn labrum, cyst removal, nerve release, and thermal capsulorrhaphy. While the execution of the surgery was successful, the recovery was and is longer and harder than either I or the surgeon anticipated. Indeed, at several points, it seemed like my spasticity stuff was endangering the capsulorrhaphy (a procedure in which they heat (read burn the hell out of the) the hip capsule, shrinking it so that range of motion is reduced and stability produced. "Snugging you up" is what the surgeon called it. (eeuwww)

Anyway, the daily continuous pain is gone -- it hurts, yes, some days a lot, yes, but the awful pain has gone -- the top of my quad is still kinda funky and I still have hip flexor issues, but the most recent MRI showed that the joint is healthy and stable. HOOOORAAYYYYY!!!!

Anyway. Point is that all the aqua therapy, land resistance bands, and movement system peeps have stressed the importance of strength in the eccentric contraction and of intentionally managing the changeover from concentric to eccentric. Despite all the physical work I do, I have not been able to feel this or make it happen. I can see the effects of it in my dancer colleagues -- that's how they get that "dancy" look. You know the one I mean? The one that makes you melt when a dancer lifts and lowers her arm? I can see it, but I haven't known how to do it.

As I am lowering my chair, I suddenly feel the change in direction. And there I am -- going backwards and forwards, managing to keep conscious muscle control in both directions and through the changeover.

The same thing, I discover, applies to pushing. They've been talking for a while about pushing like a piston. I know how to apply strength in the downward part of the stroke, but then I stop, wait, and just come back any old how. I haven't been able to gain a sense of continuous circularity in my stroke. NB: I don't mean circularity in the shoulder here -- you don't want to be riding your shoulders over the arch of your wheel (as if you were shrugging) as you push -- that will trash your shoulders pretty quickly. I am talking about managing the antagonist muscles and the changeover. I'm not doing a good job of describing this -- if I get a better handle on it, I will let you know.

This morning, I don't seem to be able to recreate the sensation, but you can bet next week I will be talking with my PT. Did I have it right? Is this what you meant? In the meantime, however, call it the silver lining from the awful Glee episode....

Wheelie Catholic Made Me Do It

Tickets obtained, I searched for the conductor/guard to get the portable ramp. I ran up and down the platform, but no such person was to be found. I gave my bag to a kindly looking chap with a shaven head and a pink mini-mohawk. Then, I backed up, tore across the platform, and hurled myself at the train; arms outstretched, I grabbed the bars and pulled myself in with such speed that I was barely able to stop myself from going too far towards the door on the other side. I was on board.

In the interim, of course, someone had found the conductor; she was irritated to find me on board. "You called me down here to tell me you needed the ramp? You delayed me for that? I thought you was in trouble...." Not a good start to the day. (She was also on the train for my return journey, but she had changed her tune: "Don't you jump off this train. You wait. You hear me now?") I was off to see WheelieCatholic for the day.

And what a day.

At the mall, I chased behind her, scaring the shoppers. WheelieCatholic loves to move quickly in her powerchair (the Beast). One gratuitous comment for the whole day? "You two look like you are ready for a race;" WheelieCatholic zooms up the ramp; I follow with what I hope is style if not pure speed. We ate our fave junk food -- no one wanted to help us more than we wanted. And we went on -- to the clothing shops. After all, ya gotta look even if you don't buy.

We were in the elevator talking so much that we didn't notice that, although some time had passed, we were still on the same floor. We rolled out of the elevator laughing and talking -- "You two ladies changed your mind?" -- we barely noticed the man until seconds later WheelieCatholic noticed that we were still looking at men's underwear -- and not because we wanted to.

She dared me to try on something wild; we passed fake fur boleros. Yes, those counted, but my eyes were very definitely on the shiny. Everything this year is metallic, sequinned, and shiny: oooo, lucky, lucky magpie me. A gold sweater we deemed not radical enough -- great colour though. We swirled through the store at a wacky wild pace and landed on this dress. Shinyyyyyyy. An accessible changing room held both of us as the glittery dress shimmied on to my body. WheelieCatholic took the pik on my phone -- you gotta preserve such images. Much as I'd like to, I don't think I have the courage to wear this out in every day life.

Mainly, though, we talked. We talked from the moment we got into her van -- a phone call. "Hey, I'm behind you!" Weird, because I was so excited about the day that I caught an early train; she seemed to have sensed this and was there early, too? We talked as she showed me around her town -- very pretty in fall. We talked as we hit the mall. We talked all the way through the shop and back out the door. We screamed with laughter as we whipped around the aisles, talking and pointing. People just fell to the sides to let us through -- no hassles. We talked all the way to the train station.

For a second, WheelieCatholic parked across two spaces (disabled parking at her station doesn't include room for a ramp!); I rolled down her ramp and across to the platform. As I turned my head to wave, she was pulling out of her spots (quickly and safely); then, she was gone. I came alone, but I felt more alone when she left. Being in community with someone else is just so incredible.

She posted first; here is her account of the day. Awesomeness.

Glee

At first, I was bitter and annoyed. But not outraged. There's nothing new about the movie and television industries choosing non-disabled actors to play the parts of disabled people. Nothing new there at all. I was disappointed, but not outraged.

As the season wore on, I found I could not stand watching Brothers: casting a disabled guy doesn't work for me -- so what if he's black? -- if the show itself is occasionally racist, mostly misogynistic, and basically weak. I continued to watch for appearances of Robert David Hall on CSI (yayy!); booed Danny's recovery on CSI: NY; downloaded Season 2 of Breaking Bad; I saw the Private Practice episode --is he a continuing character? And my heart sank when, apparently unable to get the point, the Glee producers decided to announce their big wheelchair number. How bad could it be? The hype-inducing newspaper article previews were nauseating; I went ahead and hid: I had a show to do. This morning the internet was ablaze! I went to Hulu and watched it.

How bad could it be? OMG. It was bad. Various newspaper articles mention (as if it were cool) the difficulty the cast had learning to use their chairs. Here's a preview.




Oh, yes. Bad.

“It was the scariest number we had done,” says Woodlee [the choreographer]. “You don’t know what those chairs can do, and you don’t know what those kids can do in the chairs. So a lot of it was just cross your fingers and pray.”

Prayers were called for while the cast learned the routine. At first, the stage’s ramps were too steep and the actors couldn’t get up them in their chairs. Even after the stages were rebuilt, it took the actors a while to learn how to move. Many found that if they didn’t shift their weight correctly, they quickly flipped backwards. (New York Post: h/t Lawrence Carter Long)

Or:

“Artie doesn’t get to get up ever, so I didn’t want anyone to get up,” said Murphy, who wanted viewers to see the effort that comes with performing in a wheelchair.

“If it looked too fun and easy, it wouldn’t read right,” Woodlee said. “Ryan really wanted people to understand what Artie deals with.”

That means those sweaty faces are the real deal.

“Yeah, that wasn’t acting,” McHale said with a laugh. “Lea had the wheelchair from hell. I don’t know if she was missing safety locks or what, but every time she leaned back, she would fall. She fell more than the rest of us. (LA Times blog.)

Poor babies. And those chairs? Who knows what they will do next.

What is the point of all that, eh? It's hard to use a wheelchair? Really? Gosh, those disabled people must be so brave and so strong if even we, a cast of actors can't do it. How do those poor disabled people manage?

Mmmm. How indeed.

And then there's the sad fact of the "dancing;" the choreography sucks. The one potentially interesting move that McHale supposedly "does" is a cut -- he wheelies on one rear wheel. The rest is notable only for the way that it shows that able-bodied, non-wheelchair-using folk really do think of chairs as bicycles you move with your arms. There's absolutely no body-chair integration at all. They think of sitting in a chair as being only about not being able to move their legs (and in Artie's case as being about having his hips and legs twisted to one side). That mistaken understanding leads to some very weird looking people in chairs. On chairs would be a better phrase for it. The fake paralysis of their legs somehow wends its way up their bodies so that they are really only able to push with their elbows (no wonder they have sore arms!).

It's so interesting watching them try to dance. Push. Make a dance gesture. Push. And they are only able to muster up those little beginner pushes. You know the ones I mean? The frantic shoves at the wheel? They push, the wheel doesn't respond; they don't know how to ride a stroke and feel the momentum. This means that they basically either push the chairs around in formations (because they can't dance and push) or keep the chair still and hurl their upper bodies and arms around. Hilarious. Explains the weak choreography, too. Understand how a disabled dancer moves with the chair, Mr. Woodlee, and you will be able to create something a little better than bad dance.

More disturbing is the rest of the disability stuff in the episode. Artie has an SCI, and he still has "full use of his penis." Wow. Those enlightened Glee writers. Where did they discover that useful idea? Suddenly, then, from going from no disabled characters, we suddenly get introduced to 2, new disabled people; they are playing supporting roles. And they have learning/cognitive disabilities (I think; I hate to guess). So, now, here we are. Two actual cog/learning disabled people versus a pretend SCI, a fake stutterer, and a bunch of people just riding around in chairs for the hell of it. (Who on earth thought this would be a good idea??)

A significant weakness in the disability community as I encounter us are the ways in which we handle invisible disabilities and, in particular, cognitive impairment. We have a hierarchy that mirrors that of the nondisabled world; somehow, secretly, we prioritize impairments, compare them, and treat our people differently on the basis of perceived (or not) impairment. And because we do it, because, to the outside world, this kind of prejudice seems secretly sanctioned among disableds, the nondisableds feel perfectly free to continue their own bad behaviour.

While the glee club members roll, "dance," and sing en masse, a single disabled student tries out for the cheerleading squad. A cognitive impairment, it seems, is better than the fat of many of the other auditioners (cuz what? fat people can't do dance moves? sigh). Alone, the new cheerio struggles against the bullying coach This is fun to watch, right? The dance routine happily celebrates what it imagines disabled people can do; the cheerio stuff shows a disabled person failing again and again, and as she does so, every stereotype about disability, achievement, and merit is reinforced. The studio justifies its own hiring practices; it couldn't possibly have a physically disabled dancer; s/he'd be no better than this person with a cognitive impairment.

And look how one comes to stand in as a metonym for the other: cognitive disability is physical disability's dark and unacceptable core. It is what "we" all fear about disability. This kind of shit is why it can be dangerous when a physically disabled person has to stand up for themselves and their rights by separating themselves from those with cognitive disabilities. All too often, I hear something along the lines of "My brain's OK; it's only my legs that don't work; I'm not a r*d." We separate ourselves and achieve self advocacy to the detriment of others. Even if those words aren't used, the sentiment is often implicit, and it is easily recognized. If the use of cognitive disability in Glee is at all disturbing, it is partly because we recognize prejudice per se and partly because we can see ourselves in the prejudice-filled mirror of the non-disabled tv world. I hate to think what happens next week when the program fills out the storyline with the second disabled supporting character.

So many of the newspaper articles call this episode of Glee a "game-changer." I don't see that immediately. It strikes me most clearly that "Wheels" is an example of lousy script writing, the usual inspirational over-acting, and pathetic choreography. It changes nothing; indeed, it only reinforces the able-bodied world's ideas about disability. The community is taking a stand against casting practices; it has been doing so for a while. We will succeed in having disabled people cast. Note, however, I did not write "we will overcome." Because we will not overcome and cannot triumph until we have made more attempts to heal the divisions within our community. Until that moment occurs, the able-bodied world will always be able to split us apart and reduce our diversity to its stereotypical projections.

Intersectionality

In a general sense, intersectionality has been an important part of feminist theory; it has enabled rich studies of women's lives across a number of disciplines and brought to the fore new and complex aspects of women's identities. You can read a brief guide to intersectionality here (it's wikipedia so it isn't great, but it works) and read an example of intersectional scholarship by one --no, perhaps, the -- field's founding thinker here.

It has become quite common to talk about intersectional analysis and be talking about quite different intersections: class, race, disability, gender, environment, etc. So, for this post, when I finally get down to detail, I am only going to talk about intersections of internet feminism and disability theory.

When I first encountered intersectional theory and intersectional analyses, I was new to the US and new to the idea that people thought about feminism and race. Pysched by the possibility of intentional rather than imposed identity, I hoped that the differences intersectionality would reveal could add to and perhaps change mainstream feminist theoretical ideas by rendering visible some of the ideas and experiences found in critical race discourses. I hoped that intersectionality would help me find a way to register the differences in experience of the women of colour and women of my social class of origin within the majority white feminist theory that I was reading. (I could have added ableist in that last sentence, but disability wasn't on my radar then.) In other words, I hoped intersectionality would forever end mainstream feminisms' tendency to generalize womens' experiences because it would allow the lives of women of colour and women from lower social classes to matter. I hoped I would see myself.

That last bit never really happened. Nevertheless, within the writings and halls of academia, one might plausibly say that intersectionality has been a successful approach to uncovering and understanding the possibilities of womens' lives. Out here in the wild west of the blogosphere, however, things are all too frequently different: academic feminisms are not quite the same as internet feminisms. Out here, you could say not so much that intersectionality is a failure, but that expressions of internet feminism are all too frequently resistant to the differences of women and that a certain unwillingness to acknowledge and move with difference has lead to much ugliness.

A quick definition of terms. I'm making this one up as I go. But I want to separate internet feminisms from the academic writings that I encountered while at university. Internet feminisms are not so much representative of the scholarly field as a whole, but localized to individual websites and specific groups of people. At first glance, these sites are seemingly able to take on a diversity of perspectives; they have a large audience and multiple contributors. Despite this variation, however, internet feminism is not so much a set of philosophical perspectives, carefully worked out in conversation with other scholars, but a group of outlooks pulled together by friends and people who hold congruent (if not similar/the same) takes on stuff. Each website -- each example of internet feminism -- is thus a projection of the people who run, post on, and read a given site. They are examples -- exemplifications, even -- of feminism but they aren't necessarily reference points to which one can go if you need to understand feminism.

This is an important point. Large websites tend to gain internet authority -- kind of like the way google does page rank. But internet authority does not necessarily mean content authority. The failure of feministing to respond to concerns about ableism (in the most recent blowup) is a good example of this. The larger websites often articulate a mission of giving voice to womens' experience, yes, but there is also often an unwritten assumption that at the bottom of this giving voice commonality will be found. Internet feminisms as found on large websites seem to need community. Internet feminist websites create and then survive on community; community, particularly when there is little to no personal contact, seems to need similarity or commonality. The latter, for reasons I don't fully understand, are threatened by difference.

And so it is that as marked by huge blowups, internet feminisms represented by the largest feminist websites have, in recent years, failed women of colour, men and women from trans communities, and now, mostly recently, they are failing women with disabilities.

That last sentence shouldn't really be a surprise. "My website, my voice" is an effective tactic for small sites like mine, but it is not really a good strategy for sites with multiple contributors and huge readerships. The size of readership really does matter in a weird way. The more people who read your site, the more different people who have an investment in your content, the more people you have a responsibility to. (Note, however, having a smaller site does not relieve you of this obligation, it merely means that your failures are less likely to be noticed and you are less likely to be called on your shit.)

Intersectionality was supposed to mean that your experience was no less important than that of the women on the website miles across the ether. It was supposed to allow some way of creating tissue from invisible techno fibres, some way of embodying all of our complicated selves.

So deal people, deal. Read this now old, but still necessary manifesto/statement for feminist disability studies. Get a sense of the issues from this somewhat more uptodate annotated bibliography. Try this on disability, race, and feminism. Whatever you do, just find a way to hear our concerns about eugenics, abortions, cures, genetic medicine, genetic selection, work, euthanasia, body image, assistance, interdependence, health care, reproduction, sexuality, access, language, .... This is not a win-lose situation. Honestly, what do you have to fear? What harm could come to you and your ideas? Feminism isn't not diminished by reaching out.

dance concert

It's that time of year again! Leave your cares at home and join us for an evening of old-fashioned holiday cheer.

Friday, December 4th, 8 pm
Saturday, December 5th, 2 pm
Saturday, December 5th, 8 pm

The Holiday Spectacular is a family-friendly performance inspired by the celebrity-hosted Christmas shows of TV's past: Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, etc. Included on the program will be new work by Full Radius Dance company members Jojo Butler, Sarah Kelly Kerr and Onur Topal-Sumer as well as the premiere of artistic director Douglas Scott's Blue Christmas. Blue Christmas takes a look at the emotional and physical entanglements of relationships between families, friends, and lovers. The Von Krapp Family Singers are back, and are Krappier than ever! The campy, joyous vocals of Barry, Mary, Larry, Carrie, Jerry, Harry, Sherry and Shaneekwa Von Krapp are sure to delight audiences.

Tickets are $15 for adults, $12 for seniors and children (12 & under), and just $10 for groups of 10 or more. Group tickets must be purchased in advance. For more information, contact Full Radius Dance at 404 - 724 - 9663 or through our website.

7Stages Theatre

Become a friend of Full Radius Dance!

Sunday, November 22nd @ 6pm

Tickets are still available for our upcoming fundraiser at Nicola's Restaurant. You can support our work and enjoy a great dinner and evening with the dancers for just $25, or purchase your concert ticket at the same time for a discount. Tickets are available in advance only. We rely on your support for our artistic and educational work. We'd love to see you there -- get your tickets now!

Dreaming on Wheels

I almost never remember my dreams, so the ones that I do remember I tend to think of as being significant somehow.

Last night, I had my "first" dream about me as a disabled person. It was scarily vivid. Law and Order style, I shouted to, well, whomever -- faceless dream person; the police?? -- that I would take care of this "dirtbag." The next sensation I remember was the power and the support of my chair -- so sweet, so responsive -- as I hurled the dirtbag to the floor. They somehow got up again and, apparently, without resistance, because the next thing I remember was that I was hurling them to the ground again. It was a full body over-the-head lift that terminated in a satisfying crunch of bones on concrete. I did it again and again; I was murdering this person, but all I was tuned into was my chair: how sweet, how responsive. My wheels were just the best; I seemed not to care at all for the fact that I was killing someone for no reason that I could see.

Many hours later now, I still remember the feeling of surprise -- me? killing someone? and satisfaction with my wheelchair. Today's NYT has an article about new dream science. Instead of seeing dreams as psychological -- I was expressing my pent up frustration with the world or something like that -- a psychiatrist is offering a physiological interpretation.

In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.

“It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”

What does it say that my first disabled dream has me happily committing murder? Is it really tuning my brain up for the day? Who will I hurl to the ground? Or should I be looking for a more psychological read? Have I accepted myself? Am I a fighter for law, order, and appropriate citizenship? What is going on?

I am happy to report that I have made it through the day without murdering anyone -- though I still find my chair sweet. Hope tomorrow has a less violent start.

The Morning After

It's actually worse than a one night stand; however you feel about it, you have to get up and do it again - same people, same place, same time. Do over. Yes, a case of the post-performance jitters.

How'd it go? I dunno. No, really, I do not know. And truthfully, it doesn't matter; my attention can only be on the next performance and on my body. I should only focus on fulfilling the next performance. On stretching, moving, warming up. On figuring out if the pain is anything more than usual disability stuff. On discovering whether the ache is only soreness from the energy of a hard week and a hard performance or whether I might have a minimal strain. Last night, I was so zonked, I drifted off (a number of times) in the bath while waiting for my muscles to relax. I crawled into bed and put my heating pad on and awoke a couple of hours later to put my ice cuffs on. This morning, finally, I feel less drained.

In an earlier post on physically integrated dance, I wrote (many of you have seen this before, but stick with me for a sec: it really seems to be coming into its own):

PID is about the ways a dancer moves in his or her body and also about what I see as the positive effect it can have on the audience. It seems kind of cheap to say that I am looking for an integratedness as the effect of PID, but that is what stands out to me.

Too often, I think, you go to a dance performance and see bodies on the extreme doing extreme things. They can be very beautiful and very effective, but the usual dancer body tends to be if not alienating at least in a different world. You can marvel at it, enjoy it, be moved by it, but not necessarily own it in your own body. If you are not a dancer, you know that you could *never* do that.

I think the effects of the representations of the body we see in PID are very different. The movement that, for me, defines the genre communicates a certain awareness and acceptance of the body. I think it communicates a deep engagement with embodiment. By which I mean, an understanding of the reality of the body -- something I think that disabled dancers can really bring to the field. I also mean an engagement with the idea that we know, perceive, and learn through our bodies.

Not sure whether that's clear. For me, a successful PID performance has me admiring the aesthetics, yes. It has me appreciating the social value of dancing PWDs, yes. But it also brings about within me a deep sense of recognition of the power and potential of the body. It's an embracing of the body -- any body -- the fleshly body as a beautiful thing in itself.

This morning on the phone, a friend told me that as she left the theater she saw a bunch of people outside on the sidewalk and in the marquis area. She immediately recognized them as dancers: they were repeating some of what they had seen on stage in the performance. She saw them jumping, twisting, kicking and then talking with each other -- a quick conference and another one would leap into the air. When dancers want to dance what they've just seen ...

My friend also wanted to leave me with the image of a disabled member of the audience, also moving gently in her chair as she talked about the power and effect of the performance on her. When non dancers want to become dancers ....

I feel really emotional about all of this. Something is happening that I have yet to understand.

Pre Performance Jitters

Big new works. Repeat of big works from last year.

Nerves.

Unbelievable emo day -- of the Grey's Anatomy kind. Of the wanting, but not having wild uncontrolled sex (Wizard is at work; don't want to get injured). Of the everything is a signal, a sign. Dance wheels on the street is it good or bad luck? Inflate the tyres? What if I overinflate and they go bang. Can't not inflate because everything won't be perfect. I need to be perfect. My body needs to be perfect. I refuse to indulge in the usual pre-performance rituals, but I also have to. It's not that shaving, eyebrow plucking, hair conditioning, makeup brush cleaning add anything to the actual dance, it's that they add to the readiness: the humbling and opening of self before the ineffable of performance.

Will I be there? Will I get it right? Will I execute? Will I be able to live in the full potential of every dance moment? Will I feel the pulse of every movement and live through every breath? hell, will I actually remember to breathe? Will my chair be OK? Last year, the footplate slipped out of the leg tube that holds it -- right in the middle of a piece. We were banging it in with a mallet in the wings. I was just losing it.

Last night, my pants split at the crotch -- OK. Dress rehearsal. But what if it happens again? What if at the moment when he lifts and splits my leg, the light catches a gaping hole (part of me is terrified and part of me just wants to laugh). Last night, I fell. I whipped around too fast, felt the wheel rise; I balanced for a second or two with my body and arms extended parallel to the ground, the wheel rising and, well, then I didn't balance any more.

Last night gives me hope for today. Nerves. Excitement. Passion. Raw. Vulnerable performance.

Who Are You? Do We Know Each Other?

I sat in my chair this morning and greeted it (silently), looking for our usual familiarity. But it was just going to be one of *those* days: the days where your chair, no matter how long you've had it, is simply alien. Yesterday, we floated over the sidewalk, zoomed through the world. Today, the chair is heavy, with no grace, no sense of integration coming back at me. Yesterday, the wheels slipped into my hands as if my hands had always had wheels. Today, my hands groped around slipping off the wheel, grasping for grip. Yesterday, there was responsiveness; today, there is weight. And so on.

What happened? These things happen every couple of months or so. The sensation usually wears off by the end of the day. But I always wonder whether or not that feeling of alienation heralds a change in my body -- did something get worse overnight? Better? Am I stronger? Weaker? Rested?

When change occurs, I usually worry about my body and my future, but I am beginning to wonder whether I shouldn't begin to worry also about my chair. Clearly, sometimes, a lack of responsiveness can be due to, say, flat-ish tyres or to, say, the kinds of things that get taken care of (or are supposed to be taken care of) invisibly in that tune-up no one every schedules. On top of that, I do with my chair things that designers don't usually think of as being regular parts of a chair's life. On stage and in photos/video, it all looks nice, but you can't see the effects of torque, speed, and other kinds of junk. All chairs have weak points, and dance -- just as it does a fleshly body -- discovers and rides right on through them.

I enjoy the implications of these fears: that my chair is alive, a body as vulnerable to change as my first body. We will have to settle on some things together and work together. I might be the wheelchair user, but it is becoming permanently apparent that my chair is not a secondary partner in our daily life.