Call For Submissions

mattilda is basically done with the anthology but writes, "I’m basically done with the anthology, but that I want to make sure to include a piece that centers around disability."

So, if you've got something to say...


WHY ARE FAGGOTS SO AFRAID OF FAGGOTS?: flaming challenges to masculinity, objectification and the desire to conform

• CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS •

As back rooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture becomes little more than straight-acting dudes hangin’ out, where are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a world that wants us dead?

Masculine ideals have long reigned supreme in male sexual spaces, from the locker room to the tea room, the bars to the back alleys to the beaches.  But is there something more brutal and dehumanizing about the calculated hyperobjectification of the internet? How do we confront the limits of transaction sexuality, where scorn becomes “just a preference,” lack of respect is assumed, and lying is a given? How can we create something splendid and intimate from that universe of shaking and moaning and nervous glances turned inward now groaning?

I'm especially interested in essays about community-building experiments, public sexual cultures, faggots not socialized or presenting as male, cruising, HIV, consumerism, transfaggotry, polyamory, feminism, sexual safety and risk-taking, norms for faggots outside of the US, and gender transgression (of course).  I'm looking for essays that expose hierarchies of gender, age, race, nationality, class, body type, ability, sexuality and other identity categories instead of imposing fascistic definitions based on beauty myth consumer norms. That's right, honey -- I'm talking about interventions that are dangerous and lovely, just like you.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) is most recently the author of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights 2008), and the editor of Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (Seal 2007) and an expanded second edition of That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull 2008).


Submit non-fiction essays of up to 3,500 words.

Dreaming

Since gaining my new citizenship, I have applied for a passport (wicked tricky), updated my status with the Social Security Administration (harder than it ought to have been, given the typo in my name on the original card), registered to vote (hopefully that was successful, but I guess I won't know until October), filled out my juror availability form (no one would ever want to choose me given that I trust neither police nor lawyers), changed the address on my DP parking placard (now, dear, don't let anyone else use it, will you?), tried and failed to update the address on my driving licence (it's not due yet, dear; you wouldn't want to take the test again, would you?... noooooo), and filed updated W-2 and I-9 forms with West Coast (no problem).  My new passport has arrived in the post -- I am waiting for the new card version and for the return of my naturalization certificate.  My only outstanding piece of administration is changing my status with my bank.

When all this is done, I will be a functioning American citizen.

An angry functioning citizen.  One who is appalled by the failure of the government to make a pathway for those who would come to share the land in which I now live.  When I lived in Germany, the life and possibilities for those who lived and worked as Gastarbeiter (guest worker) was severely circumscribed by the law.  I personally witnessed systemic injustice and personal random injustice.  I was fired up to change the system.  Much as I hate to say this, the fact of a system -- even one as dysfunctional as the German one --  and the concomitant possibility of limited participation in German civil life are better than the way the US is now.

For better or worse, borders are porous.  The government claims such porosity is necessary for the free flow of trade and of capitalism.  It makes no sense to me at least to focus on making money through borders without thinking through the products of profit and trade: income inequality, injustice, and the inaccessibility of human dignity.

The Best Wheelchair For Dancing

I'm writing this as a response to an email I received.  On the face of it, the question is simple: "what is the best wheelchair for dancing?"  The answer is unbelievably difficult and yet really simple.

Let's just deal with the question first.  And with my emotional reaction.  I hate this question; it pisses me off.  I usually hear it in the following context.  A non-disabled, non-dancer person has just seen a performance, and they immediately want to know: what is the best chair for dancing.  The other context in which this question comes up is a bunch of engineering and design students get together and ask how to design the next generation of wheelchairs.  As wheelchair design really needs to be driven forward in new directions, I feel I should support such work -- particularly if it is led by a person with a disability.  Not everyone is going to be a Ralph Hotchkiss-level genius, but they might be MIT-wizards or simply people, like Christian Bagg, looking to solve a difficult problem.

I love wheelchair technology, but I never really know how to respond to this question graciously.  So, here's my mixed response.

Technically speaking, it's a good and important question.

• Though all wheelchairs move through the world, not all wheelchairs move the same way or can be moved the same way.
• There are wheelchairs for running, tennis, basketball, etc., so there are wheelchairs for dance, right?

I can see how recognizing these facts would lead someone to ask which chairs are best for dance.  But there are so many problematic assumptions behind both question and recognition.  First, the "dance" part.  To ask which chairs are best for dancing is to assume, in part, that certain movements are constitutive of dance and others are not.  Not the case.  A better formulation of the question from this point of view would be:  I want to be able to have a certain set of movements in my dance piece.  What kind of chair setup would make that possible?

This latter formulation comes to a better understanding of the relationship of chair to movement.  If you have a lot of camber, for example, you are likely to be able to turn, using your arms and shoulders, very quickly.  This is a great move; it looks fabulous.  Almost all dancers participating in wheelchair dance sport, choose manual chairs with a lot of camber (and a 5th wheel).  Check out this guy (embedding disabled on the site) and the discussion underneath.  He has fabulous turns, a lot of which are facilitated and supported by  his chair.  But although he can turn, he is pretty limited in what else he can do.  The side stability created by the wide base limits his movement expression and use of his kinetic sphere -- nothing to the side, nothing to the back, just turn, turn, turn (and a neat toestand).  

If you optimize for one thing, you create a tradeoff that negatively affects your ability to do another.  If it is possible to say your dance vocabulary is only going to be these moves, then perhaps you can design a chair specifically to do those moves.  But I don't understand why anyone would want to do that.  What are you going to do if you suddenly get creative and expand your movement possibilities?

A second issue is an implicit assumption: the idea that somehow the "dance" is in the chair.  I cannot state this firmly enough: the dance is not in the chair.  That's obvious, of course, except that it isn't.  In response to seeing West Coast, so many people say stuff like: "I couldn't see the wheelchairs at all."  "The wheelchairs were just wonderful."  And over time, the dancers become conflated with our chairs to such an extent that we are invisible.  This, to me, is the problem with the reporting on Lorna Marsh, a dancer in the United Kingdom: "Sophisticated Wheelchair Helps Dancer Realize Her Dreams" and "Lorna's powered wheelchair was vital in helping her achieve all this. Her old chair wasn't given her the freedom and support she needed, the battery kept going flat and Lorna's family could not afford to replace it, let alone buy a new chair" (from an article entitled Lorna's Story, but which might more accurately be called the story of Lorna's new wheelchair that is not as far as I can tell a special dancing chair, but a chair that is better suited to her needs as an outgoing individual who wants to live her life as it should be lived: without restriction from crappy chair design).

Our chairs are beautiful.  But the chairs don't dance.  They don't move, express, or speak until we move them.  We control them; we know how to exploit their architecture to construct beautiful lines, extraordinary snapshots; we know how to direct your attention as an audience member, to make you see the chair as chair and as part of our bodies.  These are things we think about as artists; it's part of our tradecraft.  You are looking at something we, for the most part, have built with intention.  (You might of course argue that the fact that I am writing this post says something about the failure of that intention -- but, you know, we can't control everything.  Images make sense to people inside their own contexts; if they are willing to change, that's one thing....)

Post here contains a snapshot of me taken by a friend; I'm poledancing in the DC metro, head flung back, mouth open, arms gripping the pole.  To my mind, the dance is here -- in my body -- my chair is not visible.

Moral of the story?  Wheelchair users are the dancers.  And speaking of the users, here's another problem.  Even if you take out user preference, which, by the way, you should never do, the simple fact is that what works for one dancer doesn't often work for another.  I have a very particular set up; it enables me to do a bunch of interesting things and allows me great flexibility.  It has its limits, yes, but it is a workable setup.  I know one dancer who has something similar, but not entirely the same.  We've spent some time talking about the tradeoffs we've made.  My colleague at West Coast has something entirely different.  (Full disclosure: I don't dance in my everyday chair.)

Post here contains a picture of my every day chair.  it's a mostly black and white picture of a wheelchair from the back.  You can see the hard back, the back bar, and the wheels.  There's a reflection of golden light on the left of the back rest.

And that's another part of the equation.  Recognizing that dance starts with the dancer is an important part of the idea that all bodies can dance -- in and with the assistive equipment they have.  Anyone can dance.  You don't have to come to the studio in a super light, highly sporty/technical titanium manual chair or in a specially designed souped up, ledges added powerchair (something like this one from USF, for example).  Come as you are, and we will help you explore the body you have.

So, what do you do if you want to design wheelchairs for dancing?  Find a bunch of wheelchair users who dance and a bunch who don't.  A lot of them,  mind.  Not just 2 or 3.  That's too small a sample size.  Talk to people in very different bodies, with very different chairs.  Find out what they think are the strengths and limitations of the chairs they are in.  Discover more about the environments they work, learn, and perform in.  Document, document and document.

Our experience as end users matters most.  We will tell you about the relationships between our setups and our work.  Discover and deepen your knowledge of the relationships between our bodies and our chairs -- WITHOUT -- without going all medical on us.  It's no use, for example, you saying -- "Ahh.  T2.  You ought to be able to dance in this kind of chair and do these kinds of moves."  Learn instead, how we use our setup to do our moves and how we create moves in conjunction with our partners.  Learn about the dynamics between body and chair and body, chair, and dance partner.  Study dance with us.  Watch us move.  Talk to us and create equal partnerships with us.

Don't design for us; create with us.

Hiking Outside

UPDATE:  


If you want to go out hiking in CA and actually be on an accessible trail, check this OUT:

Accessible Trails on the California Coast.


There are a lot of photographs in this post. Instead of doing a description as part of the post itself, I am going to experiment with "alt-text." Please let me know if it works and/or if it doesn't.

When my shoulder went out in 2007 (I fell on it, separated the AC with grade 2, developed bursitis, tendinitis, and a scapula with winging tendencies), I rented a discontinued model powerchair from my local medical supply store.  Now, over 3 and a half years later, I own it.

It's not a great chair, technically; full time powerchair users will tell you all about how bad this brand is, how the midwheel drive sucks, how underpowered it is, how unresponsive the joystick is, how uncomfortable and useless the "captain" seat is if you have any kind of seating needs.  In the hardcore/medically complex mobility world, this thing wasn't designed not for SCI or CP or MD or any other alphabetically abbreviated impairment; it's best used, as Medicare would have it be used: indoors only.  It's all true.  But it is also true that I have a power chair now.  And that I can go places that I could not go by either foot or manual chair.

During much of the rental period, the chair didn't see a lot of action.  I felt uncomfortable using it on a daily basis.  I knew that medically speaking I wasn't "that bad" -- whatever you mean by that.  And I was hyper aware of what it might mean to be seen using one.   (Someone -- not me, probably -- should write a post about the prejudices and fears of manual chairs vs powerchairs in the wheel community and how our fears and perceptions are influenced/affected by social stereotyping.)

Anyway, I used it only when my shoulder was exquisitely painful and in the period after my hip surgery -- it was the only thing that could take the angle at which my leg had been set.  It was my backup plan for when things went totally and utterly wrong.  I had it in reserve, and in November of 2008 was beginning to wonder about how it would be to make a powerchair a more regular part of my daily and dancing life.

My need changed after the surgery and rehab, so the chair returned to its place as "worst case" or taking a walk on a long distance or terrain not navigable by manual.  That is until the other week.   While I was renting, I used it carefully.  Once I learned that it was mine, I wanted to see what it could do.

The new house is out in the country -- I mean really out in the country: people are surprised when we say we have city water.  We do have city water, but we also have a propane gas tank.  We're rural -- we worry about fire, mountain lion sightings, rattle snakes, rats, field mice, bats, coyotes, and deer.  Sometimes, I'd rather just deal with city rats (oh, very different) and the fear of bed bugs.

But one advantage of living in the country are the trails that surround our house.  Literally.  Trails criss-cross the whole area: none of them are technically accessible and for that reason, I haven't felt excited about exploring them.  Earlier in the week, however, I met with the park rangers who suggested using the fire roads at my own peril: they gave me a map, and I promised not to sue.  When they say inaccessible, they mean it.  Mostly, the road and trail we went on were wide enough.  It hasn't rained since March, so the ground was hard enough.  BUT the surface was awful and unsafe.  I wished for my belt and yet was glad that if I was going to fall or the chair was going to go over the edge we could separate.  This was no "walk in the park;" I could not have done it without Wizard.  Essentially, he had to push the chair and steer it while I added the juice for huge chunks of the way.  The ruts in the road were killer; the mid-wheel drive sucky; we came a cropper several times.  It wasn't safe, by any means; I was scared a lot of the time.  And I am glad that we were mostly alone -- our language was certainly shocking.  BUT we were outside.  Hiking.  Hiking in the area that we live.

Wizard turned on his GPS to Android/google maps tracking, hyper geekology thing.  We were out for over 3 hours; we averaged 3.7 kph (2.29 mph).  We only travelling 4 km (2.4 miles) on the dirt road, the rest was on a regular road (getting to and from the access point).

And we saw a tarantula.  The picture kind of sucks, but that black blob in the middle of the image?  That is a spider.  A big, black, furry spider.  You can get some sense of  the size of it -- approximately my palm size.  Close up pix can be found here. (Cute, not!)  California apparently has native tarantulas -- 2 kinds.  This freaked both of us out to such an extent that we scurried out of range quickly and quietly, hoping that the spider wouldn't jump or attach itself to my chair.

In sum, I had a great time, but the inaccessibility was a real eye-opener.  I was prepared for some difficult slopes; I was prepared for some uncomfortable surfaces.  I was not prepared for the dangerous combination of the trail and the unresponsive midwheel drive.  I was not prepared for how hard it would be, for how scary it would be, for how much I would have to rely on the Wizard to keep me on the path and to get me out of the ruts.  I was surprised by how dangerous and uncomfortable innocuous looking terrain actually was.  Nor was I prepared for how beautiful it is.  The photos were all taken within a short space of 45 minutes or so.  The sun comes and goes; the marine layer blows fog over the hills like "dragon's breath" (a friend's idea).

The freedom to be outdoors was just incredible.  I was outdoors -- I don't think I have had such an experience in 6 or so years.

About My BlogRoll

Heyy!

A couple of you have written to me about the security warning on my blogroll.  Don't worry: there's no security risk.  Here's from the people at BlogRolling.

We’re aware that there is an issue with BlogRolling blogrolls causing some browsers to display a security warning.

There’s nothing really wrong with BlogRolling itself but the way we connect your blog to the sites in your blogroll makes some security algorithms think there is.
If you find yourself in this situation, we recommend you remove the Blogrolling code from your site.

We’re probably going to be shutting the service down soon.  We’ll post more information here and on our Twitter account.

When I started this blog, BlogRolling was one of the few reliable and free services out there for non-HTML capable folk on Blogger.  I will be sorry to see them go.  In the meantime, however, know that as far as I can know, the blog is safe.

AND thank you for being in touch.

WCD

Activism

I received this in my email this morning.  I am working on a longer post about disability and the death penalty, but in the meanwhile, here's some information.

Teresa Lewis is a 41 year old intellectually impaired woman who is scheduled to be killed by lethal injection this coming Thursday in Virginia's death chamber. On Friday, Teresa's appeal for clemency was denied by Virginia's governor, Robert McDonnell, who is a staunch believer in the death penalty. Her appeal is pending before the US Supreme Court. The information below will provide an overview of her case and links to the Governor's website for receiving emails. For those who would like to register their horror at the Governor's decision by phone, his office number is 804-786-2211.

Here is a link to an article yesterday in the Washington Post -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/17/AR2010091706699.html?hpid=topnews

Here is a link to a post about her by the ACLU, which also includes links to a petition you can sign -
http://www.aclu.org/blog/capital-punishment/act-now-save-virginia-woman-death-row.

Here is a link to her website, which also includes a link to the Governor's website for receiving emails -
http://www.saveteresalewis.org/

Here is a link to her facebook page -
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Friends-of-Teresa-Lewis/104370726282292.

Previewing

Last week, we showed the results of 8 days of intense rehearsal.  I like that formulation a lot.  It sounds neutral, easy even.  You just show what you've been doing for 8 days.  Oh, so not true.  The addition of an audience, in fact anyone from outside the process, changes everything. Sneak peeks, previews, showings are, in my view, harder than actual performances.

By performance time, your body usually knows what to do and why and how it's doing it.  You, personally, have an association with the work and with your co-dancers.  You have an understanding about how it comes together and how we are with each other in it.  You might be nervous, but mostly, you know what to do, when to do it, and how to make it happen.  You also know something about the piece and it's effect on you.  One section always makes me want to smile (I know I shouldn't, but when I see this dancer, I just want to smile -- we're about to play!).  Another makes me want to cry; still another I am scared of because I know what can go wrong.  In yet another, I have the memory of smashing my own arm into my face and of tears streaming down (still don't know how that happened).  You, your body, and your dancing colleagues have history with the piece.

Oh, this is soooo not the case in showings.  I always feel that I am lucky if I know what comes next.  I don't know how to be present in the material in a performance way -- beyond being aware of my uncertainty.  I tend to shut down and just go through the motions -- I am still feeling my way around the movement and my responsibility to keep myself and my colleagues safe.  That's hard in performance: Performance energy can make things worse; suddenly, something you thought went at a sedate pace can just bust out.  You can fluff stuff you haven't fully figured out.  You can forget.  Oh, can you forget.

Previewing can make the most uncertain parts of a piece hang large.  And then, there's the effect on the audience.  It will be different by the time the "actual" piece happens, but what if they hate the preview so much that they don't come...  What if the reverse happens and they love the preview but not the piece?  What if?  Somehow, showing a new rep piece requires more investment than a neutral "come and see what we've been up to."  Exploration is part of the creative process, and previewing?  A hard part of the job.

Delicate Invasions

It's been over a week, and I still have that stomach upset.  My doctor is testing for all kinds of ugly bugs.  I feel as if my insides have been invaded by creatures unknown and unseen.  It's a non-delicate depredation caused, *I* think, by an ulcer that is a well-known side effect of the NSAID that I take.  I'm not sure whether it's a better strategy to rule out bacteria or to search for ulcers first.  Whatever.  I still feel like crap and am bored with the inside of my bathroom.  Should have put a tv screen there.

In-between bursts of activity and inactivity, I've been thinking about the change of direction my blogging has taken in the past 4 years.  The early entries are very much about how I was doing, about what was happening to me personally and about my daily experience in the street and in my body.  Then, as my voice and confidence grew, I felt able to write more politically relevant pieces about stuff in the newspaper, about dance as an art as well as a personal experience.

This blog has been one of the most important areas of personal growth for me, and I wonder what happens to these entries, my stories, once I press the go-button.  Some, I know, get redistributed (without my permission and without my authorship credit -- copyright people!) around the web; some are linked to, quoted, debated.  Some, so sitemeter tells me, become pieces of classroom discussion; others fall into a well of silence.  All that's fine with me.  It's my personal blog -- I write for me rather than for money or for a professional portfolio.  What I am getting at, though, is a question about how we tell our stories and what happens to them as they leave our hands.

The value of personal narrative is, I think, both over and understated.  Perhaps that's a problem of reading and perhaps that's a problem of writing.  Non-fiction writing, memoir, autobiography, blog, status update, tweet are all ways of writing a personal story (some more involved than others, admittedly); we seem to be eager to tell and, also, eager to read.  Why?  What are our responsibilities to each other and ourselves?  What is the value of our personal experience?

I'm pretty sure, for example, that my personal experience has no monetary value:  If I were to turn this blog into a book about a dancer's life, I am pretty sure no agent would take it -- there simply isn't a large commercial or independent audience for reading about the ins and outs of my life.  (Not even if I were to include in it all the things that I don't write here.)  There's not enough here to write a book about integrated dance as either memoir or manual.

As I read back through my entries (925 so far), I see an attempt to understand my life -- in all its complexities -- in relationship to the ideas, conventions, and practices that structure what we think of as normal.  My writing is not an attempt to write something that can be read as an examination of how queer disabled people of colour move through the world.  No one rolls as I do; no one should be reading me for that reason.  This is why I am always nervous about stuff ending up on Blackboard; my experiences are the experience of one person.  They are true, but the value I ascribe to them -- their meaning for me or even the triggering factor -- often depends on something that is not in this blog.  If your experience is similar, I think of it, imagistically, as a dance moment.  You and I face the same way and see/ experience the same thing for a second or two.  But I have no expectation of similarity of interpretation or value.  We both get rained on, but what happens next (or even before) and what the rain means to each of us is not necessarily the same.

I read you, if you blog, to broaden my mind.  To take me to places I wouldn't usually go.  I am sometimes lucky enough to find someone whose spirit calls to me and with whom I can build a friendship.  I read to find out how you do it, what you think, how your world works.  I take from your life little pieces of insight some of which I think deepen my experience, some of which I use to set in contrast to my experience.  In your writing, I see analysis of not of how "the world" works, but of how a piece of it works, a piece that I can sometimes share, a piece that I need to know about.  How it is for you is how it is for you.  What all or any of that means....?

(Still working on the technical hitch of the previewing piece.)

Previewing

Sorry about that. Technical hitch. Working to fix it.

WCD

Fire In The Belly

I am home sick today -- with fire (and not much else, I hope) in my belly.  It was the kind of tough night where you feel sick when you move, but you know you have to move because the outcomes of any of the other choices are worse.  So, while my dancer colleagues fly around the studio becoming alternately clouds, humans, ethereal ghosts, or grounded creatures, I am at home.  Thinking.

Today is a scorcher; temperatures are predicted to be somewhere between 101 and 103.  I can feel it already: like my colleagues, the trees have become rock.  Our elderly cat has taken cover underneath the bed.  It's hot, already.  All of which brings me back to the fire in my belly.

More and more in my life, I find myself caught between the absolute fire of righteous anger -- the outrage that wells up in me when I see and hear of injustices.  And the voice of reasoned intervention that reminds me that good intentions are not always reliable guides.  It seems that "doing right" is simultaneously the hardest thing to do and the thing most likely to backfire -- if not for the recipient of your action -- for you.  Because motives and insight are limited.

Doing right with regard to disability is deeply difficult.  It's not just the policy issues -- friends at Arnieville have been arrested for protesting the budget cuts that might deprive them of the freedom and right to live outside an institution.  Then, there's the well of hatred around the ADA; stay abreast of Bad Cripple's commentary on this tv show.  All of this says nothing about the places where I think it is hardest to do the right thing and where thinking that you are "doing right" is the thing that is most likely to lead you astray.  Here's an example:  You see a disabled person struggling; you rush to help; the person rejects your help vehemently; you feel hurt and confused: you were only trying to help....  What went wrong?  Check out this discussion on FWD/Feminists With Disabilities.

The problem with doing right is that "right" too often comes from above to someone whom the doer judges in need of their assistance.  And a second problem with doing right is the feeling of, well, words fail me, that the doer may experience afterwards.  The feel-good high, the sense that you have done something right ...  it's there, it's enjoyable, and it's sometimes misleading.

Working for justice seems to me a better formulation all around.  Keeping justice as a focus erases the feel good high: justice is not a single act performed by one to help another.  Justice involves all of us, equally; it cannot be given, but it can be facilitated and supported.  Those acts require us to step away from our own power trips and our own egos.  Justice places us in community with others and ties us to the issue before us.

In my everyday life, I am a dancer.  I ask myself about the search for justice in my work.  In the getting up, driving to the studio, warming up, rehearsing, cooling down, body care, driving home, pre-rehearsal training and practice, it's easy to forget how radical an act dance can be.  All these details seem so me focused, so local, and so personally physically.  Even though I know that seeing disabled people on stage is life-changing and, yes, radical, I forget the power of what we do together in the details of how I live.  Too often, I feel dance to be an art form contained and practised in and on studio and stage.

But being radical is not the same as being just. I remind myself of this as I pack my my costume, makeup, warmup clothes, and wheelchair maintenance kit.  We've a brief stay and performance in a nice West Coast city.

I don't know whether you'd call this fire in the belly or simple gut rot -- today, though, it's all I've got.