Remember when I made a tumblr a while ago? Well, I hope you don't remember, because I ended up using it to give advice to myself about my friends, but I just made a real tumblr that I'm going to try to use for actual tumblr pursuits:
http://fourloves.tumblr.com
(Which are, I watch a lot of television, I'm disabled and I like reading about it, sometimes I take unrealistically flattering pictures of myself, and I make habitats.)
In terms of actually posting, I know I haven't been. I had something to say about the term "self-advocacy" and the way I started to get sort of creeped out by it when I was in Vermont, but the Amanda Baggs piece I linked to in my first tumblr post expresses much more clearly the things I am feeling. It's sort of weird to go from being incredibly overworked and having no time, which was the situation at camp, to sitting in bed for almost the whole day. And it's also weird to come out of an environment where disability was so normalized and common, to The Real World. So I don't know how much I will have to say for a while, but I might be wrong.
But I'd really appreciate more comments on the post I finished a first draft of the day I left home: privilege scrounging. Maybe you already read it but I did think it was kind of epic, for me at least.
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Most of the time, putting my thoughts into writing is beyond my abilities.
ReplyDeleteI almost always have comments on your disability- or ASD-related posts, and more than usual on this one, but with sort of the brain/mind analogue of a bowel obstruction most of the time I can't get much shaken out. If three or more sentences are required it's usually too overwhelming, and less than that is not enough to catch a sense of my thoughts (even when language isn't betraying me).
I'm pretty sure that I don't know anybody except you whose vocabulary includes "self-advocacy." Where I'm calling from it's the language of a foreign country.
I have been thinking a lot about self-advocacy recently and I read (or possibly reread) that Amanda Baggs piece a few weeks ago.
The sentence that really stood out for me was:
"When one inmate in an institution fights back against the staff in defense of another inmate who is being brutalized, this is self-advocacy."
This seems to me like a terribly important point, and I kind of get the impression that the implicit concepts and propositions that underlie the concept of "self-advocacy" in the way it is often used and talked about might be bound up with Anglo-Saxon and particularly American cultural ideas of relatively extreme individualism in comparison with the majority of cultural groupings worldwide, and an ideal of self-sufficiency that is at odds with actual human realities.
To an extent, I'm left kind of wondering if the way this notion is often conceptualized, employed, and practiced tends to foreclose certain avenues of self-advocacy for some people.
I will try to put together some of my specific thoughts about "privilege scrounging," but out of 100 things I start I manage to finish about 3 or 4 of them.
But since I've gotten going here with numerous sequential sentences, maybe...