13 April, 2011

apologies & far future promises

Gosh I don't post very much do I. Sorry about that. I'm not quitting. I do post on tumblr a lot, and fairly often converse about disability stuff on there. But when I'm at school it's kind of like there are the things that I run away to when I'm stressed, and it used to be this blog but now it's more often tumblr. But you know after I graduate and all I'll be able to focus and write here more. I have lots of ideas, unfortunately, as usual, including:

1. disability and gender expression, especially painful gender expression. If you have sensory & cognitive problems, being feminine or masculine can hurt, maybe being feminine especially. Among liberal people, I feel like it's often seen as a weak/oppressed behavior for someone to care so much what they look like that they would suffer for it, but given the sort of things that cause me to suffer or be overtaxed, not suffering would kind of mean not expressing myself through presentation at all. So that's interesting.

2. this post I already wrote in a notebook months ago where I talked about 3 different ways of portraying disability in pop culture: medical model (dour fiction where authority figures are always right), fake social model (funny and interesting fiction where authority figures are wrong, but the "disabled" character isn't really disabled), and actual social model. And I discuss the movie It's Kind of a Funny Story which was an admirable attempt at making a mainstream movie in social model, but was annoyingly written off by reviewers when they couldn't categorize it as medical or fake social model. So this one I just have to type up.

3. really long post which I have written a lot of, where I attempt to show that both person-first language and disability-first language are offensive, so we basically can't win and should stop caring.

4. possibly a post about The United States of Tara? As someone who doesn't have DID or have any friends with DID, my understanding is that the show portrays DID quite unrealistically so I probably should reject it. But I can't just see it as a guilty pleasure that I stick with because I've been watching it for years--there's something about the show's portrayal of disability that is really down-to-earth.

11 comments:

  1. Do you graduate this year?

    Also, I would be so proud of myself if I wanted to write when I was stressed instead of just playing Facebook games, haha.

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  2. I read this blog when I'm stressed.

    Okay, I read other things too, but that just seems really mutaulistic somehow.

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  3. Gosh, I'm sorry to hear that. For the time being why don't you switch to something like Dave Hingsburger's blog that updates every day? Or you could read my tumblr and be baffled by the constant pop culture references.

    (yeah I graduate this year I wasn't promising to come back and write in more than a year from now. that would be kind of mean.)

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  4. I've only discovered you within this past year so you don't actually need to be writing things for me to be reading things, though I do read new things as they come in. And I was reading other things before that, of course. I'll make a point to look at both of those things anyway though.

    It's great that I'm 2 years younger than you and I'm only halfway through my bachelor degree. Oh well.

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  5. Um, that's the degree I'm on. We're on the same track.

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  7. Oh good. I'm not the only one. I realized that you were probably doing a bachelor degree after posting that but I couldn't figure out how to say what I meant to.

    Sorry about that then and good luck with everything academically and vocationally.

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  8. Gosh, did you think I was in grad school.

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  9. Maybe I misread this, but why is it unfortunate that you have lots of ideas?

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  10. you try having stupid ideas for posts that no one cares about when you're supposed to be a human finishing school and figuring out what to do with yourself.

    guess what ashenantics, I updated my directory post! not very well though, I kind of have to reorganize the whole thing. but knock yourself out if you can.

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  11. I thought you might have been in graduate school. I also sometimes say something close to what I mean or different than what I mean but likely to get the reaction that I want to get, although I don't mean to do that.

    I guess this opens the possibility to ask if you plan to try to go to graduate school of if you're intending to try to get a job upon graduating and what that would entail. I'm hoping to use graduate school as a chance to establish myself professionally rather than being thrust out into the world and having to fend for myself.

    Aaaand that directory should be enough for a while (though I'm proud to say I've already read a significant minority of them). Thanks, this is a good time in regards to being stress. I think I'm done communicating for the day after this message, anyway.

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