Is this safe? Are you safe?

Some Sins Invalid pieces which they use to open their shows which centre the non-normative body and social model politics at the heart of the night and re-position us as desirous and erotic.

http://sinsinvalid.org/

Is this safe? Are you safe?

Are you sufficiently insulated from us,

the deviant, the disabled, the non-normative, the crippled

or might you become stained, barrow leaking needs

Are we, the disabled, the unconscious visceral threat to the able-bodied myth of emotional predictability and bodily control?

Is that why you settle most comfortably in your mental lazy-boy

as we labour to shield you from our differences?

Is it why you contain us in intuitions,

police our bodies and movements,

abuse us, exterminate us,

eliminate us even before birth?

Do we frighten you so?

Must we frighten you?

We concave our chests to hold your projections

Cupped repositories for your fear of difference

Your denial of your need for help

Your terror of being vulnerable

A wise woman once said

Fear is behaving as though truth

Were not the truth

Living requires risk as does the hottest of desires

We live in continual risk

And tonight we are coming home.

--------------------------------------

We find struggle inside of desire.

We find resolution inside of our desperation and defence.

We find spirit in the darkest hours of the soul.

We struggle within our collective consciousness to transform

assumptions of who is whole,

who is healthy, who is expendable,

Who is desirous, who is erotic.

Who can fuck, who can birth,

Who can love and be loved,

 Who can lead, and who can be a revolutionary.

Is there a perfect body?

There is no right or wrong body

of a conscious revolutionary mind.

We create sacred spaces

that doesn’t not presume

whose body is sanctified or righteous,

that do not claim anybody as expendable.

When we are all recognized as sacred

our wings cross impossible borders and geographies,

We become beautifully almougious and unified.

Collectively, we witness our own transformation,

that we have no one body,

no perfect form, no perfect shape.

Like a phoenix rising, we can shift new territories

Transforming the narrative of ugly,

absurd, horrifying and deviant

In to powerful, sanctified and the sacred.

We come in bodies of various bones

 and expansive wisdom

that knows no bounds towards revolution.

We are seeking a phoenix to rise us up, to lift us up,

To collective memory,

To collective legacy,

to rise our freedom home.

Sins Invalid-krips who inspire me!

People who inspire me, (in the true non-patronizing sense of the word), are the sins invalid crew, so I’m going to share some of what they are about and links to their website and youtube clips.

Where can I find them?

http://sinsinvalid.org/ 

Youtube 

facebook-sinsinvalid 

Email: info@sinsinvalid.org

‘’We had to develop the look of a show which was simultaneously erotic and communicating resistant politics.’’

 ''As people with disabilities, we are not oppressed by what we can or cannot do with our bodies or minds. We are oppressed by the systemic prejudice, discrimination, segregation, and violence we face because we do not fall within a perceived “norm.”

What is Sins Invalid? 

Info from fb

Sins Invalid: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility

Mission

Sins Invalid is a performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized. Our performance work explores the themes of sexuality, embodiment and the disabled body. Conceived and led by disabled people of color, we develop and present cutting-edge work where normative paradigms of "normal" and "sexy" are challenged, offering instead a vision of beauty and sexuality inclusive of all individuals and communities.

We define disability broadly to include people with physical impairments, people who belong to a sensory minority, people with emotional disabilities, people with cognitive challenges, and those with chronic/severe illness. We understand the experience of disability to occur within any and all walks of life, with deeply felt connections to all communities impacted by the medicalization of their bodies, including trans, gender variant and intersex people, and others whose bodies do not conform to our culture(s)' notions of "normal" or "functional."

WHAT WE DO:

Our goals are to:
--Promote leadership opportunities for people with disabilities within our communities and within the broader social justice movement.

--Provide a supportive and politically engaged space for both emerging and established artists with disabilities to develop and present compelling works to a broad audience.

--Develop and present strong artistic work that explores sexuality and the non-normative body, integrating the full and multi-dimensional experiences of disabled artists who are also people of color and LGBTIQ, in order to represent all of our communities and challenge dominant misperceptions about people with disabilities.

WE DO THIS BY:

--Offering political education workshops for community based organizations and other organizations that share our commitment to social justice principles as a means of integrating analysis and action around disability, race, gender, and sexuality.

--Presenting multidisciplinary performances (video, poetry, spoken word, music, drama, and dance) by people with disabilities for broad audiences in the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere.

--Organizing performance workshops for community members with and without disabilities.

General Information

Vision:

Sins Invalid recognizes that we will be liberated as whole beings – as disabled/as queer/as brown/as black/as genderqueer/as female- or male-bodied – as we are far greater whole than partitioned. We recognize that our allies emerge from many communities and that demographic identity alone does not determine one's commitment to liberation.

Sins Invalid is committed to social and economic justice for all people with disabilities – in lockdowns, in shelters, on the streets, visibly disabled, invisibly disabled, sensory minority, environmentally injured, psychiatric survivors – moving beyond individual legal rights to collective human rights.

Our stories, imbedded in analysis, offer paths from identity politics to unity amongst all oppressed people, laying a foundation for a collective claim of liberation and beauty.

A Sexy Crip Manifesto in Six Parts

Extract from Berne, P, 2008, Sins Invalid: Disability, Dancing, and Claiming Beauty in Solinger Fox, Irani (eds) Telling Stories to Change the World Teaching Learning Social Justice, Routledge, London.

Sins asks the question: “have you ever been to an erotic event featuring people with disabilities?”, let’s take a look at the context in which we live. We know that our culture maintains embodied and enforced “norms,” norms that constrict all of us with unmet expectations and fears of the repercussion of not “measuring up.” Regardless of where we identify on the spectrum of sexuality, gender, size, ability, age, class, etc., the boundaries of our normalcy get policed. And when we transgress boundaries by having different abilities, gender

presentation, etc., we are at risk of social and economic alienation, hostility, threats to safety/violence, and the deepest acts of dehumanization—we become ‘they’,  othered.  

To bring the issue to the body, the definition of the “normal” body is becoming ever narrower, to the extent that even the natural process of growth and aging is seen as a problem to overcome. People with disabilities are often seen as “flawed” beings whose hope of normalcy rests in the “medical model’’.

The disability rights movement articulated another lens of viewing disability—the social model. With this view, we understand that the “problem” resides in sociopolitical and economic structures which exclude an array of people and abilities, and the solution is social and institutional change.

This should resound familiar with folks from a social justice perspective. But still let’s make sure we’re clear. Let’s say I go to a building which has stairs; my wheelchair does not climb stairs. Is the problem that I cannot walk up stairs? Or is the problem that the building owner and architect did not create a building which allows entrance to people with a variety of means of mobility?

Is the problem my body? Or is the problem being excluded because my body is different from the building owner’s?

As people with disabilities, we are not oppressed by what we can or cannot do with our bodies or minds. We are oppressed by the systemic prejudice, discrimination, segregation, and violence we face because we do not fall within a perceived “norm.”

Sins create a space where the non-normative body is centred and erotic. We challenge dominant notions of the disabled body and sexuality because we understand it is key to challenging the oppression of people with disabilities; moreover, our performers offer stories and visions affirming our strength as people with disabilities, creating beauty in which we are centred.

Disability feminism 101

The current situation for women living with disabilities in Australia

The content outlining the disadvantage experienced by women with disabilities in Australia is taken from a paper titled ‘Women With Disabilities Australia: Policy Paper: 'Assessing the situation of women with disabilities in Australia: A human rights approach'-(July 2011)--written with extensive research and documentation by Women With Disabilities Australia--the peak organisation for women with all types of disabilities in Australia (wwda.org.au). http://www.wwda.org.au/snapshot.htm Both men and women with disabilities face discrimination and a-sexualisation however; women with disabilities face particular disadvantages in the areas of education, work and employment, family and reproductive rights, health, violence and abuse. These are just some of the facts:

-Women with disabilities experience violence, particularly family violence and violence in institutions, more often than disabled men;

-Gender-based violence, including domestic/family violence, sexual assault/rape is a cause of disability in women;

-Women and girls with disabilities are often at greater risk than disabled men, both within and outside the home, of violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation;

-Women with disabilities are more vulnerable as victims of crimes from both strangers and people who are known to them, yet crimes against disabled women are often never reported to law enforcement agencies;

-While disabled people are much more likely to live in poverty, women with disabilities are likely to be poorer than men with disabilities;

-Women with disabilities are still subjected to forced sterilizations within Australia

-Women with disabilities are more likely to be sole parents, to be living on their own, or in their parental family than disabled men;

-Women with disabilities who are parents, or who seek to become parents, face barriers in accessing adequate health care and other services for both themselves and their child/ren.

Disability feminism 101

In light of these depressing facts what can we do as feminists, to understand and mobilize around these issues? We can start by ensuring events are assessable! We can understand disability politics and disability feminism and fight the struggles from within these political perspectives. Disability feminism at its core deals with issues of the non-normative body/mind and how our experience of our disabilities are socially mediated and constructed by power. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a disability feminist scholar and activist, writes about transforming feminist theory through the inclusion of the experience of disability. She proclaims that 

''disability allows for a critique of the intersections between the politics of appearance and the medicalization of subjugated bodies/minds. Feminist disability theory’s radical critique hinges on a broad understanding of disability as a pervasive cultural system that stigmatizes certain kinds of bodily variations. At the same time, this system has the potential to incite a critical politics. The informing premise of feminist disability theory is that disability, like femaleness, is not a natural state of corporeal inferiority, inadequacy, excess, or a stroke of misfortune. Rather, disability is a culturally fabricated narrative of the body, similar to what we understand as the fictions of race and gender. The disability/ability system produces subjects by differentiating and marking bodies. Although this comparison of bodies is ideological rather than biological, it nevertheless penetrates into the formation of culture, legitimating an unequal distribution of resources, status, and power within a biased social and architectural environment. As such, disability has four aspects: first, it is a system for interpreting and disciplining bodily variations; second, it is a relationship between bodies and their environments; third, it is a set of practices that produce both the able-bodied and the disabled; fourth, it is a way of describing the inherent instability of the embodied self. The disability system excludes the kinds of bodily forms, functions, impairments, changes, or ambiguities that call into question our cultural fantasy of the body as a neutral, compliant instrument of some transcendent will. A feminist disability theory denaturalizes disability by unseating the dominant assumption that disability is something that is wrong with someone. By this I mean, of course, that it mobilizes feminism’s highly developed and complex critique of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality as exclusionary and oppressive systems rather than as the natural and appropriate order of things''.

Some of our key struggles as women with disabilities are the opposite of those of mainstream feminism

A-sexualization is one such issue--to be seen as sexual beings, we want to have this choice, to cruise across the dance floor and do the pash, in short to be looked at and desired as a sexual object/being!  Mainstream feminism fights against the objectification of women’s bodies, disability feminism fights to be seen as sexy and desirable. Arising from this a-sexualisation is difficulty in finding partners and having healthy relationships where we are treated as equal and valued, free from emotional and physical abuse. Another key issue is the right to become mothers if we so wish, as we are often prevented through sterilization or being given the pill, (a common experience for women with intellectual disabilities), or actively discouraged from having children at all (Ball, 2004 cited in Newell, 2008, p. 80). If we have children there is a risk they will be taken from us, with recent research showing that over one third of children are removed from our care (Newell, 2008, p. 80).

 Feminist writer Jenny Morris writes:
‘Most people who we are interacting with including our lovers, are not like us--they don’t have a disability. It is therefore very difficult for us to recognise and challenge the values and judgments that are applied to us and our lives. Our ideas about disability and ourselves are generally informed by those who are not disabled’ (Morris, 1991, p.37). It takes courage to go out in public when we repeatedly encounter rejection and revulsion towards our non-normative bodies, are asked questions, such as ‘‘what’s wrong with you?’’ which exemplify an unequal power relationship and embody assumptions about our lives, and when ‘the very physical environment tells us that we don’t belong.

The affects of oppression
‘Once oppression has been internalized, little force is needed to keep us submissive’ as we continually inflict the pain of our oppression back upon ourselves (Campbell, 2009, p.16). The mental health effects of living in a disabling society have been found to place us at ‘double the risk of devolving a substance abuse problem or psychiatric disorder due to increased stress’ compared to the general population (Turner, Lloyd, & Taylor, 2006, p.221). The high rates of domestic violence and abuse women with disabilities are subject to leaves us at a greater risk of developing PTSD, depression, anxiety or other forms of mental illness, subsequent disabilities which further compound our disadvantage.  

 What can we do as feminists?
 ‘One of the reasons the situation for people with disabilities has been so slow to change is precisely because they are positioned as the ‘other’ in our culture. To change such terrain requires all of us to undertake a great deal of listening, talking and communication in so many ways in order to imagine disability differently and to change something that moves often only very imperceptibly-our culture itself. To embark on this journey, and proceed with it when it becomes difficult, we cannot avoid seeking answers to some important questions: why are we so concerned with defining and enforcing normalcy? What is at stake for all of us in confronting the frailties of our bodies, minds and lives? (Goggin & Newell 2005, p.200). How can we as feminists resist normative constructions of bodies/minds and find ways to subvert and challenge them?
 

Extracts from above from:

Thomas, C, 2004, Disability and Impairment in Swain, J, French, S, Barns, C & Thomas, C, (eds), 2004, Disabling Barriers-Enabling Environments, (2^end ed.), Sage Publications, London.

Goggin, G & Newell, C, 2005, Disability in Australia: Exposing a Social Apartheid, University of New South Wales Press, Kensigton. 

Garland-Thomson, R, 2006, Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory in Davis, L, (ed) 2006, The Disabilities Studies Reader (2^end ed.)

Morris, J, 1991, Pride Against Prejudice: Transforming Attitudes to Disability, The Women’s Press, London.

Disability politics 101- The social model of disability

Extract from  Garland-Thomson, R, 2006, Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory in Davis, L, (ed) 2006, The Disabilities Studies Reader (2^end ed.)  

The disability movement began in the UK in the 1970s. We reclaimed the term ‘disability’ from professionals in medicine and social care who viewed it as a personal affliction, entirely reconstructing its meaning in the light of the social exclusions encountered in our own lived experience (UPIAS, 1976). In a radical move, we severed the presupposed causal link whereby impairment resulted in disability, asserting instead that disability was an entirely socially caused phenomenon. Disability was reformulated to mean the social disadvantages and exclusions that people with impairment faced in all areas of life: employment, housing, education, civil rights, transportation, negotiation of the built environment, sexuality and so forth. Traditional medical and welfarist models of disability, together with their culturally pervasive ‘personal tragedy’ counterpart, were thrown aside in favour of a social definition of disability. Mike Oliver coined the phrase ‘the social model of disability’ to capture this new paradigm, and it became a touchstone in Disability Studies and the disabled people’s movement in the UK. The social model of disability unleashed a powerful drive for social and political change. Disability was exposed as a form of social oppression and exclusion that should not be tolerated, analogous to already recognised oppressions associated with gender, race, class and sexuality. Once this understanding of disability is adopted, the manifestations of ablism can be readily observed: a wheelchair user or a person with visual impairment cannot access public transport systems, or is not able to obtain a quality education that would enable them to compete for well-paid jobs in the labour market, or is represented as a person of lesser value in films and other media. The disabling ‘social barriers’ in the lives of people with impairments can be identified and challenged because socially created barriers can be dismantled. As people with disabilities the social model has enabled a vision of ourselves free from constraints of disability (oppression) and provided a direction for our commitment to social change. It has played a central role in promoting disabled people’s individual self worth, collective identity and political organisation. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that the social model has saved lives (Crow, 1996: 207). 

Now for some of my thoughts...

The built environment is a concrete way the social construction of disability is created and our social exclusion maintained within society. The historical failure to take disability into account when designing buildings has resulted in our ‘structural exclusion’ from many public areas of life (Thomas, 1999, p.18). The inadequate or complete lack of wheelchair access to many buildings as well as an ‘inaccessible public transport’ system exerts a profound impact on our ‘ability to assess spaces and participate fully and equally within society’ (Barnes, Mercer, & Shakespeare, 1999, p.121). Thomas (1999, p.18) adopts the stance that the inadequate access arises from widely held negative perceptions and stereotypes of disability that are ‘systemic and entrenched’ within society. Arising out of this context of exclusion are common cultural stereotypes of disability, such as it being perceived as a ‘personal tragedy where the person is assumed to be helpless and in need of pity’ (Goggin & Newell, 2005, p.19). However, the lived experience of disability is contextual to this society; Thomas (1999, p.113) asserts there is not an essential state of disability or impairment within the individual from which disadvantage arise, she argues it is a complex interplay of ‘socially constructed power relations’ and bodily experiences that form our relationship to the world.

We, as people with disabilities, seek to challenge ableism-prejudicial attitudes that equate devalued bodily conditions with decreased social value- and to reframe terms so that impairment refers to: the actual functional limitation within a person; and disability: the loss or limitation to take part in life on an equal level with others due to physical and social barriers. In this way we have a political framework from which to perceive our bodies/minds and the world from a new and empowered perspective. It gives us the words to describe our experiences of inequality and opens our hearts and minds by offering an alternative conceptualization of “the problem’’ through locating it externally within the environment; creating a collective identity which allows for a sense of purpose, political strength and solidarity to develop between us. 

Social model 

 

The unrelenting system of exclusion and otherness of disability in Australia is internalised by each of us, and indeed constructs us as subjects. In our private moments and in our cherished notions of ourselves, we are shaped and marked by the power relations of disability (Goggin & Newell, 2005, p.200). On a personal political note disability politics enables a political analysis of the dominant discourses to be undertaken leading to forms of resistance and unruly activism to be enjoyed--such as pashing women in woollies--resisting simultaneously the a-sexualisation people with disabilities are subject to as well as homophobia :)