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.

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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.

I am privileged to be within this disabled body

This piece explores the ways in which I am privileged in this life, to inhabit this body, it also looks at the oppressions I am subjected to and my methods of resistance to these oppressions. 

It is adapted from the opening of a lecture I presented to first year arts students recently at my university on disability and its social constriction.

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It is a privilege to be speaking here today, to be given this stage, to be invited as someone with academic and insider knowledge of disability and importantly its social construction. I trust as arts students you are all aware of theorists like Foucault, who explores how power shapes us as subjects and how we resist it. 

This morning I am going to examine with you how living within this disabled body is both a privilege and an act of resistance in a society where the disabled body is routinely devalued and pathologised, as wrong.  

But first I want to explore the ways I am privileged in this life.

I am privileged to be at university, where too few women with disabilities find their way and fewer still into the realms of academia. To have found Cultural Studies as discipline and this unit which includes and explores disability from a social constructionist perspective allowing us explore and examine the need for social changes in how we view the non-normative body.

My very ability to speak is a position of privilege. I have a voice I can use and a body whose movements as I grow older I feel increasingly at home within. I am very privileged compared to other women with disabilities; not be living in poverty, to be free of forms violence, and forms of racism, to own my own home and to have no children (yet) which can be removed from my care, as a third of our children routinely still are. 

I am privileged that my body’s requirements and its daily routines are not regulated by service providers whose schedules do not take into account the late-nighters I still want to pull, sometimes with lovers :). I am very privileged to come from a family and have found friends who encourage and find joy in my difference and the perspectives I bring, the knowledge I hold. 

I am privileged. 

But in acknowledging my privilege, owning what power I do carry within me, within this body, I am also routinely disempowered and disabled by a society which views my non-normative body as less than the ideal, the less then the so called normal. And has designed the built environment in ways which structurally exclude me.

 I am stereotyped. As that brave little young thing who brought tears to the eyes of a lady as I reached for the tofu in woolies the other week- yes its hard trying to be vego. To that speed demon who just won’t stay off the roads around campus-I keep finding myself in trouble with uni security-one of the down sides of having the uni on a hill I guess :)

I am stereotyped by the stranger in the street who felt the need to stop and tell me if he was me he’d go home and kill himself right now, by the psychiatrist who told me he’d do the same thing.  

My being here at all is an act of resistance -in a society which filled with the message ''better off dead then disabled''.

I come to you with stories. 

A body full of stories. Stories of this body framed by this society as a personal tragedy, a story which I am asked to repeat over and over again, when asked what’s wrong with you?

I bring you the story of how a part of my mind that turned off, stopped breathing as my tiny lungs gasped for air not long after birth. And this changed me, how my emotions, thoughts and muscles are intertwined, where big feelings run down my legs in tremors. How I am full of feeling, full to the brim, unable to hide it and now unwilling. 

My stories of my body, of how it is to live inside here, to endure experiences of discrimination and oppression as people view me from the outside and see me as less than them in need of pity, in need of help. My stories are rarely given a stage to be heard, drowned out by the narratives of disability as personal tragedy, disability in need of a cure. It is these stories we are see portrayed in media, in films, in magazines so much we may not even be aware we are seeing over and over and over again. 

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Then I go into slides looking at the media and disability representation, eg the super-crip, the search for a cure and looking at the medical model of disability vs the social model. How the social model creates a mind-shift bringing  the new perspective of the social construction of disability, creating the disability rights movement and a need for social change. 

See post for more info on the social model  http://f3ckability.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/disability-politics-101-social-model-of.html