De-centering: care, disability, and relationships

A little while back, Anna at FWD/Forward talked about the problems of having dominant narratives about disability, and especially disabled women, that don't include the input of disabled women themselves.

Also at FWD/Forward, s. e. smith talked about the problems of presenting the narratives of disabled people in a discourse that is dominated by the narratives of those who provide care for disabled people -- a narrative that is about the challenges of living with disabled people:

These personal essays are framed as providing insight about living with disability, but really they are about what it is like to be a nondisabled person in a relationship with someone with a disability. Which is certainly a point of view which may be worth hearing at times, except that right now, it’s the dominant narrative. In the media, it’s not that hard to find examples of pieces by nondisabled people writing about living with people with disabilities. It is hard to find writing by disabled people discussing what it’s like to live with nondisabled people, and it’s hard to find people with disabilities writing about themselves and their own experiences.

I wrote about my dislike of the discourse of "(in)visibility" here, drawing largely on what Anna and s. e. smith have written. But I wanted to pick up on another aspect of what they write, and it's the issue of the dominant discourse centering the challenges of disability, a discourse that centers the caregivers but not those who are cared for.

Feminist discourse has, for many years, tried to tackle the issue of caregiving work. The fact that it's hard, it's undervalued or unvalued, it's paid little if anything at all, it's highly gendered and classed and raced, and people who do it are given little structural support, if any. Overwhelmingly, feminist discourse on this topic is focused on childcare, and not care of people who are not children, even though many of the same feminist problems present themselves: the work is highlight gendered, classed, and raced, it's hard and little support is given to those who do it, and it's under-/unvalued, and under-/unpaid.

And if you're caring for a non-disabled little baby, well, that's normal, right? I mean, I don't want to trivialise the extent of "I hate kids" rhetoric, and mother-guilting. But what if the person you're caring for isn't a non-disabled little baby, but a disabled child or adult? Zuska writes about her experiences caring for her mother, and the constant reminders that elder care just isn't valued the way that childcare is, in a post that everyone should read:

Maybe you're watching t.v., and one night, you're just sick to death of all the commercials extolling the virtues of this or that diaper for the cute as a button babies crawling around. You know those babies are going to poop and pee in those diapers and there we are talking about it right on national tv! Because it's cute! And when was the last time you saw a commercial for incontinence briefs? Not so cute. Maybe you get together with your momma-friends and trade info about the best brand of disposable diapers for Junior's comfort, but who do you talk to about how the disposable briefs irritate the equally, if not more so, tender flesh of an older person? We celebrate the time when our children move from the potty-training stage to really and truly using the toilet consistently but nobody talks about how to help someone manage the griefs associated with giving up using your own underwear, or becoming dependent on a bedside toilet chair, or not even being able to reach your bedside toilet chair in time.

In my adulthood, I have been both given and received care. My significant other (henceforth, the Existentialist) and I are both disabled, we both have down days, and sometimes we can both do with some looking after.

Here's what I think: the discourses that implicitly equate "caregiving" with "parenting a small non-disabled child" let us down badly. The discourses that center caregivers and not the cared for let us down badly. They let us down badly even, or perhaps especially, when they are feminist discourses.

Supporting caregivers means supporting all caregivers, not just the ones who are parents of small non-disabled children. Upholding certain kinds of caregiving as more central to feminism itself creates hierarchies of what is or is not "real" work, of the kind that "really matters" or "really" needs support, and ends up marginalising people who desperately need support. Basically, it amounts to buying into the idea that disable people don't matter the way non-disabled babies matter. It also amounts to saying that some kinds of work, disproportionately gendered, raced, and classed, don't really matter.

Which brings me to the second point. There's no way, there's no way, it makes sense to talk about giving and receiving care like they are completely independent issues. This is effectively what we do when we talk about caregiving or caregivers' narratives to the exclusion of the receivers of the same care. These are intimately connected issues.

I modestly propose that we take seriously the issues of caregiving and support for caregivers -- the need for the work of caregiving to be recognised and valued and properly supported. I propose that we also take seriously the difficulties of being dependent on care in a society that discounts such people, that we take seriously the difficulties of explaining disability to non-disabled people, that we take seriously the difficulties of navigating a society that is focused on the needs of non-disabled people.

I'm hoping to write more about this soon.

--IP

[Crossposted at Modus Dopens]

The "choice" discourses let us down

As long as "choice" means legal abortion, choice isn't nearly enough.

I've written before about reproductive coercion, and as Lynn Harris explains in an article in The Nation, the role of reproductive coercion in partner violence and unwanted pregnancies isn't being talked about nearly enough:

Two new studies have quantified what advocates for young women’s health have observed for years: the striking frequency with which it is in fact young men who try to force their partners to get pregnant. Their goal: not to settle down as family men but rather to exert what is perhaps the most intimate, and lasting, form of control. (“Control” may also include attempts to force both pregnancy and abortion, even in the same relationship.)

[...] In the largest study of this phenomenon to date, “Pregnancy Coercion, Intimate Partner Violence and Unintended Pregnancy,” published in the January issue of the journal Contraception, lead researcher Elizabeth Miller and others surveyed nearly 1,300 16- to 29-year-old women who’d sought a variety of services at five different Northern California reproductive health clinics. Among those who had experienced intercourse, i.e. who could be at risk of unintended pregnancy, not only did 53 percent of respondents say they’d experienced physical or sexual violence from a partner, but one in five said they had experienced pregnancy coercion; 15 percent said they experienced birth control sabotage, including hiding or flushing birth control pills down the toilet, intentional breaking of condoms and removing contraceptive rings or patches. These figures were consistent from clinic to clinic.

Emphasis mine.

Choice means nothing to the person who is being raped, or whose birth control is being sabotaged, or whose partner refuses to use a barrier. Choice means nothing when violence and lack of autonomy are systemic. It's not that choice has no place in discussions of reproductive freedom. Of course it's important. But we talk about it almost to the exclusion of other factors. And that's the wrong way round. Choice matters, but it's not the right paradigm.

This isn't even a problem that sex ed is going to solve, although definitely, we need sex ed. One might be fully informed about contraception and STDs and that still won't help if your partner forces sex without a barrier. Although having said that, I'm increasingly moving towards the position that deliberately withholding safer sex information (eg, by the government) is abusive.

We should be talking about challenging domestic abuse, supporting people in abuse situations, and what constitutes a healthy relationship based on mutual respect. We need, desperately, to connect the dots between abuse and reproductive freedom.

(Hat tip: Melissa McEwan at Shakesville)

--IP

[Crossposted at Modus Dopens]

(In)visibility

A little while back, there were some great posts at FWD/Forward (a blog you should definitely be reading if you aren't already) about the "invisibility" of disabled people.
In "Making 'Invisible Women' even more invisible", Anna talked about the problems of having dominant narratives about disability, and especially disabled women, that don't include the input of disabled women themselves. In "Whose Voices?", s. e. smith talked about the problems of presenting the narratives of disabled people in a discourse that is dominated by the narratives of those who provide care for disabled people -- a narrative that is about the challenges of living with disabled people. Since then, I've been thinking a lot more about the vocabulary of "(in)visibility".

I'm not all that keen on it, if I'm honest. I mean, I know it can be useful because when we're trying to talk about opposition to "We're here, we're queer..." type sentiments. But, well, I'm not keen. I think it sounds way too much like a euphemism for "we're not interested in people like you". When we say that a certain demographic of people is "invisible", it sounds to me like we're offloading the responsibility for social justice onto them: "not my fault I [did bastard thing/failed to include you in my Grand Unified Feminist Theory of Everything] -- you/your needs are invisible."

For those of us who fall into the groups that tend to be frequently described as "invisible", this puts us in a double bind. If we talk about queerness, show our affection in public, insist on fair treatment, we're "flaunting it". If we don't, we're "deceitful, straight-acting, self-loathing queers". If I talk about my needs for disabled access, I risk being "the annoying one who never shuts up about wheelchair access ramps". If I don't talk about it and just deal as best I can, I risk being told that "you've only just brought that up now, so how were we to know? It's your own problem" when I do mention that, eg, I can't get into a particular building.*

But the "visibility" discourse problems don't stop there.

The "visibility" discourse centers a particular kind of narrative. When I first started using a mobility scooter, I found it distressing that people sometimes walked right into me sometimes nearly stepping on me, or sometimes wouldn't give me room to get past on the pavements despite being told "excuse me" multiple times. Look, the pavement belongs to them as much as it belongs to me (and note the way round that I phrased that), but on a narrow pavement, I can't always maneuver around a large group of pedestrians, and sometimes people do have to let me pass, just as they would if I was a pedestrian without a scooter. These days, well, it's not that these things happen less, but it's just that I'm better at handling them. I'm more assertive about saying "excuse me". Early on in my scootering days, someone said to me (I now forget who), "maybe if you had a scooter-type-thing that was higher up, so you'd be nearer people's eye level..." and at the time I thought "yeah, that'd be good". And now I think "wait, whose eye level?" Social problems aren't solved by asking people to accommodate to a biased dominant narratives (which, in fairness to the person, is not how they meant it). Social problems are solved saying something like "Actually, public spaces belong to everyone and the clue is in the word 'public'."

But wait, it gets worse.

The amount of sexist street harassment I experience when I use a mobility scooter, compared to when I walk unaided, increases dramatically. The amount of airtime that abuse of disabled women gets in feminist theory? Tiny (especially compared to the amount of airtime devoted to straight White, non-disabled women). What's more, I think the people who grope me or shout at me in the street have no trouble noticing either that I exist or that I'm disabled, and I don't really think we're onto a winner by claiming less insight than the gropers. So. Whenever we say that someone's experiences are "invisible" and that's why we don't talk about them, we're also claiming less insight than the people who perpetrate violence against them.

Also: increasingly I feel that "invisible" gets uncomfortably close to the vocabulary of "blindness" and other sensory disabilities that are used as metaphors for ignorance and bigotry (as in "greed makes them blind" and similar expressions). That's another way that prejudice against disability is realised.

--IP

*It's worth noting here that my annoyance about these issues is not with people who genuinely care about access and just happen to lack one particular piece of information in order to make something accessible, but do what they can to arrange access when they're told about the problem. Those people are the people I'm grateful for.

[Cross-posted at Modus Dopens]

Personhood

The other day, Maxi posted an image of a button bearing the slogan "If the fetus you save is gay, will you still fight for its rights?"

For a long time, I thought those sorts of retorts were pointless ad hominems (arguments that attack the person rather than the substance of their claims).

And then I started looking looking more closely at "pro-life" policy, and at numbers.

Here's what we know. And by "know", I don't mean "here's what pro-choice feminists believe", I mean "here are some facts that you can't argue with and still maintain that your arguments have any kind of relationship with reality":

From a study done by the Guttmacher Institute, covered by the BBC:

• Abortion bans do not reduce the prevalence of abortion.


• Abortion bans do reduce the prevalence of safe abortions.


• "Every year, an estimated 70,000 women die as a result of unsafe abortions - leaving nearly a quarter of a million children without a mother - and 5m develop complications." (From the BBC story)
  
• Access to contraception does decrease prevalence of abortion.

Here end the facts, and commence the opinions.

I understand why people might want to attribute personhood to a foetus. I really do. Many people just can't think of their pregnancies as being about "a foetus" -- they're pregnant with a baby. They're anticipating a baby, and it's exciting and terrifying, and they love their baby. Or they miscarry a baby, and it's confusing and hurts like the blazes. Or maybe not. Maybe the foetus isn't a baby until it's born, even for people who desperately want a baby. Maybe the miscarriage doesn't feel like the death of a born child.

I think strict feminist insistence on calling anything unborn "a foetus" (or for that matter, "a baby") actually lets us down hard. I don't get to define other people's experiences of wanting a baby, having a baby, having a pregnancy, losing a baby/foetus. It's up to individual people if they want to define their experiences this way. For some people, saying "you're pregnant with a foetus" will feel horribly trivialising of their worry, their happiness, their pain, and anything else they go through. For others, saying "you're pregnant with a baby" sets up unrealistic standard of what they should feel about what they're experiencing.

So when someone talks about the personhood of a foetus, I get it. Call me a bad feminist if you want, I don't mind. Because I don't really think that personhood is the ballgame when it comes to reproductive freedom. It's not the foetus not being a person that makes abortion ok. It's the fact that whether I am pregnant or not, it's my body, and whether the foetus growing inside me is a sonnet-writing jazz artist or an appendage, it's still inside my body. So if a pregnancy starts to threatening my wellbeing in any way at all, I am justified in acting to protect my wellbeing, and there is no positive duty on me to sustain life at the cost of my own wellbeing.

What I don't get, what I just can't can't can't understand is the move to give more rights to foetuses than born children have, or than born adult women have. (For the interested, I've been blogging this issue at some length over at my place, although in a rather US-centric way, which is largely due to my US citizenship).

Recently, a nun was excommunicated after she approved a legal emergency abortion in a Catholic hospital in Arizona (see also the coverage at Ms. Magazine). The patient had pulmonary hypertension which can be fatal. As the abortion was performed at 11 weeks, long before foetal viability, the options were: terminate the pregnancy and save the mother, or allow both to die.

It's shocking that we allocate more rights to foetuses than to born people. I'm willing to concede that foetuses may have personhood. I'm not willing to concede that women do not.

--IP

now where can i get these?

'Educational value somewhat suspect' - who cares, if you can have book-boomerang power and barrier-breaking feminist vision?! I wish this was real.

trust me, the only secret elena has is victoria's.

I love Maureen Dowd, and so should you if you don't already. She's a best-selling author and columnist for the New York Times and was deservedly awarded a Pulitzer in the late 90s. I fell for her sense of humour when I first read 'Are Men Necessary?' - my father pulled it from his bookshelf and gave it to me one day with a wide grin. (Yes, I come from a thoroughly feminist household). The critics were critical. I assume they were simply not open to sarcasm.

Anyway, I just came across her latest piece - taking the piss out of the current US media debate about Elena Kagan's sexuality. Because you wouldn't want a Supreme Justice with a dirty secret.

have you considered trying aversion therapy?

image via queersunited

Take a break, pour yourselves a cup of tea and have a look at this charming Heterosexual Questionnaire.

a hint of sarcasm

Bechdel testing and intersectionality

The Bechdel Test (or more accurately, the Bechdel-Wallace Test, but it's sometimes also called the Mo Movie Measure) is usually said to trace its popularity back to the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, by Alison Bechdel, who credits Liz Wallace for the rule itself. The original strip can be found at Alison Bechdel's blog, and I'm not sure of the copyright issues, so alas I cannot reprint it here. But you should definitely take a peak at the strip in question.

The Bechdel Test in its original comic strip form is:

The film must have:

1. At least two women in it,


2. who talk to each other,


3. about something other than a man.

There can be strengthened versions of the Bechdel Test too , so one can ammend (1) to require two women protagonists, and amend (3) to include a provision that the women must talk to each other about something other than a man or normatively feminine activities (eg housekeeping, childcare, etc). For example Juno passes the unstrengthened Test, but not a strengthened Test, because all the women in the film apart from Juno herself talk about babies, babycare, and motherhood when they are not talking about men.

The Test does not infallibly demarcate the sexist films from the non-sexist ones, but it is a useful tool to highlight the invisibility of women as protagonists who are not appendages to men, and trigger discussion of the roles women have in the general media, and within particular storylines. It's worth noting that only a tiny minority of mainstream films and TV programs pass the Test or strengthened versions of the Test, and children's films are known to fare particularly badly. Books tend to do rather better, but still not nearly as well as we might hope.

One might also want to have a Bechdel Test for demographic groups other than those that are gender-marked: one could have a Bechdel Test for race, queerness, disability, age, fatness, class, etc. It has been much remarked on in social justice circles that portrayals of members of these demographic groups tend to follow the same tired old tropes, many of which are downright harmful.

For example, a few weeks ago, I blogged over at my place about the problematic discourses of queerness that are presented in film and fiction books. In mainstream narratives, the death and hopelessness of queer people is still part of mainstream discourses about queerness, as is extreme gender dichotomisation. In mainstream novels and films about queer people, how many of them do not involve the death, often brutal, of a queer person, attributed to queerness itself? Consider Brokeback Mountain, Boys Don’t Cry, and even Queer As Folk (UK version). Angels in America is a rare exception: the death of queer characters is caused by silence and closetedness, not by queerness; and the ending is...more life.

There are similarly problematic narratives about disability, something that the team at FWD/Forward have been doing a stellar job of blogging. Disabled people in films are almost invariably presented as bitter and manipulative (House, Patty in the most recent series of Shameless), downright evil (Doctor Who's Davros), or just people whose lives are not worthwhile, as in the Grey's Anatomy case that is discussed at FWD/Forward, which involves narratives about both disability and size.

Racialicious and The Angry Black Woman have also discussed the difficulties of formulating a Bechdel Test for race. In much mainstream film/fiction, non-White people are either the Bad Guys, or their roles are restricted to stereotyped roles, or they are simply not present at all.

As feminists with a vested interest in addressing intersectionality, where does that leave us? I think the discussions that emerge from attempts to formulate Bechdel Tests for gender, race, disability, etc are useful discussions to have, because they highlight the problems with the roles that are currently allocated to people in those groups, and what less oppressive portrayals would look like.

But I wonder if part of the problem isn't that fact that we're trying to formulate these Test versions independently. That isn't a criticism of the Test, or of any of its versions. Nor is it a criticism of films/books that pass the Test(s). But few films/books pass more than one kind of Test, and if they do, it's certainly rare for them to pass more than two (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and Grey's Anatomy, for example, both pass a gender and race version, but no more). This means that no mainstream film or book I can think of is genuinely representative of human diversity, and I'm particularly hard pressed to think good portrayals of people who experience multiple kinds of oppression.

Thoughts?

--IP

Oh markedness, you insidious thing

Over at Language Log, Geoffrey Pullum writes about the phrase "practitioner of diversity":

It seemed fairly clear to Jan (and I think she's right) that of diversity here means something like "belonging to one of the formerly excluded groups associated with references to diversity such as women, Hispanics, African Americans, etc." — it's analogous to the common meaning of the phrase of color in phrases like person of color.

I'm leaving aside the issue of whether "practitioner" here means a practitioner of law or a human resources -type person who is supposed to run diversity-enhancing programs, because, well, I leave that sort of stuff to Language Log. And regardless of whether "of diversity" indicates the individual's demographics or not, it's quite clear that "equality and diversity" programs concern themselves primarily with institutional practices that disproportionately affect women, certain racial groups, disabled people, queer/LGBT people, and other groups who are traditionally underprivileged or underrepresented in certain spheres. That is, there's something about "diversity" that does mean "not White dudes", more or less as GKP suggested in his post.

At this point, I must affix my linguistics hat firmly to my head. There. Now we can proceed.

Very roughly, linguists say that something is linguistically marked when it is atypical for a particular speaker or context. Linguists also sometimes talk about marked identities. Roughly, these means identities that are atypical relative to a given (usually, ideologically-laden) context.

For example, compare:

1. That person is an scientist.


2. That Black woman is an scientist

One might reasonably ask why one might chose to say (2) rather than (1) in a context where both are relevant. Moreover, is less likely to say "That White man is a scientist". So we say that, in many contexts, being a Black woman is a marked identity.

Still with me? Good.

There's certainly very good arguments for saying that "people of diversity" suggests that diversity is a characteristic only of marked identities. This is the sort of attitude that is in place when people remark on the "weirdness" of intersectionality in marked identities -- for example being, a queer disabled Hispanic woman -- but they think it's totally "normal" to be a straight White non-disabled man. Having an attitude towards Black people, women, and other underprivileged groups such that one considers them to be Other (and therefore marked) makes them more oppressed, not less.

GKP writes:

I'm not even saying there is no role or motivation for a phrase like person of diversity. It is apparently intended to pick out people who are not white European or Jewish males.

Indeed (she says, leaving aside the mention of Jewish men at this point, because although I can see what is intended, there actually are some interesting issues there). And this too is problematic, because it defines people in relation to White (straight, non-disabled, etc) men. It's White-centric and andro-centric.

But to say that white European or Jewish males will be barred from some job or actively dispreferred for it sounds raw and ugly in its exclusionariness: one could hardly defend it against a charge of racial and gender discrimination. A positive word or phrase is needed for the class of people who are thought to merit help from diversity-enhancement programs. Hence the coining of a phrase to denote such people. It makes perfect sense. Especially to someone like me who has never been an opponent of affirmative action or diversity enhancement programs.

Trying to unpack what GKP is saying here: it sounds to me like he is saying that an affirmative action program for "people of diversity" sounds too close to "a program to increase the recruitment of people who are not White men", and that this comes too close to gender/racial discrimination.

It seems to me that this is a simplistic account. For one thing, this argument has always been made against affirmative action by countless people, whatever the terminology. I really doesn't matter if the wording is "a program to increase the recruitment of women", because the objection to that will be be "but that's discrimination against men!" (Note, I don't propose to go into a thorough discussion of affirmative action here. That's a whole 'nother post.)

But secondly, GKP's comments miss out the markedness issue entirely. The claim is "'people of diversity' doesn't include White men, and it is therefore difficult to defend the term against a charge of racism". But it seems to me that the people harmed by the exclusion of White men are not White men at all — it's everyone who isn't a White man, precisely because they are all being considered Other, and White men are being considered Normal. This is what markedness means. If we were to say "we are starting a new program to recruit more people" we'd have no reason to think that "people" means "White men", except for the fact that whenever we mean anyone other than White men, we call it "diversity" or "affirmative action" or "discrimination against White men". White men don't seem to need a special label — it's everyone else who needs the special "diversity" label.

So yes, the markedness here is deeply harmful. But not to White men, who seem to be doing pretty well out of it.

--IP

[Cross-posted]

Hello world

I'm delighted to be joining the blogging team here. Just wanted y'all to know. I usually hang out over at Modus Dopens, but I'm looking forward to writing some geekería of the queer variety.

--IP

a simple statement