Linkspam: Disability, whether to 'pass' or 'perform'?

[davidgillon]

Passing for Normal: The Austerity Politics of Visibility and Invisibility for Disabled People*

Fascinating academic paper by a friend of mine looking at the contradictory pressures of stigma and 'legitimacy' that drive disabled people towards either concealing or 'performing' their disability.

I think the way Naomi links the pressure towards 'legitimacy' into the wider aspects of the 'surveillance society' is really thought-provoking, as is 'the socially acceptable right of non-disabled people to invade the privacy of disabled people', while considering the DLA form as a mandatory, self-enforced version of the panopticon, oh my! Definitely worth a read if you're interested in disability politics, or just stuck between 'passing' and 'performing'.

* Site does require registration via FB or Google, but it's the first time I've seen a registration that lets you control what information is passed.

Comments

Re: Some early-morning, highly caffinated, thoughts

[cloudsinvenice]

I never knew that much detail about it (I suspect I had to peace out around then for my own mental health), but yes, I always had the impression that disability causes were conspicuous by their absence or lowkey presence on 38 Degrees. Did they ever say why they excluded our issues?

Re: Some early-morning, highly caffinated, thoughts

[davidgillon]

Details are a little fuzzy at this point, but I was told, by the head man at 38 Degrees, that it was partly due to a team member being invoved in a car crash. However he never satisfactorily explained why, after they admitted a problem, with the disability votes having being divided into two so they fell off the poll rather than topping it, they didn't fix it in over 8 months after promising they would do it. And that definitely didn't involve the injured team member. Frankly the explanation didn't add up. I got the impression none of the leadership team at 38 Degrees were interested in disability issues.

The stupid thing was they were doing a huge amount of campaigning over the NHS bill at the same time WRB was moving through parliament, there were obvious synergies that could have helped their campaign, yet they never did a thing to exploit them. It would have been as easy for them to say "Back Pat's Petition" as it as for them to say "Back the Badger Poll". Ultimately it took a handful of disabled campaigners, Spartacus, mostly working from their beds, to inflict the first defeats on the government, and they did it over WRB. With 38 Degrees working with us we might have made that defeat stick.

I've never really forgiven 38 Degrees for that. They did let me blog about disability issues on their site here, but then used that to say they were doing something about it. At which point I gave up on them in disgust. (Incidentally I notice that all the comments on the blog, pretty much unanimously agreeing with me, have now disappeared).