arbofo

This is an interesting post that merges two knotty topics. Here’s the first paragraph, from Samhita:

A Republican California assemblyman proposed a bill that would deem pregnant women “temporarily disabled” in the third trimester of their pregnancy and allow them access to handicapped parking. The bill failed, but I think this is really interesting.

She then goes on to express concern that classifying pregnant women as disabled would attach the same kind of stigma we see attached to people who have physical disabilities that aren’t temporary. Namely, the stigma of being helpless, and needing the law to help us out.

There’s one practical reason why this bill failed. Not all women encounter mobility issues in their final months of pregnancy. Those that do can be given handicap parking stickers by their doctors. My roommate observed that where she’s from, they further solved the problem simply by providing maternity parking spaces. There are ways to address access to better parking for pregnant women without creating a redundant law.

Given that the law’s redundancy is really the issue here, it’s disorienting that there was so much discussion of disabilities and abilities over at Feministing. NicoleGW said it best:

A lot of the comments (and the original post itself) rub me the wrong way. As others have already mentioned, there seems to be a big problem here with people attaching stigma to the terms “disabled,” “handicapped,” etc., and being wary of attaching that same stigma to pregnant women.

Frankly, the issue with this approach isn’t whether or not pregnant women are disabled. The issue is that there is a sh-t ton of prejudice against people with disabilities.

Samhita concluded her post with a brief dicussion of the “disability” label itself and her resistance to using it. Personally, I’d appreciate her good-intentions more if she’d just call it for what it is. Whatever word we use to describe a group of people who exist outside societal norms is inevitably going to have a stigma attached to it. Why bother with a confusing and condescending substitute like “differently-abled?”

I love this quote, attributed to a commenter’s wheelchair-using friend:

I don’t care if you call me f-cking disabled, just put a f-cking ramp in front of your store so I can get in!”

I wish I had that kind of chutzpah!

Digression:

The news story reminded me of Brigitte Jordan’s Birth in Four Cultures. This was my favorite piece of required reading for an anthropology class in college (and this was another). In it, we see very plainly how birth in the US is treated as a medical (vs. natural) event. In other words: a mother is a “patient” whose pregnancy is a medical condition.

*Apologies if you found the title kind of misleading.

Wow.

A couple weeks ago, I started reading Tibet and China in the Twenty-First Century. It’s a good book, but it’s definitely going to take me a few more weeks (months?) to read. I picked it up after seeing Seven Years In Tibet for the first time, wanting to know more about what exactly had happened over there.

The book’s introduction highlights a lot of the human rights violations, the tangible reasons why anyone would object to China’s possession of the region. As I read about the horrible lack of access to health care, education, food, and jobs, I wondered whether anyone was still talking about Tibet. Was it too ’90s to talk about it? Had Darfur (also a horrible tragedy- don’t get me wrong) supplanted Tibet as the hot human rights topic to talk about?

Within days, Bjork shouted “Tibet, Tibet!” at a concert in Shanghai. And now it seems as if there could be no end to the news coverage about protests in Tibet. Someone from work sent a mass email that included two opposing accounts of the protests. The first is an account from a sympathetic eyewitness via the BBC, the second is a completely different account from People’s Daily (a newspaper backed by the Communist Party of China). The Guardian also has Students for a free Tibet as #21 in their list of the world’s 50 most powerful blogs.

It’s hard not to be sympathetic to the protests. You would think China has its hands full with things like censorship and pollution- why spend all this energy on Tibet? (Heh- remember when they ordered living Buddhas to get permission before reincarnating?) But what would happen if the protests actually worked? Today’s Tibet is not what it was before 1959- would it be impossible to put the pieces back together?

But to answer my original question: YES, people are obviously still thinking about Tibet.

There’s a massive battle of wills going on in my head right now. My desire to watch movies, paint, or dive into the pile of books on my nightstand is at serious odds with the fact that I have a Art History midterm next Monday. It’s sorta important that I pass this thing, cause my employer isn’t going to offer tuition reimbursement for anything less than a ‘B’.

Yeah… Debt? Not fun.

So… before I ground myself from blogging and all things Internet, I wanted to share some stuff, like:

… Miranda July’s hypnotic book promo (via BoingBoing) … a gorgeous slide show contemplating the future of libraries … real-life hobbit houses … one more reason to love Takashi Murakami … and, um, this is just too hilarious to skip.

Sorry the links are so old! I seem to be developing pack rat tendencies in my Google Reader.

It was Courtney E. Martin’s* review -over at Feministing that interested me in Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. There are a lot of topics that divide Feminists- and pornography is one of them. As for myself, I don’t really know what to make of it- does it oppress women? is it inclusive and sex-positive? and how does the paradigm change if we’re talking about gay porn?

Meh. I’m sure I’ll reach my own conclusions someday.

In the meantime, it’s hard not to laugh at one of the latest developments in this particular industry. A month ago, mere days after finishing Jensen’s book, I choked on my afternoon tea when I saw this on Jezebel. It sounded too bizarre to be true: Porn with actors communicating in ASL? Hysterical!

Naturally, I emailed a number of my friends with a link to the Jezebel, including one of my roommates. Since then, my roommate has contemplated surprising me with my very own deaf porn, but opted instead to get me a tea infuser thingie from Teavana (phew). But tonight, she emailed me one last follow-up from Penny Arcade with the following note:

Penny Arcade is a MAJOR nerd comic… deaf porn has truly hit the big time.

Oh jeez.

*I am way overdue on reading her book- it looks awesome.

S. is going to love this. This guy, Virgil, who aspires to “become the #1 hit on Google for the query ‘ virgil ‘, has data-mined Facebook to create Booksthatmakeyoudumb. Basically, he and a friend manually collected schools’ top-ten lists for books, and charted them by their average SAT and ACT scores. There are some obvious flaws here, but as Virgil tells you, that’s totally besides the point. [librarian.net]

Here’s another bit I’d underline from the Power of Nonviolence, if only the copy I had wasn’t a library book- on morality of the state vs. morality of the individual:

If “trust” is meant in a moral sense, it is unfortunately true that political leaders can rarely be trusted.  The reason lies in the split between private and public morals: the state, having become an idol, justifies any immorality if committed in its interest, while the very same political leaders would not commit the same acts if they were acting in behalf of their own private interest.  -Erich Fromm, “The Case for Unilateral Disarmament”

Fromm was addressing the question of nuclear weapons, but… ugh- lines from his essay could just as easily refer to the issue of torture and wire-tapping.  It just makes me wonder how politicians rationalize the discrepancy between their personal and public codes of conduct.

Some rambles…

Having just finished reading the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, a friend remarked on how much she enjoyed the aspect of parallel worlds featured in the narrative. It’s something that appealed to me, too- the idea that somewhere in time, a world split into two. Those worlds would separately evolve, maybe splitting again like amoebas, but with different global DNA. Anyway, it’s fun to fantasize about, and I thought of it when I was reading an essay by Albert Camus on non-violence. In it, there’s a paragraph about how each person has their own idea of what utopia is:

It seems to me every one should think this over. For what strikes me, in the midst of polemics, threats and outbursts of violence, is the fundamental good will of every one. From Right to Left, every one, with the exception of a few swindlers, believes that his particular truth is the one to make men happy. And yet the combination of all these good intentions has produced the present infernal world, where men are killed, threatened and deported, where war is prepared, where one cannot speak freely without being insulted or betrayed. Thus if people like ourselves live in a state of contradiction, we are not the only ones, and those who accuse us of Utopianism are possibly themselves also living in a Utopia, a different one but perhaps a more costly one in the end.

The appeal of the parallel worlds in Pullman’s trilogy is that they don’t collide (though we see what happens when they do). In our reality, it sometimes feels as conflicting points of view are like those colling worlds. In his essay, Camus states that it’s ridiculous to think we can create bubbles around ourselves and live life on parallel planes- obviously, it’s just not possible. Instead of living side-by-side in blissful ignorance, we have to meet in the middle and not write each other off as crazy.

The essay I’m reading is included in an amazing little anthology: The Power of Nonviolence. I’m peeved that I don’t have a copy of my own, because I want to underline stuff every other page. Wah.

I finally got around to finishing the book S. shamelessly adores: the first of the Gossip Girl series. S. references the books occasionally, so I wanted to read at least the first book so I could see what’s what. The books, which are touted as “Sex and the City for the younger set” (Teen People) were covered awhile back by Rebecca Traister on Salon.com (actually, this is the same article I referenced for this ol’ entry).

The writing itself is intentionally vapid and occasionally tiresome. The back-stabbing characters astound me - another friend read S’s copy and freaked: “It’s terrible! It’s like those girls have no MORALS or something!” But I have to agree with S. and Traister that there is some merit to these books.

“You know you love me” is the signature sign-off that the anonymous protagonist always uses at the end of her gossip columns. Seriously, there’s something liberating about that. Sure, it does come off as careless, like a flippant remark you’d say after forgetting to pick up your mother’s dry cleaning for the zillionth time, but it also encourages the mentality that you are who you are. When you’re feeling down on yourself, wishing that you hadn’t said what you’d said or done what you’d done and feeling like a globby waste of space -as I was feeling yesterday- a little motto like that can save the day. So you did something kind of stupid. So what? They love you anyway. You can laugh at yourself and get over it.