I spent the morning in Emoryville rolling in and out of the two vehicles they had on display. I don’t really know what to call them. They’re not cars, nor are they vans. They are sort of a cross between a Checker cab and a London cab, only on steroids with a lift.

I’ve found my 2003 Town & Country lift-equipped mini van to be less than ideal. It works. It gets me to where I want to go, but it rattles and needs more maintenance on the ramp and assorted adaptations than the English sports cars my dad had in the 1950s. This new thing should be more rugged and easier to use as it was designed from the bottom up to be accessible. Here’s hoping anyway.

If you’re in the Bay Area tomorrow, Thursday July 22, they’ll be on display by the Barnes and Noble on Shellmound in Emoryville from noon to 7:00. Check ‘em out and let me know what you think.

The Future?

They have one in white and one in black.

On first watch of Glee I was impressed with how exaggerated and over the top the show was. It also had irony and a bite—a send-up rather than a satire. The characters are hyper-stereotypes. representing some of the more visible high school cliques, in particular, jocks, cheerleaders, and the glee club members (who are at the bottom of the high school pecking order.) The plot is almost always unbelievable yet based on our painful perceptions of high school, which is part of the fun.

For awhile I was confused about the role of the wheelchair-using glee club member, Artie. Even though the role is played by a non-disabled actor it’s still good to see disability represented in an integrated setting. Generally, his disability goes unmentioned. He almost always has a role, even if diminished, in the dance numbers. There have been a couple of episodes that have dealt with both the school’s and the club’s need for access and his inclusion in the performances. One episode had all of the members of the club using wheelchairs for a number.

Unfortunately, it’s become clear to me that disability is the show’s sacred cow. In addition to the wheelchair user who appears in almost all episodes there are two more disabled characters, Sue Sylvester’s intellectually disabled sister and a cheerleader who is also has an intellectual disability. Thankfully they are played by people with Down’s Syndrome and not non-disabled actors. These intellectually disabled characters have been used to show that Sue Sylvester, the Machiavellian coach of the cheerleaders and the villain of the show, has a soft spot—a heart if you will. Analyzing the role of the disabled characters from an insider/outsider perspective it becomes clear that there has been no insider perspective even though the show has done a moderately successful job exploring issues of race and sexual orientation.

The environment for the show is high school from the point of view of social outsiders, i.e. geeks, nerds. (The fans of the show are proud to be known as Gleeks.) It’s that basic authenticity that makes the show interesting and gives it emotional resonance for those of us who felt excluded and diminished by our high school experiences. Unfortunately when the plot tries to deal with the exclusion of disabled people it goes astray. It’s the imagined, rather than actual, needs and dilemmas of disabled students. Perhaps, the writers and producers, who must have been social outsiders in high school, think that just because they know exclusion they know the issues of disabled students. Everyone portrayed from an ironic viewpoint, except for disabled people. They and their struggles are all played most earnestly.

Then the May 11 show had a disabled actor playing a disabled character. It was another, supposedly warm and fuzzy moment to help the show’s prima donna gain some humility. The scenes were particularly cloying and lacked any edge or insight. And finally the May 18 show was particularly egregious. It went way over the line for me. They recreated what to me is one of the worst ever disability movie scenes—Tom Cruise painfully trying to walk and then falling in Born on the 4th of July. The basic premise was Artie dreaming of being able to dance. In what turned out to be a fantasy sequence Artie stood up, walked away from his wheelchair (the supposed of all of us wheelchair users), and then fell face first.

So, I continue to hold my nose at the disability scenes and enjoy the rest for what it is. I must say, seeing the club perform M.C. Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” in the school library was particularly fun.

A version of this piece was first published in the Disability and Humanities listserv,

Ta da! The example for the inclined plane was “a wheelchair ramp.” What a surprise. It’s like seeing a disability story on the front cover of the New York Times Magazine. I think it’s a pretty good indication of our influence over the past 35 years. The way I read it, the dictionary assumes that everyone will know what a “wheelchair ramp” is. There’s something enormously satisfying to see the validation by a reputable dictionary.

One of the things I like about Oxford dictionaries is the etymology. According to the American, ramp comes from the Old French word “ramper” meaning to creep or crawl. What? This is getting interesting. We get wheelchairs, stop crawling, pass laws requiring ramps, but have a connected to our former state.

OK, this is getting serious. According to this dictionary “cripple” come from the Old English words crypel and crēopel, which are both of Germanic origin and related to creep. I find this coincidence surprising—I’ll leave it to the hard core word people to sort this out.
Under the listing for cripple the Oxford Dictionary has advice for the use of the word. This, more than the ramp example, shows how far we’ve come.

USAGE The word cripple has long been in use to refer to ‘a person unable to walk due to illness or disability’ and is recorded as early as ad 950. In the 20th century, the term acquired offensive connotations and has now been largely replaced by broader terms such as ‘disabled person.’

That’s amazing. The newspaper style books have been saying the same things for years, but I’ve never seen a mainstream, public warning that’s this explicit. I’m encouraged.

Today, not being able to remember his name, I googled wheelchair wrestler. Wow! The most fun and the biggest time sink was on Zazzle. Zazzle is a site where one can “create your own one-of-a-kind product.” I found a T-shirt with wheelchair Sumo wrestlers! Once I started searching for “wheelchair,” “gimp,” “disabled,” etc I was lost for the next half hour.

My favorite T-shirt design is this:

Tribal Membership

This week I received an email from someone I didn’t know, a wheelchair user. He’s a quad who became disabled after a diving accident over thirty-five years ago. How do I know all that from the first line of his email? He told me. It read, “I am a C5-6 quad since a 1976 diving injury.” I wasn’t surprised, it’s how many disabled people introduce themselves.

I was surprised, though, by my reaction, not a first, but after I’d thought about it. Initially, I was put off by his medicalization of his identity. He didn’t say, as I do, “I’m a wheelchair user.” I prefer to identify myself by my social identity, i.e. a disabled person or wheelchair user. The world sees me using a wheelchair and even though they don’t know “what happened” (as much as most would like to ask) they stereotype me based on that assessment. I want to identify with the broadest aspect of my community, disabled people. It’s the strategy I use to remind myself of my pride in my membership. And for the world it’s my desire to focus on something other than the oft-asked question, “What happened?” I’m not particularly interested in recounting my history, nor do I want to disclose, “How much can you feel?”

But then, I realized that just as I have taken a pejorative, “disabled,” and termed it a positive, he was too, by giving me his lineage—his membership in our clan and tribe. He gave me his bona fides, his place in the disability family tree. He described, in essence, his clan, “quads.” He gave me the date of his initiation into the clan. He let me know that he wasn’t new to all this and that his clan is in the family tree of people with spinal cord injuries. He and I are cousins, we’re SCI (spinal cord injury) cousins.

It is, of course, an imperfect analogy, but it helped me understand more about our emerging identities. How we see ourselves—disabled, with a disability, handicapable—shapes us and ultimately shapes the world. Remember, we caused the transformation of the built environment in the United States with our new-found civil rights identity.

Sometimes I worry that we are too ashamed being disabled. Like the GLBT community there is shame attached to our identity—a shame that we need to reconcile within ourselves. The medical model terminology helps some disabled people to avoid the societally imposed shame. Unfortunately, invoking the medical leads back to objectification and reducing us to the specifics of our uncured selves. It also gives up the power of identity to doctors rather than holding it to ourselves.

So, perhaps, by invoking family, clan, and tribal affiliations we’re turning the medical upside down. If we are proud of who we are as a people, we can also be proud of disabled brothers, sisters, and cousins.

Since Christmas I’ve been playing around with my new disabled action figures. It seemed to me that perhaps one of the facets of my definition might be this.

Universal Health Care Now disabled pickets

Last week I noticed on my Times RSS feed a story on post-polio syndrome. It’s not bad. I like the arc of the story. It quickly moves from an historical perspective to the needs of today’s survivors. If the New York Times can slowly thaw and recognize our community, there’s hope.

More and more these days it’s OK to talk or write about disability & disability identity. I was struck not only by the excerpt from the book but also that the reviewer, David D’Arcy, mentions it in his review.

Not only do I like her music, but I’m also impressed with her disability identity. On her MySpace page she talks about the term disability. She, like many in our community, disavows it–”The very word is self-demoting.” But, by saying anything about disability she outs herself in a way that very, very few contemporary artists do.

Interestingly, her MySpace page has only one picture of herself using her cane. Most impressive is the booklet that comes with the CD has two photos of her and her cane, Citizen Kane.