Morgan’s Notes for 3/21 Readings

Notes on Working Together

Not sure what to say about this poem. The title seems apt, and the poetic speaker and their caretaker do seem to be actually working together rather than one working against the other. The poetic speaker doesn’t seem to appear nonverbal, if they can communicate when to stop, when something is too hot, whatever it means by saying the caretaker can do. What is the speaker telling their caretaker they can actually do? “Tell her she can.” Can what?

The poetic speaker works with their caretaker, rather than against, which is… Good? I know if it were someone like my grandfather, it wouldn’t appear quite so reciprocal. He had full knee replacement surgery a couple years ago, and he’s one of those people that if he can do it himself, he will, and he absolutely hates asking for help unless he has no choice, and trying to take care of him when he’s sick or laid up with injury is a veritable keysmash of frustration. He’s crotchety and insufferable when he can’t do something he’s normally able to do. If we’d had an outside caretaker for his knee recovery, he probably would have driven them insane and then away.

Notes on Plato, Again

“Such things happen to people with disabilities, more often than many would like to believe.”
Normally I don’t like to read introductions or end notes when reading a piece for a class, because I feel like it colors my perceptions before I can begin to make my own judgments, but this end note can apply to other marginalized communities as well, often in conjunction with disability. For example, Virginia is one of 31 states where it’s still legal to discriminate based on sexuality. It’s legal to get married in all 50 states, but 31 still have discriminations in place – VCU fired a volleyball coach in 2012 because he was a married gay man.

While it may not make for a “good story” or a “good narrative,” if a person in real life happened to experience the situation in the short story, they could potentially fight the decision with the ADA or even the ACLU, couldn’t they? Someone like me wouldn’t be able to, at least in over half the country.

Notes on MitchSny Biopolitics Introduction

p3. “In tandem with queer, ‘crip’ identifies the ways in which such bodies represent alternative forms of being-in-the-world when navigating environments that privilege able-bodied participants as fully capacitated agential participants within democratic institutions. Such alternative modes of interaction made available by crip/queer lives create capabilities that exceed, and/or go unrecognized within, the normative scripts of biopolitics. It is in these spaces of cultural production that disabled people offer alternatives to what Robert  McRuer calls ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’: “the assumption that able-bodied identities, able-bodied perspectives, are preferable and what we all, collectively, are aiming for.”

• Compulsory anything is toxic and potentially damaging in the long-term, e.g. compulsory heterosexuality: I thought I was broken for 10 years because I wasn’t into all the relationships that my middle & high school peers were getting into. I was 22 years old when I first learned the word “asexual” and it was like the world lifted off my shoulders. I mean, sure, I’m still going to face a lot of difficulties, especially in the state of Virginia for being LGBT+, but knowing that there was a word for me and that I wasn’t alone was a huge relief. The same thing with physical disabilities (of which I do not have) and mental illnesses (of which I do have, and I get frustrated every time someone tells me to just DO something as if it were so easy and I didn’t have to jump through the hoops of anxiety, poor attention span, imposter syndrome, etc.)

p4 “Inclusion has come to mean an embrace of diversity-based practices by which we include those who look, act, function, and feel different; yet our contention here is that inclusionism obscures at least as much as it reveals.” 

• While inclusion is important so that we can teach children that we exist and we’re not that much different from other people, and that it’s even okay to be different, we need to be careful that we’re not including just for brownie points. We’re more than a brief unit of study. We’re more than a month and done. Marginalized communities are more than February (Black History Month), March (Women’s History Month), June (Pride Month), etc. (And speaking of units of study, Pride Month is never “taught” in a school unit because it’s the month of June, which American Public Schools have summer vacation during, so we don’t get even a small “unit of study”). 

p6 “Right now, disability studies and global disability rights movements find themselves having to argue that disabled people must be allowed to pursue their lives much as able-bodied people do in order to prove worthy of acceptance and as recipients of equality of treatment […] such a goal is too small and often further solidifies the unchallenged desirability of normative lives.” 

• While it’s true that we should be able to pursue our lives how we want without being told what we can or can’t do, there’s still that underlying whisper of what is normative by ableist standards. And that we’re overcoming our disability/mental illness. Or that we’re succeeding in spite of it. I know I’ve had people ask me why I want to go into the high stress job of teaching (high school) when I have anxiety and sometimes have even shut down because of that anxiety. I’ve been outright called insane for wanting to teach on the high school level, not just with my anxiety but just because… I want to teach high school? Because apparently wanting to teach elementary school is SO much easier and more desirable. It’s like they don’t think I can do it. But I think I can. In fact, I AM doing it. I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like for people with physical/more visible disabilities. 

p18 “disabled people want to e treated like everyone else and in such a way that their disabilities are not defining their value as human beings.” 

• My ADHD is a part of me. It comes with depression, anxiety, insomnia, etc. Sometimes it makes life difficult. But it’s not who I am. It doesn’t define me. My sexuality is part of me. Sometimes it colors my perceptions. I won’t be in a sexual relationship, probably ever, and that’s fine with me because I can have the romance and the intimacy without sex. It’s a part of me and my life. This still doesn’t define me. My PCOS can sometimes get in the way of me living my life, like when I’m in so much pain I can’t get out of bed. I get out of bed and go to work anyway. It does not define me.