msmith26

A Criticism on Julia Rodas’s “Introduction” to Autistic Disturbances

Morgan Smith

ENGL384-02

April 30, 2019

Word Count: 1,091

I hereby declare upon my word of honor that I have neither given nor received any unauthorized help on this assignment. – Morgan Smith

A Criticism on Julia Rodas’s “Introduction” to Autistic Disturbances

Sometimes self-diagnosis is all a person has regarding their mental health. Visits to the doctor’s office are expensive enough as it is without the added pressure of seeing specialists that are, more often than not, far out of town. On top of that, doctors are misdiagnosing or just not listening to their patients alarmingly often. For a real-life example, an early-twenty-something goes to the doctor because she’s listless, lethargic, doesn’t find joy in the things that normally brought her joy, is irritable, easily distracted, forgets things often, and experiences nausea when dealing with large groups of people to the point of scratching her skin. She rocks back and forth in her chair. Her leg shakes and bounces when she’s not sitting on it. She doesn’t sleep at night. The doctor suggests she has depression and anxiety. The doctor gives her Prozac.

There is improvement for maybe six months. Then worsening. The doctor doubles the dosage.

Repeat. The doctor adds Wellbutrin to her treatment.

Repeat. The doctor removes the Prozac, doubles the Wellbutrin.

Repeat. The doctor sends her to a psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist outright ignores everything she says and gives her Trazodone for the insomnia.

No one thinks that the depression, the anxiety, the restlessness, the sleeplessness could all be symptoms of something larger.

The twenty-something is twenty-five years old when she finally sees a therapist, and twenty-six when the therapist suggests she has ADHD. She’s elated. She finally has answers. She talks to her primary doctor and spends one terrible, horrible month on Strattera before switching to Intuniv, and the Intuniv is working.

This twenty-six-year-old is lucky, even though her doctors weren’t listening to her at first. This twenty-six-year-old’s best friend didn’t get her autism diagnosis until she was twenty-two—and she fought tooth-and-nail for it, starting with self- and peer-diagnosis before she went to a doctor. Not to mention, sometimes the patients are right, and the doctors are wrong. After all, the doctors don’t live with the patient twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, year after year after year. The doctor sees the patient anywhere from 15-60 minutes at most once or twice a month.

Often times, self-diagnosis can provide the answers one needs without risking their autonomy and safety in larger society—the ostracization, the expectation to conform to autistic stereotypes, the judgmental side-eyes of being out in public with an “obvious” mental illness. The self- and peer-diagnosis can provide a community for the person who thinks they might have autism but is afraid of the systemic, social backlash of being autistic in a society that deems autism a defect to be cured.

So, when Julia Rados claims that she could seek out a diagnosis if she wanted to, and finds self-diagnosis as culturally appropriative and predatory, she gives those who can’t afford a diagnosis or are afraid of losing their rights and autonomy a very real reason to stay afraid and to borrow a term from the queer community, to stay in the closet. And yet, Julia Rados insists on writing her book about—what? Finding autism in classic, Victorian texts even though she claims that retroactive diagnosis and diagnosing fictional characters is dangerous and predatory? Perhaps she’s writing specifically about non-autistics reading autism into fictional characters, but what about autistics who want to find themselves in their favorite characters? Who want representation? And yet she claims that it’s dangerous and that self-diagnosis can be exploitative.

In claiming that self-diagnosis is predatory and exploitative, Rodas ostracizes those who cannot seek out an official diagnosis due to affordability or fear—or both. In the same paragraph she ostracizes the poor and the afraid, she claims that she has the privilege to get a diagnosis if she wanted to. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t want to “pass” as either autistic or allistic. In essence, she’s claiming she wants to be both or neither. Which reeks of classism—she’s implying she can afford a diagnosis and is confident that she’d have a positive one, but doesn’t want to pass, ergo, she’s engaging in that exploitative behavior she warns against when she talks about wanting to “find” autism in her favorite classic Victorian texts, and even mentions Uta Frith’s suggestion that the iconic Sherlock Holmes is autistic long before Benedict Cumberbatch came on the BBC with his heavily autism-coded Sherlock.

Throughout the introduction, Rodas seems to vacillate between wanting to “find” autism in her Victorian texts while warning against the game of “pin-the-diagnosis-on-the-fictional-subject” and the dangers of self- and retroactive diagnoses. She wants to have it both ways, but she can’t. Not if she defends the position that it’s dangerous and bordering on “evil” stereotypy. It’s unclear what her actual goal in her introduction is, whether to say something like “hey, autism has always been around in both real life and fiction” or to say, “hey self-diagnosis is dangerous and exploitative so let’s not do it, maybe.” The former could be a positive affirmation that autistics have always been around and will always be around, but the latter is potentially insidious in that claiming that people can only be autistic if they have a doctor tell them they are—which excludes people whose doctors refuse to listen to them and the people who simply cannot afford a doctor in the first place (a group largely made up of people of color).

Rodas’s claim that “Autism should be for autistics” (23) might seem like a road paved with good intentions, warning against the dangers of cultural appropriation and stereotypy, but it’s also a claim of misogyny and racism: people of color have historically been unable to afford doctor visits and doctors have historically refused to listen to their assigned-female-at-birth patients, claiming it’s all in their head or they’re just hysterical. Whatever it is Rodas is trying to claim is lost in her meandering and undermined by her exclusionary tactics. Often, self- and peer-diagnosis is the only thing a person has. To bar them from a community that Rodas declares she is not a part of reeks of gatekeeping tactics. Because she claims to not be autistic, has no knowledge of any relatives who are autistic, and has never sought out diagnostic services even though she’s reasonably certain she could get a positive diagnosis (23), she has no standing in the community to tell others who do and do not belong. Even if she did have a positive autism diagnosis, she doesn’t speak for the community at large. She, as an individual, does not get to tell others who are allowed in the larger community.

Mental Health & The Yellow Wallpaper

Write-Up Word Count: 643

“The Yellow Wallpaper” has been one of my favorite short stories through the years, but for some reason, I never really thought to look at it through the lens of disability and/or mental illness, even though it was literally and unapologetically about mental illness—a very real brush with a severe, potentially crippling mental breakdown. I first read Gilman’s story in high school, but we never touched on the disability aspect of the story. It was either Gothic Horror or American Fiction, and nothing a little more profound or potentially relating back to things that happen in real life.

In that regard, especially given the growing vocality of the disabled and mentally ill, and the constant criticism of coding film and fiction villains as mentally ill, I find that not talking about the disability aspects behind “The Yellow Wallpaper” to be a great disservice to our high school students. They still have the flexibility to unlearn toxic behavior and thought processes with teachers and administration as mediators, without them having to come face to face with it on their own without support. If we embrace that support structure, we might even help kids ask for help if they think something might be wrong. I know that if we’d taken the disability studies route when I was in high school and first read “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I might have asked for help sooner than I did. Not that I ever had hallucinations or anything, but maybe, just maybe, I would have recognized the dangers of hyperfocus and being fatigued all the time, and how staring off into middle distance all the time probably wasn’t a good thing.

So that was the motivation for this project. I’m currently in the Master’s of Education program here at UMW, and I wanted to do a project that more aligns wit my future goals and career than just writing my ten millionth academic paper. Since I’m going to be a teacher, I do need to practice writing lesson plans, since that’s going to be what I’m doing for the rest of my professional life.

Coming up with something that didn’t rely on the heavy theory readings we did in class was a challenge. Most of the theory reading we did likely isn’t accessible to 11^th graders without very careful modeling and guiding, and there isn’t a lot of time for that when you have a state-mandated curriculum to follow. They’re just that dense. I did manage to find several resources for teaching at grade level and some to use for differentiation purposes, since not all students learn the same. The experience I have as an active substitute and my twenty practicum hours this semester were an advantage I utilized to the fullest. If given the chance, I think I’m even ready to teach this lesson, even though it’s designed to take at least two 80-minute class periods. Parts of the lesson plan were purposefully left vague, as they depend entirely on student response.

Making the lesson accessible was my biggest challenge, because a lot of the theory is so dense, and I chose an SOL Standard focused on 11^th grade, and most classes won’t talk about anything other than what’s already tried and true. Even today, which the voices of the disability community growing louder, I’ve noticed in my years as a substitute teacher that schools don’t really talk to their kids about disability and mental illness. It’s still taboo, which is a shame, since it’s just as important as looking at racism and sexism in texts, both of which schools do talk about (if, still very inadequately). Disability gets nothing. With that in mind, I wanted to work on this project so that I could have something to show that it is possible to make disability studies accessible even to high schoolers. I just hope I succeeded.

Smith’s Notes on 4/4 Readings

Notes on Airless Spaces

p.4 “When critics dismiss these friendships as symptoms of illness rather than a legitimate attempt at community building, they deny the personhood of those who cannot “recover,” people who end up getting left behind has Esther moves toward normalization.”

This sounds like intentional dehumanization, potentially even rooted in misogyny. The dismissal and denial of community is also a method of control. Isolation can make and/or keep people “mad” and thus keep them in requirement of “care” (a case could be made for this scenario in “The Yellow Wallpaper”). Control under the guise of healing is also a plot point in many a modern horror story and psychological thriller – Grady Hendrix’s “IKEA” horror comedy Horrorstör comes to mind, since it plays with Foucault’s idea of discipline and punishment and the iconic panopticon.

p.8 “Graphic novels and comics, Gross argues, are important modes of communicating trauma: they can present experiences of disability in images when words fail. This is especially important when dealing with mental illnesses which have symptoms that may be impossible to express in words and are also often invisible to others.”

Visual media representation (that is accurate and empathic) is so important, especially nowadays when more people are reading comics and watching TV/movies rather than reading novels or short stories. I also admit there have been several instances in my own life when I wished I had the artistic skill to visually express what I was feeling with regard to my anxiety & depression, and my executive dysfunction because my words were failing me or generally getting jumbled up/not making any sense, and other people just weren’t understanding what I was trying to say. Visual art and media can be so incredibly powerful and sometimes people just have no idea just how much power a poster or a TV appearance can be.

Overall, this reading interested me because of the diversity involved with the project. It made me interested in writing the whole book to see a diverse set of writers talking about a diverse set of issues and topics within the larger discussion of disability studies.

Notes on The Snake Pit

p.113 “If people think you’re crazy, they don’t listen to you.”

Coupled with a line on p.109 about the importance of patient experience, it’s very hard to get successful treatment when your doctors don’t listen to you. I had a psychiatrist I had to quit seeing because he wasn’t listening to what I was really saying, and it was like all he heard was “insomnia” and “depression” so he essentially just threw Welbutrin and trazodone at me and called it a day. He barely even talked to me, and I was only ever in his office for like 15 minutes at a time. It was frustrating, and I hated going every month, since he wasn’t listening, and the medications weren’t working, and I told him they weren’t working. I finally found a therapist who, though she can’t prescribe medication, listens to me and talks to me. She’s been more help than any meds have ever been. It’s fortunate that I’ve been in a situation where I can choose to quit an unhelpful doctor and find another. Many people aren’t so lucky.

p.116 “Sometimes a sick animal knows more about how another sick animal should be treated.”

Sometimes the best help comes from someone who’s been where you are and understands. Sometimes doctors only have a theoretical, superficial understanding and not an experiential one, and therefore don’t know what it’s actually like being ill. That lack of understanding can lead to frustration on both ends at best and gross mistreatment (both medically and socially) at worst.

p.118 “They reached out to their patients. […] Some suggestions were as radical as simply calling the patients by their names.”

This really shouldn’t be so radical! The fact that people don’t seem to grasp basic human decency is appalling. Utterly astounding that basic courtesy can lead to vast improvements in interpersonal relationships does unrecognized. Talk to people. Use their names. Listen to what they’re saying – they typically know their own lives better than you do. They live them after all. They live with their minds/bodies every day. You don’t.

In general, I think it’s important that this chapter emphasizes in several places that recovery is rarely linear. Relapses happen. Something can trigger an anxiety attack or a nervous breakdown. The important fact is that we’re trying to recover and working toward recovery, and a little support from our supposed professionals and a sense of community can go a long way.

Notes on The Yellow Wallpaper

The whole “doctor knows best” trop really needs to be modified. The doctor may know how to treat maladies, but they don’t know what the patient actually lives through. They need to listen to their patients to have any hope of success. The patient knows their own body/mind. They live with it. Every day. The doctor doesn’t. Even in the case of The Yellow Wallpaper, the doctor husband and doctor brother don’t live with the patient day in and day out. The husband is away during the days and sometimes even away overnight. So he’s not there day in and day out.

There are several instances where it reads like the narrator’s husband is keeping her ill as a means to keep her close and controlled, since he’s often away from the house. He has her completely isolated, and even though this was supposedly a common treatment of “nervous disorders” back in the day, the fact that the narrator isn’t allowed to see any friends or family at all, and if she weren’t in a beautiful ancestral home (in need of renovations), she might as well just be locked up in an asylum. She, the narrator, is absolutely convinced that she would do better if she just got to see some friends and family, had a little bit of stimulation, but her husband, “the doctor” keeps her isolated and “controlled.” Keeps her insane. After all, I think we’ve established this semester that isolation can cause insanity. Human beings are social/pack animals.

The fact that the doctor-husband clearly “knows best” and won’t even listen to his wife is telling. The level of control there is alarming. A case can be argued that the doctor-husband fainted in the end of the story because either he realized he couldn’t control her anymore, as the narrator explicitly states, or he was utterly astonished to be incorrect in his treatment/diagnosis, because obviously he knows best, and she was improving physically (and wouldn’t even listen to the possibility that her mind was deteriorating).

It could even be said that it wasn’t the wallpaper itself that drove the narrator mad. It was the isolation, the lack of stimulation and any real companionship outside of her illness. The wallpaper was the only stimulating thing available to her that she could focus on, since she wasn’t allowed the creative outlet of writing – hiding her writing had exhausted her to the point where she couldn’t even do that anymore. She was essentially completely alone with no companionship, no stimulation, and a semi-checked out husband. That would drive anyone mad, even the healthiest person in the world.

Notes on Tulips

I’m not really sure what to say about this poem. Part of it reads like the poetic speaker is being treated without being listened to at all. Like the poetic speaker is just being loaded up on sedatives to keep her compliant and “happy.”

I’m not even sure what the tulips are supposed to mean, since traditionally red tulips are indicative of pure/true/eternal love, which seems incongruous with the rest of the narrative. Plath has always been difficult for me to parse out, but especially here, since I’m not sure what’s really going on outside of the sedatives and hospital bed.

Smith’s Response to Hirshberg’s “Crazy Wisdom? Enlightened Iconoclasm in Tibet, Guru Sex Scandals in the West”

While this was an absolutely fascinating lecture on Tibetan Buddhism and iconoclasm, there wasn’t much in it that I would truly consider “crazy” even though one of the Awakened Buddhists himself (Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche) coined the phrase “crazy wisdom” in the West. Much of the “crazy” parts simply sounded to me like a cultural disconnect between East and West.

Perhaps it’s because I’m pretty liberal and into philosophy, and had to read a lot of Nietzsche in the past, but a lot of the ideas behind Buddhism in the lecture given made sense to me, and didn’t seem crazy at all (e.g. that the “self doesn’t exist the way it appears” – that nothing really exists simply as it appears on the surface, and that everything, even negative/harmful emotions can be harnessed for the benefit of others and transmuted into a positive/constructive force if done correctly and one has the knowledge and skill to do such a thing. Anger for the sake of anger doesn’t get anything done, and only leads to more anger, for example).

There were one or two individuals that were eyebrow raising in their level of inappropriate behavior and general “craziness” (probably because of near perpetual intoxication, since most “), but for most of the lecture I felt that the “Crazy Wisdom” aspect of the lecture was more of a cultural disconnect than anything else. To Westerners, a lot of East/Southeast Asian cultural norms seem “crazy” and “weird” but mostly because their cultural norms aren’t Western cultural norms and most everyday people’s kneejerk reaction is to go “That’s so crazy/weird” when encountering something from another culture that’s different than our own. If you were to take a step back and think about it, consider it from another person’s perspective/culture, then perhaps you wouldn’t think it so crazy at all.

Outside of only a handful of individual practitioners/leaders, who seemed to be outliers and eccentrics, they seemed very not-crazy at all. Normal by their own culture’s standards. Trying to normalize them Western standards would be ignorant at best and racist at worst – eccentric outliers not considered. Hirshberg’s lecture was fascinating and enlightening – and I don’t think I could consider practitioners of the iconoclastic Tibetan Buddhism as crazy. It’s simply a different religious culture than I’m used to seeing, and while I’m ignorant on a great many things, I’m not ignorant enough to write them off as certifiably insane.

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.

Morgan’s Response to Medhi Aminrazavi’s Lecture on Divine Madness

Apparently 25% of the human population in the world is Muslim. One in four human beings. I didn’t know that. Fundamentalists are the extremists who base your value as a human being on how religious and devout you are. They consider Sufism as heretical and Sufism actually arose as a reaction to the extreme Fundamentalism. There seems to be debate on where the term “Sufi” came from, such as the Greek word “sofia” for wisdom, a word for burlap (like the irritating fabric worn by monks), or a Persian word for “soft.” They believe that if religion is something to truly be believed in, then it must transcend earthly laws (even if those laws are from the religion itself) and focus on something deeper, such as Truth and Love. Sufism itself is not a sect, as it has hundreds upon hundreds of sects and denominations within itself though most of them believe that being stuck on following religious laws for the sake of following them borders on idolatry and worshipping the laws themselves rather than God.

Medhi Aminrazavi showed segments of a film I think was called Beyond Words, that was considered very rare footage of an extreme sect of Sufism where initiates engage in acts of self-mutilation as expressions of love and devotion to God. Aminrazavi called this “sacred intoxication” and “sacred madness,” and it followed the idea of being so intoxicated by love that the more you suffer, the more genuine your love for God and your faith in Him. Some people were using knives, as an expression of “cutting off their ego.” Aminrazavi, several times, referred to it as “utter madness.”

There’s even science behind the “high” of these experiences. There’s a branch of brain science called neurotheology, which is the “neuroscience of religion” and it claims that the left temporal lobe is the seat of religious/spiritual experiences. The left temporal lobe lights up during these experiences, but some people are more prone to these religious highs than others.

The lecture was really interesting in that it kept discussing the idea behind “the more you love someone/something, the more you’re willing to suffer for it” and that, apparently, being in love, especially Divine Love, is madness, and that when you’re in love, even if you’re in love with a fellow human being, you’re not acting “rationally.”

How utterly mad being in love must be.

Morgan’s Initial Response to “Introducing White Disability Studies”

This reading screams Nothing About Us Without Us in its tongue-in-cheek wit. It’s easy to just assume that Disability Studies encompasses all people with disabilities, but I’m not surprised by Chris Bell’s assertion that current Disability Studies is alarmingly White™. Disappointed, but not surprised. Even the 2002 Queer Disability Conference in California, it didn’t surprise me that Bell found the entire group of organizers to be White. It was as infuriating as it was unsurprising, though, given that the entire queer rights movement in America owes its life to women of color, at least one of whom was also a trans Black woman.

Then, Bell’s summary of the MLA Conference on Disability Studies at Emory University in 2004 was just laughable in that uncertain, hysterical way—the awkward, high-pitched squeaking laughter asking: Is this guy serious? when Davis talked about including the whole “post-race” debate. Race relations have been sinking faster than the Titanic with all the flagrant abuse of power that our current government gets away with, and its empowering of today’s rabid Neo-Fascist racists.

Morgan’s Response to Jay Timothy Dolmage’s “Introduction” to Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education

WORD COUNT: 610

The introduction to Jay Timothy Dolmage’s Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education is both an enlightening and unquestionably horrific opening to an issue running rampant across the United States and Canada. While I wasn’t necessarily aware of the racist, xenophobic, ableist, and homophobic rhetoric was being touted and actively encouraged at the university level, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised by the knowledge. Appalled, but unsurprised, as the attitudes haven’t changed much. The heterosexual, the white, and the men still hold all the power (especially if they’re all three) and they still tout the same “fearful” rhetoric of becoming a minority majority, as if it takes away their power. If anything, it just gives them more power through their higher positions and fearmongering rhetoric, that sounds exactly like what Dolmage quotes from leading eugenicist Charles Davenport. So even though we’ve made it through the Civil Rights Movement, First & Second Wave Feminism, and the Stonewall Riots and have made several leaps in the advancement of minorities, these advances, evidently, aren’t much, especially regarding disabled persons on college campuses, where only the bare minimum is offered in terms of accommodations, simply to avoid legal ramifications:

“the use of higher education as a principle of equal opportunity—opened many doors and removed many barriers, but all too often disability was used to test the edges of opportunity; for people with disabilities, the equal access promised by the second step never really came, or only ever came in a qualified way. Here, while the discourse or discussion about disability was about welcoming and including, the back end was being built to construct disability purely under what might be called a medical and a liability model: define disability medically, treat it in a legalistic, minimalistic manner designed to avoid getting sued. This can force accommodation to happen, but it also tends to force—always and only—the legal minimum accommodation” (Dolmage, 2017)

Dolmage also informs the reader that, because the law requires only the bare minimum, colleges and universities don’t always tell you what accommodations they can or are willing to offer. This makes it especially hard for individuals like me, who have ADHD, to seek assistance where necessary.

My own experience with the Office of Disability Services is such that because I’m not seeing a psychiatrist (but a therapist, who cannot prescribe medications), I don’t have any paperwork to bring to ODS. I know that I have trouble focusing on one thing at a time and deadlines are my worst enemy, but because institutions rarely ever codify the services and accommodations offer, I don’t know what to ask for to gain assistance. More than that, any accommodations for shifting deadlines wouldn’t provide any assistance or preparation for post-school life in the real world. So, without the proper psychiatric paperwork prescriptions from a prescribing doctor, there’s really nothing I can do about getting accommodations. And, even if I did, there’s always the stigma, as Dolmage notes, of being considered to have an “unfair advantage.” My only option is to keep arguing with doctors about my treatment, hope for the right medication, and suffer through my inability to focus and hope beyond hope that my brain doesn’t set me up for failure.

Dolmage’s introduction has given me more insight on how universities are failing to accommodate students like me and students who have it worse than me. While we’ve made some in moving past the eugenicist movement of forced incarceration, forced sterilization, human experimentation, inhumane conduct and mistreatment, we as a society still have a long way to go with regard to how we treat our fellow humans that aren’t Straight, White, and/or able bodied.

References

Dolmage, J. (2017). Academic Ableism. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Ciao!

Hi! I’m Morgan, this is my test post, and I look forward to the semester as an exhausted, underpaid grad student working on English endorsement courses for my teaching license.