disTHIS!: more thoughts on disability

Last Wednesday I attended the disTHIS! film series. It provoked quite a reaction from me. I started trying to blog about this on Wednesday evening, but found that I kept rambling. The films and the setting and the fellow movie-watchers invoked so many responses that I had to keep editing my writing! At any rate, here is my account of the night:

I arrived a bit early and sat in the corner reading my book and trying to resist the urge to buy a drink. The coordinator (?) of the night, a very kind man who later on proved to be both witty and very well versed in his film knowledge, came up to me and introduced himself asking how I had heard of the film series. I told him I had heard about it through blogs and that I was a transgender blogger who often writes about disability and links to disability blogs. He encouraged me to stick around for the Q & A and left me to my book (which is the amazing Dorothy Roberts’ killing the black body).

The lights in the room were very low though so I stopped reading and started people watching. People watching quickly turned into body watching as more and more diverse bodies entered the room: traditional college-age students, elderly people, Black, Brown, and white folks, people wheeling in and walking in, a few guide dogs, and a good split of men and women. Looking at all of these people I felt incredibly relaxed and comfortable. As one of the panelists would say later in the evening “finally not everybody is looking at me”. While being transgender or developmentally disabled or Brown or female aren’t identities that arise from the same historical precedents, they all can share the bodily identity of standing out in a white supremacist hetero-patriarchal (ableist) capitalist culture.

My partner tends to teases me about the amount of reading and writing I do related to disability. Whenever I suggest a movie or theatre event that discusses disability she’ll bemoan having to see more of “my crips”. So tonight I was wondering if she would be uncomfortable in a room filled with such varying bodies, or if she, like me, would feel much more comfortable. I ask this partially because since we came together I have made an effort to ensure that no event I invite her too will be completely white. This may sound a whole lot easier than it truly is, especially if like me you are a white person who works in a largely white space and graduated from a largely white college. My network of friends tends to stay white simply because of the spaces I navigated in the past. Now being white doesn’t make someone a bad person, it just sets up more barriers and can cause more initial discomfort. On her part, my partner tries to ensure a gender-aware mix of friends to avoid all the ridiculous questions I get.

Tonight, in a room filled with people with disabilities I felt even more relaxed than in an LGBT scene. My body began to feel normative and sexy. I look at all these other bodies – bodies that are not supposed to exist, bodies that are viewed as freakish, unnatural, unsexy (or nonsexual), and felt very confident. This is not that I looked at other bodies and thought “oh, well at least I don’t look like that” but instead a feeling of “look at all these beautiful people, they look a lot like me”. The ways that I have had to negotiate my body, everything from buying clothes to having sex, are similar negotiations for the people in this audience. Some of the panelists who born with a physical disability even used the gay “coming out” terminology to refer to the time when they accepted and embraced their identity.

There’s a possibility here that the important differences between disabilities and other identities can be ignored in this “we are the world” homogeneity. The man who is HIV + is experiencing something very different than the person with fibromyalgia. When I claim disability I certainly don’t want to diminish the importance of the tremendous differences between various disabilities, if anything I want to highlight them. Gaging by the amazing array of disability identity presented in the films that is the goal of the creators of disTHIS! as well.