Greetings, all...

With all the kind and thoughtful things that have been written and said
about disTHIS! to date, nothing has made me more pleased than discovering
the following blog post earlier today.

While the movies we show, and the exposure we give them, remain the
foundation of the project, the real alchemy occurs when disabled and
non-disabled people alike who would probably never engage each other in
any other setting, process what they've just seen, and how it relates
culturally and personally, through the experiences and insights of the
people sitting with them during our post screening discussions.

Mik's experience is exactly the kind of coming together we hoped to
cultivate and support.

Perfect present for our 2nd birthday.

Best to all,

Lawrence Carter-Long
Disabilities Network of NYC
http://dnnyc.net
The disTHIS! Film Series: disability through a whole new lens
http://disthis.org

======================

Saturday, May 10, 2008
disTHIS!: more thoughts on disability
Link:
http://coffeeandgender.blogspot.com/2008/05/disthis-more-thoughts-on-disability.\
html

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.