Disability Blog Carnival #13: What Box?

I have finally gotten the carnival together. To start with, here are a couple of images of the most important boxes to me at the moment:

The ever-important Kleenex box

The even-more-important nebulizer

In other words, I’ve been sick which has been making my asthma obnoxious which is why I’m another day late here.

For other people who are late (I remember Anne C in particular was working on another post): Please comment on here with submissions from your blog or other people’s. I will try to include them, even after the Carnival is over. I won’t print your comments with submissions, I’ll just add the submission, to preserve submitters’ anonymity. You cannot use the form anymore, not since Monday, because it’s passed on to the next person.

On to the Carnival.

Late or forgotten submissions

Watch this area for late submissions or things I forgot to include earlier.

Of Boxes and Bias is a post at Existence is Wonderful with a great analogy about the various boxes we’re put into and the various responses we get to stepping out of them, as well as narrow definitions of personhood and humanity.

The Box, from the blog the strangest alchemy. This one deals with the fact that people are taught about child abuse, trauma, and sexual abuse, but only in a limited and formulaic way that does not allow for, for instance, trauma that happens during so-called “therapy”.

If you liked that one, you might also like the (multi-page, so don’t just read the first) monologue Disability Shame Speaks from Ragged Edge, which discusses some of the same issues.

Literal Boxes

Roof Spider Car-Top Wheelchair Carrier is a post from Wheelchair Diffusion about a literal box that is useful to disabled people.

In Fingerspelling: Tying T.rex to ASL, Carl of Kalalau’s Corner describes using a box — a window, in particular — to teach people fingerspelling.

Current Events

There were several submissions about the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

Slumgullion #36: Deranged Killer Edition at The Gimp Parade pulls together many posts dealing with the shootings at Virginia Tech, from a disability perspective, including many many important posts dealing with the ableism of simply labeling Cho Seung-hui “paranoid” or “psychotic” and smearing entire groups of people while not looking at what really made him do something this awful.

From Diary of a Goldfish, the post Here, There Be Monsters compares Cho Seung-hui’s shooting rampage to other daily rampages that don’t make the news, and discusses the boxes, disability-related and not, that he gets put into.

In Don’t Draw the Wrong Lessons from Virginia Tech’s Misfortune, from Yet Another Never Updated Blog, the author discusses the difference between crime and having a psych label.

Other Stuff

Diary of a Goldfish reminds us about Blogging Against Disablism Day on May 1st.

In Imagine That, Dave Hingsburger of Chewing the Fat explores the category of disability with several women who regard themselves as old rather than disabled. Then in Mobile he confronts his own prejudices that have led him several times to put people with developmental disabilities in the box of “foreigner” and forget that we’re as much a part of our cultures as anyone else.

Here at Ballastexistenz, I’ve written a post called The Awful Prison of Autism about the boxes that I’ve been expected to conform to both as an autistic person and as a public autistic person, and the different ways autistic people can react to these boxes. My old post Let’s Play Assumption Ping-Pong deals with some other specific boxes.

Review of “Till Domestic Violence Does Us Part” in ASC On the Couch is described by the submitter as: “An accessible video about domestic violence made by and for ASL users probably already seems “out of the box” to some, but the ASC reviewer has respectful suggestions for making it even more widely relevant.”

Pregnancy is Hell is a post by Retired Waif about the boxes she is put into by others as a woman with multiple sclerosis who’s chosen to get pregnant. In Pretty on the Outside, she discusses the boxes she’s put into when she doesn’t use assistive devices versus the boxes people are put into when they do use them.

In Plurality as a Choice, etc Lilac and Yushyu of the Amorpha system describe the controversy in the multiple community about whether multiplicity can or should be voluntarily chosen, and the problem with forcing rigid definitions of a particular way of being. They write, Maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places, but I’ve seen a lot more harm done by people being bashed on and driven out of communities for “you can’t do it like that!” than by “fakers and wannabes ruining our reputation.”

Winter Blues by Larry of in regione caecorum rex est luscus discusses his despair at how little anyone in the autism community wants to hear their boxes are all wrong.

Danechi of And Stimming with Rainbows of Every Design writes a post called Autism Prerequisites that deals with the prerequisite experiences autistic people are expected to have had, even if we haven’t.

The post ~deafness~ at Urbania to Stoneheads deals with, among other things, oralism.

Christie Gilson: Agent for Change from David of Growing Up With a Disability describes how the only person who tried to put a Fulbright scholar into a limiting box for being blind was a special education teacher (go figure). He also has an older post called Thinking Outside the Box about not having to do things the way they’re always done. And Which Box?, about a choir director who saw “cerebral palsy” and “tenor” as mutually exclusive categories and went from putting David in one to putting him in the other.

In Disability and Economic Relevance Anne C. of Existence is Wonderful describes how discussions of the ethics of disability too often get derailed by putting disabled people into the box of potential economic burdens.

In On Sunday, Angelika writes about various forms of help.

Damon of Do Your Worst eulogizes his longtime friend Sara Morgan in Sara Morgan 1972-2007.

In Diversity and Relativism, Donna of Donna Williams’ Blog poetically describes the sort of boxes she does and doesn’t want in her life: “If I had a box for my soul/I’d hope for one made of dust/so that the light would shine on the particles/and make stars.”

Gordon of Gordon’s D-Zone writes about science fiction stereotypes of disabled people in My X-File X-Life.

Ettina of Abnormal Diversity writes a post called Any Explanation Except Discrimination, about how two different medical approaches to disability are just flipsides of the same coin rather than a true change in the system.

Bev of Asperger Square 8, who regularly photographs boxes in the form of squares, has three posts: This Box I Call My Life, Life-in-the-box: Part Two, and (Not free) Prize in Every Box, all of which deal with various aspects of the autism and Asperger labels.

Planet of the Blind’s The Wrong Box describes Steve’s ability to shake up people’s boxes just by existing around them.

In The Glass Box, Andrea of Andrea’s Buzzing About describes being treated as invisible because of lack of acknowledgement of her unusual social signals.

Wheelchair Dancer writes a post called Boxing Pretty about the various categories in her life as a dancer and a wheelchair user.

Joel of NTs are Weird has two posts. Autism Myth of the Week: Empathy takes on the myth that autistic people are cold and uncaring about other people. Iran and Putting Words in Our Mouth is about the many forms of influence in communication all over the place, versus the fact that it’s always users of facilitated communication who are forced to prove over and over that they exist and are not unduly “influenced” by their facilitators.

The Autistic Bitch From Hell, of Whose Planet Is It Anyway?, writes a post called Human Strengths, Human Weaknesses about how autistic people’s skills get called “autistic skills” while non-autistic people get to just have “skills”.

A Cry For Validation or Whining? in Barbara’s Tchatzkahs is about the misunderstanding and isolation that often come with chronic illness in an ableist society. She writes of her ex-friends, Some of them outright admitted they couldn’t deal with the fact that I wasn’t getting better. Like one of my late parents said to me “you’re useless now.”