Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged disability

How We Got Barb Back: The Story of My Sister’s Reawakening After 30 Years of Schizophrenia

“There is a truism in the mental health community that says that troubled families focus on the sickest member, even welcoming the sickness, to avoid dealing with other problems,” writes Margaret Hawkins on page 77. By this time, I had been fully introduced to her family and was struck by the truth of this statement. Margy’s family story began as so many others did in the mid-twentieth century. Dad is a professional, Mom stays home with the children, three children live in a safe suburb, walk to school, argue with each other, and clamor for more freedom.

Shirley Adams

Interlacing themes of poverty and perseverance in the Cape Flats area of post-Apartheid South Africa, Oliver Hermanus explores the relationship between a mother, Shirley, and her quadriplegic son, Donovan, as he slips into depression after having been shot in his neighbourhood. Having given up her job to care for her son, and having been abandoned by her husband, Shirley struggles to support Donovan’s mental and physical well-being and at the same time take care of herself.

12th Annual Allied Media Conference (6/18 - 6/20/2010)

This weekend I attended my favorite conference: the Allied Media Conference (AMC) in Detroit. This year was way more subdued than the last two years I’ve attended. There were fewer people of color present; I didn’t go to very many sessions; I was on my period, feeling real low energy; and it was still amazing and transformative, and once again reminded me of what I’m here to do in this world.

Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America

Evelyn Nakano Glenn is a professor of Women’s and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley and author of Forced to Care. Perhaps because of her vocation, the book has a bit of a textbook flavor to it, but as it progresses, she lets go and begins to fill it out with a more humanistic view.

See What I'm Saying: The Deaf Entertainers Documentary

See What I'm Saying is an irreverent yet important introduction between Deaf performers and a mainstream hearing audience. The film, which is open captioned, follows a year in the lives of four performers who make up a cross-section of the Deaf community in terms of art form, race, gender, and sexuality.

Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature

The pockmarks on the Aztec figure on the cover of Suzanne Bost’s Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature are a reminder of the proximity of disease, illness, and pain to death.

My Baby Rides the Short Bus: The Unabashedly Human Experience of Raising Kids with Disabilities

My Baby Rides the Short Bus is an anthology of articles written by parents about their firsthand experiences of raising children with disabilities. In addition to their common identity as parents of disabled children, the contributors also share another trait: all of them find themselves outside of the mainstream by virtue of identity or political perspective.

The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader

I should probably start by saying that I absolutely love Gloria Anzaldúa. She was a writer whose work focused mostly on her identities as a woman, Chicana, lesbian, feminist, etc.—identities she insisted could not be separated from one another.

Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing

We live in an age in which the memoir has become the preeminent genre. Writers of the contemporary memoir are not required to be a “somebody” or famous personality before publication. This is the age of the “nobody” memoir—the writings of individuals who tell stories of lives that in previous ages would have remained untold.

Wherever There's a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California

On June 16th, 2008 Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin made headlines as the first same-sex couple legally married in the state of California. The couple, who first met in the ‘50s, spent the majority of their adult lives advocating for equal rights for homosexual couples and lived to see their goal realized. Although Californians have fought the battle for same-sex marriage most visibly in the past ten years, activists such as Lyon and Martin have been addressing the issue of discrimination against homosexuals in California for several decades.

Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation

The best resistance literature describes a specific moment in history and is written within the context of an organized movement. As the disability movement gains more exposure and support, Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride will join the list of classics among resistance literature.

Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces)

The latest Pedro Almodóvar film is very much what we expect, but it’s also what we don’t expect. One of the many things I love about Almodóvar is that he has normalized some of the most marginalized and oppressed people in our society in his films (i.e., Transgender Latinas, mentally ill communities, and queer communities). I also love that he creates relationships with all the people in his cast and allows them to demonstrate their acting range as he cast them in other projects in completely different roles.

Sins Invalid (10/04/2009)

As a dancer, I feel most alive when I'm present in my body; when I breathe hard, feel the power of my feet on the ground, and sense the weight in my head and arms.

Mean Little Deaf Queer: A Memoir

If I had to choose only one genre of book to read for the rest of my life, I would choose memoirs.

Call Me Ahab

Anne Finger’s award-winning Call Me Ahab showcases a plethora of historical and literary characters—each of whom is in some way disabled—and imagines new scenarios for their lives. It’s an exciting concept and while several of the stories in the nine-story collection left me cold, Finger is to be lauded for her originality. Her talent is particularly vivid in "Vincent." Here, Finger brings Vincent Van Gogh into the late twentieth century.

Spell Albuquerque: Memoir of a “Difficult” Student

I found Tennessee Reed’s memoir of her educational and professional life to be inspiring and informative.

The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities

The Revolution Starts At Home is not your usual zine. At 111 pages, it qualifies as a book, and I’m excited to say the editors are looking for a publisher. Pending publication*, it will soon be available on the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence website. Don’t be turned off by the bulk; this is an important zine that needs to be read by all activists of any sort. Contributors include Alexis Pauline Gumbs of UBUNTU, collective members of Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA), Vanessa Huang, Gina de Vries, and a collection of women from the Mango Tribe.

Poster Child: A Memoir

The memoir these days can be a forum for the expulsion of demons, the settling of a score, or with more frequency, utter fabrication to gussy up one’s adventures. On occasion, however, the memoir can enlighten, help heal wounds, and inspire the reader. Poster Child author Emily Rapp was born with a genetic anomaly that led to her left foot being amputated before the age of four, which led to a life of prosthesis.

The Amputee's Guide to Sex

Posing as a handbook, The Amputee's Guide to Sex opens up a new world: not of cold lifeless prosthetics, but the raw, quivering beings that lie beyond them. Containing prose poems and free verse, the Guide is sharp and unapologetic, yet simultaneously contains yearning and heartbreak. This book strips our obsession with Being Different/Otherness down to what it feels like from the other side; it's the difference between empathizing and fetishizing.

Bare Hands and Wooden Limbs: Healing, Recovery and Reconciliation in Cambodia

The documentary is a shocking, consciousness-raising and eyes-opening movie. It is the true story of people living in post-war Cambodia, who try to re-build their country after years of dictatorship and fear. It is shows how they prepare the land to build new houses, how they clean the ground from millions of landmines and, finally, how they managed to make both ends meet. The viewer sees how the people learn new professions to survive and earn the living – some learn how to deal with livestock, some learn how to plough and others make tools.
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