sundries

[rm]

In the last panic to get ready for this trip.

Anyone here want do so some basic web development for Erica and I? Not a whole lot of $$, but also not something hard. It's an afternoon of your life in all probability. Drop me an email if you're interested, we'll be in touch probably when I get to Switzerland. -- Done!

When you stand up and decide to make stuff, especially stuff that's challenging or confronting in theme and style, a lot of stuff can and will go wrong. The people you thought were on your side won't be, not just with an absence of support, but sometimes with judgments that can seem a little startling. This can be extra hard when you're doing work about a topic or a life you're supposed to be embarrassed by.

So let's be clear. I'm a queer woman working with another queer woman on a show about sex work that features a character with a disability who is an adult with his own life, history and sexuality. The show also contains a lesbian romance and two awesome M/F friendships with sexual overtones that provide some romantic ambiguity. These characters are not dumb, and they're not doing sex work because they can't do anything else.

The show is not targeted at women vs. men or gay people vs. straight people. It's not a "wink-wink, nudge-nudge, celebrate your bachelorette party with us" show (although you can if you want). We think what's identificatory about of the piece is the theme of persona and the gulf between who you are and who you want to be. And we think what gets people in the door ranges from "oooo, hot chicks in fetish gear" to "woman changes her life" to "people singing about the weird hidden worlds of New York."

This is a story about longing for a world you can only buy half of and how we fill the gaps.

Sound interesting? You can help us by either donating towards making our workshop production come true and/or spreading the word.

Randomly, a friend noted last night that I often use the construction "person living with a disability" and she said that that read as me being really uncomfortable with people with disabilities. So, I just wanted to tell you what I told her, which is a) I'm sorry if I gave anyone that impression and b) it's an artifact in my writing from when I was writing a lot of material for the website Disaboom, which requires that construction as part of their writers' guidelines. I'll try to pay more attention to this one.

Profiles of several subway preachers.

Now, I have a lot of laundry to do, a pounding headache, and a flight to catch. More later.

Comments

[rm.livejournal.com]

*nod*nod*nod*

One of the things my friend said to me the other night was "OMG, more than pretty much any marginalized group, people with disabilities are going to argue about what phrasing they like best, so this is data, but none of us agree with each other, so there you go!"

I try to be "person first" even when I find somewhat inorganic (since I am neither a "person who is gay" or a "person who is Jewish" or a "person who has celiac disease" in my own consructions for myself), but if it is the most consistent thing I can use to be not-assholish, that's perfectly fine with me (and much easier than "person living with").

I worry about the deaf/Deaf thing a lot, but that's mainly because the folks who are deaf that I interact with are on-line, so typing counts. And again with the living in DC and the living in DC during some pretty big controverisies at Galludet, so I'm sensitized to in a way that's atypical.

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

Actually I think QUILTBAG folks come close to this because it's pretty much an umbrella term for anyone who is not heteronormative, and that's a huge collection of diverse groups of people.

Disabled folks are also basically all these different groups of people who may have relatively little in common except that they are not part of the abled, or normative community.

And just as you can find transphobic gay males, so can you find deaf people being terribly judgmental about people who use wheelchairs. The alliances are uneasy at times, and the nomenclatures utterly unclear...

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the disabled don't really have a "community" other than that we've all been excluded from Normalville. (Heck, right now I can't even point to a national organization for all disabled; we're all chopped up by type of disability. How the heck did we ever get the ADA passed?)

The FABGLITTER queers at least pretend to be inclusive within the acronyms and so on, even when actual inclusivity breaks down (do we have to let the straight kinksters in? what about the straight transgender persons? Oh no, not the ugly people!), but I can't even figure out what capital-D disabled would *be*. It's not like we have parades or a nonprofit.

Which is another reason I tend to use language which refers to a specific chunk of disability-dom, since a) what matters to the visibly disabled won't always matter to the invisibly disabled, and so on, and b) so many of us have multiple flavors anyway.