Drage blant sauer

  Many have different versions for the future, both disabled and nondisabled. In my last post, I wrote of disabled grief. This week I'm less interested in loss and more in possibility. What does a future look like when it's built not dispite disability, but through it? For the disabled and neurodivergent populace, the mainstream version of the future doesn't include us. The futures we are offered are too often rooted in cure, correction and conformity. Stripped of disabled and other voices than those hale or rich. A neurodiverse and autistic view of the future relies neither on past nor present. Look to the past, and you see eugenics, pathologization, institutionalization and fear. Look to the present, and you see ignorance, pathologization, infantilization and budding awareness. Neither are wholly ideal, but neither are yardsticks to measure.  If we look to critical autism and neurodivergent scholars such as Luke Beardon and Dora Raymaker (in collaboration with Chris...

  Grief is a curious thing, universal to so many, yet claimed by none.   Yesterday, the 15th of May, marks the 77th year of the commemoration of al-Nakba ‘the Catastrophe’ of 1948. The event that saw the massacre and banishment of entire villages of the Palestinian people and still leaves gaping wounds and lasting scars. A day of mourning and rememberance, it made me think of grief. Who can demand the grief of others to be silent and not offend, either ethnic or disabled, when the world cares so little? The phrase disabled grief is perhaps paradoxical. How can grief be disabled? Or queer? Or ethnic? It is but a feeling, devoid of descriptive agency or claim. Who can claim grief as their own? I categorize disabled grief in this instance as the grief of a hypothetical past, not a marred present or bleak future. Perhaps stepping on several academic toes, even within my own field of study. Who claims to know grief, truly? As impossible as knowing the mind of a beetle or a ...

  For nigh a century, autistic people have been either infantilized or animalized due to differing social behavior to the average neurotypical. The time is well beyond changing that. Animalization, for the uninitiated, is the practice of equating minorities or groups of people with animal behavior or traits. This is frequently seen in literature to denote outcasts and villains such as Caliban, Voldemort, Heathcliff and Gollum. It stands in contrast to the ablebodied, ableminded hero of little flaws. It has been done historically to indiginous people worldwide, ie that the Native American or Indiginous Australian person are attuned to the land more so than the colonizer and thus represent an inferior and at the same time, more pure state of humanity. Animalization ties into such things as the myth of Terra Nullis (again the Americas, Australia or Palestine; the land was uninhabited, or the indiginous population proved themselves poor stewards of creation) and the concept of the O...

  Jeg har hatt en åpenbaring og en jeg håper kan styrke mine skribleriers fremtid heller enn svekke dem. Selv om norsk er språket jeg strengt tatt skal beherske best, støter jeg på stadige vansker når jeg skal oversette den autistiske opplevelsen fra tanke til ord. For hvert begrep jeg mangler, for hver formulering jeg må omskrive for å passe inn steder hvor vi ikke har sluppet til, jo fattigere blir ordene. Det handler ikke om at norsk ikke duger til aktivisme, men at det rett og slett ikke er rede for AST enda. Det føles hele tiden som om jeg må gå omkring med andeføtter når jeg egentlig er en rev. For å forklare selv en brøkdel av revens opplevelse til endene, som ikke skjønner ett kvakk! Noen ting egner seg bedre på norsk. Å skrive om AST er ikke én av dem, foreløpig. Når det kommer mer kunnskap til, kommer jeg til å gjenoppta å fornorske mine mange kjære fagfelt og begrep. For forskning og videre skrivings skyld er det med tungt hjerte at jeg foretar et nødvendig språkbytt...