I'm sitting here shaking my head. I'm frustrated by classism along with my now misfit experience with communities (as a result of actual success in defying my class and social location) and I don't know how else to cross class lines but bluntly and clumsily - and go quietly along with the 'group' with no voice in order to even BE in the group. I've been a lurker here for some time. I know I am writing to this group with non-academic standards, less formally, and this group remains bound by academic standards of both terms and functions. I've been on this list for a while and feel 'unqualified' to write or speak on the subject based on the, perhaps, even unrecognized group requirements. What does that do as far as diversity and inclusion? And what do I do about it?
My attempt: I'm trying to make some connection between my interests and this community based
on the bottom beliefs I do have with this group. But it requires learning a new language, credentials and replacing words and work I already have for the same life stuff which I'm not so sure I think is a good idea to actually translate to the 'other' academic language. I like the words I already have and my life's work has already given me a full education - one that is perceived largely as invisible.
We are creating a world where the different languages are no longer about 'culture' or
'country', but education. Different words for the same life stuff and I've steadily
grown in dislike of the abstractions and articulations that are part of academic language and the immense losses of brilliant clarity that non-academic language can occasionally bring.
I've thought reading and 'gaining' the same background of written materials, words and knowledge would do bring inclusion and learning the 'who' of leaders that are active and significant would do it (be inclusive and meet diversity), but it feels like I'm walking into quicksand and then trying to fly. I'm sinking the more I try to become part of. I've been on the verge for a while to give up in realizing you do have to be at a particular social location with particular elements in your background to even fit in these subgroups in our society - AND the real problem is that no matter what the illusions about our society and about mass populations and being at the top - gaining fame, credibility, reward, social power at the top of the hierarchy, well, that structure by design embeds the very real problems we're trying to overcome, so no matter what you change, if you have the top down pyramid, you've got the fraud and some people who are getting the brunt of the system design. The lack of
translators and the lack of effective communication - if it exists at all - is becoming apparent.
I'm out of social place partly because of this online technology - and so I know all too well, the results of writing like I am doing. I've seen groups fall apart by class differences. So we do have opportunity to be diverse and inclusive online but little experience of how to make it work. I think Maybe I should just go elsewhere to where no one cares or discusses these issues - or if they do, they don't even use the words disabled OR philosophy - because, well, you simply have to be up the chain of education to do so - UNTIL these words become an assault on your life from the actions of people you don't know from another group that don't know you either. I now relate some of these terms to what I've learned from women's histories - like how one was burned as a witch or how hysteria in women was a gender
creation.
There is a vast potential in exploring beyond the same life 'matter' and 'subject' that goes beyond the narrowly defined world. Why I say this is because I lived it - not just
read books about other worlds.
I've been saying over and over - to make things fair in this world - why don't we
start mass producing the idea that not being a football player or a farmer or a cook
is a 'disability' in our society? My dad never learned to cook. He doesn't even make
himself a sandwich yet. He's 80. No one has claimed he has trauma issues, low self esteem,
or a non-functioning in a major part of life. He's simply a man that doesn't cook.
Yet over the course of 20 years I have witnessed the mass producing of people named disabled - for endless reasons of behaviors unlearned -and watched children and women in all sorts of ways get labeled with 'disorders' and 'disabilities' because they too have lives in which they don't learn it all. No one does. Worse, stereotyping of behaviors means that
we pile all kinds of different experiences in the same category.
Worse, what women and children DO learn based on two or more groups of
stereotypes works against them and is the material that can be exploited for the 'research' and 'treatments'. How does this happen?
Money. Classism. Jobism.
My dad can 'buy' his way out of every disability - if the requirement
to function at all in this world needs money. Don't believe me? Well, I'm
not speaking for everyone. I'm speaking for some. At some point, people don't
fit categories nor can one person write one sentence that covers the whole
issue for everyone. But I will say that to a significant degree, you can't dismiss
the classism, and with that classism, you can not dismiss evaluating the functions
of economics and occupations and whose ideas become systematic for a one size
fits all - which simply can't and isn't. Real people with real needs for care
are mixed up with other real people with real needs for care - because in
the end we are all real people with real needs for care. It's a matter of
who, when and where real people with real needs for care are not being met.
What is clear to me is that our language; the categories of both people and academic subject matter denies important facts about social location, time and space. The structure of our thoughts and
our functioning - especially academic, excludes the 'place' and 'facts' of people's lives.
It's as if people are abstract - removed from fact = fiction. When you have removed fact,
any fiction will do. And when people start living fiction, fiction looks like fact.
Like with the advancement of flying of people in a metal container across the globe, our image and text technologies have allowed humans to remove themselves from their location and travel to other places, cross over time, and defy 'space' by image and text. Language and bodies use to be tied to a locality, but we have yet to understand what this removal from actual planet 'facts' and our technologies have done to relationships, our bodies and language.
So, In other words, from my perspective, 99% of the people who have no longer been trained in farming and/or don't know how to grow their own food and eat based on grown food from the planet but simply via exchange of money are eating disabled or non-functioning in a significant area for life survival. It's already a disability, disease creating, a health problem and a lack of education problem. It will produce homelessness and further disabilities.
They have a true disability and resulting health problems, no? Only money will save them. Of course, while trends for disability do indeed involve a person's ability to care for oneself. The requirements of 'how' one cares for oneself as constantly changing with social shifts, have no real uniform standard across society.
Actually, I just don't believe in labeling people 'disabled' for things they simply haven't been taught to do or for the changes in society that are forced on their lives like a tornado.
Am I saying things that have already been said?
What is the purpose of my writing?
Perhaps an introduction. Perhaps an exit. More so, a process of which the outcome is not determined.
Karen Henninger
Creative Artist of Life
Visual Artist and Visual Writer
Women Studies Independent Scholar and Community Education Specialist
Violence Prevention Activist
Cultural Environmentalist Consultant
Media Literacist
"The same cultural mindset that has exploited and polluted the natural resources of the planet has had the same unfortunate impact on the human global family as well. Dumping chemicals into the bodies of humans with limited ideas in brain science and chemistry is about as smart as dumping chemicals in the air, water, soil and anywhere else on the planet. The long term permanent solution is becoming smarter about ourselves, our relationship to each other and our proper relationship to our home, planet Earth. Our species' artificial design for humans can not ultimately succeed when it is on a collision course with the innate natural design for all of life on Earth. " Karen Henninger
Cultural Environmentalism; promoting a movement for the people and their well being paralleling the movement in progress for the earth.
Date: Wed, 5 Jun 2013 17:16:08 -0400
From:
[log in to unmask]Subject: Re: Whose Diversity? Which Inclusion?
To:
[log in to unmask]
Dear Shelley, thanks for sharing an eloquent excerpt from
your introduction to the important issue of DSQ on Improving Feminist
Philosophy by Taking Account of Disability. I hope that feminist
philosophers in positions of power will read the issue and have the courage and
social conscience to challenge their biases about who counts as a
philosopher and what counts as philosophy, biases that benefit some feminist
philosophers at the expense of others who are left to struggle with
underemployment and professional exclusion. I hope that feminist
philosophers in positions of power will have the courage and social
conscience to challenge the ongoing promotion of a narrowly
defined feminist philosophical establishment and a narrow
conception of philosophical rigor.
In solidarity, Andrea Nicki
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