I have been lying low so far because after a personal attack on the list,
it's difficult to respond without at some level either continuing the
personal attack or defending the person attacked -- when either response
seems to prolong the attack. But I'm jumping in anyway...
Surely we can disagree more productively than this. Maybe it's because I'm
writing from Canada but I find it difficult to understand why people care so
much what Tom Shakespeare says on a disability web site -- I mean, so much.
If we have any disabled people here whose opinion carries such weight, I
would love to find out who they are. I don't expect anyone else's writing
to represent me and my views, and I expect to disagree with other people and
their politics sometimes, in some ways, and this includes other disabled
people. That said, I agree with Ron Amundson that people tend to hear what
they want to hear, making it difficult to "say" anything else.
But surely this, at least, should be a forum in which we can disagree and
debate instead of just taking -- or assigning -- sides and positions. None
of us has exactly the same idea of what a "disability studies position" or
"disability rights position" should be on an issue, and our ideas aren't
static -- they shift in response to debate and discussion as well as in
response to political changes and circumstances.
To return to the "cure" part of the cure thread, I think there is a wide
range of views held by different people with disabilities and I agree with
Tom's column that people with degenerative disabilities are more likely to
want to be cured, or at least to want not to get any worse, than people with
more consistent disabilities. In this arena, it's very difficult to
distinguish between disability and impairment. But my experience as a
person with a degenerative illness shouldn't in anyway contradict the
experience of someone with a different disability -- or the same one -- who
has a different experience or position. Again, I agree that these
differences too easily get represented as "divisions" or "inconsistencies"
-- or, more likely, just get misrepresented -- to people unfamiliar with
disability politics.
I'm also interested in what people think about Maria Barile's question to
Tom about medicalization -- maybe people responded to it off list. But I
think it's important to distinguish between medicalization and medical care,
between the existing absurd over-emphasis on cure and the possibility of
cures in general.
Regards,
Kate
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