Legal Affairs Debate: Is the ADA expanding?

As always, we wish to thank our readers for bringing news in the wide world of Disability Studies to our attention. Professors Samuel R. Bagenstos, and Ruth O'Brien have been invited to discuss the importance of recent Supreme Court decisions extending the power and scope of the Americans with Disabilities Act to allow individuals to sue states for monetary damages. Sam Bagenstos represented Tony Goodman before the Supreme Court in its latest decision rendered January 10th. Enjoy daily installments of their discussion in Legal Affairs magazine's web exclusive "Debate Club" through Friday, February 10. If this only whets your appetite for more, why not check out next weekend's 'Disability, Narrative, and the Law' conference at Ohio State University's Michael E. Moritz College of Law. The program features an illustrious group of presenters, building on the groundbreaking effort to link law and narrative found in Ruth O'Brien's edited collection Voices from the Edge.

Additional Resources:
Samuel R. Bagenstos, Disability Law blog, http://disabilitylaw.blogspot.com

Disability Blogs Roundup, #7

Where to start? It's been a busy month. From the world of disability history, don't don't don't miss Jonathan Edelstein's fine post on deaf defendants and gestural communication in the 18th century English courtroom. It's a preview of Edelstein's Old Bailey blog symposium, coming up February 12; I'll be contributing a post on DS,TU to this unique symposium, so stay tuned for more on this subject.

The confirmation of Samuel Alito as US Supreme Court justice just this week, and the Supreme Court's ruling on physician-assisted suicide law in Oregon a couple weeks ago, were matters of grave concern for many in the disability community -- but you might not read about that in the newspapers, as Mary Johnson noted. That's why you need the blogosphere. Google tried to celebrate Louis Braille's birthday with a faux-braille logo on 4 January--but Google's continuing inaccessibility for blind users is all too real, notes the Blind Access Journal. An online petition drive is underway to bring Google up to speed on this.

From my (current) home state, California, a few stories worth noting: the deceptively named "Opportunity to Repair Act of 2006" will be a proposition on our ballots. Seems fifteen years since the passage of the ADA, some folks still need more time to get accessible (news accounts of this topic are becoming a tiresome genre of their own). Mary Johnson, Ahistoricality, and Orac Knows are watching this one. But in good California news, longtime disability rights activist, author, and radio host Shawn Casey O'Brien is running for State Assembly (official campaign photo above, left).

Blogs are often quite personal, but this past month a few disability bloggers have gotten really intimate: Timmargh shares his last two ID photos taken for his "disabled person's parking card"--the most recent being taken with Tim in bed, pillow in full view. Even more personal: Alex at Pseudarthrosis shares recent x-rays of her own hips and knees. (Orthopedic xrays should come in wallet size, like kids' school pictures--they'd be so much handier to spring on unsuspecting strangers.) David at Blob is recuperating from a broken shoulder--but he's still online, and has the pictures to prove it. Kestrell has posted part one of her memoir, in which Coyote juggles eyeballs, Shakespeare is quoted, Dickens is loathed (by a real "half-blind orphan" who is definitely not interested in being a sentimental stock figure), and "I have come to sense my own body as technology: buggy, kludged together, and yet granting me the ability to sense the world, to move through it." Speaking of the body as technology--Gimpy Mumpy is right (as usual), this new musical "exoskeleton" MUST have applications for artists with disabilities.

This blog has noted random disability items from the world of Bollywood in the past (here, and here), but Nilesh Singit has posted a more detailed listing of current Bollywood titles featuring disability themes--check it out. And staying with intersections between Asian cultures and disability for a moment, momblogger Kristina Chew at Autismland wonders if growing up in California with her Cantonese-speaking grandmother Ngin-Ngin was, in retrospect, good preparation for the non-verbal communication skills she needs in raising her son Charlie.

Got a chair in need of repair? Lisa Egan had flashing castors installed on hers most recently, saying "If the fungus growing at the back of my kitchen cupboards in my dingy bedsit has hallucinogenic properties, I'll have everything I need to enjoy my own mini-rave!" Agent Fang, meanwhile, went and tried to fix her own wheelchair: "Taking it apart was easy. Mark this. It is the signal that things are going too well," she explains ominously.

Did someone say Valentine's Day? Oh, okay--well, if you're British, disabled, over 18, and in love, send a picture of yourself and your partner in a liplock to the folks at Ouch!--and they'll judge your technique and recommend specific oral-motor therapy goals for you. No, that's not true, but they will give a "romantic prize" to the winning photo. You have until 13 February to show them how it's done.

And finally: The Super Bowl is this weekend. Football fans, be sure to use your lucky leg to cheer on your favorite team.

The next roundup should be in early March. Tips are always welcome; it's been so exciting to see the number of blogs I need to check grow, grow, grow with each passing month.

Fraudulent memoirs and disability

In the aftermath of the James Frey uproar, other stranger-than-fiction memoirs are turning out to be more fiction than fact. The latest such exposure reaches into the literature of disability: a Navajo author who wrote books about raising an adopted son with fetal alcohol syndrome, about caring for another adopted son with AIDS, and having other experiences with disability, turns out not to be Navajo, and not to have raised such sons. The LA Weekly has the whole sordid--really sordid--tale of deceit (thanks to Ralph Luker at Cliopatria for the tip on this one). Readers weren't the only ones fooled; "Nasdijj" the writer (aka Tim Barrus) won prestigious literary awards and glowing reviews in major newspapers. This scandal has a disability-blogging angle, too--apparently Barrus's wife ran an autism blog.

If you're interested in exploring more about disability and life-writing, you can't go wrong with G. Thomas Couser's books, Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (Cornell University Press 2004), and Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (University of Wisconsin Press 1997), or any of his journal articles on the same subject. If you've ever read a disability-themed biography or parenting memoir that felt somehow "wrong," Couser can probably explain why it had that effect, and then proceed to point out ten other ethical missteps in the book that maybe you hadn't caught.

"A curious phenomenon"

Now ongoing, in New York City, NEUROfest, a series of theatre events (including plays, monologues, puppetry, a musical, and a full-length opera) on neurological topics (January 5-29); next month, in Liverpool, a one-day colloquium titled Autism and Representation, sponsored by the Association for Research in Popular Fictions (24 February), not to be confused with the Autism and Representation: Writing, Cognition, Disability conference at Case Western Reserve University last October. Then there's the publishing boom on autism topics, fiction and non-fiction, as described in a Guardian article last month by Sarah Adams, titled "A Curious Phenomenon," which asks, "So are we talking a whole new literary genre? Is autism the new crime fiction, the new chick lit, the new miscellany? Is there such a thing as 'spectrum publishing'?"

If the field of disability studies has given more attention to physical disability and less to cognitive disability in the past, it looks like that could be changing now. Hang on tight.

January 16: Frances Browne (1816-1879)

Years and years ago there lived, in a certain town a poor old blind woman. All her friends and neighbours pitied her because she was poor and blind. But if they had only known it there was no need for pity. They might well have envied her instead, for this old woman had the gift of magic, and because of her magic her blind eyes could see farther and clearer than any other pair of eyes in all the town. She could see hidden things; the things of fairyland, and of the world beyond this.

--Katharine Pyle, Preface, Granny's Wonderful Chair and its Tales of Fairy Times by Frances Browne (1916 edition)

Irish children's author Frances Browne was born 16 January 1816, in Donegal. She became blind at eighteen months, in consequence of a bout with smallpox. As a child, she listened while her many siblings recited their school lessons, and gleaned vocabulary from church sermons. In her twenties, she began publishing poetry, with enough success to move herself and her sister to Edinburgh, then London in 1852. Besides her children's stories in Granny's Wonderful Chair and elsewhere, she wrote three novels in the 1860s.

For more on Browne:

Thomas McLean, "Arms and the Circassian Woman: Frances Browne's 'The Star of Atteghei,'" Victorian Poetry 41(3)(Fall 2003): 295-318.

Robert Dunbar, "Rarely Pure and Never Simple: The World of Irish Children's Literature," The Lion and the Unicorn 21(3)(September 1997): 309-321.

C. Nelson, "Art for Man's Sake: Frances Browne's Magic and Victorian Social Aesthetics," Bookbird 36(2)(1998): 19-?.

What you didn't see during the pre-show...

Richard Cohen Films has started an interesting new web feature, Newsreel Cinema Online--short documentary videos about disability, homelessness, and other overlooked subjects. The first one "What Happened Outside the 77th Academy Awards?" is now posted. (The audio includes some language that would not be work-safe in all environments.) I was there--at the back of the march, with my kids, and we were separated from the pack before the events depicted--so this was a chance, finally, to see what happened with the front of the group.

Disability Blogs Roundup, #6

And a happy new year!

Except if you're the manager of the Star nightclub on New York's Upper West Side--shouting "You can't come in here, you're in a wheelchair" at a prospective partier is hardly festive. (Seems like New Yorkers are having enough access problems these days with the transit strike, anyway. And the city parks.) Not that Californians are behaving much better where access is concerned....Mary Johnson's been following the recent ADA controversy in Julian. Meanwhile in Oregon, schoolgirl Emily Lang needs to sell bracelets to raise money for a door to her own school...and Mary Johnson rightly asks, what about the school's responsibility? The parents' organization? The other students? "Why only her?" Katja at Broken Clay is looking for statistics to refute the ever-popular "I have never, ever seen a wheelchair passenger on the route" refrain. What do YOU say to that one? Planes aren't a much friendlier alternative for the chair user--not even if you wear your tiara, as it turns out.

Sigh. Out with the old and out-dated, please, and in with the shiny and new. There are always new-to-the-roundup blogs to note. Damon at Do Your Worst is having PA problems (a holiday-season epidemic, it seems); Eeka at One Smoot Short of a Bridge found the 1856.org project's website fascinating (and you might, too: they're "documenting a current artistic project about the abandoned mental institutions of Massachusetts"); The Willa Woman patiently explains why "winter and wheelchairs do not mix." On the tech front, Gary at 6by7reports has an hour-long audio report on the World Congress and Exposition on Disabilities, a trade show recently held in Philadelphia.

And for some innovative winter technology, try the Trail Boss, or maybe the Snowpod. (And then when you get lost in the snowy wilderness, Scott Rains suggests this gadget.)

Got some big resolutions for 2006? Maybe you've promised yourself, "I'm going to find time for more serious literature." Well, David Faucheux tipped readers off to the fine, fine service Librivox, which is a free audiobook service delivered by free download or by podcast. Site visitors are invited to volunteer; by reading public-domain texts, costs are minimized. This month: Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, with new segments available in various formats every Monday, Wednesday and Friday starting 2 January. There are plans for non-English-language reads soon, and the weekly poetry reading invitational also looks fun. Maybe you've decided to garden more--Gimpy Mumpy has the telescoping tools to make that more comfortable for many. Did you decide you need new ornaments for the tree next December? Firinel suggests making ASL salt-dough ornaments--better get started now! And while you're in the kitchen, some Braille biscuits might also be nice, says Lady Bracknell at Ouch! (part of the "Merry Cripmas" feature that makes Ouch! such a fine blog).

It can't be January without some best-of-2005 lists...here's Gimpy Mumpy's. Susan LoTiempo's "Very Short List" of the best disability films of 2005 includes Murderball, and...well, that's it. LoTiempo wonders, where's the disability-friendly movie that's NOT about men and masculinity? She clarifies, "one that didn't concentrate on wheelchairs crashing into each other, locker room blather and overdoses of testosterone." Sounds great. (I'd suggest Liebe Perla, for its scenes about shopping and appearance--being of small stature, Perla Ovitz cannot buy suitable adult clothing readymade, and instead sews her own dresses, and advises her young German friend Hannelore Witkofski on fashion--no testosterone in sight.)

Next roundup should be posted in early February. Until then, stay warm (northerners), stay cool (Australians), and stay dry (my fellow Californians).