Crip Kinship

Crip Kinship the Disability Justice and Art Activism of Sins Invalid, by Shayda Kafai, is another amazing book. The reason it's so important is that Kafai documents the history, creation, and legacy of this incredible performance group of queer, disabled people of color. We have the opportunity to learn the first hand stories of Disability Justice leaders such as Patricia Berne, Maria  Palacios, and Leah Piepzna Samarasinha. This beautiful writer gives us insight into how Patty Berne and co-founder Leroy Moore imagined a radically inclusive theater community at a cafe named La Pena in Berkeley, California. Knowing that this wonderful performance project started over one conversation gives me hope that any dream can be possible.

Happy pride

Happy 2023 pride month. I know it's been a long while since I've written anything on here, but get ready for a lot more content. Given that this is LGBTQ  pride month, I've decided to feature some of my favorite examples of LGBT representation in the media. Although the 2012 film,  Any Day Now, is  extremely sad and has no main cast members  of color, it has a very special place in my heart. This is because Performing Arts Studio West, a professional training program for actors with disabilities, directed by the kindest man I know, John Paizis, gave me the opportunity to be an extra in this movie. Being able to have a part in Any Day  Now was really meaningful because it tells an important story of the struggles that a gay couple go through trying to adopt a young man with Downs Syndrome. If you are in the mood for comedy though, check out Netflix's original series, Special. Starred in and written by Ryan O'connell, Special is about a young white guy who has Cerebral palsy, and is trying to figure out how to be more sexually active.

While these are decent examples of LGBT representation, I would now like to present even better ones. In the 2021 version of Cinderella, the ingenious Billy Porter redefined what it can mean  to be a fairy Godmother as a queer, Black, man. This is huge, because it shows the world that magic can come from people of all races and gender identities. Another fantastic show with excellent representation is The L Word Generation Q.  In this groundbreaking  series, beautiful Jillian Mercado, who is Latina, tries to face the challenges of having a baby with a trans man, while dealing with her Muscular Dystrophy. We need to celebrate this content that embraces queer characters of color during pride.

A fantastic book

One fantastic book I've read semi-recently is The Pretty One; On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me, by Keah Brown. Ms. Brown is a young, Black, activist/writer who has Cerebral Palsy. What I love about The Pretty One is that Keah Brown really focuses on telling the readers who she is as a whole person, instead of merely explaining the mechanics of her disability. For example, I know that she loves cheesecake, and her favorite band is Paramore. I also found out that she likes Tia and Tamera Mowry  more than Mary Kate and Ashley Olson, because she sees herself in the former. Keah Brown's book is a real life illustration of Patricia Berne's principle of Disability Justice, ''recognizing wholeness.''

#RepresentationMatters part 2

Does the entertainment industry really care about inclusion? Recently, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences created an initiative to celebrate more of our country’s diversity in films. This initiative states that starting in 2024, for a movie to be nominated for Best Picture, it must meet a diversity threshold for two of the four following standard:

On-Screen representation, themes and narratives

Creative leadership and project team

Industry access and opportunities

Audience development

Although this is a valiant effort to be more inclusive on the part of the Academy, I personally think it is deeply flawed. This is because even if a movie has racial diversity in the senior executives on their marketing team and women getting industry access and opportunities Hollywood could still be exclusionary. Hollywood can still rely on the ableism that the entertainment industry has been built upon since its inception. From My Left Foot to Me Before You to The Upside, Hollywood has always made millions of dollars off of movies about people with disabilities without casting anyone disabled. 

One 2020 film that would fit the requirements of the new Oscars’ inclusion Initiative, but is not fully inclusive, is Prom. Prom is about a group of washed-up Broadway stars that want to create a prom for a young lesbian who has been bullied. Even though I hate to criticize a movie with such an incredible cast (especially Kerry Washington), I do see one major flaw. There are absolutely no people with visible disabilities in the entire ensemble. According to RespectAbility, a nonprofit organization that fights stigmas and advances opportunities for people with disabilities, 1 in 4 Americans has a disability. This means that when movies like Prom and others choose not to include people with disabilities, they are also choosing not to be representative of the largest minority group in the United States. The entertainment industry should include people with disabilities and people who identify as members of other marginalized groups, not to be rewarded, but because it’s the right thing to do. 

https://time.com/5887344/oscars-diversity-rules-movies/

#RepresentationMatters

Advocating for more disability representation in the media is something I have been passionate about for the last 10 years. I have seen all of the errors that Hollywood has made related to portraying people with disabilities. The entertainment industry has messed up so many times: from Ryan Murphy playing into the stereotype of wheelchair users wishing to walk on a Christmas episode of Glee, to HBO Max’s film, The Witches’ decision to make Anne Hathaway’s character have a missing limb. Another recent example of disability drag is Sia casting a neurotypical actress to play an Autistic character in the movie Music. Yet recently, the media has thankfully upped its representation game.

For one, the Lifetime channel created a wonderful movie, Christmas Ever After. Christmas Ever After is the first romantic comedy to star an actress who uses a wheelchair. Ali Stroker, the star, is a world changer in her own right, being the first wheelchair user to win a Tony Award for her part in the Broadway musical, Oklahoma! Besides Christmas Ever After’s decision to cast a character with a disability authentically, the story also portrays a person with a disability in a more positive light than most films do. Instead of the director, Pat Kiely, reinforcing the stereotype that people should pity people with disabilities, she made Ali Stroker’s character, Izzi Simmons, a professional writer. Ali Stroker’s success absolutely should be celebrated. However, as one of my best friends, Andy Arias, an amazing, disabled, superstar advocate, pointed out, actresses with disabilities who are white, like Ali Stroker, are not necessarily paving the way for performers who are multiply marginalized.

Speaking of multiply marginalized people with disabilities, perhaps the most important accomplishment of 2020 in the disability community is the publication of Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century, edited by Alice Wong. Alice Wong, who is a disability activist, curated this incredible anthology of stories by some of the greatest leaders in disability justice today. Patty Berne, the executive director of Sins Invalid, who is a queer, disabled, femme of color, writes one of the vignettes. She beautifully explains the importance of loving each other, even in the midst of the world maybe coming to an end. Another great contributor to Disability Visibility is Lateef McLeod, who is a Sins Invalid performer. He writes about how his augmentative communication device helps him create political and social change. Equally powerful was the story of Jeremy Woody, who recounted how he was denied access to an ASL interpreter while in prison. This story defines both the need for access everywhere and the need for story telling by people with disabilities for the disabled community. All three of these stories represent experiences we do not normally read about, but we need to. In my opinion, Disability Visibility shows us that the best disability representation in the media happens when people with disabilities create it authentically. 

We Love Like Barnacles

This new era of ushering in Joe Biden and Kamala Harris into the White House is a symbol of hope for the United States. For me, it’s hope that brutal killings of Black people, like George Floyd in Minneapolis, and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky will no longer go unpunished. It’s also hope that America realizes that under no circumstance is it acceptable for immigrants to be thrown into cages, or Black Lives Matter protesters to be tear gassed. Additionally, my hope is that no president will ever be as mean as Donald Trump was when he said to representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, “go back to your country.” Simply put, I hope that people in America return to treating each other with kindness and respect.

            However, we as people who are disabled or probably know someone with a disability cannot simply rely on hope alone. My beloved Sins Invalid community sent us a clear message in their most recent performance, “We Love Like Barnacles: Crip Lives in Climate Chaos,” that we need to love each other, especially in this time of climate chaos. One of the performers, Maria Palacios, known as the Goddess on Wheels, discussed issues around emergency preparedness. Painfully, this beautiful, brown, immigrant, disabled woman conveyed the fact that a lot of people with disabilities do not have the money, due to being on Supplemental Security Income (SSI), to buy enough food to prepare for an emergency. Nobody should have to worry about not having enough food. Lateef McLeod, another brilliant performer and a published author, expressed his concern of whether a person will take him out of his wheelchair in a fire. A memorable part of Lateef’s piece was when he mentions his anxiety about firefighters forgetting to take his augmentative communication device, which is his primary means of communication. Since Lateef is a Black Jamaican man, he also worries about whether the color of his skin will impact how first responders treat him. Again, no one should have to deal with any of these concerns. Bianca Laureano, an award winning writer and sexologist, also performed a powerful piece in “We Love Like Barnacles.” She very personally discussed her devastation around the President’s careless reaction to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. President Trump did not do anything (except have a helicopter dispense some rolls of paper towels) to help thousands of people who lost their electricity and homes in the aftermath. There is absolutely no way in the world that this should be acceptable. All of these incredible artists’ stories demonstrate that there is definitely not enough love and human kindness on this planet. Even if the world is about to end, we need to go out treating each other with more compassion, love, and support.

Another great book that I think is important to read and discuss is Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc. Leduc, who has Cerebral palsy, brings her disability justice lens into her analysis of childhood stories. This author quite intelligently lays out several problematic themes that are hidden beneath the surface of these fairy tales. After reading this amazing piece of writing, I have a completely different perspective of the tales I grew up knowing and loving.

First, Leduc notes that fairy tales, for the most part, follow norms of white, heteronormative, and ableist society. Besides the obvious fact that these children’s stories usually center a male-identified prince and a female-identified princess who are in love with each other, there are numerous other ways that fairy tales exclude kids from marginalized communities. I don’t think there is an inherent problem with portrayals of heteronormative, white characters, but when that is all we see, we are not giving children of color the opportunity to see themselves reflected in popular media.

With all the books, dolls, dress up costumes, movies, tea party sets, and other paraphernalia Disney has created based on its princesses, it’s shameful that Tiana is the only Black princess (who spends most of the movie in the embodiment of a frog); there are no Disney princesses that are Latinx or South Asian. Looking at the Walt Disney Studios’ creative decisions even closer, there is so much more evidence that they operated under white supremacy. Behind all the magic and innocence of Cinderella’s fairy godmother and Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather, from Sleeping Beauty, was Disney’s choice to exclude characters of color and those with disabilities. Even in the more modern Toy Story movies, both of the main characters, Woody and Buzz Lightyear, are white. By mostly centering white characters, the Disney studio is sending a message to children that only white stories matter. This world-famous company needs to diversify its characters and plotlines, so that children of all backgrounds can recognize themselves in the content they consume.

Leduc, also points out that several fairy tales tend to align with the medical model of disability. Interestingly, Leduc views Cinderella’s fairy godmother transforming her clothes from that of a lowly scullery maid to that of beautiful princess as a metaphor for those who want to transform people with disabilities into what they consider “normal.” Likewise, the beast from Beauty and the Beast physically changes after receiving the affection of the person he loves. It begs the question why the beast finding happiness physically changes him, why is being “fixed” somehow a great reward for doing morally right? 

Another fascinating fact explored in the book is that only villains, such as Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty and Ursula from The Little Mermaid, can stray from society’s ideal of beauty. Only having villains be fat or differently formed says to children that being different is somehow inherently wrong. Why can’t Disney princesses be fat or disabled or old or scarred in any way? Disney princesses and other good characters should not be pigeonholed into this idea that beauty has to mean an able-bodied, cis, heterosexual, white woman. Human diversity is beautiful and needs to be more represented in the morally upright, not just evil.