![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
4/5. Collection of essays on disability justice. I picked this up because the author is a queer disabled person (I thought woman before picking up the book, but actually she/they are genderqueer), and disability writing from that perspective is, uh, not thick on the ground. Turns out this book is not really meant for me because, though I am also queer and disabled, I am white and well-off, and therefore really not part of the community she is speaking to. More power to her – she knows she is writing a very specific collection for very specific people, and she knows how rare that is and how unusual it is for her to get this published.
That said, there are still pieces here that really speak to me. Specifically, this one on how our models of trauma are ableist and unrealistic and how they only approve of traumatized people when they are either in crisis or getting steadily better or over it. Any other state is not acceptable, and any life that simply incorporates trauma needs to be pathologized. This is a thing I have been shouting about in fandom for literal years, and this essay does it much better than I ever have. (You guys wouldn't believe some of the comments I had to delete on a story that dared to posit that a person could just live with the consequences of trauma without having a breakdown or going through a traditional healing process, and also that his trauma lived a lot in his body but not very much in his mind because that's the sort of person he is. This upset people a lot because it violated the Rules of Trauma Narratives or something, and wow did they let me know.)
4/5. Collection of essays on disability justice. I picked this up because the author is a queer disabled person (I thought woman before picking up the book, but actually she/they are genderqueer), and disability writing from that perspective is, uh, not thick on the ground. Turns out this book is not really meant for me because, though I am also queer and disabled, I am white and well-off, and therefore really not part of the community she is speaking to. More power to her – she knows she is writing a very specific collection for very specific people, and she knows how rare that is and how unusual it is for her to get this published.
That said, there are still pieces here that really speak to me. Specifically, this one on how our models of trauma are ableist and unrealistic and how they only approve of traumatized people when they are either in crisis or getting steadily better or over it. Any other state is not acceptable, and any life that simply incorporates trauma needs to be pathologized. This is a thing I have been shouting about in fandom for literal years, and this essay does it much better than I ever have. (You guys wouldn't believe some of the comments I had to delete on a story that dared to posit that a person could just live with the consequences of trauma without having a breakdown or going through a traditional healing process, and also that his trauma lived a lot in his body but not very much in his mind because that's the sort of person he is. This upset people a lot because it violated the Rules of Trauma Narratives or something, and wow did they let me know.)