The equal rights rhetoric on most progressive web sites usually is limited to the problems white women face, with the occasional smattering of race-related dialogue and GLBTQI issues.  (I've written about this before.)  Mama Salon isn’t immune to that sort of narrow journalistic focus, although they seem to do a better job at throwing in the occasional hey-don’t-forget-us piece.  The works of Kate Harding bring attention to the struggles facing white, overweight women, for example, but the more cynical of us lump her works in with problems-white-women-face.

That’s why I was pleasantly surprised to see Elizabeth Svoboda’s piece on the Aspie culture movement on the cover of Mama Salon.  Ms. Svoboda gave a proper shout-out to the Deaf-rights/culture movements that began almost thirty years ago.  I don’t mean to strut my shit (yes, yes I do actually) but the deaf empowerment struggles are the foundation of every current, relevant disability movement happening today.  And, although our battles are far from over, I like to think that we’ve softened the Hearing People enough that Aspie culture has less of a fight ahead of them.

I don’t always hold abled people in high esteem.  Fighting the lot of you, for almost two-decades , just for the most basic of accessibility needs tends, to make even the most Pollyanna of us jaded and bitter.  In my worse moments, I actively detest hearing people and devise all sorts of twisted ways I can get back at them.  Right now, the captioning on many Cox Communications channels is wonky, if not lacking completely.  I envision dangling meat hooks and “enhanced interrogation procedures.”  On my better days, I truly believe that with the right amount of education, the disabled will be treated as equals rather than downtrodden creatures garnering only pity and paternalistic attitudes.

A run-through of the comments on Ms. Svodoba’s piece shows me that, unfortunately, even the most progressive of persons still maintains reactionary opinions on how to approach and treat the members of the disabled community; as if possessing all one’s senses and employing neurotyptical thinking made a person inherently superior.

Following is an excerpt from a comment that Phillyart wrote

I like to think that Salon readers are smarter than the average bear, so comments like the one above frustrate me because they contain gross inaccuracies, profound misunderstandings of what entails a culture, and some plain old entitled paternalism.  No, you can’t have your fat culture because possessing the property of being overweight doesn’t meet the criteria for defining a culture.  And, the debate against using cochlear implants was framed twenty years ago, back when implants were only one channel and often failed.

(The deaf community, as a whole, isn’t against cochlear implants per se, but rather their mischaracterization as a panacea for deafness.  Those who are implanted require years of expensive therapy for the implants to be utilized correctly, a fact that for some reason never makes it into those puff pieces on miracle, implanted children who suddenly can sing pitch-perfect Christmas carols).

Another commenter, Aeschylus, writes (excerpted - format botching mine by accident and incompetence)






Even though I’m a activist for the disabled community, particularly the deaf one, I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know everything about every disability.  Frequently in my wanderings I meet new people with disabilities and take the time to learn about how they adapt themselves to a rather smug society that generally only cares about macro-oppressive issues, such as gender, race, and sexuality.  I don’t deign to assume that because I’m disabled too, I automatically have an insight on their disability’s mechanisms and psychological needs.

The deaf culture movement has less to do with accepting wholesale brokenness than it has to do with educating the general population with over forty years of hard and soft science on the neurological and sociological differences that exist as a result of what I call a “visuocentric” brain.  I feel about people who deny deaf culture the same way a lot of progressive folk feel about people who reject climate change.  It takes a narrow person to deny decades of research because that research doesn’t fit their particular world view.

(Accepting their “brokenness” is an incredible psychological journey for any disabled person.  Using that as a litmus test for actualization is pretty shallow.  There are days when I want to tell the world that, damn it, I’m not, not, not disabled!  And, then there are days when I feel broken and whaddya-gonna-do-about-it?)

Ms. Svodoba’s piece should be commended for referring the burgeoning Aspie movement, but she seemed to focus more on the debate itself and the discussion about various therapies than the rationale for Aspie culture.  Since I’ve become more-or-less self aware about my deafness and my role in deaf culture, I’ve tracked similar interest pieces on deaf culture.  They’re always very similar to Ms. Svodoba’s piece and I imagine that the writers think themselves similar to Dian Fossey, in the ooh-look-different-people-I-shall-observe-them-and-report vein.  Unfortunately, pieces like that tend to be self-referential and muddy the waters for activists such as myself, while stirring up passions on both sides of the disability culture debate.

Deaf culture’s scientific mojo comes from the language (visual-based – e.g. American Sign Language) and the cultural isolation that arises from having a disability that cuts off most forms of verbal communication.  Aspie culture, the only other valid disability culture, has a more theoretical background that currently can only be hinted at with science. 

Post-modern psychologists argue that the brain’s construction of reality is wholly dependant on how it processes information provided by the environment and the language used to describe it.  If we remove the language aspect of reality construction (another scientific argument for deaf culture), by-the-by, people’s sensory construction of reality tends to be similar, even among those of us with sensory disability.  Aspie brains; however, process sensory information so differently from the average person that their construct of reality cannot be made normative through traditional means, like discourse.  The spoon is not a spoon, you betcha’.

Embracing and exploring Aspie culture gives us new insights on how the brain works and how we create artificial realities in order to maintain our societal systems.  I believe this makes some people uncomfortable because they then have to question how our society is built, and the cultural brainwashing that every individual undertakes during their childhood, just so that they fit in proper society.  Those who simply cannot join proper society because of their disability are a stark reminder of the inherent injustice of our system even though the system encompasses every aspect of our life.

To me, the oppressing are the truly disabled.