Why Aspies ARE disabled, and we should embrace that.

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WOW, you REALLY didn't understand me huh?

If you don't receive the same level of support, that has NOTHING to do with differently abled! Let me break down the term for you:

differently-- not the same way
abled -- can do

SO, differently abled means that they can do something in a way that is not the same.

SO I can't cummunicate with people well on a non verbal level! BIG DEAL! I can communicate better in nearly every other way. HECK, I apparently have less of a social interest, and I have the intelligence and persistance, to allow it to be less of a problem.

Yesterday, a VERY NT woman revealed to me that she had a pet peeve I did, and it was about a type of foreign non verbal communication. Apparently SHE didn't know what it meant, and I DID!

That was FOREIGN though. I have only known some indians to do it.(BTW I call it a head wag, and it means "I am following your conversation". It is similar to the American(Or is it used elsewhere also?) head nod.)

So I can't play sports, BIG DEAL!?!? I could make whatever to compensate.

So I can do the stuff, just in a different way, etc...

Hahaha, the South-Asian head-bobble.

I don't think the social and medical models are mutually exclusive. Society needs to adapt to peoples' differences, but the more one is different from the mean the more difficult and impractical it is for society to adapt to those differences.

To me, disabled means broken. I'm not broken. I just work differently, like a Routemaster in an area of bendy buses.

I know you don't mean it this way, but that's a stereotype other disabled people have been trying to fight forever. They're not broken either.

The only way I can think of that the medical and social models of disability would be mutually exclusive is if a person was treated against her will.

As I have said before, I prefer speaking of a dialectic between being differently abled and differently enabled. However, my ideas are still rooted in the social model of disability.

The obvious answer is "legs."




In fact, it is the disabled who have the intangible social power, in so far as they are able to convince or compel a largely able-bodied society to expend time and resources catering to their special requirements.




Thanks. I am already very familiar with the SMD and the anti-cure movement, which is why I have such strong opinions on them.






I am trying to complete a reductio ad absurdum of the social model of disability by using a case of obvious disability about which no controversy should reasonably arise. I think we could reasonably discuss whether AS is a disability. Is that a conversation you'd be interested in having? Also, are you still defending the SMD in principle or are you arguing that it only applies in certain cases?

You are focusing on one category of ableism (able-bodism). There are others.

As a sociologist, I am not in the ranking game. I do not place oppressions on a top-10 chart. IMO, each category of oppression, and each experience of oppression, needs to be examined uniquely. Only then can we look for similarities with other categories and experiences.



Well, I wonder where that power was hiding when I was being drugged up with antipsychotics and receiving electroconvulsive treatments.



No, I support the social model of disability - first and foremost because it was the conclusion I reached as a teenager, long before I ever heard of it. However, second to that, I see it supported inductively from the broad number of cases I have come across (reading, interviewing, directly observing, etc.). Yes, I would be interested in reading what you think on Asperger's and disability.

As indicated by my avatar, I am a Foucaultian (more precisely, a critical poststructuralist), and the social model of disability is largely indebted to his work on the "government of disability."

This is really all semantics. Disabled, differently abled, etc. are just mere terminology - what some people want to call others, what some want to call themselves, whatever. The point I was trying to get across is it doesn't really matter what the label placed on you is.
But, then I thought. It does actually matter to some people, doesn't it? It might matter because, if another person has heard of this term and associates various misconceptions with it, wouldn't the term breed conflict? I'd rather just be called my name than a label, but sometimes I can't hide the fact something is different, and I either tell people or let them think less of me for something essentially beyond my control. But, sometimes, when another has heard the term, yet as I said only knows misconceptions, problems arise. It could be harmless, though irritating, for example someone told me Aspergers is a "social disease". Poverty is a social disease.
Point being; if you want to say you're disabled, go for it. If you don't, good still. I don't care. Not my problem. I'll call myself whatever I want.

I agree with that. I think we should each call ourselves what we want, i.e., not what the establishment may call us.

I call BS.

Good. With that in mind, I vote we call ourselves Vietnamese chicken waffles.
At least that way - no irritating stereotypes. Unless someone has something against vietnamese chicken waffles. Why should anyone? They don't exist. Well, until now, they didn't.

lol

Good point. As I've said in another thread, there are some advantages to having Asperger's. I wish people would focus their attention on them more.

Yeah and the thing is, non-disabled people already convince and compel each other to expend constant time and resources catering to their special requirements. For instance, there is an enormous amount of money spent on such things as seating and lighting alone in America. This is so that people who don't bring their chair with them everywhere, and who need light to navigate and understand things, can be accommodated. This is normal so we don't see it as special or accommodation, but in fact it really is. That is why these people are non-disabled in these areas. There are a huge number of things that non-disabled people need that some disabled people do not need, and we expend tons and tons more time and resources on that than anything else for anyone else.

Disabled people, on the other hand, have to overtly convince and compel anyone to expend time and resources on us, because we're considered special, and things are designed in such ways that automatically shut us out in one way or another, even though there's no particular logical reason to do so most of the time. People don't think about us because they don't have to. And if they really really want to, they can find ways to shut us out in the most extreme ways possible, making us live and go to school in "special" places so they don't even have to see us. Disabled people are always compelled to put up with non-disabled people (even, often, when they're scary people who'd rather we didn't even exist), whereas they have the privilege of not wanting to put up with us even because our appearance disturbs them in some way and nothing else, and can just make us go away to special places where most of them don't have to see us unless they choose to work in or visit those places.

The power dynamic is not comparable and treating it like disabled people have this massive power to demand what everyone else gets without even demanding it, becomes silly. Acting like non-disabled people don't effortlessly get what disabled people have to fight for, is ignoring one of the main points of disability and proving it's not even understood, it's just conveniently glossed over, the way the existence and nature of disability is glossed over all the time (with no penalty to non-disabled people even though they're quite probably in the minority).

brilliant post.