Blog moved!

I'm a bad blogger...I decided to make the move to Wordpress with the Adventures of a Part Time Wheeler blog.  There are things I like about both blogging platforms, and dislike about both platforms, but it is allowing me to organize my posts in a way that works better for my work/school/pain-addled brain right now.  I'm hoping that I will be able to afford my own URL as well in the fall (likely www.parttimewheeler.com, or a similar derivation).  It's still under construction, so don't mind the dusty bits.

Feel free to head over there and take a look.  If you like what I'm writing, doing, accomplishing, I would love donations to my adaptive aid fund through GoFundMe or directly through Paypal.  If you like how I write and want to hire me for editing work, check out the details here to get started (rates negotiable!  Help a gimpy grad student pay her medical bills!).

Call For Proposals: National Women's Studies Association 2014 Fat Studies Interest Group

Here is the NWSA Fat Studies CFP for 2013. Please feel free to pass on!

NWSA 2014 Fat Studies Interest Group Call for Papers--
November 13-16, 2014 in San Juan, Puerto Rico
Papers on any topic at the intersection of women's studies/ feminism/ womanism/ gender/ sexuality and fat studies will be considered.


At minimum, your submission should fall under one of the following themes for NWSA 2014:

• Rethinking the Nation
• Trans-feminisms
• Technologizing Futures
• Love and Labor
• Creating Justice

For more information on the themes, visit: http://www.nwsa.org/


While this is an open call, topic suggestions from last year's meeting include:

• Social media and Social Networking
• Fat sexualities (asexuality, hypersexuality, deviant sexualities)
• Defining and Refining Fat Studies
• Fatness and Beauty Ideals/Beauty Privilege
• Women of Color and Body Size/Fatness
• Fat Intersections (including race, nationality, disability, sexuality, appearance/beauty)
• Fat Feminist Research Methods (including role of the researcher body)
• Fat Feminists Theorizing the Body
• Fatopias/Fat Utopias
• Transnational Fat Bodies (immigration, globalization)
• Knowledge-sharing/de-colonizing
• Fat Performance/Performing Fatness/Fat Icons
• Fat Activism & Feminism/Fatosphere

If you are interested in being a part of the 2014 Fat Studies panels at NWSA, please send the following info by February 13, 2014 to NWSA Fat Studies Interest Group Co-Chairs Michaela A. Nowell and Candice Casas: (michaela.nowell@uwc.edu and cdbuss@uncg.edu). Please make sure one of us confirms receipt of your submission.


Your submission should include your:
*Name, Institutional Affiliation, Snail Mail, Email, Phone.
*NWSA Theme your paper fits under (and fat studies topic area/s if yours fits any of the above).
*Title for your talk, a one-page, double-spaced abstract in which you lay out your topic and its relevance to this session.
*AND a 100 word truncated abstract (NWSA requirement).


Each person will speak for around 15 minutes, and we will leave time for Q&A. In order to present with your name in the program, you must become a member of NWSA in addition to registering for the conference.
_______________________________________________________________

If you submit a fat studies related paper or panel, you can tag it with the keyword 'fat feminisms,' and likewise search the program for 'fat feminisms' to find relevant panels. If you submit a paper or panel on your own, we encourage you to use this keyword if your paper or panel fits the bill. We thank NWSA for adding a keyword that helps conference attendees locate fat studies panels.

Access in feminist scholarly spaces

Silly selfie sitting next to my wheels

Last month I was at the National Women's Studies Association annual conference in Cincinnati, Ohio.  I've been to the conference four times now, thanks to one of my masters department professors letting me know about a call for papers in 2010.  As a co-chair of an interest group of the organization, I have to go whether or not I'm presenting a paper or moderating a panel.  This year was one of my "multiple hats" years, with co-chair duties, co-presenting a workshop, moderating a panel, and presenting a my own paper.  So off to Cincinnati I went for my annual gathering of scholarly feminist type people.

Photo description: A selfie taken sitting on the floor next to my wheelchair. The black cushion & back tire with thin spokes are in the foreground, with the rosy cheeked, bespectacled, auburn haired author in the background smiling.

Because of the cost of this conference and the lack of funding available at my institution to get to events like this (which, for people who want to become professors and work in academe, these conferences are required to get a job after graduation), I decided to drive from North Carolina to Cincinnati, Ohio.  Without stops, the drive takes about 7.5 hours according to Google Maps.  With the hourly stops my spine requires of me, this became a really long venture.  The perk was that I could pick what assistive devices I wanted when I wanted them.  I wasn't stuck with only crutches, or only my wheelchair.  This gave me some freedom....and it came in handy because the elevation changes from driving through the Appalachians resulted in less-than-fully inflated tires on my wheelchair (with no good way of inflating them without hunting down a medical supply store or bike shop).

I can't get to the first floor! Ack!

While my transportation afforded me some choices, the conference is notoriously barely accessible for a variety of reasons.  The past years' conferences were held at a hotel convention center.  This year it was at the Duke Energy Convention Center with a separate official hotel (I stayed in a nearby town with Amanda of FatBodyPolitics and another scholar from Texas, & commuted to the conference).  This place was hell as a gimpy person.  The first day we attended we had trouble finding the one accessible entrance (I used my wheelchair).  We then had issues with elevators only going to certain floors, with all the elevators really far from each other.  Also, thick carpet...evil, evil thick carpet.  Add to that bad signage and last minute schedule changes (like a change of time for the Disability Studies Interest Group meeting between the program, the webpage, and the app.....that was complete and utter access fail). I made due with the company of other rad scholars (feminist pool party!!), but it felt like an epic pile of microaggressions.

Photo description: A photo of an elevator button panel. The sign above says "Duke Energy Convention Center" with descriptions for levels 2 & 3. Below are buttons showing options for the second (main) floor, the third floor, DH (unknown location), and open, close, and alarm.

I should make an art book with my crutch

Saturday I decided that my tires were just too flat to use even though I was having a bad pain day.  I really realized how bad the distance between different meeting rooms was that day.  The disability related panels were on one end, the fat studies ones in another area, with access to the exhibition hall and food/sustenance in another.  Because of this, I ended up taking pain medication and found it really difficult to be a functional academic on the day that I really needed to be "on the ball" (with the workshop, moderating, and presenting in the same afternoon).  My paper was in the last panel of the evening from 5:25-6:50pm....while a concert was doing a soundcheck nearby, while a grad student social was going on, in a strange corridor that people had trouble finding....if it wasn't for the awesome response I received for my paper (an autoethnographic work about my experiences as a fat spine fusion patient), I would have seriously considered quitting my involvement with the organization.  Thankfully a bunch of us had a lovely dinner together that made me realize how much I value these kinds of scholarly gatherings (including one scholar and I reminiscing together about life in Northern Minnesota, as both of us are studying elsewhere).

Photo description: a bronze forearm crutch with a rainbow dyed rose propped on it. They are leaning on a brown wood countertop. The roses were in a vase that said "take one" (not shown).

Sunday was a short conference day, so thankfully less eventful.  A couple panels then going through the exhibition hall (a lot of publishers and organizations advertise their scholarly wares in there...most of the organizations don't set up on Sunday though, but most of the publishers offer book sales on display copies).  I had a long drive home that day, so I tried to walk as much as I could....although overdid it because of the books & talking with my hotel roommates (it was like scholar slumber party all weekend and none of us got sufficient sleep.  I regret nothing!).  I warned my partner that I was overdoing it and may need to stop somewhere to either nap or get a hotel room.  Thankfully I made it home in one piece despite being afraid to drive in the mountains at night, but copious amounts of caffeine plus the Honor Harrington audiobook got me back home.

There's my belated conference post.  The TL:DR is that feminist conference spaces need some serious work in accessibility.

30th anniversary of Shadow on a Tightrope

This post was actually supposed to be posted on November 8th, the actual 30th anniversary of the book, but I was in Cincinnati, Ohio at the National Women's Studies Association annual conference (which I will blog about in a day or two).  This is a part of a blog carnival being hosted in celebration of the anniversary.

As someone who has been aware of fat acceptance since my girlfriend at the time introduced me to Marilyn Wann's Fat!So? book around 1999, I thought I was pretty aware of a lot of the history of the movement.  I wouldn't say that I was an activist at the time, but it opened my mind to many possibilities to stop waging a war against my body that never started out as "normal."

When I began my masters degree program in 2009, I took the scholarly leap into fat studies with a paper I wrote for my feminist theory class.  I was fairly ignorant of a lot of things that happened in fat history until I started digging deeper and deeper in my classwork and my conference presentations.

In 2011, I presented a paper at the NWSA conference that talked about fat athleticism and dance, and connected writings by fat folks online to my Youtube dance video.  It prompted my culminating project that involved a more thorough search for published writing on fat physical activity as a whole, but more specifically on fat dance.  I found Shadow on a Tightrope while trying to get my hands on any published work that either referenced fat dance or had personal or creative work on what it was like to be a fat dancer.  I was thrilled as this seemed to be the first book that had published stories on fat women in motion (if someone finds earlier work, please let me know!).

My used and loved copy of the book

I still remember finding a battered used copy and the book and smiling when it arrived in the mail.  It looked like the previous owner probably loved it dearly.  Reading the stories of other fat bodies in motion, seeing how similar some of the stories are to the stories I hear about today's fat bodies in motion....this is a powerful work that gets at so many parts of fat existence!

If you've never read this timeless book, I highly recommend picking up a copy.  Aunt Lute has kept this book in print and so many of the stories are still very relevant to a variety of fat experiences (I also highly recommend picking up a copy at a feminist bookstore like Charis Books in Atlanta...there are very few of these treasured spaces left in the United States!).

Photo description: A black seat with a cream colored book on top of a white take-out box.  The book says "shadow on a tightrope" in a large font with a sketch of a fat female-appearing face, with "writings by women on fat oppression" underneath and the editors names at the bottom.

NWSA 2013 Fat Studies panels, papers, & events

It's less than one week away from the National Women's Studies Association annual meeting, this year in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA from November 7-10th, 2013.  For those of you that are attending, I have the fat studies related panels, papers, and events posted here for your perusal (I'm a co-chair of the Fat Studies special interest group, so it's my duty to let people know what's happening in this corner of the scholarly woods).

Friday, November 8th:
5:25pm-6:50: Fat Studies Interest Group meeting (network with fellow scholars!), Room 209

Saturday, November 9th:
12:55pm-2:10: Fat Studies in the Women's and Gender Studies Classroom, Room 202-AV

4pm-5:15: Fashioning Fat Fashion, Room 263

5:25pm-6:50: Fat Positivity and Embodied Experiences, Room 263

Sunday, November 10th:
8am-9:15: Theorizing Fatness, Embodiment, Subjectivity, and Identity, Room 204-AV

We will likely be organizing a dinner get-together either after the interest group meeting on Friday or the last panel on Saturday.

~Casey

Call for Papers: National Women's Studies Association 2013

Here is the NWSA Fat Studies CFP for 2013. Please feel free to pass on!


NWSA 2013 Fat Studies Interest Group Call for Papers
November 7-10, 2013, Cincinnati, OH.
Papers on any topic at the intersection of women's studies/ feminism/ womanism/ gender/ sexuality and fat studies will be considered.


At minimum, your submission should fall under one of the following themes for NWSA 2013:

• The Sacred and the Profane
  
• Borders and Margins
  
• Futures of the Feminist Past
  
• Body Politics
  
• Practices of Effecting Change
  

For more information on the themes, visit: http://www.nwsa.org/

.I love this pic of me on my racing bike

While this is an open call, topic suggestions from last year's meeting include:

• Defining and Refining Fat Studies
  
• Fatness and Beauty Ideals/Beauty Privilege
  
• Women of Color and Body Size/Fatness
  
• Fat Intersections (including race, nationality, disability, sexuality, appearance/beauty)
  
• Teaching Fat Studies (professorial bodies, student bodies, resistance)
  
• Fat Feminist Research Methods (including role of the researcher body)
  
• Fat Feminists Theorizing the Body
  
• Fatopias/Fat Utopias
  
• Transnational Fat Bodies (immigration, globalization)
  
• Knowledge-sharing/de-colonizing
  
• Fat Performance/Performing Fatness/Fat Icons
  
• Fat Activism & Feminism/Fatosphere
  

If you are interested in being a part of the 2013 Fat Studies panels at NWSA, please send the following info by February 13, 2013 to NWSA Fat Studies Interest Group Co-Chairs Michaela A. Nowell and Candice Buss: (michaela.nowell@uwc.edu and cdbuss@uncg.edu). Please make sure one of us confirms receipt of your submission.


Your submission should include your:
*Name, Institutional Affiliation, Snail Mail, Email, Phone.
*NWSA Theme your paper fits under (and fat studies topic area/s if yours fits any of the above).
*Title for your talk, a one-page, double-spaced abstract in which you lay out your topic and its relevance to this session.
*AND a 100 word truncated abstract (NWSA requirement).


Each person will speak for around 15 minutes, and we will leave time for Q&A. In order to present with your name in the program, you must become a member of NWSA in addition to registering for the conference.
_____________________________________________________________________
If you submit a fat studies related paper or panel, you can tag it with the keyword 'fat feminisms,' and likewise search the program for 'fat feminisms' to find relevant panels. If you submit a paper or panel on your own, we encourage you to use this keyword if your paper or panel fits the bill. We thank NWSA for adding a keyword that helps conference attendees locate fat studies panels.

The language of dis/abled sport

Video is from the UK's Channel 4, advertising the London 2012 Paralympics through it's "Meet the Superhumans" ad.

Adapted sport, challenged athletes, disabled sport, Paralympics, Special Olympics. These terms use language that bifurcates sports that are explicitly for people with disabilities. This split creates a power dynamic that impacts various cultural flows (Appadurai, 1990). By separating sport categories by ability or impairment, and more specifically by adding qualifiers like "wheelchair" to basketball, "blind" to football, or "para" to triathlon, a subject versus object divide is created that makes the disabled athlete othered by the alternate designation that demarcates itself as different or separate from the prototypical athlete. This invokes an ideoscape of adaptation that makes the disabled athlete viewed as disingenuous at worst or an inspirational novelty at best.

Athletes that require the least amount of adaptation to their sport ventures are privileged. Since the archetypical Western athlete is seen as one that is white, male, able-bodied, and a good citizen of his nation-state, any deviations of this body lends itself to embodied qualifiers. In women’s tennis, Venus and Serena Williams are many times constructed in terms of their not-whiteness, with whiteness considered the default tennis player (Douglas, 2005). Any time their perceived behavior deviates from the script of the archetypical athlete (particularly when the behavior is thought to threaten the interests of the nation), their otherness is highlighted. This is also evident in the case of many indigenous Australian athletes in the Sydney 2000 Olympics (Gardner, 2003; Elder, Pratt, & Ellis, 2006), as well as with the black United States track and field athletes in the HBO documentary Fists of Freedom (Stem & Roy, 1999). The more the hegemonically atypical body resists the mold of the good citizen-athlete, the more resistance it encounters in its athletic pursuits. Resistance itself sometimes forces ideals and institutions, both sporting and general, to adapt.

While adaptation is a common concept in terms of discussions of disability and impairment, it’s a concept generally used to refer to when an existing environment has been retrofitted to accommodate a specific person or group of impairments. Adaptation as a concept assumes an essentialism that privileges the status quo and enforces neoliberal constructions. Stone (2001), when discussing the shift from a collectivist society to a neoliberal one, refers to this as the “’four selfs’:self-respect, self-confidence, self-strengthening, and self-reliance” (p. 58). For a disabled body to be able to be accommodated in society, the person must be able to request the environment be changed in a manner that complies with the policies, procedures, and practices of that setting. The person must also have a familiarity with the financial and technological ramifications of the request for accommodation, and be prepared for the social implications that follow that may require the person to justify their continued need or desire to exist in that space (an opposing viewpoint on accommodation and environmental adaptation is through a concept called universal design, in which an environment is not retrofitted but is constructed to consciously allow as many types of bodies to function at their peak).

Adaptation in regards to sport and athletics is mostly used to denote sports for people with impairments (although can be used in the context of athletic training to refer to physiological adaptation to effort, muscular capacity, or the like). For example, wheelchair basketball as an adapted form of (standard) basketball, sitting volleyball as an adapted form of (standard) volleyball, or ice sledge hockey as an adaptation of ice (standard) hockey. These sports that have abled analogs are usually the most well-known. This is in part due to a palatability factor, for example popular culture’s fascination with the violence inherent in wheelchair rugby, also known as murderball, and partially due to a familiarity factor, in which the adapted sport resembles an able-bodied analog that the audience has previously watched or participated. The advertisement that the British television station Channel 4 created for the London 2012 Paralympics is a good example of this palatability of adaptation. Which bodies are included? Which sports are highlighted? What’s missing?

Elite athletes that participate on the international scene, specifically Olympic or Paralympic athletes, have media narratives that may attempt to generate interest in a particular team, a particular event, or a particular sport. For example, Oscar Pistorus is a track athlete that competed in both the Paralympics as a division F44 athlete and in the London 2012 Olympics. He was one of a very small number of disabled athletes that claimed a sort of dual citizenship in the elite sport world by participating in both events. Many news pieces that discuss his athletic success place his success in light of the congenital impairment that led to the amputation of both of his lower legs, sometimes in vivid detail. The idea that impairment must be biomedically justified combines with the media narratives that require a tale of struggling and overcoming one’s disability to create a supercrip. Supercrip (and superhuman or superhero, in the case of the aforementioned Paralympics ad) narratives are intertwined for disabled athletes.

While disability may indeed be a valid addition to the narrative of the super-elite athlete much like other narratives of struggle against other life adversity, the focus on the origin of the disability (whether congenital or acquired) makes the idea of disability as always able to be overcame a problematic construct. These narratives create a divide between levels of impairment and also levels of socially constructed disability because of the involvement of technoscapes and finanscapes (Appadurai, 1990). Those with more access to fiscal resources, whether by charity, employment, or other means, are more likely to be able to navigate their chosen environment in a way that meets their needs. This means that Pistorus is more able to be seen as able-bodied through the adaptation of specially designed carbon fiber running prostheses (although it could be argued, in Pistorus’ case, that the technology involved clearly marks his body as super-abled or possibly cyborg).

While the concept of adaptation is generally seen as constructive and beneficial to people with disabilities that participate in adaptive sport, it is critical to keep questioning the impact of adaptation on the construction of the disabled body. The continual focus on adaptive sport may overshadow the ways that the disabled community has contributed to the sporting world, like the history of the Gallaudet University football team’s invention of the huddle, and also overshadow the other ways in which people with disabilities find themselves in sport and physical activity.

Dear readers, what do you think?  Does the concept of adaptation impact how sports for people with disabilities are viewed?  Would combining the Paralympics and the Olympics change the perception?

References

My first wheeled 5k...I was the only wheeler

Appadurai, A. (1990). Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Theory, Culture, and Society, 7, 295-310.

Bernstein, R. (Producer) & Roy, G. (Director). Fists of freedom: The story of the ’68 summer games [motion picture]. United States: Home Box Office.

Douglas, D.D. (2005). Venus, Serena and the WTA: When and where “race” enters. Sociology of Sport Journal, 22, 256-282.

Elder, C., Pratt, A., & Ellis, c. (2006) Running race: Reconciliation, nationalism, and the Sydney 2000 Games. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 41(2), 127-141.

Gardner, G. (2003). Running for country: Australian print media representations of indigenous athletes in the 27th Olympiad. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 27(3), 233-260.

Stone, E. (2001). Disability, sport, and the body in China. Sociology of Sport Journal, 18, 51-68.

PCA/ACA Fat Studies Call for Papers (CFP)

My STANDard poster

Since some of my scholarly work is in sociology of the body & sociology of physical activity, my work frequently discusses fatness.  So, I'm reposting this CFP for the Popular Culture Association & America Culture Association conference to put the word out for any interested folks:

-------------------------------

(please circulate far & wide)

PCA/ACA Fat Studies 2013 Call for Papers

Fat Studies is becoming an interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary field of study that confronts and critiques cultural constraints against notions of “fatness” and “the fat body”; explores fat bodies as they live in, are shaped by, and remake the world; and creates paradigms for the development of fat acceptance or celebration within mass culture. Fat Studies uses body size as the starting part for a wide-ranging theorization and explication of how societies and cultures, past and present, have conceptualized all bodies and the political/cultural meanings ascribed to every body. Fat Studies reminds us that all bodies are inscribed with the fears and hopes of the particular culture they reside in, and these emotions often are mislabeled as objective “facts” of health and biology. More importantly, perhaps, Fat Studies insists on the recognition that fat identity can be as fundamental and world-shaping as other identity constructs analyzed within the academy and represented in media.

Please join us in Washington, DC from March 27-30, 2013 for the PCA/ACA National Conference at the Washington Marriott in Wardman Park. Presenters must become members of the Popular Culture Association. Find more information on the conference and organization at http://pcaaca.org/conference/national.php.

The deadline for online submission of presentations is November 30, 2012. Please do not email your abstract to either of the Fat Studies Area Chairs; we will only accept submissions entered into the PCA/ACA online database. You can find instructions here: http://pcaaca.org/areas/areas.php. In short, under “Fat Studies,” enter the name of your presentation, an abstract, and a short bio. We welcome papers and performances from academics, researchers, intellectuals, activists, and artists, in any field of study, and at any stage in their career.

All submissions are welcome, but please use the information above to ensure your proposal fits within the academic and political scopes of Fat Studies. Please also be mindful that Fat Studies is a political project and not merely an umbrella term for all discussions of larger bodies. Also, we encourage submitters to rethink using words like “obesity” and “overweight” in their presentations unless they are used ironically, within quotes, or accompanied by a political analysis.

Topics may include but are not limited to:
• representations of fat people in literature, film, music, nonfiction, and the visual arts
• cross-cultural or global constructions of fatness and fat bodies
• cultural, historical, inter/intrapersonal, or philosophical meanings of fat and fat bodies
• the geography and lived experience of fatness and fat bodies
• portrayals of fat individuals and groups in news, media, magazines
• fatness as a social or political identity
• fat acceptance, activism, and/or pride movements and tactics
• approaches to fat and body image in philosophy, psychology, religion, sociology
• fat children in literature, media, and/or pedagogy
• fat as it intersects with race, ethnicity, class, religion, ability, gender, and/or sexuality
• history and/or critique of diet books and scams
• functions of fatphobia or fat oppression in economic and political systems

Special Topic Session: For the 2013 Conference, we are inviting proposals for papers and performances for a joint session (1 to 2 panels) with the Fashion, Style, Appearance, Consumption & Design and Fat Studies areas. Possible topics include the intersections between body size, shape, and weight and one’s experiences as a fashion consumer, the ways fashion as an industry shapes the discourse around weight (“plus-size,” “women’s”, “husky,” “King-Size”, and “Big and Tall”) and fashion as a space for reclaiming the fat body through accentuating and adorning it (fatshion). Other topics could include the study of sales and the financial success of the plus-size, women’s, King-Size, husky, and Big and Tall market that have spawned a whole array of specialty stores dedicated to these consumers. Also the influence of fashion design and the evolution of the types of garments manufactured for these consumers to wear could also be suggested. Submit your online proposal for this Joint Session only one time to either the Fashion Area or the Fat Studies Area.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact one or both Fat Studies Co-Chairs:

* Julia McCrossin (jmccross@gwmail.gwu.edu)
* Lesleigh Owen (lesleigh.owen@gmail.com).

We look forward to hearing from you!

On being an academic with disabilities

A sign on one of the elevators on campus

Since the fall semester just started, I've been reflecting on how my life might change going from working on my masters degree to working on my PhD.  I recently read an article from Academe Online entitled "Chronic Illness and the Academic Career" which has made me really think about the consequences of being pretty frank about my spine mess along with the rest of my interesting physiological issues.  I'm pretty frank about the fact that I will be taking six credits a semester (baseline full-time for grad school) because of pain & related issues.  Life for me runs on what some folks have dubbed "crip time."

Running on crip time can impact my academic life in a number of ways, but for me is most apparent in my writing. Just like Sharon from After Gadget, writing takes extra time because of the dark miasma that is chronic illness...particularly writing that is coherent.  Like her, I usually have several blog posts percolating, making sure that my pain or pain-med addled brain (the usual dichotomy of my existence lately) has made something that makes sense to the general populace, doesn't ramble or derail too badly, and I'm willing to post to everyone that might see it.

Scholarly work is like these blog posts in this respect...they need a lot of TLC because sometimes a sentence or a paragraph will make sense to me when I write it, but make absolutely no sense later.  Most of my papers are proofread by friends (as one friend so lovingly stated, "I can see where you went from 'I know Science!' to 'yay pain meds'").  I cherish my scholarly community for our collective proofreading, and have traded drafts of papers with folks across the planet

I'm also very open about the fact that the job market is pretty dismal for tenure-track professor positions, and with my medical needs (both spine-related and birth defect-related) I absolutely cannot live without health insurance...which means being open to working as an administrator within the university setting.  This means I cannot take adjunct positions until a tenure-track position comes available as adjuncting is much like being an independent contractor.  If I were healthy and not disabled, paying for health insurance out-of-pocket wouldn't be a big deal....but that's not how my life is.

Honestly, I wonder how much of this openness comes from an internalized need (due to internalized ableism) to justify my use of adaptive aids like my cane,  wheelchair, use of the elevator, or my parking placard.  I wonder how much of it is related to the current "war on obesity" and how that impacts the myth that all fat people become disabled by their fat (for an awesome post on this, check out this post entitled "Fat People on Scooters" from Ragen Chastain's Dances With Fat).  Essentially, bodies are not equipment (which is why the photo I posted bothers me so much.  This is posted on an elevator on campus) although sometimes my body needs equipment to live life to its full potential.

This post was pretty rambly as I tried to wrap it up before my first day helping out as a TA for an undergraduate course my advisor is teaching.  So I'll leave you with this YouTube video entitled "Shit academics say about access:"