The sustainable cripple differs from last year’s cripple. S/he has a flag. Ye Olde Standard is the first thing you need if you plan to stick around. The aim is to assure disability will have a future. There’s a bad history “mitt der cripples” and the SC doesn’t want to see pages blow backwards.
The SC knows a physician/researcher who hopes to cure blindness. “I just want to cure the motherfucker,” he says. He might just do it—at least the genetically caused forms of blindness. The SC is with him, for though blindness is not a ticket to second class citizenship, and though the SC tends to see it as a nuisance rather than an affliction, s/he thinks your mother shouldn’t have to go blind from macular degeneration; a child with Stargart’s Disease should have choices. The sustainable cripple struggles with nuance and the articulated taxonomies of disablement. S/he doesn’t want you to “have to be cured” but wishes you options. The sustainable cripple worries s/he may not know precisely what the distinction means. Essentialism has the SC by the scruff and s/he blinks.
The Society for Disability Studies is hosting a conference in June around the following questions/ideas:
•What does it mean to sustain disability? How do/might/should/will we sustain disability?
•How does/doesn’t your own academic or professional field engage with disability and sustainability?
•What local, regional, national, continental, transnational, global practices and policies are available—or need to be developed—in the intersection between disability and sustainability?
•What practices, processes, policies, and products of the sustainability movement most impact, intersect, overlap, inform, or resonate with disability practices, processes, policies, and products?
•How can/do people with disabilities best carry out—or critique—the sustainability movement?
•Where and how do identities based on class, race, gender, geography, politics, or sexuality further inform, influence, and interact with disability (and) sustainability?
•In what ways do interactions with and practices of Native communities affect or shape disability (and) sustainability?
•How can access be imagined as an element of sustainability?
•Where do current theoretical models—such as impairment/disability; social/medical; (in)dependence/interdependence–coincide or collide with disability (and) sustainability?
•How do disability (and) sustainability fold into or against our understanding of transnational, international, global, and geopolitical “work”?
•What can conversations about disability (and) sustainability offer to global, national, regional, and local healthcare policies and debates?
•When disability (and) sustainability enter into global, national, regional, and local policies and practices around employment, what difference(s) can/does this make?
•How do/can disability (and) sustainability contribute to notions/systems of sustainable food, farming, and land development?
**
The SC tends to think of sustainability in the manner of Levi Strauss: there’s
the cooked and the raw.
Raw sustainability is the future understood as intersections of house holding—
of care for environments, for our food, for our neighbors and strangers, all equal.
Cooked is what constituencies (all equal) may bring to architectures and agronomies.
**
If people with disabilities have trouble with “the cure” vs. “dignity” then the “cure”
must be sustainable, not disability. The SC means by this a cure that allows
for difference.
**
The sustainable cripple leads whenever the subject is difference.
**
The SC understands that if a limb can feel revulsion there’s still a false move in store.
SC knows imagining tomorrow requires recollections of defeat.
Architectures: inclusive, no segregation, no separate classrooms or hospitals.
Governments re-designed to prohibit segregation.
The abolishment of panopticons.
Teaching with the motto: “presume competence”.
Neurodiversity understood as human potential.
Economies built for diversity—no more pyramids.
Demand religious leaders stop using disability as metaphor.
Disability as metaphor is usually hate speech or superstition.
Sustainable planets do not require hate speech or superstition.
**
Thought early morning. Cold day. Syracuse.
Planet of the Blind 