Jessica Davanzo Must Stay In The UK!

Jessica Davanzo, a survivor of domestic violence and a Personal Assistant essential to her disabled employer, has been unjustly threatened with deportation by the Home Office, in direct contradiction of its claim to be "building a safe, just and tolerant society".

Jessica Davanzo, originally from the US, moved to the UK on a 2 year visa in October 2006 after marrying her ex-husband, a UK citizen, and breaking all ties with her former life in the US. However, after she moved to the UK, but before her visa came up for renewal for indefinite leave to remain, her husband started abusing and threatening her, forcing her, after many attempts at relationship counselling failed to have any effect on his increasingly abusive behaviour, to leave him, move to another town (Northampton) and start a new job.

Soon after this, and possibly as a result of the stress and trauma she experienced, in June 2008 Jessica became ill with a neurological condition called Guillain Barre syndrome, which resulted in her spending 6 months in hospital and being temporarily paralysed, needing intensive rehabilitation to regain the ability to walk, as well as having longer-term effects of chronic fatigue and back pain, and being unable to work for 10 months. Due to her immigration status Jessica had no access to any form of UK state benefits, leaving her destitute and at risk of homelessness.

As a result of this experience of impairment and the awareness of disability it brought with it, after her recovery Jessica decided to work as a PA (Personal Assistant) for a disabled employer, Roxanne Homayoun. Roxanne, who has physical and visual impairments and requires 24-hour assistance, and is an activist for disability rights with an MA in 20th century history, said "Jessica is such a truly positive, honest, and principled person that she has helped me to see that many of my dreams are still achievable, they just need modifying. I would be absolutely devastated if Jessica is deported."

In the notice of decision dated 3rd June 2009 (which Jessica only received on the 10th June), she was informed that there was "no right of appeal against this decision" which she was later told by an immigration solicitor was not in fact true. Jessica and her solicitors are now seeking a judicial review of the decision. She was also told, despite several police reports and a supporting letter from Victim Support, that "you have not produced evidence to confirm that your marriage was caused to break down during the probationary period, as a result of domestic violence".

Jessica's case brings together issues of vital concern for feminists, disability rights activists and all those who support the free movement of people across borders. The UK Government's decision to demand that she leave the country shows a complete disregard for the circumstances of women fleeing abusive relationships (if she had stayed within the relationship and continued to submit to her ex-husband's violence, she would have been permitted to stay in the country - what message does that send to women trapped in such situations? This is victim-blaming at its worst - women being punished for getting out of a life-threatening situation or rewarded for staying within it) and for the incredibly important role of PAs in maintaining disabled people's independence.

The letter Jessica received from the Home Office claims that forcing her to leave the UK is not a breach of Jessica's human rights under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. However, they have totally failed to take into consideration the human rights of her employer, Roxanne, whose physical safety, freedom of private life and ability to participate in political society would all be put in serious jeopardy by the loss of her PA, given the extreme rarity of PAs with whom disabled employers are able to build up the sort of relationship (itself arguably "family life" under Article 8 of the ECHR) enjoyed by Roxanne and Jessica.

If the UK government cared either about women survivors of marital abuse or about disabled people who need assistance to live independently (for whom it can take an extremely long time to find a PA with the right attitude to genuinely support their human right to choice and control over their own lives, and for whom losing such a PA could easily result in risk of institutionalisation or life-threatening neglect), then it would not have threatened Jessica with deportation. Jessica Must Stay!

There is an online petition to let Jessica stay in the UK here and a Facebook group in support of her (with at the time of writing over 160 members) has been set up here.

Roxanne and Jessica are friends of mine, and came to the recent DAN actions in London and Birmingham that i blogged about. This is the press release that i sent last night to national newspapers, Northampton local news, Midlands/East regional TV and radio, the UK radical/"left-wing" press and UK disability organisations. Please forward to anyone else you think is relevant...

Recent Links of Awesome #5

I don't really know why i haven't blogged in over 2 weeks; there have been lots of things i've wanted to blog about, i've just somehow not quite had the energy or motivation to do so. I've also been trying to organise quite a few things in the offline world which have been taking up a lot of my time and energy. Anyway, there are things i'm really going to try to write about in the next week or so, but in the meantime, i thought i'd do a link post, as i've read quite a few really good posts on other people's blogs recently...

Bev at Asperger Square 8 has a powerful and moving post called Flocks, which (even though i don't have/do the pet/caged animal thing) has a hell of a lot in it that strongly resonates with me. I need to post more about friendship/social group dynamic issues.

Urocyon is a blogger that, somehow, i've only just discovered (from her comments here) - a Native American autistic anarchist living in the UK (it always pleases me to find other anarchist/libertarian-socialist people on the spectrum "out there", and especially in the UK... tho there are actually quite a few i know of now, whereas even 5 years ago i couldn't imagine encountering more than the one i already knew...), and i've been really enjoying reading through her posts. This one particularly stands out to me as worth linking, as i think it really brings together disability-rights and post-colonial critiques of charity (and puts them in an anarchist context), and a proper libertarian-socialist critique of the concept of "charity" that incorporates all those perspectives is both something i'm incredibly excited about, and long overdue...

Lindsay at Autist's Corner has several posts about the revision of the DSM (which i really need to blog about), including this one on "autogynephilia" as a pathologising categorisation of trans women, which links to this (scary but essential reading) post at Feministing by Julia Serano about aspects of the DSM revision that "should be of great concern to feminists, as well as anyone else who is interested in gender and sexual equality". Lindsay also recently posted a link to this study linking autism and trans/genderqueer identity, which is (IMO) nothing new, but interesting as "official" confirmation of the intersection nonetheless.

cripchick has a great discussion about what constitutes accessibility, to which i have pretty much nothing to add, but which is probably actually the best resource for planning accessible events - in as broad a sense as possible, and going beyond just disability/impairment issues - that i have seen anywhere on the web.

AnneC at Existence is Wonderful has written a great 2-part post called "On The Feeding of Quirky Mammals" (part 1, part 2), on autistic issues to do with food, hunger and appetite (the only reason i haven't commented on it is because my response would probably be as long as the post itself - in fact, i may write my own post on the issue). Her experiences are in many ways similar to mine, but in other ways very different - but this is yet another area that massively needs an autistic-led "literary conversation".

Finally-for-now, for a bit of humour too good not to share, the latest xkcd comic is utterly awesome (and so often me... well, if you replace the maths with esoteric sociopolitical theory-stuff) - i've long suspected that Randall is on the spectrum, and there are hints in a couple of earlier comics (such as this one), but this one is, i think, as near to proof as could ever be needed.

More soon...

Reclaiming words: Who can reclaim what?

I suppose i'd better start this post with a warning, however obvious it might be: this post will, by necessity, contain many words which many people will find hurtful and/or offensive. It's pretty much impossible to talk about the politics of reclaiming words used against minority groups without using those words, so if you are someone who is triggered or offended or similar just by seeing those words in print, then don't read this post, because it would be impossible for me to write it without using them. (Some may think that that means i shouldn't write this post at all; they should be right. Give me a convincing argument that i shouldn't have written it in the comments, and i might agree with it - but this post is, itself, an attempt to address that debate...)

I've been vaguely thinking about the politics of reclaiming offensive words for quite a while, but a few recent discussions in different places inspired this post. Firstly, there was a subscription request to an email list that i am a moderator of (which, incidentally, has nothing at all to do with disability, or any minority/identity politics - it's a local climate change activist list) from someone whose email address was "retardedgimp@_______.com". This pretty much stopped me in my tracks - my first thought was to delete it as the person must have been trolling and have registered that email address solely to be offensive. Then i thought of other possibilities - that it might actually be a disabled person reclaiming the terms "retarded" and "gimp" as positive self-description... or that it might be a non-disabled person who was, perhaps somewhat misguidedly, using the "non-PC" or "outsider" value of those words as some sort of intended-to-be-positive (although probably still offensive) jokey self-deprecating/self-aggrandising (depending on which way round you look at it).

I posted in my Facebook status that i wasn't sure how to respond to it, and got a few responses - the first (from someone who, i think, assumed the owner of the email address was a disabled person) saying:

Is it really any different to someone calling themselves a "cripple"?

For some reason most disabled people respect the reclamation of most old, offensive words, except retarded. Retarded is seen as evil at all costs and must never be used.

I'm in favour of reclamation equality. If I can call myself a cripple then a learning disabled person has every right to call themselves a retard.

However, another person responded: "i actually dont even like people whose impairments don't cause spasms using the term 'spaz'" - implying arguably that the term "retarded", by analogy, was reclaimable, but not by all disabled people, only by those with learning disabilities - despite the fact that, in my experience, "retard" gets used as an insult for anyone who appears to be disabled, whether the impairment is physical or mental, and so does "spastic"/"spaz" (although there may be UK/US differences there - i seem to recall reading about someone in the US who grew up thinking that "spastic" referred not to the muscle spasms typical of cerebral palsy, but to behaviour typical of people with ADHD - perhaps similar to casual usage of "manic" over here?)

I think the first commenter was right that, of the many common disability-related slurs and insults, "retard" is the one that never or almost never seems to be reclaimed. I've been struggling to articulate why i think that is, and why there seems, for me, to be an inherent negativity in "retard" that makes me feel like it, unlike "crip", "gimp" or even "spastic", is unreclaimable, that it's something people would never want to call themselves - is it the mind/body dualism (which i think is a false one) so prevalent in our culture that makes terms referring to the state of someone's mind somehow seem more "fundamental", more "intrinsic" to a person than terms describing the state of someone's body? (and, if so, why do i not mind the reclamation of terms like "nutter" and "mentalist"?) is it the meaning of "slowed" or "delayed" that just seems inherently negative, with nothing reclaimable for positive meaning within it? or is it something entirely different? could there even be internalised vestiges of patronising stereotypes in my perception of it as more unambiguously negative than physical-impairment-related words (learning-disabled people being seen as intrinsically unable to defend or define themselves)?

Looking around for discussions in the disability blogosphere about reclaiming words, i found this post by PhilosopherCrip (whose blog i have somehow been ignorant of, despite friends like cripchick being regular commenters there - and there's another thing - can i imagine a blogger calling hirself "PhilosopherRetard" or "retardchick"?), discussing different usages within the disability community of the word "crip" - as a term that can be used as a political identity for all disabled people, or only for those with physical impairments? Even within the radical part of the UK disability rights movement, i find people who use both senses of the word - some physically impaired activists explicitly including all disabled people, regardless of impairment, in it, while a visually impaired activist friend uses it in a sense that very clearly doesn't include himself, for example critiquing paradigms of personal assistance as "all defined by crips" (meaning physically impaired people to the exclusion of other categories of disabled people). I find my own use of the term to be ambiguous, not actually certain whether i am using it in the inclusive or exclusive sense, and never quite certain whether, as an "able-bodied disabled" person, i can use it to include myself - but i've never felt that i shouldn't use the term at all, as the friend who commented on my Facebook status clearly felt about "spaz" (and many trans people do about "tranny"; see further down this post).

In the comments to PhilosopherCrip's post, cripchick says "but to switch it up a bit, if ND really took power in ideology and the shaping of our movement, what would the disability community look like if everyone called themselves aspies?" It's interesting that my first reaction to that is "that's a completely different thing", seeing "A/aspie" (i'm never sure whether or not to capitalise, TBH) as far more specific, and feeling both that physically impaired people could and should object to "aspie" being used as a blanket term for all disabled people, and that i would be uncomfortable with the term being used to refer to a person who was physically (or otherwise) impaired but not on the autistic spectrum.

Then again, i have mixed feelings about the term "aspie" anyway; for one thing, i'm not sure that i want a term deriving from the name of a doctor who studied autistic children in the 1930s to be a part of my identity, for another i think it's a loaded term with regard to the so-called distinction between "Asperger's syndrome" and "(non-Asperger) autism", which i think is a totally untenable one (the ever-amazing Amanda Baggs has great posts about this here and here), and i don't want to support that division; but sometimes i do use it to refer to myself, as a convenient shorthand, or for example when saying that someone "has a few Aspie traits" (where those would usually be traits of the general type of autism which is highly verbal but impaired primarily in non-verbal communication). "Autie" could be an alternative, but then that tends to get used in phrases like "aspies and auties" to refer specifically to "non-Asperger autistics", so that's problematic too; in the end, for my own self-definition i think i prefer just using "autistic".

This isn't just a debate in the disability sphere: recently on Questioning Transphobia, there was a repost of a call for submissions for a book called "Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation" by Bear Bergman, and in both places heated discussion emerged of the reclaimed-or-otherwise status of the term "tranny", which seems to be somewhere between "crip" and "retard" in the reclamation stakes - in that, unlike "retard", there are significant numbers of people trying to reclaim it, but unlike "crip", there are significant numbers of people who don't think it should be reclaimed at all (or, at least, i don't think i've seen that attitude to "crip") - but, like "crip", there is also a debate about whether a wider group (in this case, all trans* people) can reclaim it, or only a narrower subset (in this case, trans women) within that group, with many trans women making a convincing case for the latter based on the fact that it is primarily, if not exclusively, trans women against whom "tranny" is used as an insult. I'm a bit agnostic on this one, as it's not a term that applies to me in either case (although i might fall within some definitions of the term "trans", i am cissexual and pass as cisgendered), but i am not certain whether, for instance, i should call out its usage when a male-assigned-at-birth genderqueer friend who falls somewhere between "transvestite" and "transsexual" on the transfeminine spectrum (he performs a female gender role without intending to pass, but uses male pronouns when not doing so) refers to his performing female gender as "going out trannying", or to "heterosexual trannies" (meaning heterosexual men who sometimes dress as women, rather than, as i would have assumed he meant, trans women who were exclusively sexually attracted to men).

I find myself agreeing with the commenter at Questioning Transphobia who says that "it has as much to do with misogyny and male dominance as transphobia"... but then i also find myself agreeing with another commenter who says "How the hell is it transmisogynistic for someone who was male assigned at birth, (I’m pretty sure still does, or at least has in the past) identifies as femme, usually uses female pronouns, and in general moves through the world as a woman, to use the word tranny?" - however, this one is clearly not my battle. With both "crip" and "retard", i'm not entirely sure whether it's my battle or not - "crip" is if it refers to all disabled people, but not if it only refers to physically impaired people, and "retard"... well, arguably includes me as a cognitively impaired person, but then, at school i was bullied and insulted for being "too clever", not the opposite, and as an adult have encountered terms like "nutter" and "psycho" used hurtfully far more often than "retard" (if i've ever been on the direct recieving end of the latter, which i'm actually not sure of).

I've seen this sort of thing happen with racial and ethnic insults too; apart from the reclamation of "nigger" in hip-hop culture (which has been discussed exhaustively all over the internet, although i'm too tired to find links now), the word "Paki" was used extensively by young people of Pakistani origin in the town i grew up in to refer to themselves and each other (the main ethnic group most of them actually were was Pashtuns, some of whom were from the Afghani rather than the Pakistani side of the border), but there was disagreement over whether non-Pakistani South Asians (such as Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis) were "allowed" to use the term, and its casual usage among Pakistani youth caused a lot of non-Pakistani young people to feel they could use it without that usage being racist... although in some cases it definitely was (for example, one white convert to Islam i knew who had no hesitations about using it disparagingly, saying for example things like "Pakis aren't proper Muslims").

(Actually, i will say one thing about "nigger": if i hadn't downloaded Saul Williams's most recent album "The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust" when he made it available free for a limited time from his website, i would definitely have felt uncomfortable asking for it in a shop. Its title track itself plays on the discomfort white hip-hop fans have with the word "nigger", with its chorus "When I say Niggy, you say nothing" - the name is also a pun on David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust.)

Of course, i can't have a post about reclaiming words without mentioning "queer", which i think in some ways is both the most and least problematic of all reclaimed words, precisely due to its being by far the widest in scope (unless anyone can think of another?) - as someone recently said to me with reference to the trans/transgender/genderqueer debate, the problem with "queer" is that it is so wide in scope that it can mean almost anything that people want it to mean - and yet, despite the massively wide reclamation of "queer", to such an extent that many people have stopped seeing it as an offensive or even formerly-offensive term (and thus, perhaps, it's even lost the subversiveness and radical edge that it once had in terms of being deliberately chosen as a self-identifying term because of its offensiveness), i know people from some parts of the UK who, despite only being in their late 20s, find it strange that "queer" can be used as a "positive" term because they grew up hearing it used only as an insult. Anyway, extremely long books could be (and probably have been) written about "queer", and i still have some more specific posts planned on that word and how it relates to me, so i won't go into it any further here...

Like with my previous post about disability terminology, i don't have any answers here; i'd just like to throw it out to debate, largely because, while i've seen plenty of discussions about the appropriateness or otherwise of reclaiming particular words with regard to disability, gender identity, race/ethnicity and sexuality, i'm not sure if i've ever seen any attempts to put together a coherent analysis of reclaimed words across all dimensions of oppression (and i'm very aware that there are many i haven't even touched on here - words for sex workers, for example, or words for female genitalia used as insults, to pick two obvious categories... and i'm sure there are more).

A pattern i find particularly interesting that crops up repeatedly is the ambiguity of how widely words can be reclaimed - just where are the boundaries of the group allowed to do the reclaiming? - which seems to me to feed into much bigger questions about identity politics and whether it's unitive or divisive, the fluidity of identities and just how "self-defined" identities relate to those defined from outside or "above", etc - which is of particular interest to me with regard to my strong feeling that all people who are oppressed or discriminated against because of biological or cultural difference have common interests and parallel experiences, and have much to gain from allying with one another - yet at the same time, the identities of individual minority groups can be fiercely and jealously guarded, and there is a fuzzy and incredibly difficult (for me, anyway) to locate line between alliance, analogy and appropriation (I tend to have a vague and general discomfort with the idea of words that some people are "allowed to use", but others are not, which i think also needs to be somehow factored in here)... what do people think of this? Any and all responses welcome...

Terminology request: trans and genderqueer

I want to post in more detail about this sort of thing, but haven't time/spoons right now - however, i've had a couple of conversations (one here, the others have been with an offline friend and on Facebook) where the same thing has been mentioned, so i'd like to ask others what their opinion/usage is...

It seems like the ways that i use the terms "trans" and "genderqueer" is the opposite way round from how many (most?) other people use them:

I tend to use "trans" to describe people who either transition from one sex to another (transsexual) or who deliberately present themselves as the (broadly) binary gender opposite to that traditionally associated with their physical sex (transvestites/crossdressers*, drag performers, etc), and "genderqueer" to mean a much broader group of people, including the genderless/agendered (like myself), those who feel they are a mixture or composite of both "binary" genders, those who feel they have a strong gender identity but that it's not one of the binary genders, etc - basically, anyone who isn't cisgendered (and possibly some people who are cisgendered, but still oppose the gender binary). Thus, for me, most (if not necessarily all) trans people are genderqueer, but not all genderqueer people are trans (I tend to say that i am genderqueer but not trans).

*I'm also not sure what the difference between those 2 groups is, although i've been told that there is a difference (which confuses me a bit as the terms are respectively Latinate and Anglo-Saxon synonyms for each other). I tend to get hung up on the idea of clothes having gender, as to me, as clothes are inanimate, the only gender an item of clothing has is that of the person wearing it (shades of Eddie Izzard's "It's not women's clothing, it's mine") - but that's a side issue...

However, it seems like a lot of people - possibly the majority of trans/genderqueer activists - see the terms the other way round, regarding "genderqueer" as a subset of "trans" - thus "trans" being the more inclusive term, including anyone not cisgendered, and "genderqueer" being the non-binary or non-transitioning subset within that...

So, what is the generally-agreed-on usage (if there is one)? Would the majority of people in the trans/genderqueer/etc community consider a cissexual, non-transitioning genderqueer person to fall within the definition of "trans"? Is "genderqueer" best understood as a subset of "trans", or vice versa? Or is neither strictly speaking a subset of the other, but more like an overlapping Venn diagram - where some/many/most trans people are also genderqueer and vice versa, but there are both trans people who are not genderqueer and genderqueer people who are not trans?

For me, i think it would feel somehow unfair and/or appropriative to call myself "trans" - like i was claiming the identity and/or experiences of other people for myself, when i really don't have those experiences at all - i have never experienced body dysphoria, for example (or indeed identification with my body either positively or negatively), nor have i or likely ever will i experience being read as the opposite of what i identify as (more as something that has no relevance to my identity either way, which is, i think, far less traumatic and more just vaguely silly - being described as "male" or "a man" does make me feel dissonance, but only in a slightly bemused way, not the profoundly upsetting way that it affected many of the trans women i know) - but then, i don't feel like i'm being appropriative when i call myself "disabled", despite the fact that i don't have the experiences of a physically impaired person and that, for many people in the cultural mainstream, "disabled" means "physically impaired" - but is me-as-a-non-transitioning-genderqueer calling myself "trans" more like me-as-a-mentally-but-not-physically-impaired person calling myself "disabled", or more like, say, someone with a physical (but no other) impairment calling hirself "neurodiverse" (which i would consider appropriative)?

So, um, yeah. I can't seem to find any "official" definitions of "trans" or "genderqueer" stating which of the two is the more inclusive term, and i'm not 100% sure where my own (possibly wrong) understanding of the definitions came from - most likely from conversations with the trans woman friend who first opened my eyes to the existence of gender identity (prior to knowing her, i had lived under the impression that gender identity isn't innate for anyone, but comes entirely from socialisation processes that i had missed - a position that i think some cissexual socialist and radical feminists still seem to take), and others i got to know through her, who were all fairly "feminine", binary-identified fully-transitioning trans women (it wasn't until much, much later that i even knowingly met any trans men or FAAB genderqueers, which makes me still find the common assertion that trans men and FAAB genderqueers dominate trans community and discourse very strange and not-my-experience), to whom i would be a "trans ally", but pretty definitely not "trans" myself...

So if anyone can shed any light, i'd be grateful, as i don't want to be using terms at cross-purposes to others using the same terms, especially with the levels of emotional investment that many people seem to have to them. I, personally, am not so strongly attached to my usage as to want to cling on to it in the face of opposition, as i basically feel that i know what i am, even if i don't know the "correct" word for it - but i don't want to use terms to describe myself that inadvertently either appropriate others' experiences, could be construed as denial or distancing from other people on the gender-variant continuum, or would seem to most people to be inherently nonsensical or self-contradictory...

Oh, the irony: part 3

Previous posts in this picture series: Part 1, Part 2...



This is a photo of the doorway of an estate agent's on Kings Heath High Street, Birmingham. It shows the lower half of an old-fashined shop doorway, with part of a window visible on the left (in the window is one of those office-type blinds, and you can see some adverts for houses). The door and window frame are painted dark blue. On the door, above 2 letter boxes, is a sign which says "Inclusive Access for Disabled Customers", in white on a blue background. Below the text on the sign are symbols of a wheelchair user, a person walking with a cane, an ear with a bar through it (symbolising hearing impairment) and an eye with a bar through it (symbolising visual impairment). Next to it are 2 smaller signs, one advertising a hearing aid loop and one saying "No Smoking".

In front of the door is... A STEP. A big, stone step - i would guess the height is about 8"/20cm from the pavement to the level of the door. There is no ramp, there is no alternative entrance, not even a bell or buzzer saying "please ring if you need assistance". Yes, that's right, the shop is completely inaccessible to wheelchair users. Presumably, the business owner must have thought that just putting a sign on the front door saying "Inclusive Access for Disabled Customers" would somehow magically make that inclusive access a fact, and/or was an acceptable substitute for actually making hir premises accessible.

WTF???

Disability, Gender and Horror in "Planet Terror" and "The Orphanage"

Note: this post contains spoilers for both films mentioned in the title. If you haven't seen either of them, and would like to see them without knowing what happens in them beforehand, then don't read this before watching them!

The Orphanage (original Spanish title El Orfanato), directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, and Planet Terror, directed by Robert Rodriguez, are two recent-ish horror films which, like many in the genre (but possibly more explicitly than most) contain strong disability themes. Both films, according to Wikipedia, originally came out in 2007, although i'm not sure if the UK cinema release of either was in 2007 or 2008; I have owned DVDs of both for several months, but only got round to watching them in the last couple of weeks, hence my reviewing them now. Apologies to Lisy and Tera for stealing their blogging turf ;)

The films are from opposite ends of the horror spectrum (Planet Terror is a homage to 1970s "exploitation" films, with an emphasis on gore, action, special effects and "rule of cool" characterisation, while The Orphanage is more of a supernatural/psychological "chiller", with quite an "arthouse" vibe (although it has to be noted that anything filmed in a language other than English and/or subtitled tends to get put into that category in the mainstream press, even if it's wildly inappropriate)), and they have extremely different visual styles. Nonetheless, there are several parallels between them; both were produced by a more famous director than those who directed them, and used that director's name heavily in marketing (Quentin Tarantino in the case of Planet Terror, and Guillermo del Toro in the case of The Orphanage). As well as the disability themes, both play to an extent on gender roles using female protagonists (conventionally or otherwise), and both can be seen (albeit through readings that may not necessarily correspond with authorial intention) as critiques of paternalistic medical and social "care" systems.

In Planet Terror, the main protagonist (played by Rose McGowan) is a sex worker who becomes disabled early on in the film, losing a leg as a result of a zombie* attack, and first gets a broken-off table leg as a makeshift prosthetic, then later (actually surprisingly late in the film for me, given it being the iconic image that was plastered everywhere of the film) gets her leg replaced with a machine gun, which she uses (rather implausibly, seemingly able to fire it by moving the leg stump alone - tho that fits in with the general over-the-top, stylised tone of the film, a Tarantino hallmark shared with the somewhat thematically similar Kill Bill) to massacre zombies and save the day, thus gaining power and purpose as a disabled person with assistive technology - in fact, becoming an effective saviour of humanity as implied by the ending - that she never had in her pre-impairment life, which, IMO, even if Rodriguez didn't realise it, is an audacious subversion of the usual disability tropes found in horror and action films (where disabled characters are nearly always either pathetic victims, mentor/mastermind types detached from the action, or monstrous villains/antagonists).

*Some purists may argue about whether the "zombies" in Planet Terror are actually zombies, as they are mutated by a virus rather than reanimated from the dead by supernatural means. However, they act like zombies, and even on the DVD cover Planet Terror gets described as "a kick-ass zombie movie"... so i'll call them zombies for convenience.



A secondary protagonist, a female doctor (played by Marley Shelton) at the hospital where the zombie plague is first discovered, is also rendered (temporarily) physically impaired by her abusive husband (who is also a higher-ranking doctor, played by Josh Brolin) when he finds out she is attempting to leave him, by injecting her hands with anaesthetic and paralysing them. Despite this, however, she still manages to escape from the cupboard he locks her in, get into her car, rescue her son and drive to her father's house, while fighting off several other antagonists along the way. Brolin's character is also portrayed as enjoying the power he has over his patients in a particularly arrogant and sinister way, and can be seen as representing the authoritarian nastiness of patriarchal medicine (one could even see Shelton's character as representing a more positive vision of medical professionals allied to their patients or the community rather than to "the system", or as a medical professional whose "switching sides" by becoming disabled herself parallels her decision to liberate herself and her son from the abusive family relationship). Brolin's character also ends up becoming one of the "infected" himself, linking his patriarchal and medical authority with the military-industrial conspiracy origin of the plague.

Thus, Planet Terror is, for me, that unusual thing, a relatively-mainstream horror movie that seems to be thoroughly and unambiguously on the side of the oppressed - unlike the many other horror films in which disabled or otherwise marginalised people, when they gain power, use it for evil and have to be destroyed, in Planet Terror they are the protagonists and use their power to save the world (and even survive at the end, where the male, non-disabled, martial arts expert protagonist dies!), while the establishment-upholding institutions (medical, police and military/government) are portrayed as corrupt, evil and monstrous. (thanks to Tera for that insight :) )

The Orphanage is rather more ambiguous. The plot centres around a couple with an adopted son who buy the former orphanage that the mother (played by Belen Rueda) grew up in, with the intent of re-opening it as a "home" for disabled children. Their son is himself disabled, albeit without knowing it at the start of the film, as an HIV-positive adopted child (it's implied by his appearance and some incidental dialogue, but not explicitly stated, that he was presumably adopted from an institution in a developing country, probably (given the Spanish-language setting) somewhere in Latin America - although this isn't really touched on in the plot), but his parents are keeping this from him "for his own protection". The boy's finding out about his impairment and his origin, however, lead into the supernatural events of the plot, involving the ghosts of children who lived in the orphanage in the adoptive mother's childhood, who eventually lead both son and mother to their deaths.



The villain of the film is a former care worker at the orphanage (with the highly ironic name "Benigna"), who turns out to have killed the other children whose ghosts haunt the orphanage, after they caused the death of her own facially disfigured son, Tomas. However, Tomas and the other children all seem to be working together as ghosts, with no sign of enmity or tension, which strikes me as something of a plot hole; I was expecting Tomas' ghost to be an antagonist because of a grudge against the other children. Of the other ghost children, one is stated to be blind, while another wears a leg brace, but their impairments are incidental to the plot. The disabled children for whom Rueda's character had intended to reopen the orphanage are only shown briefly (although it looks like actually disabled child actors were used for the parts, albeit probably more accurately described as "extras" than "actors"), and again not much is made of disability as a plot element here.

Overall, The Orphanage felt to me like a film which could have made much more of the themes of disability and institutional "care" which formed the backdrop to its plot than it did; I was expecting it to have a much stronger theme of the true horror inherent in a segregated and institutional setting itself (as well as more of a presence of the disabled children the protagonists were reopening it for). It's also a much less radical film in its treatment of gender roles than Planet Terror - it follows typical horror film conventions of "emotional" female characters being much more receptive to the supernatural than skeptical, "rational" male characters, of women's primary identity being as mothers protecting their children, and of the "caretaker" role (whether seen positively as nurturing or negatively as authoritarian oppression) as a primarily female one. (In this it can be contrasted with del Toro's earlier The Devil's Backbone, also set in an orphanage and featuring ghost children, in which it is an abusive male authority figure who is led to his death by the ghosts, who can be seen as (anti)heroic rather than antagonistic.)

Laura, the main protagonist of The Orphanage, in some ways parallels Dakota, the secondary protagonist of Planet Terror: both are mothers of sons of a similar age whose sons die in ironically tragic circumstances, both are temporarily physically impaired by the actions of an antagonist, and both have husbands or male partners who are oppressively scornful and dismissive towards them (albeit one portrayed as actually abusive, while the other is merely the standard supernatural film "disbeliever" or "skeptic" character). Both also have antagonistic counterparts (Benigna and Dr Block respectively) who personify the authoritarian paternalism of medical and social care that disabled people are subjected to. However, Laura herself, as a (presumably) fairly rich and privileged international adopter of a disabled child, who plans to open what is still essentially an institution for other disabled children, is open to criticism as the same sort of "do-gooding" paternalist. (It's a subtle but pleasing parallel that both Laura and Benigna separated their own disabled sons from the other children in the institution - also, Laura's own rise from orphaned/institutionalised origins to proprietor of the same institution could be seen as showing an assimilation process of oppressed people being socialised to imitate, and ultimately become, oppressors.)

Both Planet Terror and The Orphanage are visually stunning films, although they use extremely different visual styles. Both also have flawed plots, in which some events seem implausible even given the supernatural settings and certain elements do not (IMO) entirely satisfactorily hold together. Both, however, are recommended for critical viewing, although of the 2 Planet Terror is the one that i think is the most radical and positive in the way it presents disabled and otherwise oppressed characters.

I find it interesting that this is somewhat the opposite of how the subgenres of horror film that The Orphanage and Planet Terror are representative of generally tend to get percieved - the subtler, more psychological "arthouse horror" of The Orphanage being generally praised by more intellectual critics and seen as more "alternative" and for the more "aware" or "discerning" viewer, whereas the gory, effects-heavy "action horror" of Planet Terror (and the older "schlock" or "exploitation" films that it draws on for inspiration) tends to be seen as the sexist, anti-intellectual domain of macho adolescent boys, and as using minority stereotypes in crudely exploitative ways. However, here it's Rodriguez's "exploitation" horror (with its roots in pulp sci-fi magazines, circus freakshows and the like) which is ultimately more subversive and minority-positive than Bayona's "intellectual" work. (It's worth noticing that the disability arts movement has a long tradition of reclaiming and subverting exploitative "freakshow" imagery, with Tod Browning's classic film Freaks as an arguable antecedent).

What i would really love to see is a horror film with disabled protagonists played by disabled actors, with the themes of institutions and their lingering, haunting legacy as used (if not explored as deeply as they could have been) in The Orphanage, but with the style and attitude of Planet Terror. (I'm sure the likes of Mat Fraser and Nabil Shaban would be interested in such a project, if there was a director and finance to get it off the ground. While doing dream casting, i'd love to have Sarah Gordy playing a protagonist and Liz Crow playing some role in either producing or directing...) Now that would be a true successor to Freaks. However, in the absence of such an imaginary film (and the extreme unlikeliness of anything like it ever happening), Planet Terror and (to a slightly lesser extent) The Orphanage are both above average for "mainstream" cinema, and worth watching for anyone with an interest in either "genre" films or in disability and its intersections with other oppressive systems...

What would/could personal assistance look like in a mutual aid society?

I've been meaning to blog about this for a long time, but have been prompted into finally posting by the discussion involving Anarchafemme, Foibey and myself in the comment thread on this post at Anarchafemme's blog, which was getting quite a considerable distance from the original post topic, so to avoid derailing it any further, i thought i'd better at least make a start on the topic here. There's no way that this post is ever going to cover all of my thoughts here, but it's a start...

Background first: for almost a year now, i have been working as a PA (Personal Assistant) for a fellow disability rights activist with a physical impairment. There have been, and still are, various ongoing tensions within that working relationship, but those aren't (directly) the subject of this post, and it's still, by a long, long way, the best job (in terms of waged work) that i've ever had. In many ways, it's arguably the best possible job for an anti-capitalist - it doesn't benefit any oppressive corporation or state agency, it's effectively using money from the welfare state to sustain activism, and it (genuinely and directly, unlike so many other jobs in government departments or charities/NGOs that claim to do so) empowers and liberates oppressed people. It's also a job which does not require any particular educational or professional qualifications, and in which having experienced barriers to more "mainstream" employment is arguably actually an advantage (because members of oppressed/discriminated-against groups who tend to have such barriers are more likely to get the point that this job is about enabling and liberating, not controlling, patronising or "care-taking").

The paradigm of disabled people directly employing PAs, however, while being a major part of the Independent Living movement (a movement that i would argue is possibly the only minority liberation movement that is inherently both libertarian and socialist - but that's something i'll have to save for a future post) is one that is rooted in hierarchical and capitalist social structures of wage-work and the employer/employee relationship. Is there a contradiction here?

The employer/employee model of personal assistance comes from the concept developed by the disabled people's movement of "independent living" as not meaning "doing everything for oneself", but "having choice and control over one's own life" - a concept which, IMO, is the only concept of "independent living" which makes any sense in any modern context, as no human being in any present-day society (and possibly at any time in human history) is entirely self-reliant, but we are all interdependent on one another. This means, then, that being physically (or otherwise) impaired does not in itself prevent a person from being "independent", but it is social structures and policies that prevent people with personal assistance needs from having control over when and how they recieve that assistance that do prevent them from having "independence" in the choice-and-control sense (for one of many excellent articles on that topic, see "What's So Great About Independence?" by Sally French here).

This is libertarian in that it puts the freedom of choice of the disabled person over what happens to their own body and in their own life as the highest priority, and socialist in that paying for it is seen as the whole of society's, not just the individual's, responsibility - but where does it fit in with the anarchist/anti-capitalist/libertarian-socialist critique of the whole concept of wage work and employer/employee relationships?

Generally speaking, the anarchist vision of a world based on equality and mutual aid is one without any hierarchical relationships between (adult, at least) human beings - but the relationship between a disabled employer and hir PA is inherently hierarchical, and it's hard to see how it could not be without compromising the disabled person's autonomy. For anarcho-communists (which i would loosely speaking consider myself... although some anarcho-communists might disagree, and i generally prefer "anarchist without adjectives") at least, Utopia also doesn't have such a thing as money (as all production of goods is for need rather than for profit or exchange-value, and everything is shared freely) - but this also raises issues in relation to PA work, because of the issue of motivation...

In a "free" or "autonomous" society, in most anarchist visions, the motivation for any kind of work is either that the person doing the work enjoys doing it, or that the work needs to be done - in contrast to the "heteronomous" work that dominates existing capitalist society - work that is done not out of either need or desire to do the work itself, but because of a secondary motivation, namely the payment for doing that work - thus, people work in factories producing goods that they neither consume nor want to consume, or in administrative jobs that would have no purpose at all in a free society, because they need the money, leading to alienation (which is not seen exactly the same way in an anarchist as in a Marxist critique of capitalism... but, for now, close enough).

In PA work, however, the heteronomous nature of the work is arguably a good thing, because the fact that PAs' motivation for working is financial need creates a relationship that is co-dependent rather than one-way dependent - the PA needs hir job for the income as much as the disabled person needs the PA to get hir embodied needs met. This, however, only works in a capitalist wage-work system - in a moneyless anarcho-communist society (such as Anarres in Ursula le Guin's The Disposessed), where the motive for work is its necessity of the work itself rather than financial gain, I think there would be a significant risk of the PA/employer dynamic that currently liberates disabled people by giving them choice and control would be lost - it would be easy to fall back into a patronising "do-gooder" dynamic, where only the disabled person needs the personal assistance, meaning that the PA would be acting purely altruistically or as a "favour" to the disabled person. For many disabled people, that would be unacceptably like the paternalistic charity model, with disabled people expected to be the passive and grateful recipients of altruistically given "care", rather than in charge of their own assistance, which, in the currently existing model of PA work, their position of authority and financial power as employers allows them to be.

It could be hoped that in an anarchist society, with an explicit ideological commitment to opposing all forms of "power-over", the power of providers of assistance over dependent disabled people would be recognised as such and a paradigm based on rights and solidarity could be created to try to overcome that - but it still makes me feel slightly uneasy, because i strongly suspect it's inherent in human nature for those providing necessary assistance to others to feel that they should get some sort of "reward" in return, whether money or the praiseworthy status of "do-gooder" and the gratitude and subservience on the part of the recipient that comes with it... and also, even in anarchist circles, i have known too many people who have accepted paternalistic attitudes to disabled people all too easily (including several "anarchists" who have worked as "carers" in institutions, apparently without having the slightest idea of their jobs as being those of oppressors).

(This is, to an extent, also about intersectionality, and the fact that the disability rights movement has, at least in the UK, existed fairly separately from other new social movements and wider critiques of the statist/capitalist system, while the wider anarchist/anti-* activist movements have almost entirely failed to address disability issues...)

This post is not so much laying out any answers as asking questions and inviting debate - so i'd be particularly interested in replies from anyone who has any ideas about this (especially, in fact, from PA users). Does a model of personal assistance that is liberatory for disabled people only work within a capitalist wage-work system (where work is defined as "heteronomous production of exchange-values", as Andre Gorz says in Farewell to the Working Class), or can it transcend that system? Can disabled people with personal assistance needs be assisted effectively without depriving someone (either the disabled person or the PA) of autonomy? (Or should the employer/employee relationship between disabled person and PA be seen as "depriving" the PA of autonomy? Perhaps it could instead be seen as a form of consensual power exchange, similar to that found in some BDSM sexual relationships?) Is there a "3rd way" possible here, that is neither paternalist nor capitalist?

If we are to have a fully "joined-up" anti-oppression politics, these questions need to be addressed, regardless of whether they can be decisively answered. Anyone up for tackling them?