Thoughts on a local news story

I saw this story on the front cover of a discarded local paper on a bus today. On the surface, it looks like a fairly unremarkable example of the standard local paper sympathy-eliciting disability story - but i think that this one - like many of its kind - has deeper undertones to it.

Anthony Booth, the man who has had his prosthetic legs stolen days before his sister Angela's wedding, has been a wheelchair user since the age of 9 - and, as he's a Paralympic wheelchair racer, it's obvious that that's his strongly preferred method of locomotion, and he's quite likely more "successful" at it than many people with no physical impairment at all are at walking. ("Successful" seems an odd way to put it, but i can't think of a better word - i mean in terms of finding it easy, effortless, something he can comfortably do many miles a day of. Of course, i'm not at all implying that those for whom walking, wheelchair pushing, or whatever their preferred method of locomotion is, is at best painful and difficult are "unsuccessful" because of that - i'm just struggling to escape disablist language. Sapir-Whorf again, methinks...) So, why is it so important to his sister that he "walks her down the aisle"? What purpose has it actually served him to spend so much time, effort and self-cited discomfort on learning to walk on prosthetic legs "without using a stick"?

Is the sister's voice authentic in saying "It's more for him that I'm upset because I know he really wanted to do it"? On the surface, that seems a simple and honest thing to say - but it also has an air of required justification about it, a suggestion that, on some level, she is aware that it would be somehow inappropriate or unjustified to be upset about this "for herself". Has she, perhaps even subconsciously, put pressure on her brother to learn to walk when he himself - wheelchair user since childhood and professional athlete who has thus essentially built a huge part of his identity around being a wheelchair user - might well have preferred to play his role in her wedding ceremony using his own comfortable, "normal" method of moving, rather than walking on "uncomfortable" prosthetics because he "wanted it to be the way she wanted".

Also, the whole focus of the story is the theft of his prosthetic legs, but it glosses over the fact that his wheelchair was also inside the van that was stolen. It doesn't say whether it was his Paralympic racing wheelchair - it's probably more likely that it was the wheelchair he used for ordinary, everyday locomotion - but, given that in 24 years of being a double amputee, he apparently hasn't wanted to learn to walk with prosthetics until recently, i strongly suspect that the loss of his wheelchair would have been a far more significant loss for him in terms of everyday mobility than that of his legs.

Going a bit further, why does she feel such a need to have a male relative "walk her down the aisle" anyway? Has she stopped to question the roots and implications of this custom - of women as property of the men around them, and marriage as a ceremonial handing over of woman-as-property from her father, brother or whatever male relative "ownership" defaults to in a patriarchal inheritance system, to her husband? Does she conceptualise herself that way - and, if not, does the survival of patriarchal customs marking women as chattel, even as arguably decontextualised and now-effectively-meaningless bits of ritual, still contribute to oppressive attitudes and actions on the part of those men and internalised self-oppression on the part of those women who uncritically accept and perpetuate those customs?

How many people, reading this "human interest" story, will take for granted the assumptions - about marriage, about disability, about what obligations are and should be part of family relationships - that it contains - that although Anthony Booth found walking on prosthetic legs "uncomfortable", it was right that he should have mimicked the locomotion of a non-disabled person - putting the appearance of normality before his own ease and comfort of movement - to play the part expected of him by his family in a patriarchally normative ritual, and that it is a tragedy and a scandal that he was prevented from doing so (although perhaps not so much that he had his primary means of mobility taken from him)?

There's nothing particularly important or remarkable about this one, small local news story - it's just an example of the many levels of assumptions and prescriptive social norms embedded in what seem like trivial examples of simple, factual reporting - all of which can be unpacked or deconstructed to show biases that go largely unquestioned in mainstream media and mainstream society. There are stories that can be similarly unpacked in every newspaper (magazine, TV news broadcast, etc.) every day. The purpose of deconstructing this superficially trivial story isn't to attack Angela Booth or the Manchester Evening News - it's to highlight that the way the mainstream news reports stories, concerning not just disability and other marginalised identities, but also "normal" and generally-approved-of customs such as marriage, is not "neutral" or "objective", but - even if it does not do so consciously - defends and upholds privileged constructions of what is valued and devalued.

The same local paper which makes a headline out of an individual disabled person's mobility aids being stolen has failed to report on the collective theft of huge amounts of money in tax and benefits from disabled (and otherwise poor and marginalised) people by the UK's new government in its "emergency" budget, and also didn't report the collective direct action taken by disabled people last week in Manchester city centre against the exploitation of disabled people by contracts between government and big business (notably, the independent, community-run Manchester Mule did.). Is this because an individual thief is easier to vilify than an entire system which has theft and violence at its very foundation? Because disabled people are more newsworthy as individualised "victims" (of individual criminality, not of systemic oppression) than as organised activists fighting back? Or merely because certain news stories fit easily into stereotypical formulae, and it's easier and "safer" to keep to such established, non-boat-rocking narratives than to report on anything more "challenging"?

I want to get into the relationship between activism and the media, and the thorny questions of how and whether to engage with corporate/mainstream media and/or simply create our own, here, but i think that's for another post, and i'm still not quite back into "regular" blogging. I will hopefully get back into at least semi-regular posting in the near-ish future, tho...

DAN Defend Welfare action in Manchester, 16th June 2010

I posted this at Indymedia a few days ago, but it just occurred to me that i could also post it here. (Real life stuff happens, and i somehow manage to forget that i have a blog...)

Yesterday (Wednesday 16th June), DAN (Disabled People's Direct Action Network), along with members of Manchester Anarchist Federation and Manchester Unemployed Workers Union, took action in Manchester city centre as part of the National Day of Action against the Flexible New Deal called by the No to Welfare Abolition coalition (see the Defend Welfare website).

Around 25 activists, mostly from Manchester (although people from Sheffield, Leeds and Lancaster were also involved), and including disabled people with a wide variety of impairments and other benefits claimants, assembled in Portland Street at 2pm to hit the first target, the Beaver House office of A4E, the company who take government contracts to run "workfare" schemes which force benefits claimants into "temporary work placements" for far below the minimum wage, with promises of full-time jobs afterwards which never materialise - effectively using disabled people and other claimants as slave labour, while also claiming credit (and getting public money!) for "clients" of theirs finding jobs, even when A4E themselves had nothing to do with it (and could be said to be actively hindering people from seeking "real" jobs by forcing them to waste time in their offices on "training" and "placements" which lead nowhere).

(A4E also have subsidiaries involved in Israeli-occupied territories in Palestine and have attempted to censor criticism of them on the internet, among many other nasty things. For more information on A4E, see links such as: Watching A4E
A4E: Supporting Your Future?
A4E to claimant: "Get a job" (Edinburgh Anarchists)
A4E: more from the Poverty Pimps (Johnny Void)
Jobseekers treated like cattle (Manchester Evening News)
A4E's scheme wins award (Manchester Evening News) )

A small group of activists tried to enter the office and demand to speak to the manager of A4E, but were locked out from the inside by staff operating the "automatic" doors, and rejoined the main group outside, picketing the entrance to the office with banners, placards, leaflets (of which we gave out several hundred to workers and passers-by) and chants such as "Real Work for Real Pay", "We want jobs, not slave labour", "A4E, not for me, stop exploiting disabled people!" and "welfare not Workfare, Welfare not the Workhouse".

DAN's second target was originally going to be the central Jobcentre on Albert St(?), but we were tipped off by a last-minute text that Maria Miller, the Tory Minister "for Disabled People", was going to be at Manchester Town Hall to speak at the Independent Living Awards organised by Breakthrough UK from 4.30pm. Therefore we made a quick change of plans and headed to the Town Hall, where we did some more leafleting and talked to an interested local radio journalist before getting into the Town Hall lobby via the access ramp and demanding to speak to Maria Miller (without, it has to be said, much expectation of actually getting her...)

The second surprise of the day, however, came when Miller, accompanied by the chair of Breakthrough Uk, came down the corridor and ran into our protest, and after being made aware of the situation was willing to speak to us "briefly", which we managed to stretch out to a good 20 minutes, during which DAN got to ask her several uncomfortable questions, in response to which she displayed a typical politician's evasion of a straight answer (for example, never giving a clear "yes" in response to being asked if the new government actually had any plans to engage with grass roots disabled people who were actually affected by its policies).

Miller repeatedly claimed she "couldn't agree with us more", despite having disagreed minutes previously, and in general seemed to be full of vague assurances and "reassuring" claims that the government was not doing what it is well known to be doing, denying disabled people welfare support and forcing them into "job placements" (a phrase she repeatedly used without clarifying if it meant real jobs) that are completely unsuitable. She claimed that "those genuinely unable to work will not be denied access to welfare benefits", but declined to acknowledge the fact that many disabled people who would be both able and willing to work if barriers were removed and impairments accommodated are left in limbo, unable to find work that is practically possible for them yet deemed by the government and mainstream media to be "workshy" or "able" but not willing.

While we may not have actually shut down the A4E office, we managed through this action to raise considerable awareness among the Manchester public about the reality behind their shiny corporate facade, and managed a fantastic coup by getting the last-minute tip-off about Maria Miller's presence at Manchester Town Hall!

Other actions happened as part of the National Day of Action against the Flexible New Deal in Edinburgh, London, Sheffield, Cambridge and elsewhere.

For more information about DAN or to get involved, email danmail-subscribe@yahoogroups.com


DAN banner outside the A4E office on Portland Street


Another DAN banner


Will they give me a job as an England footballer?


Leafleting outside Manchester Town Hall


Negotiating with Town Hall security guards


Maria Miller, Minister for Disabled People, being interrogated by DAN