Another awesome call for papers...

This one via Miss Crip Chick:

“Feminism For Freaks”

At its best, feminism offers an emancipatory potential from gendered oppression, inequality, and violence. At its worst, however, feminism can work to simply affirm the rights of middle-class, heterosexual, white women, and exclude the voices of already-marginalised groups such as women of colour, trans* women, sex workers and so on. Like Derrida’s democracy, a truly liberatory feminism is mostly a feminism to come.

Not un-coincidentally, those marginalised groups of women are often demonised by the dominant culture, rendered as monstrous - simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible, compelling and threatening, desirable and disgusting – and forever denied a voice of our own. The question of if and how monstrosity can be reclaimed or re-worked is a vexed one for feminists.

We therefore invite proposals that affirm the voices of socially excluded people, that seek to create new and exciting knowledge and address themselves to feminist theory and activism or the wider culture, on such topics including, but not limited to:

* Monstrous bodies and identities
* Social marginalisation and exclusions (for instance, borders, walls, and immigration laws, and the silencing of voices such as those of women of colour and transgendered people)
* Liberation/transformation/organisation
* sex work
* queer sexualities and genders
* BDSM
* Visible signs of difference (Muslim women wearing the veil, disabled bodies etc)
* religion and spirituality
* freaks in popular culture, body modification etc
* fat positivity

Academic, non-fiction and creative work will be considered–the call is broad, and we’re willing to accommodate new and interesting work by freaks of all kinds.

Please submit abstracts of up to 250 words by May 31st to estrangedcognition[at]hotmail.com and suzanmanuel[at]gmail.com

*Note - Given that some contributors may not feel safe or comfortable telling their stories in the public sphere, submissions under pseudonyms will be accepted.

Monsters and the Monstrous: Call for Papers 2008

Found via Cryptomundo:

6th Global Conference - Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil

Monday 22nd September - Thursday 25th September 2008
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference seeks to investigate and explore the enduring influence and imagery of monsters and the monstrous on human culture throughout history. In particular, the project will have a dual focus with the intention of examining specific ‘monsters’ as well as assessing the role, function and consequences of persons, actions or events identified as ‘monstrous’. The history and contemporary cultural influences of monsters and monstrous metaphors will also be examined.

Perspectives are sought from those engaged in the fields of literature, media studies, cultural studies, history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, health and theology. Ideas are welcomed from those involved in academic study, fictional explorations, and applied areas (e.g. youth work, criminology and medicine).

Papers, reports, work-in-progress and workshops are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:

- The “monster” through history
- Civilization, monsters and the monstrous
- Children, childhood, stories and monsters; monsters and parents
- Comedy: funny monsters and/or making fun of monsters (e.g. Monsters Inc, the Addams Family)
- Making monsters; monstrous births
- Mutants and mutations
- Technologies of the monstrous
- Horror, fear and scare
- Do monsters kill because they are monstrous or are they monstrous because they kill?
- How critical to the definition of “monster” is death or the threat of death?
- Human ‘monsters’ and ‘monstrous’ acts? e.g, perverts, paedophiles and serial killers
- The monstrous and gender
- Revolution and monsters; the monstrous and politics; enemies (political/social/military) and monsters
- Iconography of the monstrous
- The popularity of the modern monsters; the Mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, Vampires
- The monster in literature
- The monstrous in popular culture: film, television, theatre, radio, print, internet. The monstrous and journalism
- Religious depictions of the monstrous; the monstrous and the supernatural
- Metaphors and the monstrous
- The monstrous and war, war reportage/propaganda
- Monsters, the monstrous and the internet; monstrous virtualities
- Monsters, gaming and on-line communities

Papers will be accepted which deal solely with specific monsters. We also welcome proposals for pre-formed panels which specifically explore the themes of hybridity or themes of monstrous parents and families. In addition, papers which examine the theme of hope in relations to monsters (for joint sessions with the Hope project running at the same time) are wlecome.

Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 9th May 2008. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 8th August 2008.

300 word abstracts should be submitted to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order: author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Sorcha Ni Fhlainn
Project Co-Leader
School of English, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
mailto: iheartvampires@gmail.com

Rob Fisher
Network Founder & Leader Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire
United Kingdom
mailto: m6@inter-disciplinary.net

Stephen Morris
Project Co-Leader
Independent Scholar
New York, USA
mailto: smmorris58@yahoo.com

The conference is part of the ‘At the Interface’ series of programmes organised by ID.Net. The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers will be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume.

[end quote]

I think this whole conference sounds awesome, and with the potential to bring all kinds of things together. I have bolded the topics in the list that i think sound particularly exciting...

It would be utterly awesome if some Disability Studies people submitted papers for this. I know i'm not up to it at the moment (and not (yet) being within the hallowed halls of academia, probably wouldn't be eligible), but there have to be some people who would be well into this out there...

A few topics that i can think of offhand that could potentially fit into this from a disability studies perspective: changelings, freak shows in fiction and reality, representations of disabled people as monsters or villains in horror films (see this post at Sweet Perdition, discovered through the latest Disability Blog Carnival... another one i need to add to my blogroll), the Neanderthal hybrid theory of neurodiversity, the use of disabled actors to play monsters or non-human characters (eg in Doctor Who)... shit, there's fucking loads of stuff...

(I think i'm going to have to spam about a couple of dozen blogs with this...)

oh, and a couple of classic blog posts which i think are relevant to this:

Little Light: the seam of skin and scales
Boots (of Makezine): Monster Trans
Ballastexistenz: I'm the monster you met on the Internet

edit: archives of the previous 5 conferences in this project can be found here...

Visibility and/or objectification: images of disabled people in books and media

I was at a friend's house recently and, with my friend and her partner, rather randomly looking through some books that were lying around her house. Two of the books had photos of disabled people in them, and it got me thinking about images of disabled/impaired people, visibility and objectification...

The first book was a university biology textbook on human genetics. Sections of the book discussed various congenital impairments and the genetics behind them, and had accompanying photos of people with those impairments. One was a picture of a baby with Cri du Chat syndrome, which is caused by a partial deletion of a chromosome (and gets its name because babies with it have a distinctive cry which, apparently, sounds like a cat). Alongside the picture of the baby was the remark that, although "mentally retarded", people with Cri du Chat syndrome could, with "proper support", develop intelligence "in the trainable range".

On the next page was a discussion of Down's syndrome, which is caused by trisomy, or having an "extra", third copy of chromosome 23. The accompanying photo was labelled as being of "a child with Down's syndrome"; in actual fact, it looked to be of a young woman in roughly her early 20s. She was dressed in some sort of sporting gear (probably a winter sport like skiing?), and proudly holding a trophy for winning a sporting competition.

The other book was a very silly book supposedly about cryptozoology (if it wasn't that one, it was a very similar one), which was basically a complete work of fiction presented as a "science" book, probably mostly aimed at kids, featuring pseudo-scientific depictions (with fake Latin names, etc) of mythological creatures like centaurs, dragons, winged horses, merpeople, werewolves, unicorns, etc. (Note that cryptozoology is actually real, and a perseveration of mine, and generally deals with somewhat more plausible putative creatures than the above (well, at least when crazy US creationists aren't trying to hijack it)- this speech by Darren Naish is a good introduction to it...)

On the intro page to the "Hominids" chapter (which, rather than dealing with relatively plausible hominid cryptids such as the Almas or the Orang Pendek, was about such creatures as goblins, giants and fairies), however, despite the premise being that it was about fictional non-human species, there were several photos of disabled humans: several people of restricted growth, Joseph Merrick the "Elephant Man", and one of the "Rat Children of Pakistan", who are actually children who were deliberately physically and mentally impaired in order to exploit them as beggars.

All these portrayals are problematic IMO. Cri du Chat syndrome is one of many syndromes which i've only ever seen pictures or descriptions of babies/small children with, despite the fact that people with it grow to become adults. This kind of thing is quite common with regard to autism as well; lots of stuff in the media about "autistic children", but a distinct absence of autistic adults, as if the assumption is that disabled children either don't live to adulthood, or somehow miraculously become non-disabled on reaching adulthood; it also contributes to the perception of disabled adults as some sort of "eternal children". This perception is shown incredibly clearly by the labelling of the photo of the woman with Down's syndrome as "a child with Down's syndrome" - congenital impairment is assumed to be a property (only) of children to such an extent that a person with a congenital impairment, regardless of their actual age, is automatically assumed to be a child. So prevalent is the reference only to children in medical/scientific articles about congenital impairments that i sometimes wonder if the thought of the existence of adults with such impairments has ever crossed the minds of the writers of such articles.

The phrase "trainable range" is one that makes me shudder. A search for "trainable" on Wikipedia redirects to the article titled "Mental retardation", despite the word not being used in that article. I believe that, at one time, people with mental disabilities were classified by the authorities into "trainables" and "untrainables", with the former regarded as being capable of training for employment (in positions at the bottom of the workplace heirarchy, doing menial work and often paid far less than a living wage, if anything at all), and the latter regarded as incapable of any meaningful learning or contribution to society, and thus "warehoused" in institutions. (This, in fact, parallels current UK government policy, as laid out in the Welfare Reform Act, which similarly seeks to classify disabled people as either "capable of work", and thus to be forced into any job, however unsuitable, with the threat of destitution, or "incapable of work", and thus by implication incapable of meaningful membership in society and deserving of social exclusion.) The "trainable"/"untrainable" categorisation starkly illustrates the values of a society which defines people by their capacity for economic exploitation, and which considers it appropriate for disabled people to be coercively "trained" to accept a prescribed social role regardless of their own desires and aspirations.

The fact that images of visibly disabled people are considered an appropriate introduction for a fictional classification of mythological "hominid species" clearly shows to what extent disabled people are considered "Other", objects of fascination yet not of empathy or identification, not fully human; exhibits, just as "exotic" animals are, in a zoo or a freak show (a subject i touched on earlier here) - indeed, it is implied that the "dwarves" whose photo captions say they were exhibited in circuses and at the courts of European royalty are the same as the fictional "dwarves" described a few pages later as a species of Homo with non-human physical and personality traits based on the portrayals of dwarf races in fantasy (Tolkien, etc). "Elephant Man" and "Rat Children" are, of course, names which seek to compare and associate disabled people with animals and portray them as some sort of hybrid or intermediate between humans and animals, definitely not fully human; so, arguably, is "Cri du Chat syndrome".

(Although i know some people of restricted growth use it as a self-definition, i find the term "dwarf" very difficult to use to describe real people, because i can't help it making me think of them as living in mines underneath a mountain, having huge beards and Viking-style helmets, making magical artefacts out of gold and having wars with elves, orcs, etc...)

The writers of the fictional cryptozoology book probably didn't think of the possibility of causing offence to, or furthering negative stereotypes of, disabled people when they used those photos or descriptions. The writers of the genetics textbook almost certainly thought they were portraying disabled people in an ideologically neutral way, as a matter of science, not of culture or politics. However, such images cannot help but objectify and reinforce stereotypical perceptions of disabled people.

Of course, with many if not all of these types of images, i can't help feeling ambiguous; there are some arguable positives to them, despite the negatives. It's good, IMO, that impairments are part of a biological education, and that people have at least a basic knowledge of different impairments and how they affect people (as long as that knowledge is placed appropriately within a social context) - the social model does not, or at least should not, deny or ignore impairment, and understanding of impairment is, IMO, necessary (if not sufficient) for understanding of disabling barriers.

Just being aware that different kinds of human beings exist is, IMO, a good thing, and i think that some sort of categorisation of types of human difference is something that the human mind finds necessary. The image of the young woman with Down's syndrome, if taken by itself without the inaccurate caption calling her a "child", is pretty unambiguously positive; it shows a disabled person looking strong, independent and confident, and proud of her achievement in something that she is a success at. (Admittedly it does reinforce the association of disabled people with sport as primary achievement, which is something i have problems with, but that's a critique i'll have to save for another blog post...)

Even the "freakshow" images of disabled people alongside mythical animals can, IMO, be reclaimed in certain ways; as people proud of and (in many cases) choosing to earn a living from visible difference; "we're here, we're biodiverse, get used to it". (Eli Clare has a great chapter on this topic in Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation, which i'll have to return to in future posts - of course, there is also Tod Browning's magnificent film Freaks, which is justly regarded as a classic by many in the disability movement.)

Kay Olson at The Gimp Parade recently posted about a story that made it into the UK mainstream media about a woman from China who refused a disability pension despite having "her feet attached backwards" (actually turned upside down - i suspect she has a form of arthrogryposis), which is typical of many stories about people with impairments which get featured in the media as "weird news" or "quirky" stories (I'm surprised it didn't make it to the Fortean Times breaking news column, which is my source for most of these types of stories) - another recent-ish one was that of the "families who walk on all fours" in Turkey and Iraq.

On the one hand, these are clearly voyeuristic, objectifying stories; on the other, there are differing views about objectification, ranging from the view that it is always and only negative to the view that it can, if freely chosen, be something desirable and positive (these being in reference to sexual/gender objectification, but IMO applicable to any other kind). I am torn between thinking "this is non-news if it were not for the factor of a "freakish" impaired body for "normal" people to gaze at", and being pleased at visible difference being portrayed at all, and the always-welcome illustration that there are more ways than the "standard" way to be human. Is the positivity or negativity of possible interpretations located in the creator(s) of the portrayal itself, or in the mind of the person observing it?

I'm not sure. (I thought i might have had a conclusion there for a second, but i obviously don't...) I do know that this is both an incredibly important (from a cultural/sociological point of view), yet much neglected, and a (probably inevitably) very much essentially contested area. I'd be really interested in other disabled peoples' (especially those whose impairments are much more visually obvious than my own) opinions...

Trans liberation and disability liberation: a necessary alliance

Today is (or, technically, yesterday was, as it's now about 4am here in the UK) Transgender Day of Remembrance, "set aside to memorialise those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice". Several bloggers I read wrote moving and powerful posts about this, which inspired me to write about what I believe to be both a natural and necessary alliance between disability and transgender issues...

One of my closest friends is a trans woman. It was her coming out as trans (at which point in fact we were not particularly close friends), and the ensuing conversations between us about identity (both gender and otherwise), disability (she also has a physical impairment), the psychiatric/mental health system, childhood experiences and other stuff, that led me to seek diagnosis for Asperger's at the age of 22, and ultimately to embrace "disabled" as an identity.

While I would never claim to appropriate her experience, there were levels of, particularly childhood, experience on which I connected more with her than with anyone I had ever known before - conversations which lasted from early afternoon until sunrise the next morning, and which felt like the deepest I had ever had in my life. Essentially, the experience that we both shared was that of having been brought up by (suburban, working-class-but-educated) parents under the assumption that each of us was a "normal boy", when in fact both of us were something else - an experience which is difficult to explain in many ways, because it is just as harmful and destructive as the experience of deliberate abuse, yet those responsible for it were acting not from any kind of malice but from a completely genuine desire to do good.

In fact, this is a defining characteristic of many if not most disabled people's lives (although particularly, specifically so for those whose impairment or other physical or mental "difference" is not diagnosed until adulthood) - false assumptions about who and what we are, resulting in well-meaning treatment that is as harmful as, or even more harmful than, malicious treatment would be. It is an experience that can be survived, even triumphed over, but not without scars - in some cases physically as a result of either "self-harm" or unnecessary and therefore harmful medical treatments, in pretty much all cases metaphorically in the form of reactive depression and PTSD. (Show me either a congenitally disabled person or a trans person who doesn't have PTSD, and I'll show you someone who must have been brought up in Utopia.)

I have seen my friend grow into a beautiful woman, while she has had to see me (in many ways) "regress" or "deteriorate". I have seen her grow into herself, while I am still not sure if I truly have a "self" to grow into. I have seen her dysphoria turned, quite literally, into euphoria by a simple little pill (the only medical-model solution for depression I have ever seen that actually worked, which makes a mockery of some so-called feminists' ideas about transitioning as a form of "self-hate" or "self-mutilation"), while there has been no such easy solution for me. This cannot have been easy for her: yet, through all of it, she has treated me continuously and consistently as a friend and an equal. There is no better definition of a friend, comrade, ally.

I believe that the disability rights/liberation movement and the trans* rights/liberation movement are natural allies, even if many within both of them have never considered that alliance. Both are about acceptance rather than elimination of physical and mental difference. Both are about freedom of choice, the inalienable right of the individual to have self-determination over, and to be regarded as the person with the best knowledge of, hir own brain and body. Both are about the depathologisation of that which the establishment persists in considering pathological. Both intersect with feminism in incredibly exciting ways which can enable feminism (if feminism lets them) to get beyond problems and dichotomies which it has struggled with for generations (see FRIDA and The Transfeminist Manifesto (PDF), and also, for intersections of both movements, the very awesome Emi Koyama). Both are about resistance against a patronising, patriarchal, paternalistic medical establishment which claims to know our bodies and minds better than we know them ourselves. Both are about human biodiversity.

There is considerable overlap, also, in the area of intersex conditions, which can be regarded both as physical impairment (and are often accompanied by, or "comorbid" with, other physical or mental impairments) and as a gender identity issue; Emi Koyama has written (although I haven't read it) a lecture with the awesome title of "Intersex at the Intersection of Queerness & Disability Theories". There is strong evidence that many people labelled "transsexual" may actually have one or more undiagnosed intersex conditions. The routine mutilation, often without their parents' either consent or knowledge, of intersex babies to make them "conform" to one binary gender or the other (which, of course, if the doctors get it wrong, leads to gender dysphoria and thus transsexualism) closely parallels the non-consensual sterilisation and other surgical mutilations of physically and/or mentally disabled children.

The long and sad history of trans* people murdered because of transphobia, and the horrifyingly widespread belief that those murders were justified because of those people's gender identity, is paralleled by the equally long and sad history of disabled people murdered (often under the guise of "mercy killing") by family members, "carers", medical professionals and institutions, and the similarly horrifyingly widespread belief that those killings were justified because of the victims' impairment or disability. Both groups were among the first to be killed (before Jews or any other ethnic minority) in the Holocaust.

This is why I think that it's absolutely awesome that disability bloggers such as Elizabeth McClung and Trinity have blogged about Transgender Day of Remembrance, and that Lisa Harney of Questioning Transphobia has posted a link to this video by Amanda Baggs. I would absolutely love to see a movement which actively brings together the disability and trans* movements (along with all kinds of other diversity-related movements), as "the human biodiversity movement", but in this lifetime, the disability movement and the trans* movement recognising and appreciating one another as allies is enough. Well, in trying to change the world, there's never really such a thing as "enough", but you know what I mean...

Transfeminist blogger Little Light wrote a truly awesome piece called "the seam of skin and scales", in which she declared "It is time for a feminism of the monstrous". While on an immediate level it's about her own identity and experience as a transsexual feminist, there is a hell of a lot in it that disabled people can equally well relate to. Disabled people too have been treated or regarded as monsters, freaks, subhumans, deviants, abominations, angels, demons, changelings, witches. Her writing sparked off a blog war with certain dogmatic "radical feminist" (IMO, their position is neither) bloggers who accused her of plagiarism (with no realistic case whatsoever).

What this is rooted in is the refusal of certain strands of feminism to accept trans* people's realities, in the same way that some of the "straw man" style critiques of disability rights are based on a refusal to accept disabled people's realities. In both cases, the issue is complicated by some well-meaning defenders of inclusion (consciously or unconsciously) embracing in reality the irrational positions that their respective movements have been stereotyped as holding.

Transphobic "feminists" tend to advance the position that transitioning is a "choice", and one which is harmful to the cause of feminism by "reinforcing feminine stereotypes" and/or "men invading women's spaces" in the case of trans women, or by "deserting womanhood to get male privilege" in the case of trans men. This - apart from having no relationship at all to reality except in the minds of people who have almost certainly never even knowingly spoken to a trans* person - completely ignores trans people's lived realities, of, for example, having known they were girls/boys from as early as they were capable of coherent thought (despite physical "evidence" of the opposite), or of having been continuously depressed to a suicidal extent (without anything other than gender dysphoria for that to be reactive to), along with other symptoms including physical pain, to be near-instantly "cured" on starting gender reassignment treatment. Trans*-ness is attributed solely to socio-political factors and even the possibility of its being the way a person was born is excluded without consideration. (For an example, see Sheila Jeffreys' claims here.)

(This is, of course, like all identity issues a complex and contested area - I have encountered (albeit only online and not in "real life") trans* people who claim that they did "choose" to transition, and did not "always" experience gender dysphoria, and I certainly don't wish to deny their realities. Ultimately, I don't think it matters if someone did choose their gender identity - I wrote about the same issue with regard to sexual orientation here... however, no one has the right to, or honestly can, deny the existence of those whose gender identity is, to them, innate.)

I see similarities here to a "straw man" version of the social model of disability, which is often advanced in order to deny it or reduce it to absurdity - i.e., that the social model supposedly states that impairment does not exist, or does not matter at all, and thus denies the reality of people whose impairments cannot be (fully) compensated for by social change. The earliest originators of the social model, such as Mike Oliver and Vic Finkelstein, shared with Marxists (from whom their critique was largely derived, albeit IMO going beyond Marxism in several crucial ways) and second wave feminists a focus on the sociological sphere and how it, rather than nature, was the source of many forms of oppression and injustice, patriarchy and disablism among them. Thus the early social model theorists did not write much about impairment, because the point of their writing was to take the focus away from impairment; however, there is nowhere that I know of, even in Finkelstein, that they deny its reality. However, this "straw man" causes many people, including disabled people, to reject the social model of disability altogether - much as the transphobia of much second-wave/radical feminism causes many trans* people to reject feminism altogether.

(On a more impairment -specific level, I see something kind of similar in some autism advocates who refuse to see autism as a "disability", or even as an "impairment".)

Disabled feminist writers (eg. Jenny Morris, Carol Thomas, Micheline Mason) have sought to redress this balance by "bringing impairment back in" to the social model, influenced by third-weave* feminist and ecofeminist writing about embodiment - arguing that diversity and difference need to be embraced, not denied, and that impairment as a lived reality inevitably informs our understanding of the world as disabled people, just as disablist oppression does, but that this can be seen as a positive thing, allowing as it does for plurality of experience...

*typo, but so appropriate I decided to leave it in ;)

Just as transphobia does not define transsexualism, so disablism cannot (wholly) define disability-as-identity. Just as even in a world completely free from disablism, impairment would continue to exist, and to affect some people negatively through factors such as pain, communication difficulties which cannot wholly be solved by technology, or shortened lifespan, and some impaired people would need medical interventions (whether drugs, surgery or both) in order to stay alive or have a decent quality of life, even in a feminist utopia where the shape of one's genitals has literally no significance socially, politically, economically or culturally (which would be (one aspect of) my utopia), there would still be people who would need hormone treatments and/or genital surgery to have a bearable life because of the physical condition (presently called gender dysphoria, in a gender-free utopia probably called something else) in which their "brain sex" and physical/hormonal sex do not match. Transsexualism is (like) impairment; transphobia is (like) disability.

Sadly, I am almost certain that there are transphobic disabled people and disablist trans* people, just as there are racist disabled people, homophobic black people, classist feminists, sexist working class people, etc, etc, etc. However, I can't help but dream of a banner of diversity under which all oppressed people can unite as allies in one another's struggles. For this to ever become anything like a reality, seeking out of parallels and interrogation of assumptions held about one group or movement by another is a permanent, ongoing necessity... and, just maybe, an alliance between the trans* liberation movement and the disability liberation movement could be the start of such a reality...

Tomatoes!

So last week i harvested the first crop of fruit from the tomato plants that i grew from seed this year:



The varieties of tomato i grew were "unregistered" varieties, which means that it's actually illegal to sell them in the EU, simply because they are not on the official EU plant variety register (which of course costs money to put a variety on). In protest against this law, which effectively gives the EU a monopoly over food plant biodiversity, and to preserve such varieties (which are almost always better tasting and more nutritious than "mainstream" fruit and veg varieties), various organisations such as organic gardening centres in the UK (and, i presume, other places in the EU) offer ways to get round the ban, such as "seed exchange" events where seeds are swapped for other seeds or given away free, or membership clubs in which people can pay a yearly membership fee and be able to get X number of seed packets a year "free" (a very similar tactic to that used by legally rented social centres to get round alcohol licensing costs by being "private members' clubs").

I believe it's also possible to get hold of unregistered seed varieties by ordering them from outside the EU (there are quite a few US-based seed catalogue websites which offer payment in UK£ and stock loads of unusual varieties of stuff). Most unregistered varieties are heirloom varieties.

I got these ones from a seed exchange at a weekend of events in Nottingham called "Spring Into Action" (organised by the East Midlands neighbourhood of the Camp for Climate Action) - i believe the seeds originated from Ryton Organic Gardens near Coventry (formerly HDRA... yeah, i love the linguistic resonance with hydra)...

The red ones in the above picture are a variety called "Darby Striped", which actually looked more striped when they were green:



(pic of Darby Striped tomato plant about a month ago)

The pale yellow ones are a variety called "Ivory Egg", which didn't have a description on the packet when i picked them (i actually picked them because of the unusualness of the name). As you can see, they somewhat live up to the name (although again, there are some green ones still on the plant that look more unusual)...



(again taken about a month ago; some of the ones still on the plant and not ripened yet are now quite a lot bigger than the ones in the top photo)

I also grew a couple of plants of a beefsteak variety called "Yellow Brandywine", but those haven't produced much fruit (i think the flowers might have had pollination problems)... in the photos further down of the plants, those are the ones with the "potato-like" leaves.

These tomatoes are from plants that were grown in a polytunnel on a friend's allotment. I also had 6 plants in pots at home, which grew much taller and much bigger leaves than the ones in the polytunnel, but their fruits haven't ripened. As it's now getting too cold for tomatoes to ripen on the plant, i've taken quite a few of the green ones off and put them in bowls on my windowsill with some (bought) ripe tomatoes and bananas (which apparently encourage green tomatoes to ripen):



The process of indoor ripening is supposed to take about 2 weeks, but as you can see a couple of the tomatoes in the window have turned red already, although the rest of them show no indication of changing colour as yet...

I seem to have the same problem every time i try to grow tomatoes - plants which grow huge and very healthy-looking, but take a very long time to flower and fruit, and don't manage to produce much ripe fruit before the weather gets too cold for them. (I think it was made worse this year by the incredibly wet and cloudy summer.)

Here are the plants in my garden, at their healthiest looking:





(at the time those pics were taken, the tallest plant was about 5'6", including the height of the pot - 3 of them ended up reaching over 6')

The ones in the polytunnel, which didn't grow as big (4' approx), but produced bigger fruit:



Some photos of the tomato plants at earlier stages in their development:



Seedlings a couple of days after germination (leek seedlings and part of the leaf of a runner bean plant can also be seen). I germinated about 50 tomato plants, and gave away all but 15 after potting up into the first pots (although i was kind of dismayed to visit one friend i had given some to a couple of months later, when my plants were in 12" pots and had started flowering, to find hers still in the soup/yoghurt pots i first put them in, with no chance of getting flowers or fruit out of them).



One seedling which had 3 "seed leaves" instead of 2. Sadly it didn't grow into a new, 50%-more-productive mutant breed of "threemato" (its mature leaf arrangement was normal; i think it ended up in the polytunnel) ;)



The same plant a couple of weeks later, at the "yoghurt pot" stage

If i grow tomatoes next year, i think i'll have to a) sow the seeds earlier on (March maybe rather than April) and b) pot them up into small pots as soon as they reach the 2-leaf stage, rather than waiting for them to grow in the seed tray (as they just "sat there" in the seed tray at the 2-leaf stage for about a month before i potted them up, then almost immediately started growing). Maybe they inherited some of my executive dysfunction ;)

I've always felt a real connection with plants (i possibly blame Alan Moore's Swamp Thing); growing them from seed to fruit is a real buzz, and the allotment project i'm involved with is probably among the most positive things currently in my life... yeah, i'm a hippy ;)

(The plants have also given me an opportunity to practice my photography...)

Random crazy tomato factoids:

- Tomatoes were once believed to be poisonous, and to be the "apple" from the Garden of Eden.

- According to Wikipedia, the world's biggest tomato tree has a harvest of more than 32,000 tomatoes and a total weight of 1,151.84 pounds :o (Presumably this is a perennial tomato variety, which could have really interesting implications for permaculture...)

- The Soviet regime in Russia (partly influenced by their... unorthodox, ideology-"informed" approach to the theory of evolution) experimented with trying to grow varieties of plant crops that would resist very cold climates. A result of this was the Russian black tomato varieties, one of which was named after Paul Robeson, who was regarded as a hero by the Soviet regime (if they really are cold-resistant, maybe i should try to get hold of some of those for next year...)

Sexuality as choice vs sexuality as inborn: a false dichotomy?

I recently found this via Trinity's Livejournal. While i probably have somewhat more sympathy for the radical feminist position than Trinity does (or at least i find radical feminism's critiques of patriarchy and society in general powerful and persuasive enough to consider it a hugely important body of theory despite some of the things i'm not sure i can accept about it, and i tend to think it's a straw man to consider all radical feminism to be dependent on some of the more extreme premises inherent in this checklist), there are certain things that some people seem to regard as essential to radical feminism which i will instantly turn into your enemy if you try to defend them. Transphobia is one of them, condemnation of any kind of consensual sexual practices as somehow equatable to rape is another (which Trinity more than amply expresses my views on). One which i hadn't really encountered before (or at least not so explicitly) is this "all women are lesbians, and if they think they're not they need to be liberated from their false consciousness" thing...

OK, so, on a personal level, i really don't "get" why a woman (or a man, for that matter) would be sexually attracted to a man - but i don't doubt or question the reality that women, and men, are sexually attracted to men...

The responses to Yawning Lion's post point out how the "sexuality is malleable" argument is used as fuel for condemnation of people's sexuality and attempts to brainwash it out of people (which have a lot of parallels with the many nasty things that have been done to disabled people under the ideology of "behaviour modification"); however, it strikes me that the idea that sexuality is inborn has the potential to be used in oppressive ways, or to deny people's lived realities, as well...

The debate about whether sexuality is something people are born with, something socialised into people through external agencies beyond their control (ranging from intra-family abuse at the individual level to patriarchal cultural values at the "macro" level), or something that people freely choose, seems to be one that will never end - but, IMO, it's actually a distraction in terms of liberation...

One (disabled, lesbian) friend said to me that the reason she thought a higher proportion of disabled than non-disabled people were queer is because of the higher likelihood of sexual abuse happening to disabled children (either in family-home or institutional settings). The issue i had with this theory was that, if it was accepted as true, it could be used as fuel for arguments that queer sexualities are the "product" of abuse and therefore somehow pathological.

However it seems to me that the libertarian response to this, and the one which would be consistent with the social model of disability, and acceptance-of-diversity in general, should not be to deny vociferously that a person's sexuality could ever be influenced or "caused" by abuse, but to affirm its validity regardless of that fact.

Likewise (or conversely), a lot of people seem to have a lot invested in denying the possibility that someone could "choose" their sexuality, seemingly based on the idea that something freely chosen is somehow a less valid part of one's identity than something congenital and inalterable.

My response to that debate is: why can't it be all of the options? Why can't it be accepted that some people are born gay, some achieve gayness, and some have gayness thrust upon them? There are as many possible experiences of sexuality as there are people with sexualities; I don't see why it has to be either/or, when it might be option 1 in some cases, option 2 or 3 in others, and a bit of all of them in yet other cases...

There's an obvious parallel here with disability and impairment. Attitudes towards disability may vary between those with congenital impairments and those with acquired impairments, but neither group is any less "genuinely" impaired or disabled than the other. Why should it be any different with congenital or acquired sexualities? (I am going to post fairly soon on hierarchies of impairment...)

There is not necessarily a hard and fast distinction between aspects of a person which are "freely chosen", and those which are "socialised", due to biology or to any other external factor. One thing which is important on a personal level to me is trying to disentangle those "lacking" aspects of my own personality which are due to my impairment, and thus "inborn", from those which are the result of depression and/or PTSD from living in a society without understanding or acceptance of that impairment; however, i recognise that what is really important is not whether some hypothetical version of myself, with identical biology but raised in a "perfect", prejudice-free society, would have those negative traits or not, but whether or not it's feasible for me to change them. Even if I, or any other disabled/queer/whatever person, are who we are because of things that happened to us that "should not have" happened to us, we still deserve acceptance for who we are, not an obligation to change or "cure" ourselves (unless, of course, we want to change in that way).

Of course, that analogy doesn't really include the "freely chosen" bit: having tried and failed to be attracted to people of both sexes, i am forced to conclude that i cannot change my sexuality, and that i am exclusively attracted to women whether i like it or not. (Thus i probably shouldn't feel the guilt i sometimes do over being "inherently patriarchal" or "sexist" for such "discrimination"). However, i wouldn't ever try to deny someone's claim that ze did choose hir own sexuality. (I'd probably submit that such a person would have to have had the capability to fancy both genders to begin with, in order to have chosen one or the other, but i have no pronlem with different people having different capabilities in the realm of sexuality any more than in any other realm of human experience). Thus, while i might kind of envy someone who can choose hir sexuality, i believe that, consistent with libertarianism as a general social principle, they have the right to make that choice, and no one has the right to deny them that choice, regardless of whether or not everyone else has the ability to make that choice (I also need to write something about libertarianism and recognising different capabilities...) - a "chosen" sexuality is neither more or less valid IMO than an "unchosen" one.

It is up to us and us alone, whoever and whatever we are, to conclude both whether we are "broken", and whether we want or need to be "fixed". If a behaviour or a human difference harms no one, then no one has a right to condemn or attempt to alter it in anyone but hirself, and whether it is "chosen" or not is immaterial...

(this turned out a lot longer and ramblier than i intended it to... but at least i wrote it :) )

White Crow

I've seen quite a few crows around Birmingham with some white in their plumage - typically one or two wing feathers, but several (especially in the Cannon Hill Park/Rea Valley Walk area) with enough to look mottled with white or almost piebald. This one, which i saw in the Hall Green/Shirley area, had more white on it than any i'd previously seen...

(Apologies for the blurriness of the pics, which is due to the crow being about 100m away, the closest i could get before it flew away)





(It also looks more grey than white in the pics (at least on this monitor); it looked more white to me when i was taking the photo...)

I'm not sure if there's any advantage or disadvantage to white feathers on a crow; possibly it might make it more conspicuous and more of a target to predators, but i'm not sure what would eat a crow in a big city anyway. I imagine that living in relatively predator-free urban environments enables animals to survive with a lot of conditions that would make them more vulnerable to predators in the wild (that would certainly account for the number of disabled pigeons i see, limping about with multiple toes or even whole feet missing). It's cool to see intraspecific biodiversity in species other than humans, anyway...

(Another odd thing about crows in Birmingham is that i see them pretty frequently gathering in large flocks (50+) - rooks and jackdaws usually do that, but crows tend to be solitary, hence the saying "a crow in a flock is probably a rook, a rook on its own is probably a crow". These are definitely carrion crows (Corvus corone), tho... must be another adaptation-to-urban-environment thing...)

Alan Moore knows the score

Alan Moore, legendary comic book writer (author of, among many other masterworks of the form, V For Vendetta and Swamp Thing), links anarchism, biodiversity and (implicitly) the social model of disability in an Infoshop News interview here:

Now anarchy, on the other hand, is almost starting from the principle that “in diversity, there is strength,” which makes much more sense from the point of view of looking at the natural world. Nature, and the forces of evolution—if you happen to be living in a country where they still believe in the forces of evolution, of course —did not really see fit to follow that “in unity and in uniformity there is strength” idea. If you want to talk about successful species, then you’re talking about bats and beetles; there are thousands of different varieties of different bat and beetle. Certain sorts of tree and bush have diversified so splendidly that there are now thousands of different examples of this basic species. Now you contrast that to something like horses or humans, where there’s one basic type of human, and two maybe three basic types of horses. In terms of the evolutionary tree, we are very bare, denuded branches. The whole program of evolution seems to be to diversify, because in diversity there is strength.

And if you apply that on a social level, then you get something like anarchy. Everybody is recognized as having their own abilities, their own particular agendas, and everybody has their own need to work cooperatively with other people. So it’s conceivable that the same kind of circumstances that obtain in a small human grouping, like a family or like a collection of friends, could be made to obtain in a wider human grouping like a civilization.

(Can Blogger do the quote tag where the quote is indented from the rest of the text as well as bolded?)

Biodiversity: an introduction

Right. I've been having trouble writing any actual blog content without feeling like there ought to be something here that's kind of... introductory. (I need to find out how other bloggers started their blogs, i guess.) So i'm now going to attempt to write an introduction to the concept of "biodiversity", and how i see that as relating to disability and the other stuff i'm interested in. Please forgive me for the clunky writing and tendency to waver between the painfully tentative and the pompously would-be-messianic in this post... it's become obvious while writing it that my writing style needs some serious work, which this blog will hopefully provide...

A year or so ago, i was thinking about how strange and disparate my various (online and offline) interests are: disability (including both impairments and social aspects of disability), anarchism, (trans)gender and sexuality issues, ecology, animals/wildlife/zoology, music, literature (each of the latter categories itself subdividing into several different and arguably very disparate subcategories), new social movements, forteana/unexplained phenomena, etc... in an attempt at self-analysis, i pondered how and whether these things were all connected, and whether there was in fact a single, potentially cohesive identity* that i could bring out of all of them.

After pondering this question "What am I?", or perhaps more accurately "What would someone add my various online and offline "identities" up to?", the phrase came to me "I am a lover of biodiversity in all its forms" - that the thread that tied together most, if not quite all, of my interests/obsessions/perseverations was some fundamental love of the diversity of life - both human and nonhuman - a desire for life to be diverse, and to be accepted as such - a love of the unlimited possible forms and processes of life. This concept stayed brewing in the back of my head for quite some time, gradually forming a framework to tentatively hang other thoughts on, until i eventually had it formulated enough to bring up in a conversation with another disability rights activist, not long after i had managed to finally come into contact with other people within that movement.

Until then i had pretty much thought of the "biodiversity as overarching concept" idea as just one of my wild flights of fancy, something on a level with my little personal hybrid theologies/mythologies that in geeky, and often stoned or drunken, conversations with friends more knowledgeable than myself i had made up out of existing belief systems - but his very positive reaction to the concept made me realise that i might actually be on to something here...

The context in which biodiversity is usually understood is a biological and ecological one. Wikipedia says that the term was coined in 1985 and defined as "variation of life at all levels of biological organization"; of course, this is generally applied to the non-human world. My use of "biodiversity" as an umbrella concept, which could potentially cover just about all equality and identity issues, is in taking that and applying it to the human world (which parallels my personal desire to apply concepts and methods of activism and social movement organisation learned from the environmentalist movement to the disability movement): bringing together biology and ecology with sociology. Disability, gender identity, sexuality, race/ethnicity, etc can all be seen as elements of the biodiversity of the human species...

One of the key claims of social ecology is that the same systems and ideologies which lead to the domination, exploitation and oppression of humans by other humans also lead to the domination, exploitation and degradation by humans of nature. Ecofeminism, the product of feminists bringing social ecology together with feminism, is based on the idea that the oppression of women is linked to the domination of nature by linguistic and cultural equation of women with non-human nature: this is also true of the historical and current treatment of disabled people, sexually diverse people, people of minority ethnicities and all other groups of people who are seen to differ from a culturally defined "fully human" norm. The same systems of domination - the triple alliance of capitalist monopoly, statist centralisation and patriarchal social segregation - that threaten ecosystems and natural biodiversity through monoculture farming, exploitation of non-renewable resources and unsustainable economic growth also threaten human biodiversity by oppressing, exploiting, discriminating against and attempting, by methods ranging from enforced proletarianisation of peasant cultures to institutionalisation and eugenic abortion or sterilisation of disabled people in developed countries, to eliminate "abnormal" human beings.

The ecological, anti-war, anti-nuclear etc movements, the feminist movement, the various anarchist or libertarian socialist movements (including co-operatives, social centres, etc), the postcolonial liberation movements and the rights/freedom movements of disabled people, queer people, trans people, and any other minorities, can thus be seen as (although it has to be said they don't all necessarily see themselves or each other as) part of an overall movement in defence of biodiversity (in all its contextually overlapping definitions) against monoculture (in all its contextually overlapping definitions). In this blog, my aim is to draw together and make connections between all these movements, and in doing so demonstrate, in my own small way (as all the people i link to here do in their own large or small ways) biodiverse resistance...

(*I understand that many people will strongly dispute that one's interests either are the source of, or add up to produce, one's identity. The concept of "identity" for me is a complex one, and there are ways in which i believe that, for me (and possibly other autistic people) it actually is significantly different than for most people - that it's possible i/we actually lack some kind of "core" identity that many/most other people have, and thus need to piece together a (no less "real", just differently constructed) "identity" from other things. I'm probably going to blog about this at some point in more detail...)