Breasts — Augmented or Not — Belong to Real Women
For a show set in Miami in 1959, the director and casting director are discovering that women who haven’t had breast augmentations are hard to find.
...read moreFine Art, Social Change, and Community Involvement
A connection of ours who does excellent community work, including in the field of fat activism, has asked us to summarize how we create community involvement (especially diversity of involvement) in our work. Because all of the work we did before Body Impolitic was done before the explosion of social media, much of it would be done differently now–and at the same time, we both believe that face-to-face contact is a profoundly important piece of connecting to any community.
...read moreKuttin Kandi: Hiphop, Heart Disease, Fatphobia, and Truth-Telling
I’m sorry to say I never heard of Kuttin Kandi (also known as Candice Custodio-Tan) before I read this article, clearly because I’ve been hiding under a rock.
...read moreThe Toll of FAAB on FAAB Childhood Sexual Abuse
This is a highly subjective account of my experience with FAAB on FAAB childhood sexual abuse. Trigger warning for detailed account of abuse. In addition, I want to emphasize that this piece is explicitly about *my* process, and I will be focusing on outlining the difficulties I encountered in my recovery, and discussing what I believe could have helped me heal more quickly and fully.
...read moreNude Photos as a Revolutionary Act
The Nude Revolutionary Calendar is a project undertaken in support of Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, a young Egyptian woman who posted nude portraits of herself on Twitter last November, tagged #NudePhotoRevolutionary. Here’s a nude portrait of Elmahdy.
[Probably NSFW because, y'know, "nude portrait of Elmahdy." - C]
...read moreThe Evangelical Christian Movement – Harm Reduction
I’m a solutions oriented person. Find a problem and fix it, I always say. Okay, usually I don’t say that…I just proceed with the fixing. But, to be honest, I’m not sure there are “solutions” in this particular situation. People are and, in my view, should always be free to believe and to worship as they deem necessary limited only by the principle that they are not permitted to cause direct harm to others. In a pluralistic world the best that we can do is try to convince people to agree with us instead of with them. And it’s my guess that no matter how brilliant our arguments are, there will still be a non-zero number of people who will consider me to be possessed by a demon. The question then is not “how do we stop people from believing things” since…well, I think Hagee said it best:
...read moreBeing an Advocate and an Ally
One of the discussions that I’ve seen pop up on Feministe a lot lately has been the question of how one can be an ally or an advocate without crossing the line into paternalism or playing savior. When it comes to madness or special education, I feel that the best way to be an ally is to be educated. The problems with how we see madness are so deeply rooted that, in my opinion, the only way to really start changing the way we think is by actively challenging the ways in which we experience madness as a concept and mad persons as individuals.
...read moreBloodied Yet Unbowed
As some of you might know I’ve had the dubious privilege of sitting on a lot of different sides of the educational world. When I was very young I was given a series of trendy diagnoses and pumped full of drugs that made me sick, when they didn’t work I attended was sentenced to survived several behaviorally-based programs for children with severe behavioral, emotional, and learning disabilities. These were the kinds of schools where “reasonable goals” were about as ambitious as eventual independent living and a closely supervised service job.
Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain
Years of anti-gay bullying, teachers afraid to confront students for calling other students faggots because of a policy against supporting “gay lifestyles,” and a school district too cowardly to confront Evangelical political interests lead to a rash of teen suicides in Minnesota. Whats this got to do with madness and diagnosis? Well, as it turns out, the story includes two very good illustrations of the ways in which certain assumptions about madness serve to privilege certain interpretations of an event.
...read moreWho I am, how I see the world, and a question for the Feministe community
One of the things that has always struck me about how we discuss madness is the terms we use. “Words mean things” has become something of a trope in the feminist world, but its especially important to remember when we’re talking about madness because, in a very real way, all we’ve got in the world of psychology is language.
...read moreWhy We Need V-Day More Than Ever
“Why are you doing Vagina Monologues?”
...read moreDisabled Bodies in Able-Bodied Contexts
No one wants to be pitied, but many people are comfortable having others to pity. And it’s easy, if you haven’t thought it out, to pity someone in a wheelchair, or someone who walks tapping her way with a white cane. It’s much more complicated to think about that wheelchair, or that cane as something that opens up the person’s life … and would open it up much more if buildings and streets were more accommodating to a variety of needs. It’s not only complicated, but potentially deeply disturbing, to think about high-tech prostheses, maximized for the needs of a particular person with particular skills at a particular time in his or her life, to think that a “disabled” person perhaps has something that works better than what “normal people” are issued with.
[Nudity below the fold]
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