between what @zaranosaur describes as bizarre takes about “grappling” with isolation from able people, to all the new measures that we’ve asked for for years but w/no consultation, & the casualized eugenics in every sphere...no one is learning empathy for disabled ppl

I reflected on the latter podcast & have been thinking elsewhere as well about whether academia will learn some lesson. I said yes & no. https://twitter.com/divya_m_p/status/1260315489043185664?s=21 https://twitter.com/divya_m_p/status/1260315489043185664

No because people just want to go back to “normal” and normal is violent etc. as many have said about many contexts. Profs want to go back to networking over drinks and harassing women at a conference.

With a hopeful yes of, people are realizing how unwieldy much online tech is for young, able people and at least consumer demand will shift the nature and quality of that tech, but will it be accessibly priced AND secure AND not evil? hm

But just the very...semiotics of the willingness of folks to call themselves “housebound” when everyone knows many disabled people. Taken to the point of “I realize my physically-based interactions give my life worth” type of Eugenics Lite TM? Invisibilized is a Word

I can only bring myself to think of the academic context because of my conference & it’s overwhelming otherwise. This pandemic became, in many countries, a eugenicist experiment. I don’t have the bandwidth right now to reflect on that.

But I think of #SSiC2020 which was born from being wholesale demonized by academia whether in classrooms or at conferences. We centered access in a plan in *January*. Will people learn from us? Was anyone listening before? and what is the nature of the attention now?

“virtual conferencing” or attempting to make a really bad, hegemonic model of dissemination of information somehow a little more just? we’ll see.

The layers and layers & academic trauma & watching your peers cosign BoJo’s March policy as reasonable etc. and arts orgs suddenly have prizes and funds (^in this moment where everyone is struggling*) for “housebound” able people. There’s no lesson learned.

not to be a downer - I think that my connections with disabled friends and community have strengthened and that well have a lot of work to do to strengthen our bonds because the sh*t will continue to hit the fan.

but also I feel so much freer now to say that people should be ASHAMED. academics—professors and conference organizers and the lot of you—should be ridden with guilt. gutted. living a measly 1% of what we live and complaining about the meaning of life & publishing away

you commit to narratives that refuse to acknowledge that disabled people are incarcerated in prisons & care homes but then dare say “housebound” about spending time with your family and making your wives clean for you as you publish a ridiculous # of papers. lol. evil

disabled people are so patient and gracious to not say jack when everyone (rightfully!) grieves for their freedoms while we completely realize that it doesn’t give you any empathy about our lives. if it did, you would ask us. if it did, it wouldn’t toe the line of eugenics.

Like there’s nothing WRONG with making blanket statements about how to deal with x and y. Those are useful guides for able people. But they’re also bananas. All the guides from astronauts about isolation lol. The hubris.

This is a RANT of a thread but yeah space folks? The astronaut comparison is fab for kids but isn’t useful. You are not an astronaut you are a scared person who is watching your loved ones die, & your body is wearing all that trauma & the trauma of staying in one place.

I’m losing my train but just the many. DMed side-eyes and laughs about able people. We’ll never make those comments in front of you because we have some grace, and grace we’ve learned we’ll never receive from you.

Like gosh I had to learn to structure my day & time when I was bedbound for half of my undergrad degree and my profs punished me or ignored me, never asked about me. I did that alone. Will profs learn from this experience, to treat us like human beings? Never.