Sex and Disability (a.k.a. Dissertation Fun Time)

After handing in my final essay last week – and taking an entirely reasonable week off – it’s time to start playing with my dissertation. What I’m looking at hasn’t changed since I handed in my proposal; as it’s Blogging Against Disablism Day, I thought I’d blether a little more about it.

I have chosen to look at experiences of erotic/sexual pleasure in queer disabled people, specifically in how those experiences are changed – or not changed – by an acquired physical disability. Obviously, this is heavily influenced by my own experiences of disability, but I’ve also realised it’s important for me in other ways.

I’ve recently seen a lot of things – particularly on tumblr – saying that feminism is not engaging with disability; I think a lot of these posts do the disservice towards disabled feminists that they are accusing feminism of doing towards them – making massive over-generalisations. Feminism isn’t perfect, but it has made huge leaps in terms of inclusion and intersectionality – and while most intersectional feminism is primarily concerned with race and class, there is a growing awareness of disability, particularly in academic feminism. To take last year’s SlutWalk in London – the march had speakers from WinVisible (and has an event this friday – The Visibility of Women of Colour in SlutWalk London) posted accessibility information online, and had BSL interpreters on stage. Obviously, not all feminists are brilliant when it comes to disability; I’m not perfect, and I’ve undergone a learning curve as well. But forcing feminism to interact with disability is important – and in academia, it’s obvious that a lot of disability studies is influenced by feminism and feminist thought; I want my research to be both useful in terms of disability studies, but also for feminism – I’ll be using broadly feminist research methods, acknowledging and foregrounding the importance of intersectional identities alongside lived realities to examine the usefulness of theories of disability and sexuality and sex.

There is still very little on queer disabilities and sex. There often seems to be this point where you can be queer, or disabled, but not both – and you can’t have sex. Sex is complicated by disability, sex is complicated by sexuality, and so disabled sexualities are just plain messy at times – but they are less messy when it’s considered a normal part of life. While The Undateables was deeply problematic in so many ways, it also highlighted that disabled people are also sexual beings, who seek relationships with other people who are romantic and/or erotic (of course, aromantic and asexual people can also be disabled). Being disabled doesn’t turn you into a genitalia-free doll. Giving a space for to counteract this discourse, in which queer disabled people can talk about sex and pleasure is a key part of why I want to do this dissertation on the subject.

Once I’ve got ethical clearance from uni, I’ll be putting out feelers for interviewees – I’m trying to work out how to make the interviews as accessible as possible for both myself and the participants, given that I need to record the interviews (so the phone is out) and that I don’t have much any money for interpreters or travel. I’m hoping to use email or online messaging when face-to-face interviews aren’t possible – other ideas are welcome, of course. And I’ve got to speak to my uni library and see if the interlibrary loan limit can be increased, so I can get at some journal articles without having to use the British Library – which, while wonderful, is restrictive – my memory being shite, I need to make notes as I read, which isn’t possible there. I’ve also had to order some books from the British Library – the uni library isn’t particularly well-stocked when it comes to disability (nor is Senate House – which is annoying as hell; also, their access sucks balls at the moment – I hate having to ask to use the lift and being taken up to the seventh floor in this tiny claustrophobia-inducing service lift – you wouldn’t get a wheelchair in there – like I’m a naughty child being escorted to the headmaster’s office) and access to other uni libraries is restricted during exam season.  Bloody libraries. Thank fuck for e-books and journals I can access. I need to see if Senate House or Birkbeck will get a subscription to Disability and Society, because fucking everything I want to read is in there. All of it. Well, half of it.

Dressmaking

Every now and again I get mildly over-excitable and decide to get my sewing machine out. I like making my own clothes – I usually use patterns and adapt them, rather than make it all from scratch – but I do find it takes me bloody ages to get it all together.

Mum brought me back some fabric from Cameroon – one in red, with shinier leaves in the same colour, the other yellow with red hearts.

Both pieces of fabric are slightly waxed, as though they’d been printed using batik techniques, which makes them a little stiff; I put the red one into the wash, but it didn’t make any difference to the stiffness. It’s not a problem though, it just means that the fabric doesn’t have any give to it. I decided to go with the hearts, and to make a dress – a New Look pattern I’d used before, for a slightly vintage-looking dress. Because the fabric is quite thin, I decided it needed lining – I used the white silk from a skirt Marie-Estelle gave me (the rest is being turned into a petticoat).

The lining is a little shorter than the skirt of the dress, as I didn’t have enough fabric. I winged it a little, as the original pattern wasn’t for a lined dress – I just cut a second dress out of the silk, and attached it to the bodice.

wheat-free dogs

Holly has an allergy to something in her usual dog food. This does not especially bother her, she just vomits and carries on, because she’s a pillock. But it is a little unpleasant for everyone else – usually I’m the lucky one home when she upchucks, so I get to clean it up before either Potato or Indigo eat it. Dogs are so delightful.

Anyway, we’ve started feeding her homecooked food – rice, meat, vegetables, maybe an egg or cheese. She loves it, and while I don’t love cooking it, I do enjoy not trying not to throw up while I scrub bile and half-digested kibble off the rug.

But what it does mean is that we cannot give her much in the way of leftovers or snacks (I’m going to have to find a source of treats). Potato does not understand this.

G has taken to informing her that everything has wheat in it.

This results in her staring at me, as if she’s seeking conformation. If I go “yes, Potato, it has wheat in it, none for you”, she looks at me like I’ve gone nuts. She’s quite obviously pretty convinced we’re being cruel to her, and has been getting increasingly needy and ridiculous.

Indigo is doing his best honey badger impression, and doesn’t care.

Fat, disability, diet (or: ongoing rambling, part whatever)

At the moment I am actively trying to lose weight. I hesitate to say I’m on a diet, because – for me – a diet implies that I’m following a specific set of rules, and I’m not, because I’ve never found a diet that I’m comfortable with. And I don’t want to diet. I just want to lose weight.

Losing weight is, for me, deeply problematic. Over the last however long, I’ve become more and more interested in fat acceptance and healthy at any size movements; for myself, it’s tied into disability and ableism – body policing put bounds on the “acceptable” able body, and all disabled bodies are automatically excluded. A lot of the materials around dieting and weight loss and healthy eating assumes that their readers are able-bodied; when you look for information around healthy eating and fibromyalgia, you have to wade through page and pages of bollocks about how cutting out one thing or eating more of another will make you magically better (with absolutely no medical evidence to back it up whatsoever). And because I’ve never been thin – the smallest clothes size I’ve taken since puberty is a UK 14 – and don’t come from a family of thin women, a lot of the dieting talk is abhorrent to me; I find the body acceptance movement much more of a comfortable fit for me in terms of thinking about my body, and in terms of my feminism.

Which still doesn’t help me lose weight. I am, thanks to assorted med changes, fibromyalgia and the resulting lifestyle changes, the heaviest I have ever been – in clothes sizes, I take a UK 20 in trousers (an 18 tends to be a little too tight for comfort) and a 14-18 in tops and dresses. The numbers are not a particular problem, except as something to fixate on; I avoid thinking about my actual weight as little as possible, because I don’t like the number. I know this is because I have been told all my life that I am fat, that my body is disgusting and ugly. So I am trying not to think like that; I am taking pleasure in my body – but I am losing weight because I am not entirely comfortable with myself; I do not want to be 8 stone and a size 10, because I’ve not been a size 10 since I was ten years old – but I do not want to be the size I am now. I’d like to be a size smaller. I’d like to know that even if I don’t shop in Topshop, I could. I’d like to be under 200 pounds – and fuck knows why that’s a line, but it is to me.

I know losing weight won’t make the pain and the tiredness and the unrelenting ache go away. And somehow, saying I want to lose weight feels like I am betraying the principles of being one of those women who call for an end to body policing and the utter bollocks of how one person’s weight is anyone else’s business. I don’t want you to lose weight. Beautiful, sassy people come in all different shapes and sizes and colours and with different impairments or none or none that you can see. I don’t have a problem with femininists who wear makeup or heels or jeans and buzzcuts or whatever makes them happy in themselves. So why do I not like talking about why I want to lose weight?

I don’t think I’ll ever be truly comfortable in my body. My body is a painful, uncomfortable place to be. I can support Healthy At Every Size movements all I like, but I will never be healthy. I am ill, and while I know my illness causes my weight gain (despite everyone who thinks it is the other way round; they’re probably the same people who won’t give me a seat on the tube because as a fat cripple I must have done this to myself), I am not entirely comfortable being this size.

let’s just call it a curry

I dont know whether it’s the result of spending several years of my childhood in New Delhi, or because it’s a national dish here, but I do love curry. Proper curry, mind. The sort with flavours other than “chilli” and “miscelaneous meat”. Curry is a comfort food – dhal especially – and I tend to make it when I’m stressed. I like the way the house smells of spices, spending time on preparing vegetables or frying paneer.

I usually make curries involving tomatoes – especially now saag paneer is out (G has a disagreement with spinach). But today I’m making something approximating a korma. It’s not particularly authentic – I’ve ended up basing it off several recipes – and it doesn’t involve cashews or dairy cream; I use coconut milk instead. I prefer vegetables to meat in creamier curries (unless it’s chicken passanda) or we’ve got leftover meat about.

Here’s my recipe:

• Vegetables! Carrots, potatoes, cauliflower, anything else you like.
• Bell pepper
• One large white onion
• 3 decent-sized cloves of garlic
• small chilli (red or green) or tsp of dried chilli
• tin of chickpeas
• tin of coconut milk
• handful of red lentils
• tsp tumeric
• half tsp coriander and cumin
• several cardamon pods
• quarter tsp garam massala

Mince garlic, put in big-ass pan with spices and chopped onion and a few glugs of olive or vegetable oil. Heat lightly.

Chop vegetables and bell pepper, add to pan and coat in spices and oil. Add chickpeas and lentils.

Add tin of coconut milk, then a tinful of water. Simmer until potatoes are soft and lentils cooked.

Serve with naan or chapatis and rice and yoghurt or raita.

Dog vs Snow

Hello, I am General Indigo-Go Gadget Dog, and I like snow. Snow is fun, and temporarily distracts me from the mundane and tiresome minutiae of my life.

Snow is good for chasing – and eating, except it is not as good as ice-cream or peanut butter or bacon or chips or pizza or cheese or curry. But it is ok. So I like to make the man make snowballs for me to chase.

This makes Mummy laugh. Mummy is very silly and does not understand how hard it is to be me. Sometimes I do not get peanut butter for days and then Potato sits on my head when I am sleeping. Also mankind is doomed.

When all that jumping about gets boring, it’s time to run. Because running in circles with Potato chasing you is fun. Potato is stupid and annoying and says “POTATO” a lot. I do not think she knows other words. Potato depresses me. I am still faster than her when there is snow though.

Mummy and the man were scared I was going to hurt myself running. I did not, because of the snow. Also I hurt my leg earlier in the year and I only hurt myself once a year. Sometimes twice. She made this face a lot.

Mummy is silly. The man is silly. They depress me.

Stupid slow snow-hating Potato.

Then it was time to go home.

There was no peanut butter. Or bacon. Why do they hate me?

hello the internet

The internet has finally arrived, no thanks to the service providers involved (I’m looking at you BT and O2). But I have broadband at home again, which is a perfect relief – I can now watch videos and download without worrying about the data limit on my dongle, or having to restart the connection every few minutes.

Unfortunately, I can’t access my flickr account because even though I switched all my account stuff over to a new yahoo account (with gmail as secondary, because yahoo sucks balls), flickr is insisting I should be using a defuct BTmail address – which BT won’t do anything about unless I pay them money. Because BT also suck balls. Let the rage be unconfined.

At least I can catch up on my tv. And weirdly, my flickr uploadr works just fine, so there are now photos from NYC/NJ up there. Which is something I’ve been looking to do for ages – along with updating my rav projects. Oh internets.

I’m also intending to restock my folksy shop – or possibly switch over to etsy, in the light of folksy’s rule changes, as I’m not sure all of my stuff will be handmade enough – especially the jewelry and stitchmarkers, which are handmade, but I didn’t make the individual components, only put them together (I’m not entirely clear on the rules, but there you go). And, you know, get a job.

Not having a job sucks, for the record. While I find being employed makes me ill, being unemployed makes me depressed – and poor, which doesn’t help with the depressed, because frankly, when you find yourself buying sainsburys basics tomato soup and going “this is a bit pricey” at 17p, you know you’re broke.

This is cheering me up though. If you haven’t heard it – go listen: Stereogum’s DRIVE XV: A Tribute To Automatic For The People.

And it looks like we’ll be looking for a housemate again.