Monday, June 14, 2010

Intersectionality in Working with the Developmentally Disabled

After being a week into the program, I see many things that are apparent about the classic race/class/gender spectrum at my job. There are interesting intersections too with sexuality, ability, and fat (to be fare reaching and as inclusive as possible). This blog will be part of an ongoing theme of autoethnography investigating the inclusion of Developmental Disablility (DD) into disability, queer, feminist, etc. theories emerging canon. As a subculture that makes up 10% of the overall population in the US, the institutionalization of DD creates a unique phenomenological experience to build an embodied subjectivity within people with these types of disabilities, ones often forgotten even by the scholarship advocating for effective empowerment of those with disabilities.

The first to note about the 'Individuals' (those with developmental and intellectual disabilities, as they are referred to by other medical health officials in the field) is that their lives are almost completely enveloped by the medical industrial complex, the church, and the state. Where one falls short, serendipity has replaced their function with another, each institution working together to provide perfect safe haven for these people with special needs. The movement away from 'mere care' to something like teaching independence and integration has been a great stride made in the realm of advocacy for those with 'MR'/ID (intellectual disability) and DD; this is not to be taken lightly. The seriousness now that abuse has in the field (including a gender right with is protection against sexual abuse/harassment) is also important to note.

Two things they do not have, as I can see from a 'perfect blueprint' meticulously planned by the state, church and medical field, are access to 'serious' political ideology (or rather an alternative to their institutionalized context's inherent ideology) and access to adult sexual freedom, except for the rare few deemed 'having the ability to consent' by psychiatry. I am sure that once I start on site with my individuals (ages ranging from 11-21) I will see that they have a knowledge of the 'sinful earth' (as their nuns would probably call... hell, queer nightlife, regular nightlife, socially non-normative/criminal activity) in their music, exposure to radio, possible cable TV and even the rare internet user. By analyzing from this position, both within the power structure of surveillance that the state has empowered me with (I would say unfortunately, since it creates a power differential potentially as invasive as the panopticon) and as a person engaging in critical resistance (by taking a critical approach in the interest of the Individual's human rights, to give voice to their nonverbal subjectivity, ergo resisting dominant culture's subjugating and blighting ability to make DD/ID invisible/speechless), 'I' will mediate my response to the system.

The rare exposure people with DD/ID would have with 'overt' political ideology would be possible commercials on the media they encounter in society, which is fairly regulated by the church/medical context, where psychology has deemed the majority of 'adult' issues too complex for people with DD/ID. While I agree it would be difficult and arduous to actually 'bring them up to speed' with our current context, and simplifying history to a point comprehendible will be reductive, I believe it their right to engage in whatever conversation they can about their multiple intersections with power in the world. Remember, difference isn't gender, color, class or sexuality blind. Though I have not seen represented, encountered personally, or been told a second hand story of any queer Individuals, I would not be surprised to eventually meet one. What politics do you get form pop music? Television without news? Commercials? These are the most deliberately apolitical entities in our capitalist structure, and apolitical because capitalism requires its contradictions hidden so we are less likely to seek solidarity in shared power differentials. Therefore, people with DD and ID totallized by this institutional setting, having limited access to 'overtly' political media, are less likely to improve their own empowerment in the realms of race, class, gender and sexuality rights on top of their unique ID/DD rights as a group.

Secondly, the only Individuals with full sexual freedom (having the ability to actually have sexual contact with someone other than themselves, in any way more than kissing) are those deemed psychologically able to consent to everything in their lives (i.e. giving out medically sensitive information, consenting to medical procedures, right to vote, etc.). Does a person need to know what the best approach in psychotropic drug therapy for them is in order to have sex? I don't mean literally, that the two realms of knowledge and understanding inform one another, just that the degrees of safety in each somewhat incommensurable. Granted, it is important to give education (which it is their legal right to be educated in) in sexual health, and as we teach our individuals to cook and clean themselves, how hard would it be to incorporate proper condom usage or even birth control and (arguably difficult for them to grasp the full weight, physically and politically, of abortion) an understanding of the options one has in 'family planning'. i.e. abortion, adoption or raising children by one's self. These are issues that we all deal with, negotiating how either one of these options will effect our lives is our right to decide, and they should be considered and discussed with people one has sexual encounters with. Yet, as we can easily see, these concerns don't stop anyone (at least anyone my age that I know) from having sex. We are just safe. And informed. Just as we're informed about what fashion is acceptable, and what the news might be, we're informed about our sexual health. And even so, those who are 'nuerotypical' don't (most often) have explicit, expanded, or even satisfactory sexual education or access to sexual health facilities.

I will continue in another entry on the workers in the industry of DD, being a field employing a large number of women and people of color it is interesting to see where there is a 'consumer/corporation' binary breaks down and power operates around care, or under the guise of care in instances of abuse as Foucault expresses in the History of Madness. Enjoy the second oil spill, the fucked wildlife (400 species) and the fucked economy of Nawlins seafood; thanks BP!

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

A New Inclusion of Developmental Disability in Disability Theories' Canon: My Experiences in a training DCC

Wow, what an incomprehensible title!

So, I'm starting a new job within an agency that offers individuals with developmental disabilities (DD) and 'mental retardation' (MR) which each have a degree of functionality levels. The whole thing is very medical, even though the institutions (incorporated non-profits) are funded through (partially) public education budgets. I'll be assisting children (11-22), since this is the age to which free care is provided. The law which allows these institutions to service concerns free, compulsory education up until 21. Therefore, when a child is deemed 'mentally retarded [a medical term whose signification has become so pejorative that the DSM-V, released next year, is changing the term to 'intellectual disability']' a set of public institutional representatives (the committee on special education, the school board, the school psychologist) meet with the parents of the child 'in need' and agree to a legally binding contract creating an IEP (individual education program) regarding the degree of care will be necessary for the child's legally obligated educational/developmental needs. Therefore, since both medicaid and the school funding are at stake for the benefit of the child, there sometimes becomes a conflict of interest between what the school budget will allow and what the child needs in regard to its development.

As a worker in this industry, I'm learning everyday, more and more, I must become an advocate for people with DD, since their acceptance in society isn't too high. Of course, there's the default Christian guilt everyone barely believes in to pity the disabled, but it has no consideration of their social circumstances; their pity concerns itself with how hard that individual's life is personally because of its difference from 'everything normal, natural and expected' that they fear. They cannot empathize with those with DD because, as able-bodied minds, their 'ability to reason' is superb and incommensurable. With such difference, dominant culture's resistance to considering disability as a natural part of life and, as such, that integration (even with dependency and care needs) would not be so impossible. People are literally afraid of persons with DD when we take them on day trips to public areas. Most stare, I had a co-worker in high school tell me her secret, that she became a little sick when seeing them in the store. I could never understand her perspective, because I accepted them as people, and had worked with a few people with DD when in martial arts. Regardless of their function level, they are people with interests, skills, personalities, subjectivities, and perspectives that are both socially relatable and psychologically, freeing-ly different. They could perceive the world in ways I couldn't, and I always appreciated the ability to be exposed to a multitude of perspectives.

Academically, I will begin writing on the inclusion of DD into the 'canon' of disability, queer, feminist, and even fat theory. This will eventually lead into a broader range of inclusion that I will hope to accomplish surrounding mental illness and the intersection of all three (developmental, intellectual, physical disability) to show the multiplicity of phenomenological experiences extremely embodied within an othered subjectivity. Colonized by medicalization, and yet reliant on care ethics and therefore medical aid, the relationship that these individuals have to the institutions they interact with and rely on are complex and arguably problematic at times. My goal in problematizing the system that cares for these individuals is in line with the goal of these institutions: the empowerment of this social group that has faced oppression while getting them the help required for them to live happily, or even self-sufficiently if possible. By including mental illness in my analysis we will see the intersection of different medical gazes, which are of course industrial, such as psycho-pharmacology, neurophysiology, psychology, psychiatry, occupational therapy, speech pathology, and the entire major medical industrial complex with its investigation of the body in every objectifying manner. Understanding how perception works has been a predisposition of continental philosophy since the beginning, of queer theory, poststructuralism and 'postmodern' feminism with Freud and Lacan, critical race theory and postcolonial theory with Franz Fenon in The Psychology of Oppression, existentialism, and even the other other other side of the pond: Anglo-American Philosophy! AHHHHHHHHHHH

I propose an idea only rumored by philosophy nerds that continental philosophy should at least communicate with philosophy of mind, and therefore the whole lot of analytic philosophers. Though both hold strict to their linguistic differences, even on topics of linguistics, there can be an interesting clash and resistance to motivate writing on technology, social politics, and the mind. The psyche. Ego. Self. self. 'I'. whatever we decide to call it, we can all talk about the mind and, at minimum, shut Steven Pinker the fuck up about his ignorance on feminist and queer realities. Read "How the Mind Works," the second half to see what I'm alluding to, but read the first half if you want to learn about computational theory of the mind. And, where they lack any notion of consciousness, ergo ego, or "qualia" as they call emotional experiences, I believe there could be a more neurological approach to psychoanalysis' freedom to understand desire before 'natural, genetic behavioral pre-dispositions.' This would mean that social constructionist theory would actually get a point back at the science and medical community for their lack of observance in the effects, funding, or purpose of their research. To be against the agenda that science doesn't even know it has, aside from Alfred Nobel who was so horrified at what he did in creating dynamite, does not mean I hold an anti-science view. I am critical in the association it has with capitalism, industrialism, and power, but within itself (though as a means of violence in methodology, ethic as objectifying and believing itself to be removed from a subjective experience, even of the the facts they study. When I say that science or medicine has colonized the bodies of every oppressed group in history I do not believe it was intentional on the independent thinking of medical professionals throughout history. Power operates across vast spectrums to totalize (or attempt to totalize) its structure; medicine, government, popular and folk media all had equal share in the production of constructions of bodies as they saw fit to oppress because power was on their side.

Over the next few months, I will be reading and even deconstructing at times Foucault's History of Madness while learning about and interacting with people with DD on a daily basis. This auto-ethnographic approach to seeing 'non-institutionalized madness' (since most people mistaken call them 'crazy' and not having impairments or disabilities) will allow me to include Foucault's psycho-social analysis of power and institutions in the framework of a nearly privatized industry that regulated the bodies of a highly othered and forgotten group. Yet, in the potential spirit of queer optimism, the consequence of trendy-problematizing (overcritique without often a social alternative, often justifiably because an alternative is unthinkable given the current contingencies of power structures) leaves the very real, practical, embodied people in need of dependent care simply in bad places without real change. The method of change that these connected industries are susceptible to are not of simple 'social work' methods of patching up existing wounds constantly re-opened by the power structure we cannot escape. It doesn't recognize structural roots to the issues they solve reactively, and since the pervasiveness of institutions-- of power-- must be opposed while trying to alleviate the inevitable result of current power difference, simple psychology will also not suffice under a financial system that only treats the petty psychological illness of those who can afford it. My goal will be to explore what 'neurotypical' aka 'normal' and 'natural' are in terms of phenomenological, psychological and anthropological/sociological lenses.

On an unrelated, fragmentary note check out the new pre-performance audio of the gypsy caravan's "broken glass"

Coming Soon:

More on Neofuturism, apocalypse myth that dominates 'tea party' politics and the 'history' channel, and projections of present fear by constructing totalalized dystopias vs. critical resistance .

Histiography of 'mental retardation' and developmental disability: how people with DD experience a unique and complex, intersectiional oppression in fields such as sexuality, will in regards to resistance or political awareness at all, race, class, gender and of course physical disability.

Friendship: Aristotle's happiness for other's happiness, the notion of homosocial corporate spaces pre-and-post queer theory, membership, and power at the level of male bonding qua masculinity constructing gender/sexuality/racially exclusive spaces.