Arts & Media at the SDS Conference

By Barbara Duncan (bjdnycla@aol.com)

The Society for Disability Studies 2000 conference in Chicago, June 29-July 2, featured a rich and lively arts and media program interwoven with the academic presentations and discussions. Some took place during evening performances and readings, while others were part of program sessions. Following are a few highlights.

Open Letter to Helen Keller

One of the best comedic readings I have ever heard was delivered by Georgina Kleege of Columbus, Ohio, who snarled through her essay, "Blind Rage - An Open Letter to Helen Keller." The premise of the piece was that the late great Keller's reputation for implacable serenity has made it impossible for all the blind people who followed her to just have a bad day. Kleege's delivery of her version of a very bad day, ranging from malfunctioning technology to patronizing attitudes, was in the style of Dorothy Parker, as updated by Chris Rock.

Sight Unseen is a Kleege collection of personal essays about blindness and sight. She described it as "based on my own experience of blindness, and read together, the essays add up to a kind of argument...and it is not just about me, not just about blindness either, but raises a lot of issues about disability in general."

Memoir

Another impressive memoir, awaiting a publisher, is by Simi Linton of New York, author of the well reviewed Claiming Disability. She read from a section of the new work, Citizens in Good Standing, reflecting on her early experiences in rehab with humor and insights gained from 30 years in the disability movement.

A particularly poignant reading was by Mary G. Mason of Emmanuel College, who is working on a memoir describing her experiences with childhood polio, rehab at Warm Springs and a father who was primarily focused on her being cured. Mason recounted how she was selected to sit by FDR during a Warm Springs holiday dinner, supposedly the highest honor bestowed on the "crippled kids" contingent-and all she could think of was how to escape.
 
Disability Culture

During a cultural evening, artist Riva Lehrer gave a slide show presentation of her paintings, showing through chronology her own growth and exploration as both a painter and a woman with a disability. Some of the most riveting portraits were those of her Chicago-based friends and colleagues in the disability rights movement, such as Tekki Lomnicki, Mike Erwin and Anna Stonum. Information on Lehrer's works available via email: mktsupport@goldenpaints.com

Tekki Lomnicki and Susan Nussbaum performed Forever Profaned (By Her Condition), a short social satire by Nussbaum. The piece is a brilliant and dark forecast of what our future would be like if doctors had the power to give us "thumbs up or down" depending on how well we were faring on a 10 point "Quality of Life" rating system.

Videos & other media

One of the best U.S. videos I have seen in the last year is The Disabling Bullet produced by Patrick Devlieger and Miriam Hertz. It documents the stories of four African-American men, who recount their lives before and after being shot through street violence. The production values are not of a high level, but the point of view is presented through each man in turn and makes compelling film. It is intended for teaching about disability and disability studies, but would also be equally effective in public education programs about the rising rate of disabling violence in the USA. Available for $15 from the Department of Disability & Human Development (MC 626), University of Illinois at Chicago, 1640 West Roosevelt Road, Chicago, IL 60608.

For his presentation on "Disabling Youth/Deviance, Dis-ease and Social Control in Recent American Youth Films," Todd Ramlow of George Washington University showed clips from two recent films. The clips from Boyz-N-the-Hood and Kids both showed macho youths out on the town who are having an interaction with disabled men. Ramlow developed a short paper around the significance of these interactions.

In a provocative session on "Disability in German Culture," Katherina Heyer, doctoral student at the University of Hawaii, presented a media collage of various posters, stickers and slogans which were disseminated all over Germany in 1997 as a public awareness campaign. The campaign was developed in collaboration with the German disability rights movement to increase public understanding of the need to amend the Constitution to forbid discrimination based on disability. Heyer lived in Germany for a period and is developing an analysis of the campaign.