#Alice Wong

[lullabiestoparalyze]

The Last Walk, Melissa Hung (from Disability Intimacy, ed. Alice Wong)

[sainte666]

Disability Divest: We Demand the Disability Establishment End Its Relationships with War Profiteers (July 1, 2024)

Hi friends and comrades,

This Disability Pride Month, please read and sign onto this letter to the disability establishment to divest and end its partnership with war profiteers and complicity with genocide and colonialism.

Some of us are affiliated with organizations in the US disability advocacy space, and some of us are not.

Many disability organizations and their leaders have been silent about the mass disabling event and genocide that has been happening since last October. Silence is complicity.

Several US disability rights organizations, which advocate for equal rights and treatment for disabled Americans, accept funding and have fostered partnerships with major war profiteers and weapons manufacturers including Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen, Boeing, RTX/Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Motors, and Google.

Disability rights organizations go even further than accepting money from war profiteers: they honor them with disability inclusion awards.

One example is the 2023 Disability Equality Index, presented by Disability:IN, awarded HP, Siemens, Barclays, Chevron, Intel, and 11 weapons manufacturing companies with the top score 100 of “Best Places to Work.” (All 16 companies are corporate partners with Disability:IN.)

Disability:IN is certainly not the only one doing this in the US disability establishment, and we see similar patterns with other national orgs as well. They take money from these war mongers and turn around and pay lip service to the idea of liberation and disability rights.

Read the full letter and sign: DisabilityDivest.org. All you need is a first and last name and an email address. The letter is being translated into ASL and a Plain Language version, which will be available at the top of the page once ready.

Please feel free to contact me @sainte666 if you have any questions.

We MUST do better as a community and work to stop genocide and mass disabling events.

[cerealdigitalgallery]

Portrait of Alice Wong by Georgia Webber

Contemporary Calgary, Mohkinstis, Canada

As part of the exhibition “Resistance & Respiration”

January 2024

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, a nd Desire

Edited by Alice Wong.

[godzilla-reads]

“This may feel true for every era, but I believe I am living in a time where disabled people are more visible than ever before. And yet while representation is exciting and important, it is not enough. I want and expect more. We all should expect more. We all deserve more. There must be depth, range, nuance to disability representation in media. This is the current challenge and opportunity for the publishing industry and popular culture at large.”

—Alice Wong, from her Introduction to “Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century”

[disabilityjusticeandyou]

Book

Wong, A. (2020). Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

[ID in alt]

This is “Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century,” published in 2020, and edited by Alice Wong, a disabled activist, writer, editor, and the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project. A table of contents organizes the various essays into four main parts, and information about the contributors as well as further reading can be found at the end. This book is a collection of essays from all across the array of disabled people, providing a glimpse into the lived reality of all sorts of disabilities. This book is a beautiful way for nondisabled people to learn more about the lived reality of disability, but it is also a heartwarming and provocative display of disability justice for people who already are disabled. If you’re unsure of what a disability justice politic may look like, or are curious about the state of the world for your fellow disabled humans, I would highly recommend this book. I think a baseline foundational level of knowledge on disability studies may help, but this book can be enjoyed by anyone.

[smokefalls]

If we love fiercely, our ancestors live among and speak to us through these incandescent filaments glowing from the warmth of memories. Loving fiercely is real-time legacy building. Maybe that’s the best way to honor people.

Alice Wong, “Ancestors and Legacies” from Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life

[dailycrippledcharacters]

Alice Wong (Big Mouth)

[Image Description: From the official show. Alice, a light-skinned Asian woman with brown eyes, sits in a motorized wheelchair. Her hair is black and long on top with the sides shaved. She is wearing an oxygen mask around her nose and smiling. She is wearing a blue shirt and red sweatpants with black shoes. She is in a room with a bookshelf in the background. Offscreen, a black hand holds a glass of red wine. End ID.]

Alice has spinal muscular atrophy and uses a wheelchair.

✨Alice is voiced by a disabled actor!✨

[long-anti-covid]

article date: July 25, 2024

Today, the mask is the unsightly marker of deviant individuals: the sick, the immunocompromised, the disabled, and the protester who wishes to keep their identity anonymous. (Many demonstrators at pro-Palestine marches have worn medical masks or other face coverings, both to protect their identity from authorities and to protect their health in large crowds.) We’re told such masked individuals threaten the moral order of society, and these bans are meant to keep the public “safe.”

“Safety” is a key word used by people who mask and those who consider masking a criminal act. But it’s worth asking, who is kept safe by the state or by individual acts, and who is left out? “We keep us safe” is a phrase used by community organizers that view public safety as a collective endeavor. As Charis Hill, a disability activist, tells me, “I take medications that weaken my immune system, so I primarily wear a mask to protect myself, but I also wear it to protect others and to show that we are still in a pandemic. If mask bans become the reality, I have little hope that I'll ever be safe in public again.”

What is clear to me is that disabled people have never felt safe. Many of us view masking as a form of solidarity with workers, activists, and people of color all over the world fighting fascism and genocide. But mask bans send the message that it is a crime to be disabled. I think of people who have fought hard to stay relatively safe since early 2020, those who hang on a precipice that feels like it could fall at any moment. Some days I wonder what my breaking point will be.

Since July is Disability Pride month — or Disability Wrath month, more appropriately, as my friends and I call it — non-disabled people can do the following to ally with the disability community: Stop minimizing and denying the pandemic; talk about the pandemic in the present tense, because it’s not over; wear a mask (if you can), and contact your elected representatives if there is a proposed mask ban in your state or city. Most important, listen to and believe disabled people [...] while we are still here."

[lilypadd23]

[wormworker]

🚨 Call to action against the eugenics and oppression Disabled people continue to face. 🚨

[emergency siren emojis]

Please email UCSF Health to demand mask PPE requirements in healthcare.

This is the reality Disabled people have been facing during this now 4 year battle with COVID. Masks work. COVID never ended.

It is eugenics. We are being killed off. And no one seems to care. We can't do this alone.

More info and email address in the link.

[qbdatabase]

Daily Book - Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

Disability Visibility ed. Alice Wong Adult Health / Identity, 2020, 309 pg personal essays by disabled / neurodiverse authors, including an asexual female author, poc authors, etc One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent—but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people.

[queereadsmontreal]

Our next book club meeting is April 13 at 7:30pm Eastern and we will be discussing the first half of Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life by Alice Wong.

We meet online at https://meet.jit.si/ReadingQueerly

Whether you read the book, didn't finish the book, or didn't start the book, our meetings are open to everyone interested in a laid back discussion about themes, opinions, and personal experiences in relation to the books we read. We try our best to create a comfortable, safe space for queer community, and if you have any questions or comments we would love to hear from you. Hope to see you there!

[tigger8900]

Disability Visibility, edited by Alice Wong

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Inspired by editor Alice Wong's podcast, Disability Visibility, this collection of thirty-seven essays have been contributed by a highly-intersectional group of people with disabilities. Topics covered vary wildly, including such things as: the philosophy of inclusive fashion design, musings on the partnership between a blind person and their guide dog, a personal account of ableist abuse a Deaf person suffered while imprisoned, the importance of joyous disabled spaces, and much more.

This was an incredibly informative read. As Alice Wong notes in her introduction, these essays aren't presented with the intention of swaying abled readers. There's little sugarcoating or gentle easing in these chapters, and often the rage behind the words is palpable. With many of these essays, the reader is expected to meet the author where they are, and to do the work themselves to understand any concepts that don't make sense. This is okay. After all, we've got google in our pockets and are capable of searching up a reference.

It's not all frustration and anger, though. Several of the essays focus on community, companionship, and finding joy. I smiled the whole way through "Guide Dogs Don't Lead Blind People. We Wander as One." even at the inevitable moment of sadness. The collection also makes a point to end with positivity, with the entire last section focusing on community and the final essay detailing a moment of joy at a performance conducted by and for the disabled community.

I think most readers would walk away from this volume with at least a few thoughts to chew on, even if you've already spent some time pondering or working in disability advocacy. The sheer diversity of the voices presented virtually guarantees it.

[smokefalls]

May we all receive the help we need to make our lives a little more bearable.

Alice Wong, “How I Spend My Caturdays (and Nights) at Home” from Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life