#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.

[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”

[judgingbooksbycovers]

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

Edited by Alice Wong.

[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!✨

[cerealdigitalgallery]

Portrait of Alice Wong by Georgia Webber

Contemporary Calgary, Mohkinstis, Canada

As part of the exhibition “Resistance & Respiration”

January 2024

[lilypadd23]

[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

[whilereadingandwalking]

Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life by Alice Wong is a scrapbook-like memoir by a disabled activist and icon, the editor of Disability Visibility and partner in the creation of #CriptheVote, among other achievements. So I was excited to dig into her story. 

This isn't what this book is for (remotely), but I did end up confronting some serious internalized ableism of my own as I read, thinking about my own assumptions and thoughts about my future as a chronically ill person. Wong's book digs into the idea that we can't choose whether or not to be an activist when we have a chronically ill, in-pain, or disabled body: politics becomes part and parcel of trying to survive. 

Wong's memoir is vividly creative—and she emphasizes, again and again, the power of adaptation and creativity that disabled people have in their day-to-day lives. She also shows how accessibility really is rooted in willingness and openness to listen, to adapt, and to commit to experimenting to help improve the lives of others. Her creativity is vivid in its multi-media memoir that uses so much to add to its story. A beautiful comic chapter illustrated by Sam Schäfer about living like a cat; scanned copies of forms that she uses to struggle to access necessary services from the government or Medicaid; chats, quotes, and photos, all among the essays reprinted and written fresh. 

Wong really emphasizes the day-to-day uncertainty of being disabled, including things many of us wouldn't think about—her BPAP ventilator means she's dependent on a machine for oxygen, which makes her terrified of power outages. She digs into the issues of performative mourning, how hard it was for her to get a vaccine, the ableist comments of people who decide her life isn't worth living, and much more. It's an excellent memoir, front to back. 

Content warnings for ableism, medical trauma, body shaming, hate crime, violence.

[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.

[badatwritingstuff]

Book haul but it's presents from my last birthday 🎂

[wreckitremy]

"Anyone can become disabled at any time. We are people just like everyone else.

The time needs to be over for people to be sent to institutions because there aren't options in the community or because people think it's cheaper or more protected.

It wastes people's lives and, in the long run, keeps them from contributing.

There's no such thing as a good institution."

- Disability Visibility edited by Alice Wong: We can't go back by Ricardo T. Thornton Sr.

[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.

[spooniestrong]

The amazing Alice Wong follows SpoonieStrong on Twitter (I used to post a lot). 💙🥄

[dear-indies]

Sorry, could you tell me what does "prescriptive" means? I've searched but couldn't find a meaning that fit the "activism isn't prescriptive" quote

Don't be sorry, anon! As somebody who is dyslexic trying to explain words makes me want to scream but it means "enforcement/rules/instructions on how something should be done" so basically activism isn't one thing and people can advocate in many different ways. The quote carries on to say "everyone can do something with the time, energy, and resources they have." As a disabled person just trying to do their best, it was a powerful read and I always recommend Alice Wong.

And also, I'd feel wrong of me not to include:

[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!