I attended a the Disability Inclusion workshop, organized by Hawk Stone, and offered to share some resources with those attending. I also want to post them here. There are so many natural connections, and a whole lot of overlap, between queer health and disability rights issues. I was really surprised there was but one workshop that made the connection. At one of the Tobacco workshops, a person from St. Louis, talked about not being able to go to smokey bars, not because of discomfort or second-hand smoke (which are also real reasons…), but because of Environmental Illness–she, and many others, get physically sick in smokey environments. It becomes an issue of ACCESS, just like ramps for wheel chairs or ASL interpreters for Deaf people who sign. Access is a wider way to frame “can someone come to your event” and includes financial access, geographical access, cultural relevancy access. (This “politics of access” frame work is from fellow QD conference organizer Alison Kafer.)
This more broad way of looking at access was reflected in the conference evaluation, which asked “Did you have any issues regarding access to the conference?”
Anyway, here are the resources I mentioned.
Hi folks who attended the Disability Session at the Summit:
Queer Disability list serve that is active via Yahoo. Here it is:
1) This is the website to join the group, via Yahoo.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/QueerDisability/
2) And this is the address to send an email to the group:
QueerDisability@yahoogroups.com
If any of you have any problems finding the group this way, just let me know and I can connect you directly with one of the moderators. If you sign up for the list through the Yahoo site, you can look at old posts that go back four years from the Queer Disability conference.
A few other websites of interest:
The website from Queer Disability conference:
http://www.disabilityhistory.org/dwa/queer/
BENT Online, a journal for gay disabled men:
Bent devoted a lot of space to coverage of the conference itself. That material is here:
http://www.bentvoices.org/bentvoices/queer_disability_conference.htm
Current Bent material is located here:
http://www.bentvoices.org/home.htm
Also, I recommend Crip Commentary, www.cripcommentary.com, the website of Laura Hershey, disability activist and author. I know one member of our workshop was particularly interested in info for training Personal Attendants and Laura has a lot of material on helping attendants be LGBT-competent.
Thanks everyone!
Thanks for providing these resources. On the workshop proposal review committee calls, we knew we were falling short on workshops dealing with disability issues. Any effort to raise the profile of these issues and to make the next one more accessible is helpful. I hope that whoever organizes the next one takes advantage of the fact that you have collected these resources here to draw from.
Comment by Bill J — March 20, 2007 @ 8:00 pm
Hey nice conference Blog! The politics of access is something we all could think more about. Thanks for posting these resources.
Comment by Knoll — March 21, 2007 @ 9:43 pm