gimpled

Roll up, roll up.   Here’s the new Freak Show, right here, right now, right in your country.   It’s not sixteenth century England, nor nineteenth century America.   You don’t even need to go to an amusement park, a circus, a vaudeville hall or museum.   It’s coming to you right from your Twitter feed, in your art gallery, from your Facebook newsfeed.      It’s ExploitAbility.  We’re calling this brave new trend ‘ExploitAbility’ to bring it in line with the hundreds of other disability organisations with Ability in their headline (note the capital A) – why not?   It’s as good as any other name to describe the plethora of tragedy and pity porn that’s currently being rolled out as an alternative to inspiration porn.   It’s to raise Awareness, you see.   About whatever particular issue is the flavour of the day – diagnoses, violence, poverty and homelessness.   And like those Freaks in other long-gone shows, our sto...

There we were, on the dance floor, feeling slightly conspicuous.   Drunk enough not to care, but conscious that we were in our forties (in my case, late forties) and far older than most of the twenty somethings on the dance floor.   We danced at the outskirts – me in my wheelchair, my three friends in a group around me.      It’s a different thing, dancing when you’re older.   You’re not dancing to please anyone but yourself.   If you’re with friends, you’re dancing with wild-woman abandon, uninhibitedly, to celebrate your friendship and your own joy in the moment.   There are those casual encounters with strangers, a shared dance, a conversation, but mostly it is about the music and the dance and the celebration of being alive.  We’d been there for a whole twenty minutes.   And then it happened.  A young woman in a crop top and sneakers danced over to us, attracting every male gaze a...

You can see the look of strain in Glenda Lee's eyes as she prepares to meet with media.  There are cameramen bending down to wheelchair height to clip microphones onto her brightly coloured scarf.  Her power wheelchair is wedged into an artfully arranged cluster of manual and power chairs. 'This is the last thing I will do,' she says.  'I'm sick of fighting.  I've been doing this for forty years.' The other women nod in agreement.  They are not anti euthanasia activists - they are disabled women who have flown or traveled to protest the South Australian assisted suicide bill from a disability and human rights perspective.  Half are South Australian.  Others are from NSW, Victoria and WA.  One by one, they've been admitted through a side door and ushered into a small lift to hold a press conference in a courtyard at Parliament House. 'It wasn't accessible at all until a few years ago,' says a staffer brightly.  The women look unsurpr...