gimpled

Image description:  A large, triangular table is set with 39 place settings.  Each has a different runner and hand painted plate. In 1974, feminist artist Judy Chicago created an installation artwork called ‘The Dinner Party’.   Her ‘guest list’ included the names of more than 1000 women, with 39 ‘guests of honour’, including luminaries like Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony and Virginia Woolf.   It’s now regarded as the first epic feminist artwork – a ‘true milestone celebration of women in history’.    That work is now almost forty years old.   Chicago started thinking about it in the late 1960s, after noticing that ‘there were no women’s studies programs, no women in history courses, no seminaries teaching about the female principle in religion, and scarcely any women leading churches.’   She wanted to create a visual symbol ‘to end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record....

In the disability community, our diversity is our worst enemy. It is hard to be proud in the face of oppression and discrimination, but it is harder when your culture is almost wholly comprised on stories based around those things. Stories create culture. The response to the story makes it narrative, and it informs the way people behave. Our public narratives are all created by non disabled people - inspiration and charity and tragedy, and our private narratives are conce aled by our diversity.  Even stories which should belong to us have been appropriated by non disabled people as inspiration porn. We're objectified every day because of it. And even stories that reflect pride are often based on protest. Although it is wonderful being part of a community who are fighting for their rights, there is nothing beautiful about the desperate struggle to stay out of nursing homes or have good health care or access or just to be part of the world. It is hard t...