February 20, 2010<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tribal Membership<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This week I received an email from someone I didn\u2019t know, a wheelchair user. He\u2019s a quad who became disabled after a diving accident over thirty-five years ago. How do I know all that from the first line of his email? He told me. It read, \u201cI am a C5-6 quad since a 1976 diving injury.\u201d I wasn\u2019t surprised, it\u2019s how many disabled people introduce themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was surprised, though, by my reaction, not a first, but after I\u2019d thought about it. Initially, I was put off by his medicalization of his identity. He didn\u2019t say, as I do, \u201cI\u2019m a wheelchair user.\u201d I prefer to identify myself by my social identity, i.e. a disabled person or wheelchair user. The world sees me using a wheelchair and even though they don\u2019t know \u201cwhat happened\u201d (as much as most would like to ask) they stereotype me based on that assessment. I want to identify with the broadest aspect of my community, disabled people. It\u2019s the strategy I use to remind myself of my pride in my membership. And for the world it\u2019s my desire to focus on something other than the oft-asked question, \u201cWhat happened?\u201d I\u2019m not particularly interested in recounting my history, nor do I want to disclose, \u201cHow much can<\/strong> you feel?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But then, I realized that just as I have taken a pejorative, \u201cdisabled,\u201d and termed it a positive, he was too, by giving me his lineage\u2014his membership in our clan and tribe. He gave me his bona fides, his place in the disability family tree. He described, in essence, his clan, \u201cquads.\u201d He gave me the date of his initiation into the clan. He let me know that he wasn\u2019t new to all this and that his clan is in the family tree of people with spinal cord injuries. He and I are cousins, we\u2019re SCI (spinal cord injury) cousins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is, of course, an imperfect analogy, but it helped me understand more about our emerging identities. How we see ourselves\u2014disabled, with a disability, handicapable\u2014shapes us and ultimately shapes the world. Remember, we caused the transformation of the built environment in the United States with our new-found civil rights identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes I worry that we are too ashamed being disabled. Like the GLBT community there is shame attached to our identity\u2014a shame that we need to reconcile within ourselves. The medical model terminology helps some disabled people to avoid the societally imposed shame. Unfortunately, invoking the medical leads back to objectification and reducing us to the specifics of our uncured selves. It also gives up the power of identity to doctors rather than holding it to ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, perhaps, by invoking family, clan, and tribal affiliations we\u2019re turning the medical upside down. If we are proud of who we are as a people, we can also be proud of disabled brothers, sisters, and cousins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" February 20, 2010 Tribal Membership This week I received an email from someone I didn\u2019t know, a wheelchair user. He\u2019s a quad who became disabled after a diving accident over thirty-five years ago. How do I know all that from the first line of his email? He told me. It read, \u201cI am a C5-6 […]<\/p>\n