12th Annual Allied Media Conference - Detroit, MI: (6/18 - 6/20/2010)

This weekend I attended my favorite conference: the Allied Media Conference in Detroit. This year was way more subdued than the last two years I’ve attended. There were fewer people of color present; I didn’t go to very many sessions; I was on my period, feeling real low energy; and it was still amazing and transformative, and once again reminded me of what I’m here to do in this world. Even with its challenges, the AMC is the kind of conference that has me checking the calendar to make sure I’ve got it on deck for next year.

The most powerful part of the conference for me was being connected to the Creating Collective Access folks, organized in less than a month by some of the fiercest people I know. I was reminded how conferences themselves create a non-sustainable way of folks relating to each other, to themselves, and to their own needs. On some days the conference schedule was filled from 8am-2am. Being connected to the Collective Access folks allowed me to give myself permission to chill, to not push through exhaustion and inattentiveness to be at every session, and to not sacrifice a really good slow conversation to make it to a panel presentation on listening. I felt more in my body, more aware of my needs.

Creating Collective Access also had me questioning what collective space looks like and what to do when access may be so different for different people. I went to one of the sessions that was part of the Indigenous Media and Technology track, and the presenters were using smoke as a tool in the workshop. I was thinking about folks with disabilities that need scent-free spaces and how you hold those things together or, if you can’t, what do you do? Are we willing to do what it takes to create or use tools to share across real boundaries?

I was amazed by Adrienne Marie Brown’s Octavia Butler Symposium, people’s overwhelming interest as well as her awesome awesome facilitation skills. Adrienne is so fierce she had the notes up later that day! I was once again struck by folks' reluctance, and perhaps inability, to talk about trauma in our movement and how we heal or don’t from all these –isms that impact our lives.

I feel softer now, and sharper at the same time. I am refined and focused, recommitted to kindness with direction, and more prepared to speak up as an ally for the disability justice movement and the rights of indigenous peoples. I’m full and content and feel myself coming into a new era of myself. I’m hopeful and it feels really good.

Review by Moya Bailey

Cross-posted at Crunk Feminist Collective

Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America

By Evelyn Nakano Glenn
Harvard University Press

Evelyn Nakano Glenn is a professor of Women’s and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley and author of Forced to Care. Perhaps because of her vocation, the book has a bit of a textbook flavor to it, but as it progresses, she lets go and begins to fill it out with a more humanistic view.

Forced to Care begins with a look at those who are responsible for the lion’s share of caregiving in America. Glenn’s findings basically confirm what most of us know already: in most cases, women of color, women at the low end of the socioeconomic scale, and illegal immigrants are the ones caring for our nation’s young, disabled, and elderly.

The author then takes her inquiries one step further by tracing the roots of caregiving back to colonial America in an effort to discover why such a disproportionate amount of paid and unpaid caretaking falls to these individuals. Glenn does a terrific job of leading the reader through the individual events that occurred politically, socially, industrially, and economically to reinforce the notion that it is a woman’s duty to take care of needy family members. Following the shift from an agricultural, self-sustaining, family-based society to a market economy, Glenn shows just why gender divisions still remain with respect to these types of jobs. She illustrates, through the use of an amazing amount of research, just exactly how American women with very few other choices have been coerced into providing care for others to the detriment of their own needs for centuries. Our society’s continued devaluation of these kinds of “homemaking” services serves to perpetuate the problem.

It is clear that the author encourages a sea change with respect to both paid and unpaid caregiving, but she refrains from demonizing any particular groups or individuals, instead offering a clear, concise look at how we got ourselves here, and why we need to get out of this mess while we still can.

Glenn advocates for both care providers and those receiving care and uses her vast knowledge of the history and foundation of the problems to offer concrete solutions to the difficulties both face as our aging society pushes us closer to a crisis in the fastest growing segment of healthcare in America.

Before picking up this book, I was nearly certain that I would be called upon to care for elderly family members at some point in my life, although hopefully not until my children are grown and gone. Despite my fears of being able to do so with grace and love versus resentment and frustration, it was nonetheless something I didn’t see a way out of. I can’t say that Forced to Care allayed my fears in any way, but I gained a tremendous amount of insight as to how and why I might be called upon to provide such care and how, if I am so inclined, I might join in efforts to increase the availability of resources and respect for caregivers as a whole.

While the book is not an easy read—I didn't settle down with it in my lounge chair next to the pool—it is an absolutely eye-opening look at something many of us take for granted; that we as women will eventually be called upon to care for those family members who cannot do it for themselves.

Review by Kari O’Driscoll

See What I'm Saying: The Deaf Entertainers Documentary

Directed by Hilari Scarl
Worldplay



See What I'm Saying is an irreverent yet important introduction between Deaf performers and a mainstream hearing audience. The film, which is open captioned, follows a year in the lives of four performers who make up a cross-section of the Deaf community in terms of art form, race, gender, and sexuality. One performer identifies as hard of hearing rather than deaf, but wishes to be accepted as a part of Deaf culture.

Before I go on, a few definitions:

Deaf Culture: Deaf with a capital “D” means a specific reference to the largely American Sign Language (ASL) using community, and the media, theatre, comedy, music, history, and other aspects of any culture transmitted through language. Deaf with a lowercase “d” means the generic description for someone who can’t hear, whether they are a part of the Deaf community or not. The film goes a long way toward making this clearer, as well as succinctly demonstrating various different ways of communicating using speech and sign.

Open Captions: See What I'm Saying has the captions burned into the film itself, and there is no way to turn them off. Every print of the film in every cinema is captioned. The captions also include descriptions of incidental sounds and music, but are otherwise like watching a subtitled foreign film. This is a huge deal for a film on release at major cinemas. The film is also voice-interpreted where necessary, so there is a continuous signed, spoken, and captioned narrative.

Now, back to the review. The four performers featured are really engaging people. Bob Hilterman is an old school rocker who, Blues Brothers style, decides to get his former band back together for one last show. Everyone in the band is Deaf and all the guys are really funny, as is their repartee when they finally get together and start rehearsing again.

CJ Jones is a comedian with a level of success on the scale of, perhaps, Robin Williams, going by reactions of his fans when they spot him at Deaf events. His humour is a mix of storytelling, improvisation and observation, and he’s a comic actor as well. The film follows his well-deserved but not always fruitful attempts to break into mainstream comedy and television.

Robert DeMayo is an admirably centered person who can talk about his difficult past with honesty and understanding for people who’ve let him down. He’s an amazingly gifted storyteller and comic mime artist, and it’s a shame there wasn’t time to feature more of his work in the film. I could watch his stuff all day.

TL Forsberg is the youngest performer, the only woman, and also the only artist whose journey specifically relates to being accepted by the Deaf community, while the others are followed trying to achieve success with hearing audiences. This juxtaposition adds further depth to the audience’s understanding of the difficulties of "crossing over." In fact, any minority artist or from any underground art form could relate to the difficulties portrayed in See What I'm Saying.

Hilari Scarl, a hearing performer and director who worked as a voicing actor with the National Theatre of the Deaf (NTD), decided to make the film after noticing that once the tour was finished, she was getting work and her deaf colleagues just... weren’t. Scarl became passionate about this issue and used her considerable skills as a producer to make this happen. She does not come across as an outsider but, to this hearing reviewer in any case, as part of the scene. Her drive as a filmmaker was evident when I spoke to her, and she had a dedicated team of performers, promoters, volunteers and friends, as well as the financial backing of a few major corporations. It is her hope that these and other Deaf performers will receive the attention they clearly deserve.

See What I'm Saying is on limited release at several major cinemas throughout this year. It is also taking bookings for festivals, so check the film's website for details.

Review by Chella Quint

Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature

By Suzanne Bost
Fordham University Press

The pockmarks on the Aztec figure on the cover of Suzanne Bost’s Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature are a reminder of the proximity of disease, illness, and pain to death. Chicana artist Maya González’ painting is in fact entitled Death Enthroned, and serves as a constant thematic backdrop to Bost’s book since it embodies many of the themes that Bost will deal with in her study of Chicana feminist literature: Aztec culture, illness, death, religion, and woman’s precarious position in the intersection of these elements.

Bost’s study is not the first to examine Chicana feminist literature, as many readers will note (many such studies have been reviewed by FR). In effect, the three authors Bost chooses to analyse are part of the established cannon of Chicana literature, with Gloria Anzaldúa being the face of said literature with twice as many critical articles written on her (over 200 in the MLA directory as of April 1, 2010). Both of the other writers, Cherríe Moraga and Ana Castillo, have also established themselves in the last twenty years or so. All three have been studied within other “literary labels,” such as Queer Studies for Cherríe Moraga and Ecocriticism for Ana Castillo, for example.

Separately, all three authors have been examined under the relatively new label of Disability Studies, but the intersection of Disability Studies with Chicana Feminist Literary Studies is a novelty, which Bost (and other academics) sees as appealing. In the contextualization of her analysis, Bost finds it fitting to differentiate studies on the Female Body (which have been done for each of the writers mentioned) with Disability. This is perhaps one of the most interesting theoretical parts of her analysis since the line separating the two is very fine: pain, illness, and disability are all part of the bodily construction and seem inseparable. Thus, Bost’s analysis is enlightening as to what exactly is new in her approach: a Chicana identity rooted in the body, but which transcends it, as her use of the Spanish term encarnación (incarnation) in the title signals both a figurative and literal embodiment. Bost specifically writes that she is interested in “the ways in which other corporeal qualities—ones that are not genetic, visible, or already politically inscribed as an assumed axis of oppression/privilege—upend the familiar forms of identity.”

Before moving to individual chapters examining each author, Bost explores the context of identity and grounds Chicana identity in the Aztec traditions. The author is very thorough in her reminder of all the Aztec symbolism throughout the four chapters and, for those of us who need a refresher, there is an abundance of useful information. What Bost terms as a hagiographic (reverential towards the religious figures) study of Aztec culture is also useful in that it establishes an unconventional (read non-Christian) relationship to pain, illness, death, and their relationship to representation in that tradition. Furthermore, in this chapter Bost chooses to iconize Frida Kahlo as one of the central contextualizing figures for the Chicana disability studies as she epitomizes both analytical elements, as well as being a significant influence on all three authors.

All three chapters on the individual authors are well written and quite detailed. However, one can but lament the fact that Bost did not take the opportunity to write a proper conclusion to her study (one that would have reiterated the more direct links between the writers and come to some consensus about the use of Disability Studies as a useful tool to examine Chicana Feminist Literature). Although I personally find her introduction of the Chicana artists Maya González and Diane Gamboa in her conclusion to be fascinating and informative, it is Chicana Feminist Literature that her study chooses to focus on, and it would have been interesting to see if Bost had found relevant links to other Chicana writers. With the prominence of the Chicana women artists and the inclusion of the twelve beautiful color plates in her book, it is almost fitting to suggest that the book be renamed Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Representation.

Review by Sophie M. Lavoie