One experience of intersectionality

In light of all the disability issues recently, and inspired by katemoore’s beautiful entry prior to this, I thought I would share my own experiences of how living with a disability has influenced my feminism.

I am very new to disability rights activism, and still learning. It is very probable that I will say something that goes against key ideas in the field, or that is deeply problematic in some way – which is why this is nothing but a very personal (and difficult to write) post. This is how the form of feminism I practice has departed from some norms and developed in unusual ways because of my disability.

I have lived for many years now with a mild form of epilepsy (a seizure disorder); mild enough that I don’t have seizures on a regular basis, but serious enough that I am severely limited in what I can do without risking a seizure. I also have terrible migraines, which basically all adds up to my brain being a total mess.

This has changed the way I view many issues, the way I interact with
myself and my body, the way I interact with other feminists, and simply
what I can do as a feminist. My energy is usually taken up entirely by
day-to-day activities, which means I can never be an ‘activist’ of the
sort most people usually imagine, or attend many socials or
get-togethers with other feminists. I rely mostly on books and blogs to
learn feminist theory, and both are necessarily limited due to time and
energy. These are, perhaps, the more tangible things, but it doesn’t
stop there.

I know many disability rights activists would disagree vehemently,
but my particular experiences with my disability have led me to
question the basic feminist tenet of bodily autonomy and choice. My
body is never quiet or tame; it does not do what it is told. There are
times when I watch my body moving even as I desperately tell it not to.
I struggle to understand what is going on in my own brain, to match
hallucinations or blurred vision with my understanding of what I should
be seeing. I do not control my body, and I never will, regardless of
any laws.

In a way, I find autonomy really just another form of control. My
body fights against control of any sort. The rhetoric of choice simply
replaces ownership from ‘men’ and/or ‘the state’ with ‘my mind'; but I
hate pushing my body into ownership of any sort when it rejects that so
definitely. My mind controlling my body is certainly a step up from men
controlling my body, but it is not enough; I want a feminism that gets
away from control altogether, that recognizes the power and life in
bodies and the problems of mind-body dualism, not seeing bodies as
empty houses inhabited by all-powerful minds.

Living with epilepsy and migraines also influences how I learn to
love my body and have confidence in my body. It can be difficult to
love a body you sometimes cannot understand, and when you are
frequently limited because of it. It’s not easy to love your body when
you’re crying in pain in a public place. And having confidence in your
body when you know it could basically shut down any minute is
challenging, to put it mildly.

 But on the other hand, my uncooperative body gives me strange
moments of connection that I may not otherwise have. When I have a
migraine or lie in bed jerking around for no apparent reason, it is
incredibly painful and frightening – but these are moments when I can
do nothing but be with myself. I am forced into a kind of
hyper-awareness of my body, forced in a way to make peace with myself.

This odd mixture of struggling and connecting with my body leaves me
in a complicated place when it comes to the ideal of loving your body.
At times I passionately believe in this ideal more than words can say –
it is me, it is all I have – but at times it can seem incredibly
condescending or hurtful.

Having my bizarre brain also results in strange experiences that
drive home an appreciation of just how mysterious and fascinating this
world can be. Sometimes migraines come with hallucinations that take
the form of an unbearably beautiful barrage of bold colours; sometimes
I find myself in a state where the intensity of sound and light is all
I can process. These are painful experiences, but they are also
beautiful in a way, and they keep me believing in the impossible
complexity of this world. I am not a religious person by any stretch of
the imagination (quite the opposite), but I could never adhere to a
form of feminism that completely relies on Western Enlightenment-style
rationality or a total de-animation of the world. It simply does not
make sense to me.

Not, of course, that any feminist without a disability couldn’t have
exactly the same issues as what I outline above (I know for a fact that
some do), but my goal was to illustrate how disability and feminism
cannot be separated for me; my disability directly informs the beliefs
I hold, the way I experience the world, and therefore the types of
feminism I can and cannot adhere to.