Astoundingly, many people in the United States are not aware that there are some important exceptions to the Federal minimum wage, according to which people can be paid less than the alleged minimum. Sometimes far less. Those exceptions include certain types of contract workers (like coders in Silicon Valley) and food service personnel, who may […]
Category Archives: disability
Further Thoughts on ‘Wrongful Birth’
I’ve been seeing wrongful birth crop up again in the news lately, and I thought it was worth a second look after my Tiger Beatdown post on the subject. It’s a loaded and complicated issue, and before proceeding, I want to note that I’m going to be discussing some very intimate, raw subjects when it […]
Mental Illness, Medication, and Social Attitudes
This is a society that hates mentally ill people and wants nothing more than to suppress craziness in all its forms. Whether it’s forcibly committing people to institutions, excluding people with mental illness from society, or pushing for exceptional legal treatment to make it easier to abuse mentally ill people, there’s a long history of […]
Why IS It So Difficult to Find Better Methods of Chronic Pain Management?
Most of the social framework surrounding pain has to do with acute pain; the sharp snap of a broken arm and subsequent fiery wave of pain that follows, the jab of a needle, the sear of a burn. The rapid, emergency signal the body sends when something is going very wrong and it would like […]
On Children and Organ Donation
A number of controversial, complex, and troubling stories about organ transplants involving children have crossed the media this year, most involving situations in which children have been denied transplant or put so far down the list that they’re likely to die before they receive organs. These cases have stirred up substantial emotion among members of […]
NBC’s Ironside and Cripface on Television
This fall, it seems that some networks are trying to up their diversity quotients with more token inclusion of disabled characters, adding a handful more to the extremely short list of recurring disabled characters on network shows. One of the most notable is Ironside, in which the title character is disabled—and not only that, he’s […]
Gendering Disability/Disability as Intersectional Text
Disability is, in many senses, gendered. The classic representation of disability, after all, is that of a man in a wheelchair, which tells the casual viewer two things about disability: it is a male experience, and it is a distinctly physical experience, one which leaves clear marks on the body. That both of these things […]
What a Freakshow: A Strange Facet of Disability History
One of the few ways in which disabled people have always been able to earn a living is via the freakshow, a European tradition that exploded in the 1500s1. Whether it was a person with dwarfism acting as a jester or clown for an individual monarch, or a person with a unique physical impairment displaying […]
Medicating Foster Children Into Oblivion
Being thrown into the foster care system in the United States sends children hurtling along a path surrounded with potential landmines. If they’re lucky and truly needed to be removed from their homes, they manage to get a good placement with caring foster parents who may eventually adopt them, if that’s an option, providing a […]
On ‘Handicapped,’ Disability Euphemisms, and False Etymologies
The word ‘handicapped’ makes me cringe. Has for as long as I can remember. It just sounds so degrading and dehumanising. And, of course, it’s everywhere; official signs carry it, people use it frequently in common speech, and it’s not uncommon for people to say ‘handicapped’ instead of ‘disabled’ because they think it’s the correct […]
