Wow the 80s were real different. You could advertise as a swinger and it’s just chill.
The secret ninth rule of fight club
there’s something hauntingly poetic about the ebb and flows of human compassion coming together to form language that allows the marginalized to express their need for emancipation, only for the inevitable surge of encultured ableism to quell that spark and steal that language for its own purpose. over and over and over. what will break the cycle? will people with disabilities ever get to have a concrete hold on the words they use to describe themselves, or is this a permanent fixture in the world we are forcing onto the disabled?
In the latest Diagnostic and Statistics Manual (DSM-5-TR), intellectual disability is the term that replaces mental retardation meaning mentally slow or delayed. Before mental retardation, it was mental deficiency implying there was something inferior. To me, there’s no real difference between mental deficiency and intellectual disability. They are synonymous. Before the first DSM, a prominent doctor in the field of intelligence created a tiered system of intelligence that applied the labels moron, imbecile, and idiot (ordered higher to lower intelligence). Those words became derogatory too. The issue is not that scientists can’t guess the correct term that wont become an insult.
The issue is that society defines values for people which allows terms to be insults. As long as oppression exists, the vulnerable will fall victim to it. The disabled, by definition, will always be part of the vulnerable group. Additionally, oppression is always justified by arguments on who deserves what, whether it be religion, race, sex, social class, work ethic, or intelligence. As long as we hold the value that inequitable distribution is not only acceptable but the ultimate goal of a just society, then regardless of the rules we establish, however noble or virtuous, the disabled will always be part of the oppressed, and thus, the terms for lower intelligence will continually evolve from neutral to derogatory.
As long as we hold the value that inequitable distribution is not only acceptable but the ultimate goal of a just society, then regardless of the rules we establish, however noble or virtuous, the disabled will always be part of the oppressed, and thus, the terms for lower intelligence will continually evolve from neutral to derogatory.
Preach! 🗣️🗣️🔥
The deaf seem to own it. They made up their own language and ableism can’t do shit.
But that is the only exception I can think of. (And they are really independent).
Are their other groups that you think experience this? As other poster said, deaf is deaf. Blind is blind. Paraplegic and that family all seem fine. And autism/neurodivergent is having it’s heyday as everyone realizes the symptoms are pretty broad and most people express some of those symptoms and most people want to feel unique.
So…what’s special about this group?
Yes, different subsets of the disabled community have emancipated their language to different degrees.
Have you ever heard “special olympics” being used as an insult? What about “acoustic” or “neurodivergent”? “Special needs” or “the ‘tism”? Sadly, I have. That’s why, when I see these terms being abused in day to day life, I tend to call it out. I want those words to belong to the people they represent, not people who just want to verbally abuse.
But yeah, asking “what’s special” is sort of the wrong way to think about it. The fight for disability rights has barely started in the grand scheme of things, and it’s only natural that some disabled identities have obtained more broad acceptance than others. Good question though.
Special Olympics when I was in middle school or below, I think predominantly from south park fans. It’s always a bit cringe to watch shows from the 90s or early 2000s cause sometimes this stuff will randomly appear.
The rest no, most people seem to call themselves neurodivergent or autistic lately. I’ve never heard of acoustic, had to look it up. I assumed it was something to do with issues handling noise and I was very wrong but right about which group it was mocking.
I think where I’m trying to get to is that for a lot of groups having a label (or if not a label, just knowledge that a concept exists) and find this positive. I know I’ve heard from several people in the various LGBTQ categories who felt that way, xyz event or discussion was the point they realized the way they feel or are is actually an option and that it’s ok. Big deal for them. More precise descriptions of physical disabilities were the first to be broadly understood and accepted. When I was a kid I didn’t know anything about autism except some nutjobs wanted to bring back polio, and then we got the concept of Asperger’s and a spectrum and neurodivergent and now things are clearly much much better. In contrast to LGBTQ it’s more “this is a thing I know about myself and must manage” but still, helpful. But from my PoV I know literally nothing about this situation. I know a bunch of people got upset and tried to phase out retarded. There’s some pushback from people who don’t get or care why. But in my head that word has no other meaning than calling someone stupid. It’s not derogatory to a group, only to an individual. Then one day someone said it was derogatory to some group I’d never met and I should stop using it. And I did, but I still don’t really get it. I don’t think my experience on this has been out of the ordinary.
So my point here at the end is that it feels like the labeling/marketing is wrong. LGBTQ folks and neurodivergent folks have both found ways to feel superior to straight/“normal”(I don’t have a label for this, but it feels weird to say normal when they are in the minority) and to generally reclaim the derogatory terms used against them. So what is that alternative marketing for this group?
Saw this at a consignment shop a couple months ago, from about that same time period.
