Comment Paper for Week #6

Barron, Karin (1997). The Bumpy Road to Womanhood. pp 223-239 in Disability & Society, Vol. 12, No. 2. (Sweden)
Priestly, Mark (1963). Disability: A Life Course Approach. pp.88-115. (Cambridge, UK : Polity)

The topic of this weeks reading was ‘disabled youth’. I think that this weeks articles by Barron and Priestly complemented each other very well. It was nice to read Barron’s stories of personal experiences of disabled youthful women, and then to relate their life experiences to Priestly’s literature.
Although the issue of gender was of bigger emphasis in Barron’s article it was brought up in both. Gender is a part of who we are and our everyday life, but we often fail to look at it critically to determine how it may impact our lives on a larger, social, scale. A very interesting connection between both articles is the reference to women with a disability being viewed differently than men with a disability because they are women. I found it very disturbing when Barron (1997:229) spoke about how some male teachers may ask young female students with a disability if they need help using the washroom. Before reading the rest of her explanation I never would have thought about how this could be a form of sexual harassment or abuse. Even if a young girl were disabled, it would not necessarily mean that she needed help using the bathroom, and if she did need help using the bathroom, there would always be a female teacher around to help her. Therefore, it is very out of line for a male teacher to be asking that. In Priestly’s article he quotes a newspaper interview that stated:
“When you look at the fact that there are so few prosecutions and the law doesn’t provide an effective deterrent, I think society is saying that these acts are trivial compared with those carried out on non-disabled people. You are effectively saying that they should not be treated as seriously.” (Priestly 1963: 100)
When I analyze these parts of both articles I come to the understanding that if an able bodied girl was asked if she needed help using the bathroom by a male teacher and reported it, action would probably be taken against the teacher. But, if a disabled girl was asked if she needed helping using the bathroom by a male teacher and reported it, chances are that nothing would be done because she would be viewed as needing help anyways.
Another topic from both articles and talked about in class was the view of disabled youth as being asexual, not normal, and also the sterilization of disabled people. Barron’s article talked less about asexuality then I thought it would considering Priestly’s article focuses a lot on it and therefore you would expect that topic would come out in her interviews with the six women. But, what I did find interesting from her article was the point that from a young age, girls with a disability are focusing on their physical appearance, but in a different way then able-bodied youth. Barron states that, “the everyday lives of physically disabled girls/women involve a great deal of physiotherapy treatment which aims at ‘correcting’ and ‘making whole’ their bodies. (Barron 1997:230) This is a hard issue for me to deal with being able-bodied myself. I personally think that the physiotherapy and other treatment should happen if necessary for the functioning of the person, but it is awful to think that a young girl might feel like they are being ‘corrected’ because of this.
Sterilization is an awful topic. Although much could be said about this, I would like to focus on two quotations from Priestly, the first stating, “as the proceeding examples show, past and present practices have been highly gendered, and are most likely to involve young women with the label of learning difficulties.” (Priestly 1963: 103) The second states: “Thus, Waxman Fiduccia (2000) concludes that medio-legal intervention in disabled people’s sexuality seeks to control the fertility of ‘dangerous’ women but to restore the potency of the ‘damaged male’”. (Priestly 1963: 103) From these two quotations, the conclusion can be drawn that sterilization was a highly gendered thing, placing more of the discrimination and oppression on disabled women. Although none of the women in Barron’s article had been sterilized, they speak of other people continually telling them that they will not hold a job or get married or have children of their own because of their disability. “Motherhood in our culture is viewed as an essential part of womanhood” (Barron 1997:232) and by telling a woman that they will probably never experience this joy in life because they are disabled is an extremely discriminatory thing to say. I feel as though both of the readings were useful towards my understanding of the oppression youth with a disability face, although I don’t feel as though I gained a better understanding of how to over come these barriers through my readings. The authors may not have wanted to touch on that aspect of it but I feel as though the education of able-bodied people and of caregivers of youth with disabilities may lessen some of the oppression they face. I also think, after reading Barron’s article, that youth who do have an impairment or disability need to work together on all aspects of their life to make their voice heard, not just when cut backs in funding are made or when a larger issue comes up. (Barron 1997: 226) If it is easier for a youth with a disability to have his or her voice heard when they are part of a group or organization then that is something that they should be doing to counter more of their oppression.