Dear Mr. Scarborough and MSNBC: Nearly one week has passed since you, Mr. Scarborough, made the false and unsupportable claim that most people who commit the kind of violence seen in Aurora, Colorado are on the autism spectrum. Your statement…
Read MoreWe in the disability community knew it was coming. We’d known it for days. After a young man in Aurora, Colorado took the lives of 12 people, wounded 58, and left nothing but grief and misery behind him, we knew…
Read MoreI live in a small town in southern Vermont. As most people in town know, there is a man who walks back and forth in front of the post office every day carrying a long scroll of papers. He has…
Read MoreRachel Cohen-RottenbergUnion Institute & UniversitySpring-Summer semester, 2012 Beginning with Erving Goffman’s ground-breaking 1963 book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity — a masterful examination of the nature of stigma as a social construct — scholars and activists over…
Read MoreA few months ago, I discovered the writing of feminist author and essayist Nancy Mairs, a woman who has lived with multiple sclerosis for over 40 years. I stumbled across her essay, “Sex and Death and the Crippled Body: A…
Read MoreI have been reading, with great interest, Susan Wendell’s The Rejected Body. I have been particularly interested in her analysis of our cultural “myth of control” — the notion that we can control our bodies and protect them indefinitely from…
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