Tag Archives: women

GimpGirl Turns 14

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Today marks the 14th anniversary of GimpGirl Community! We have taken many forms in the last 14 years, but our mission has always remained the same: to bring together women with disabilities in the spirit of mutual support and positivity. That single mission brings together individuals with many different disabilities from a variety of countries and backgrounds to share our commonalities.

Our community’s administrators and facilitators have always been women with disabilities who volunteer their time because they believe that our community should be strengthened from within by people who understand the lived experience of being a woman with a disability.

We have also grown through the support of many others. Indeed, it is through volunteerism, in-kind donations of services, creative management of available resources and the use of open source and free to use online tools that we have survived and flourished.

Do you have any stories, anecdotes or favorite memories of your time with GimpGirl? We would love to hear from you on your experience of the last 14 years!

Spotlight: Sins Invalid

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Every now and then we like to spotlight organizations other than our own that in some way support the voices of women with disabilities. Check out Sins Invalid!

What is Sins Invalid?

Sins Invalid: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility (aka “Sins”) is a San Francisco/Bay Area based performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized. For the last five years, our performance work has explored themes of sexuality, embodiment, and the disabled body to sold-out audiences.

What people say…

The world of enforced and embodied norms constricts all of us, regardless of where we identify on the spectrums of sexuality, gender, or ability. In this project, people with disabilities are engaging in the wholeness of our bodies and our sexualities. When people experience our shows they are deeply impacted:

“I am moved beyond words, moved to an emotional state that I can’t quite explain. Thank you for making this space possible!” – audience member 2011

“You are brilliant and beautiful and help me remember that so am I.  Thank you.” - audience member 2011

“What makes Sins Invalid so powerful is that it thoroughly succeeds artistically and erotically, separate from the impact of its political message. Sins Invalid challenges its audience to think about sexuality, beauty, and disability in new and expanded ways. But Sins Invalid is also, quite simply, a hot, arousing, sexually charged evening of thought-provoking, imaginative sexual entertainment that only happens to be entirely by and about people with disabilities.” - David Steinberg, SFGate

Want to support Sins Invalid and their upcoming movie project? Visit their Kickstarter page and help them reach their goal by February 14th! Can’t donate? Just help by spreading the word to friends!

Featured Work: Margie Suarez

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One of the focuses of GimpGirl Community is to spotlight the work and voice of women with disabilities. Below is three amazing poems from Margie Suarez. Want your work featured? Contact us and let us know!

My name is Margie Suarez. I am working towards a Masters in creative writing.  My favorite poet is Maya Angelou. I would like to thank my family and friends for encouraging me to continue writing.

Continue reading →

Engaging with the Community

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Since the launch of our new website earlier this month, many of you might be wondering how to engage with our awesome community of women with disabilities outside of this website. Take a moment to look to the right of this post (on our website), where you will find a collection of icons (under “Follow Us!”) for various social media and online tools that GimpGirl uses. Each of these icons link to our specific group or page. They are a great way to find us around the Internet!

On Facebook, we have an amazing, active forum for posting links, sharing stories and ideas, and discussing various relevant topics. Outside of our weekly meetings on Second Life and our Chat Room (IRC), our Facebook group is probably the best way to connect with other women with disabilities.

What if you just want to keep track of blog posts or events? Twitter is our largest group, and is a great way to keep track of links to relevant news topics and GimpGirl’s events. You can view our Google calendar to see upcoming events, as well as subscribe to the calendar to see the event times in your time zone and sign up for notifications when events are getting close. If you use an RSS blog reader, you can add our RSS feed. If not, you can also follow our various groups and communities on FriendFeed or our blog posts on LiveJournal.

Our Flickr community is a must-see, with member pictures, event snapshots, and various works of art. On LinkedIn, you can network with other women with disabilities on employment and other professional matters. If you would like to buy various items with our logo on them, visit our Zazzle store (hosted by NoPityCity).

So, what are you waiting for? Connect with us and join the conversation!

Stop SOPA/PIPA

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We here at GimpGirl have a 14 year history of showcasing compelling, original stories that are the direct personal experiences of women with disabilities, as well as curating the best material to support our members in leading their kickass lives.  We get to tell innovative, creative stories that no-one else is telling.

If SOPA/PIPA passes, it could genuinely become too expensive and too much of a potential legal problem for us to be able to continue our curation practices, or even to tell stories where women say things like “I saw a movie and it inspired me to change my life.”  Or worse, it could mean that Google considers this too much of a risk to index our site, so we won’t be able to be found by women looking for information.  Under SOPA/PIPA, ANYWHERE that people express themselves – our site, our LiveJournal, our Facebook group, our Twitter, our Second Life – could become too much of a legal risk or get shut down.

Please support SOPA/PIPA actions today to keep the Internet free and safe for everyone – especially rarely heard voices like women with disabilities.

Here are some links on PIPA/SOPA:

Clay Shirky gives a 10 minute speech on the topic (video, not
subtitled) – http://www.ted.com/talks/defend_our_freedom_to_share_or_why_sopa_is_a_bad_idea.html

Fight for the Future
http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa
(Subtitled version of video here:
http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/5A31ep7v6HFd/)

Google’s Take Action Page
https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

Huffington Post on the blackout:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2012/01/18/sopa-blackout-internet-censorship_n_1211905.html

Mashable on the blackout:
http://mashable.com/2012/01/18/sopa-dark-ages/

The New Year

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When most people think of New Year’s resolutions, they picture easily made and easily broken promises. I like to think of the New Year as a time for reflection and self-guidance — a time to look back on the year behind us and what we have learned from those experiences, and a time to look forward into the new year to see how we can use those lessons to get closer to our goals.

Most of the GimpGirl regulars know that, for me, the last year has been one filled with a great deal of difficulty. The summer saw a sudden end to my long-term relationship, which sparked an interstate move and an endless cascade of problems with arranging social services and dealing with various other issues, on top of continuing school and my work here at GimpGirl. It has not been easy, to say the least. At times it looked as if I would end up in a group or nursing home on a long-term basis, something I fight very hard to avoid. It has been soul crushing, heartbreaking, and has tested every ounce of my somewhat renown tenacity.

As a disabled disability advocate, I feel it is important to share this experience. Sharing experience is a big part of how our community learns from each other. I often encounter assumptions that advocates don’t experience the same kinds of struggles and barriers that many other people do. We do, and it is just as difficult for us. We also know that what we do for ourselves affects those that come after us.

I have learned so much in the last six months. More than I ever thought possible. I have learned even more about navigating the system, what housing options are available to people with disabilities, what specific terminology to use when being assessed for caregiver funding, federal laws and statutes, and a multitude of other things. What I was reminded of more than anything was to stick by who I am as an individual. I am worthy, and the goals I set for myself are worthy. It was a reminder to not let anyone change me, because who I am is pretty awesome even if not everyone thinks so. It was also a reminder of how vitally important having a community is. Without my GimpGirl family – all of you amazing women who understand what facing these struggles is like – all of this would have been unbearable. When I was tired, these reminders would echo through my mind, keeping me from giving up when everything was telling me to.

As I go forward into the new year, I will take those lessons with me into my own life and in my work with GimpGirl. I am already seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but I know that in order to fully realize what I want from my own life I will face many obstacles in the months to come. However, having looked back at the previous year, I know that I can face it. I know that the struggle is worth it. I know that I am worth every bit of energy I put into myself and my dreams. I believe in myself, probably more than I ever have after facing all of this.

I look forward to the year ahead. I look forward to working with other volunteers to make GimpGirl an even better community, with more community-created content and outreach. As we begin our 14th year together, I look forward to getting to know all of you even more. I am grateful for every one of you.

– in solidarity… Jennifer Cole

Women and Virtual Spaces

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What kind of virtual world do women inhabit, and what are the implications of their increasingly diverse online activities? This is a difficult question to answer, because there is no singular “virtual world.” The Internet is a tool for people to create communities of their own, not one unitary community. While there are a lot of very big and open common spaces, it is also entirely possible to create a fairly insular community online where the participants work together to create whatever kind of virtual space they want to (Youngs). This is particularly beneficial for marginalized groups, such as women and people with disabilities (Herring et al.), who can create spaces in which a shared experience can lead to building identity and a sense of empowerment from being able to work through barriers with others who understand.

In many (maybe even most) virtual spaces, there is still quite a bit of hostility towards women and women’s issues. Discussion of women’s issues seems to draw trolling behavior (Herring et al.). When gender equality is discussed in many online spaces, it is met with disbelief and resistance, particularly in the context of developed, industrialized nations. There seems to be a general response of, “What are you whining about? You ‘feminist types’ have ruined everything.” Doubly so when you consider disability issues on top of that, as our whole group is often judged by people who don’t know us to be a leech on society, rather than considered as valuable individuals who are full members of society. This hostility, often termed ableism, is never easy to see, let alone overcome, particularly for those who are not entirely sure where they stand.

However, many women have managed to carve out relatively safe spaces in which to build community and discuss issues that are important to them, using a combination of traditional community-building practices learned from offline spaces and thoughtful use of new online opportunities and moderation tools. …

Read the entire article on Yahoo! Accessibility.

The Internet, Disability and Artistic Expression

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Female artists with disabilities are no exception. As a marginalized group, they struggle with representation in the larger art world. However, in the later half of the 20th century, the disability rights movement also fostered the creation of an entire genre of art (Disability Art) that explores the experience of living with a disability (Barnes, 2008). Many modern female artists with disabilities cite both the disability rights and feminist movements as dominant inspirations in their work.

Here is just a small list of amazing women (mostly from the U.S.) who at least in part benefit from the use the Internet to spread the impact of their work: Petra Kuppers, performance artist and founder of The Olimpias project; Ju Gosling, multimedia storyteller and performance artist; Cheryl Marie Wade, writer and performer; Laura Hershey, writer and poet; Anne Finger, author; Victoria Ann Lewis, performer and writer; Riva Lehrer, painter and writer; Sunaura (Sunny) Taylor, painter; Veronica Elsea, composer and musician; Carrie Sandahl, performer and head of the UIC Program on Disability Art, Culture, and Humanities; and many of the AXIS Dance Company dancers. This is nowhere near an exhaustive list. …

Read the entire article on Yahoo! Accessibility.

Original Cyborgs: Disability and Technology on Yahoo Accessibility

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While reading this and other papers that have attempted to extrapolate further on “the cyborg myth” it often strikes me that they are missing a really obvious connection when discussing various intersections; many people with disabilities have been cyborgs (under Dr. Haraway’s definition) since long before “technology” or the concept of a cyborg was even a popular discussion. There is some rare exceptions, such as this piece on Frida Kahlo and a brief mention in the Cyborg Manifesto itself (as pointed out by Theresa Senft):

Here, she makes what is her only real reference to prosthetics and disability in her entire essay, in a discussion of Anne McCaffrey’s 1969 novel, The Ship Who Sang. The novel death a severely handicapped [sic] girl whose brain was connected to complex machinery, in which machines serve as “prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves.” Haraway wonders aloud, “Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?”

Indeed, those of us with disabilities and chronic health issues would be hard pressed to separate ourselves from technology. Our lives are intrinsically linked with technology, and our identity is often defined by it.

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Read the entire article on Yahoo! Accessibility.

Privacy Issues Continued

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In our last post — Privacy, Women with Disabilities and Online Space — we discussed online privacy issues for women with disabilities, as well as some of the things we do to address them as a group. Though it is impossible to summarize all privacy issues people with disabilities face, our team thought it was important to look at privacy through a broader scope. Invasions of privacy are a constant and pervasive part of the experience of having a disability, for many people.

To recap our last post, most online privacy issues are related to creating identity. The Internet has some ability to “normalize” people with disabilities and allow them to disclose whatever information they want when they are ready. If someone is uncomfortable with their disability, they may have no need to disclose their disability online to have a place where they can be free of stigmas that may be difficult off-line. Conversely, if someone is totally comfortable with their disability, they can be totally upfront about it online in order to reach out to others in the disability community. People have different expectations of what privacy means online, but the ability to control what information is disclosed can be a powerful experience that many people with obvious disabilities ordinarily wouldn’t have the freedom to do. The same could be true of gender or any other identity. People can experiment with what they disclose online in ways that feel safe to them.

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Read the entire article on Yahoo! Accessibility.