Yesterday, I wrote my first piece for The Mary Sue, an awesomely nerdy and feminist website. It’s on the show Switched at Birth, a “Peabody-award-winning family drama on ABC Family.” I’ve been interested in the show for awhile, as it addresses disability issues in a more centered and interesting way than anything else of which…
The Pope suggests abortion can be forgiven. Earlier this year, he talked about big changes to its position on the family. Does he mean birth control? People forget that before Humanae Vitae, the papal encyclical against birth control, there was widespread hope and reasonable arguments among more liberal theologians that birth control would be approved….
Last December, I finished teaching and went on sabbatical. Tomorrow, I go back in the classroom again. I worked very hard, and these last nine months mark a major career transition for me. I suspect I produced well over 100,000 words, and it could be a LOT more if you count each blog post, talk,…
I have a new piece up at Al Jazeera America today on disability and upcoming television shows that have, in the past, done a good job with disability issues. None are perfect shows, but it’s ok to admire the good even while criticizing the bad: Since the emergence of the newly renamed Bechdel-Wallace Test, which is…
One of the great pleasures of my summer was meeting and interviewing Claudia Gordon. She works for the labor department now, but ten years ago she was at the Office of Homeland Security, her attention focused on people with disabilities in the aftermath of Katrina. Her video, shared below, talks about her development in the…
Content Note: This post does not describe rape, but does describe the way our justice system embodies rape culture. In March, 2013 – I wrote about a rape case involving a woman with Down syndrome. Her rapist was convicted, but the judge threw out the case because “she didn’t act enough like a victim.” The…
Richard Utz has a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the ways that medievalist can more intentionally link what they do to popular expressions of ideas about the Middle Ages. There is now a manifest discrepancy between the large number of students who request that we address their love of Harry Potter, Lord…
I wrote a piece for CNN opposing the Ohio Down Syndrome Abortion Ban. Read it here. It’s been picked up and quoted by some interesting folks. I like to track impact of my writing on other journalists. I gave this quote to Mic directly: “But beliefs in abortion rights and disability rights are not mutually…
I have a new piece on Vice about Westworld. It’s a new show coming from HBO and could be pretty awesome. Or, it could just re-tread the “robots become sentient” stuff from Battlestar Galactica and Humans and Ex Machina and whatever. Here’s my hope: Because Westworld is set in an amusement park, the movie deliberately invokes clichés. You might…
Over the weekend, the New York Times had a front-page story on the Ohio GOP’s plan to pass a ban on abortions based on prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. It got a ton of social media play and was the top story on Huffington Post for some hours yesterday, in part because John Kasich, Ohio’s governor, is…