Monday, February 4, 2008

Disability culture embraces a good joke

Visually impaired writer and poet Kathi Wolfe explores this topic in her Feb. column for Scene4 online magazine, an international magazine of arts and media. She writes, "Disability culture painting, poetry, dance, theater, cartoons and fiction isn’t of the maudlin disease-of-the-week variety. Crip creative artists are making art, using their talent and craft, not bowing before the altar of 'inspirational' icons. They, along with a small number of their non-disabled peers, are creating images of crips, in all of our variety. Depicting, without embarrassment, our different bodies and showcasing our varied personalities and perceptions. If you can’t accept that people with disabilities can be sinners as well as saints, funny as well as sad, and frauds and fakes, you’ll never 'believe that we’re fully human,' my friend George Covington, a legally blind writer in Alpine, Texas, told me in a phone interview."

Read her entire column here:
http://www.scene4.com/html/kathiwolfe0208.html