HELLO FRIENDS,

I just started Song of Achilles and it is already slowly killing me. 

I feel a special kinship with people who use the same color notebook for a class as me.

and certainly not the best friend of the bravest and kindest and wisest human being I have ever had the good fortune of knowing.

[two selfies of auden, short blue hair pushed back with a white and purple flower crown. they wear a dark purple shirt, large-framed glasses, and magenta lipstick with glitter. they smile, revealing a single dimple.] 

there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell -walt whitman

hey reblog my selfies, tell me i’m cute

“The Puritans have harsh values. They can’t play with puppets on Sunday. They can’t dance in the forest.”

my intent is not to be mean but I am sure it will come off that way anyways so I'm sorry for asking, but I am genuinely curious how you, a sighted person, reading braille is any different than a sighted person cosplaying as matt murdock.

wow, i, uh. i don’t really have an easy way to answer this question.

cosplaying matt murdock - or any other disabled character - if you’re nondisabled is taking on a set of experiences that’s associated with a tremendous amount of stigma and systemic oppression for the sake of a costume. it’s approaching the tools and aspects of lived experience and turning them into something fun for a day that can be taken off and cast aside when it gets inconvenient.

 it’s an action that’s totally ignorant of the impact of media, the social and historical contexts of spectatorship and disability, the lack of prominent disabled characters as representation, and the real life accusations of ‘faking disability’ that disabled people face every day (and which severely impact availability of needed resources). it’s disrespectful and harmful. 

so. that’s cosplay. 

now, i’m working in a broad sense to become more knowledgeable about accessibility, alternative formats, and the representation and misrepresentation of disability so that i can explore these things in more formal academic contexts and hopefully work towards more relevant and valuable change. i’m probably going to graduate with a focus in disability studies. 

as far as braille comes in, i’m in the process of writing a 100+ page research paper on the representation of disability in daredevil. i’ve read about 200 daredevil comics, but i realized pretty early on that my paper would be absolutely valueless if my only point of attention was the comics themselves, so i did a lot of really varied reading and study. i am sighted, and the experiences matt murdock has as a blind person aren’t in any way something i would ever feel like i could just like, assume to be able to talk about. they’ll never be something i’ll be fully aware of, ever, but i think research remains important, because a paper like the one i’m writing doesn’t exist in the world and i think it’s valuable. 

i’m working on learning braille because of its inclusion/lack of inclusion in the daredevil comics and its subsequent connection to my research topic, but also because a major part of what i’m working on is making a piece of media that centers so fully on a blind character accessible to blind/visually impaired people. because i think structures of accountability are really really key to representational work, and right now that’s basically impossible. braille is one aspect of a potential ‘accessibility kit’ that i’m working on for comics. 

primarily, though, i’m learning braille because my attention to disability, representation of disability, accessibility, etc. extends well beyond this specific piece of media in a way that’s very distinct from the lack of awareness in cosplaying this character. i think it’s important to effectively address situations of inaccessibility and ableism, and doing so requires being knowledgeable and aware. i don’t know if things are improperly or incompletely labeled if i can’t read those labels. i don’t know how things should be formatted correctly, i don’t know if something’s a valid alternative format, i don’t have a method available to try to help make things suck less. like, many many many of the buildings at my college are incompletely brailled. so i’m working with the office of disability services and independently to try to approach that issue. 

a lot of people accessorize basic braille. in those contexts, braille is stripped of its significance. it’s reduced to a fun thing for sighted people to play with and throw aside. the same thing is true of ASL. those uses of braille and ASL are absolutely in the same sort of vein as cosplaying a disabled character, because they’re disrespectful and unaware. but i don’t think that learning braille and ASL are inherently damaging or thoughtless. learning braille allows me to become a resource for translation and a prompt towards accountability. 

ultimately it comes down to this: i’m working really hard to be aware of my positionality and how easy it is to accessorize experiences of disability. of course i fuck up, and i really encourage you to call me out if you see that happen. but for me, learning braille isn’t like. collecting action figures and t-shirts and reading as many comics as possible. it isn’t about the character. it’s about developing more tools to approach accessibility, accountability, representation, awareness. 

tfw your deadlines on Tuesday and digital print says there’s a ‘couple days wait’ but they’re closed all weekend and ya gotta bind all 36 pages n cover em before the deadline someone send me food n patience

I know I don’t have very many followers but for those of you who do, a notice that I changed my URL to “Ionlyrunfromshame”