The poet had just not considered that there are amputee readers.

July 25, 2020 8:48 AM

Poet Jillian Weise on living as a Common Cyborg. "Maybe this feeling of trial-and-error, repetition and glitch, is part of the cyborg condition and, by extension, the disabled condition." Included in the fantastic new anthology Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the 21st Century edited by Alice Wong. Weise's satirical persona Tipsy Tullivan, a "nondisabled Southern writer who has really good intentions," was created out of exasperation and frustration after her complaints to a writer’s conference about access were repeatedly ignored.

The post title is from Weise's interview with 3AM magazine. In another great interview, Weise shares more about the trouble with technosolutionism:

I’m not very binary about technology. I’m probably a skeptic more than an optimist. I’m interested in the ways it already changes our life. I am really skeptical of transhumanist technology and people who are working on prosthetics or biological engineering without any cue from actual disabled people who wear the technology. To me, it seems like a backward trajectory where able-bodied people are promising a kind of “cure” when, ontologically, we’re already so much more sophisticated in terms of what it means to be composed of a technological device.

posted by spamandkimchi (9 comments total)

Oh, that first essay is amazing.
posted by feckless at 10:05 AM on July 25, 2020

Thank you for posting, this was great writing and reading.
posted by winesong at 10:41 AM on July 25, 2020

wow... that first essay... those closing lines are a gorgeous punch
posted by kokaku at 12:58 PM on July 25, 2020 [2 favorites]

Thank you so much for this amazing post!
posted by Bella Donna at 2:00 PM on July 25, 2020

Great post and terrific writing. Thanks for bringing Weise to my attention. As a cochlear implant-wearing cyborg, I find the questions of integration of technology with the body really interesting. I am very conscious of the narratives that surround disability, telling people that they just need to be enabled or enhanced, and that if the technology exists to do so, then there is an expectation or obligation to be "fixed". I'm also reminded of the writing of Sara Hendren, who coined the phrase "all technology is assistive technology".
posted by amusebuche at 3:40 PM on July 25, 2020 [4 favorites]

This is a great post, thank you.
posted by medusa at 3:40 PM on July 25, 2020

I had no idea what I was getting into when I started reading this, but I felt my own perception of cyborgs (to use her term) shift while reading it. Thank you very much for posting this! Much to think about, and to consider/reconsider about how I look at the world around me.
posted by hippybear at 4:22 PM on July 25, 2020

Jillian Weise is not only a great poet & essayist, but her novel is really great too
posted by attentionplease at 8:14 PM on July 25, 2020

This is a great post! I am getting the Disability Visibility book and anything beyond that amazing Weise piece is gravy.
posted by away for regrooving at 12:34 AM on July 26, 2020 [1 favorite]