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[Image description: A black flag diagonally crossed from the top of the hoist to the bottom of the fly by a four-color "Lightning bolt" in stripes of blue, gold, green and red (three long sections running from hoist to fly, alternating with two short sections from fly to hoist), Description ends]
My “Artist’s Statement” about this Flag:
1) The black field:
Black has three significant meanings:
First: the color of mourning for all those disabled people who have been murdered in the name of “mercy.”
Second: the color of the pirates’ “Jolly Roger” flag, representing our determination to steal our lives back from those public (and private) ‘authorities,’ who use their power in an attempt keep us marginalized.
Third: A reference to the Nazi Black Triangle badge, which was used to identify those whom the Nazis considered “antisocial“ and which has been adopted in Britain to protest the government’s austerity measures against the Disabled.
2) The “Lightning Bolt” motif:
Diagonal lines have been traditionally used in the flags of former colonies, to represent breaking free from colonial powers (empire nations tend to have flags dominated by horizontal and vertical lines). And Disabled people’s lives have long been ‘colonized’ by the medical, religious, and educational establishments.
The zigzag shape represents how the Disabled people must continually navigate around the structural and attitudinal barriers erected throughout normate society, and also the creative, ‘lateral,’ thinking we have to use to solve problems each day.
3) The individual colors represent broad categories of disabilities:
Blue: mental illness disabilities
Yellow: Cognitive and intellectual disabilities
Green: Sensory perception disabilities
Red: Physical disabilities
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So -- would you fly this flag? I really am curious.
no subject
Date: 2016-08-11 02:08 am (UTC)This feels really appropriative.
Everything else seems ok. I don't really do flags, though, so am not the best person to judge. Closest I come is rainbow-ing it up a bit for some queer events.
no subject
Date: 2016-08-11 10:41 am (UTC)But I still believe in the underlying concept -- that of "Disability Culture."
When that phrase was coined 30-ish years ago, it was criticized as impossible, because disabled people don't share a common language, and each disabled person is isolated within their generation, and knowledge is not passed down from parent to child, etc..
But the argument for the reality of Disability Culture is that, if you look across borders of both space and time (i.e. through history), you find that disabled people share many of the same problems and attitudes toward solutions that are analogous to any other, traditionally accepted, forms of culture (noting, of course, that no culture is monolithic).
And, seeing that, worldwide, people with moderate-to-severe disabilities make up more than one in seven of the world's population, we certainly have the numbers to populate a nation, if one existed.
And as individuals, people with disabilities are often denied autonomy over our own bodies, and our rights and responsibilities are often laid out not by the governments of the places we live, but by the policies written up by committees we did not elect.
So, yes, equating life with a disability to life within a colonized nation is problematic, it's the strongest analogy I can think of at the moment.
I may come up with something better soon (possibly in the shower). When I do, I'll rewrite that paragraph.