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This is a short audio clip from an interview of Mia Mingus, activist and writer, conducted by Alice Wong, Project Coordinator of the Disability Visibility Project at StoryCorps San Francisco on August 23, 2014. Text transcript:
Mia: For me, aging has become something I think about differently than a lot of able-bodied friends I know, you know, I'm thinking about retirement, or not even retirement, but like, what gets coded as retirement…I'm thinking about, a.k.a. “when I'm not able to work anymore,” when my body is not able to work anymore and what I'm gonna have to do, and think about when that happens. Whereas, I feel like, you know the kind of like, woman of color trope, is like, you just work and work and work and work, and you know, like, that's part of like, such a huge part of our identity I think as women of color.
So what does it mean then to be a disabled woman of color and to really be like, putting forth questions around work? And what does work mean? What does it mean to be a woman of color who can't work? Or who is not able to work as much, right? And like, in some ways I feel like it's totally oppression that like makes us work harder and makes us look forced to carry the brunt of a lot of women's work as just well as work in general, as women of color but then at the same time it's also like we have this like attachment to that too that's also really ableist that we do to ourselves and each other and its a catch 22 often times so I think about that a lot around like, yeah, disability and aging.
Alice: Yeah and I think sometimes for me, I really, you know, there’s this huge pressure to fit in, to do well and fit in within this ableist framework and like you said, to you have friends who are mostly non-disabled, you know, it's really I think, sometimes that learning experience part of that coincided with growing up. So that I really pushing myself hard and in my mid-twenties, and it was really until then when I hit a wall, that I realized, “Oh my gosh, I need to make changes in my life for myself and that I shouldn't have to worry about the consequences of those changes.”
Mia: Yes.
For more information:
Website: http://disabilityvisibilityproject.com
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- Genre
- disability