Published at The Guardian, October 2012.
The gradual commodification of breast cancer reflected a failure of the movement, in that it wasn’t able to adapt quickly enough to fight the commercialisation of breast cancer awareness. Now, groups like Breast Cancer Action are having to fight cancer on two fronts: battling for patients, as well as fighting the rise of pinkification.
Published at AlterNet, August 2012.
Increasingly, young people in America are getting caught in the collision of “zero tolerance” laws and growing concerns about school safety – and paying an irrationally high price for it. A series of school shootings and threats in the 1990s, including the Columbine massacre in 1999, radically changed the concept of “school safety” in the United States, and as administrators and law enforcement officers determined that campuses were no longer safe places, a new, more militarized approach to monitoring schools began to take hold. It may be hard to recall but this wasn’t always so; 40 years ago, it was sometimes difficult to get police to arrive on campus at all. Now, they are everywhere.
Published at Salon, May 2012
Cases like these, of students trapped by school policies rarely designed to deal with the nuances of their diagnoses, are growing – and the situation is further clouded by race, class and social factors. These factors can determine what kinds of evaluations, interventions and treatments are provided to students with disabilities or suspected disabilities, and they ultimately decide whether children are able to successfully complete their educations or fall by the wayside.
Published at The Guardian, April 2012.
Rather than enacting Laura’s Law and extending state authority over mentally ill people, the state should strongly consider improving funding for early diagnosis, intervention and treatment. If mentally ill people are provided with evaluation and treatment before the onset of severe mental illness, they have a much higher likelihood of success in treatment, including adherence to treatment programmes. This is particularly important for mentally ill youth, who have few resources available to them, sometimes forcing parents to give children up to the foster care system in order to access treatment.
Published at AlterNet, March 2012.
Hyatt Hotels has a funny way of showing appreciation for its housekeepers; first it tapes their faces onto pictures of bikini-clad babes, and then it fires them.
Read more at AlterNet.
Published on xoJane, December 2011
There’s a mythology particularly in small towns that everything is beautiful and nothing hurts, which means a cutting teen gets ignored because the teen doesn’t fit the narrative. Shoving things under the carpet, though, doesn’t make them go away.
Read more at xoJane
Published on PopMatters, November 2011
Analysis of Six Feet Under often focuses on the human complexities of the show, but it is important to remember that it was also about the business of death, which happens to be extremely large. Service Corporation International, a global company with a reach that rivals the fictional Kroehner from the show, made over two billion dollars last year on funeral services from the United States to Australia. Like Kroehner, Service Corporation International specializes in the creation of vertical monopolies, a practice criticized by Mitford back in 1963. SCI owns the florist, the coffin manufacturer, the monument carver, the vehicle rental…and so did Kroehner.
Read more at PopMatters
Published on Global Comment, June 2011
The persistent belief that childhood is a rosy, happy time where nothing bad ever happens is directly damaging to children who are, in fact, not having a rosy and happy time. The rise in dark YA isn’t about feeding the depraved tastes of children who enjoy violent videogames. It is about addressing the very real pain and marginalisation experienced by children across the United States who find that the ‘responsible adults’ in their lives fail to act, and it is through young adult fiction that they may find the words to express themselves, to describe their experiences, and the courage to keep going even though no one around them offers support.
Furthermore, many children also grow up with the idea that they are wrong in some way; because their gender doesn’t match the one assigned to them, because they are disabled and surrounded by nondisabled people, because their skin is the wrong colour. Gurdon claims that YA is damaging because it ‘normalises.’ On the contrary, that normalisation is one of the greatest gifts young adult authors can give to their readers, to tell children that, no, they are not freaks for being who they are. That there is nothing wrong with being a gay teen, that you are not irreparably damaged if you are mentally ill. If YA celebrating diverse identities is ‘dark’ and ‘depraved,’ what does that say about the lives of young adults who actually inhabit those identities, and experience constant social pressure to be ‘normal’?
Read more at Global Comment
site & all content © 2011 s.e. smith
California Coalition for Reproductive Freedom: Reproductive Freedom Week 2013: Disability and Reproductive Justice
Published at CCRF, March 2013.
As we think about reproductive freedoms this week, we must consider all their permutations, and the importance of a world in which the right to parent is protected just as fiercely as the right not to parent, or to choose to wait to become a parent. Disabled people need the full force and support of the reproductive rights movement, and so do their children; freedom for some is justice for none, and no loving, competent parent should have to live in daily fear that her child will be taken from her simply because of who she is, how she lives her life, the fact that she lives interdependently rather than independently.
Read more at CCRF.