College academic life involves taking up space. We fill the silence with spoken “participation,” disrupt blank pages with written words, place our bodies into classrooms, and fill professors’ desks with blue books. At Bryn Mawr, we are, at the end of the day (no matter how much we refuse to talk about it), graded in a way that reflects the space we take up and judged by faculty, staff, and fellow enrolled students that reflects the space we take up. The methods of assessing the space students take up vary, but the tools of judgment that the administration and professors wield bear lasting impact on us. These expectations often do not seem to take into account the complex identities of students, especially erasing the intersection of our academic lives with the other aspects of our lives, like mental disability (Brooke, 141).

Mental disability at Bryn Mawr, when officially marked down as such, goes through Access Services. Accommodations can sometimes be made when everything goes right with the bureaucracy of filing what the college calls an “…impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities; has a record of such an impairment; or has been regarded as having an impairment,” a definition that echoes the one found in The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), but puts the stress in its definition on personal “impairment” and leads, through this definition, following explanation, and unwritten standards, to the necessitation of the medicalization of disability to validate both the “impairment” and any disability that is related to it.

In the 1960s and 1970s, teachers and scholars asked, “Where are the women?”

This question echoes the second-wave mantra that turned attention to the rising issue that women were facing in regards to sexuality, familial expectations, discrimination in the workplace, and many legal inequalities. Women’s Studies was born from the student, civil rights, and women’s movements of the 1960s and the 1970s.

San Diego State University is credited as the first college in the United States to offer Women’s Studies courses. Cornell joined in the movement in same year, 1970. This came to fruition when students from SDSU’s Women’s Liberation Group, along with faculty and other women from the community, formed an Ad Hoc Committee for Women’s Studies. The committee, who felt women’s voices had little representation on campus or in the curriculum, collected signatures from over 600 students in support of establishing a Women’s Studies Program. They hoped the program would address issues such as political equality and questioning gender roles. In the spring of 1974, the Faculty Advisory Committee undertook a nationwide faculty recruitment campaign to develop women’s studies as a strong academic department. The initial course offerings mirrored the concerns of first-wave feminism. Some of their mission statement reads, “We will continue to host engagements that increase awareness surrounding issues of gender and sexuality, acknowledge the social change we hope to foster, and celebrate the transformations we have accomplished.”

You need to change your topic. That’s what I heard when I tried to write my essay on overcoming ADHD for my college application. I questioned that I was supposed to write about a struggle that I’ve encountered in my life and that I felt that this was what I wanted to write about. But everyone from my college counselor to my parents felt that I should pick a different topic.  Even though colleges are accepting and have services for students with disabilities there is still the worry that showcasing disability will hurt your chances in the academic realm. How can we change this in college admissions, in general and at Bryn Mawr? In order to change the admission process do we first need to change the academic structure of the college and classroom to be more accepting of people with disabilities of all types? And are we discriminating against people with disabilities by the arduous process of documentation and the normative time placed on a person’s individual ability to work?  

The old rhyme was wrong, words hurt. Names matter, labels stick. The stigma isn’t always patent; inherent in our lexicon are modifiers and morphemes that convey status with just the addition of a mere suffix. Too often those bearing the brunt of the verbal assault inherent in the institution that is language are the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the minorities. As they struggle to find equal footing, these intersectionals confront the challenge of overcoming discrimination woven throughout everyday vernacular, starting with, but by no means limited to, the very words used to define their persons. Applications, medical forms, census data, and beyond are a daunting undertaking when deciding what box to check off; those of us who do not fit into that square binary of “male or female”, wondering why checking off our “race” is relevant see these societal structures as oppressive, limiting, forceful. The English language is subject to the binary; the default “he” when a gender isn’t made apparent, the need to make feminine words evident with an “-ess”, all limit our language to thinking in two parts, not as a whole. These restrictions don’t even account for labels the language has created for us. When it comes to language, people search for qualifiers, a way to define one another, fit them in. This is where a great irony lies—language lives to be limitless, so why must people create parameters?

About this time last year, I was being considered for the Posse scholarship. If I was awarded the scholarship, the Posse office in Houston would train me in workshops for developing leadership skills and then pay my tuition at Bryn Mawr for four years. And what was the purpose of this scholarship? In the Posse Foundation’s mission statement, they say they have three goals:

“1. To expand the pool from which top colleges and universities can recruit outstanding young leaders from diverse backgrounds.

2. To help these institutions build more interactive campus environments so that they can be more welcoming for people from all backgrounds.

3. To ensure that Posse Scholars persist in their academic studies and graduate so they can take on leadership positions in the workforce.”

When I got the scholarship, I was in the unique position of having to explain why a white Jewish girl was being offered money to diversify Bryn Mawr’s campus. Many of the other people with whom I’d been competing for my position in the program and who had assumed they had been rejected because they were not “diverse” (read: non-white) enough demanded an explanation.

In Don Kulick’s Travesti, he introduces a subculture of Brazilian prostitutes who, despite self-identifying as male, dress in a feminine manner and adopt feminine pronouns. As Kulick joined his new companions in their daily lives in Brazil, he found a culture where feminine language was practically requisite, where the only male pronouns among the group were shot as insults, and where designated-at-birth females were seen as ‘lesser’ because of their conventional methods of having sex. These prostitutes, called travesty, appeared to Kulick as gender outliers, falling between man and woman and integrating aspects of both while remaining entirely a separate category. Given the nature of the Portuguese language, they found it simple to evoke a feminine nature by altering the genders assigned to listeners that they were, in fact, women. In English, similar systems do not exist, and while one would imagine a simple ease into a genderless mode of speech, the language still resists adopting a comprehensive third-gender pronoun and grammatical usage. While far from the only language with difficulties in integrating third-gender/agender pronouns, English lays a simple foundation for gender pronouns, and fully moves to, outside of pronouns, eliminate gender unless speaking about a specific individual.

When there’s a crowd of people yelling and screaming the only person we seem to focus on past the yelling and screaming is the one that’s silent. We wonder how they’re processing what’s going on or what there thinking. We zone into there thoughts and try to figure out there feelings. They may be the quiet one but their silence is what draws attention. In this case Eva was subjected to sexual abuse and past her hurt and pain all I can focus on is her silence and what that means. Does it mean pain, anger, or sadness... The possibilities are endless. The silence screams attention to me and makes me again want to figure out what’s going on in her mind. However, I struggle within myself to understand whether her silence was actually a positive or negative thing. It seems as though her silence is what dug her in a deeper and deeper hole. She wouldn’t defend herself or share her feelings. In Eva's case silence may not have been the most empowering, privileged decision but rather the most damaging one. 

The embedded video (shows up at the end of the post) is an interview with Eden Atwood, conducted by Dr. Lindsay Doe, who was born intersex, meaning that she does not biologically fit into the gender and sex binary. She shares the story (starting at 4:57) of how she found out she is intersex and how she was treated as a child.

I watched this interview with Eden Atwood a few months ago, and her story shocked me. Her doctors and her parents lied to her and performed unnecessary surgery on her just because of her intersex condition. I also remembered that historically, there were people and organizations that tried to “cure” homosexuality, using physically abusive methods. I decided to look into how healthcare and health insurance in America support the socially constructed gender binary and heteronormative lifestyle by refusing some people care and forcing it upon others.

A fifteen year-old boy is beginning high school today, the school he is attending was just renovated under a very large budget, it is now very aesthetically pleasing. His mom will drop him off and most likely embarrass him just as any parent of a freshman in high school would. There is a twist in this seemingly “typical” day, his mother will have to lift his wheelchair out of the back of the car and then lift him into it in order for him to get around for the day. She’ll wheel him into the building and he’ll get sympathetic or attempted sympathetic stares the whole way, but it’s okay right? Because he must be used to it. The entrance to the school is accessible in a very literal sense so she brings him to his first class and leaves him to his day.

A fourteen year-old girl is beginning high school today, she will attend the same school as the boy and her day will start off similarly. She will walk in nervously with her parent, most likely get embarrassed by them, then her day will begin. Her disability is not as visible as the first student but rather a constant internal battle of when she is going to tell her parents she is queer, should she have to? Will people at school know? Will she have to tell them? Her mind is a constant whirlpool of questions and doubts about herself and who she really is. Disability is not always visible or physical.