Plurals in the Chocolate Factory
Mar. 2nd, 2023 09:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_lee "Actual liberation requires that our liberatory practices incorporate our need for health and survival. Displacing the notion of virtuous suffering from the church, only to reinstitute it as a revolutionary practice is not emancipatory for people with disabilities. Our physical and communal survival requires that a first-order priority of a liberatory theology is the creation of positions that enable people to work full-time for liberation within the disability community and within the church." --Nancy Eiesland, the Disabled God, pg. 95
Eiesland was talking about Christian disability liberation theology here, but it's applicable to a lot of things, and I've been thinking about it a lot.
We have the fortune to be in a financial position to do what we do pretty healthfully: $6k a year in art income (after expenses) plus $10k a year in disability payments equals a lot of disposable income, by our standards. It feels deeply uncomfortable, like I'm a bad person for having that money, even as I acknowledge the capriciousness of both disability and self-employment (and disability laws that obligate me to never own more than $2k in savings). I am stating this publicly, though, so people know what I make and where it comes from. (Patreon is over half that art income; the rest is scattered across online sales, in-person events, and miscellaneous random stuff like commissions or donations.)
Having this financial security, as much as such a thing is possible in this chaotic world, has given me the freedom to look around and realize I want other people to have this security too. I want it for others, despite my shame for having it myself. I don't want to be that one special plural who got the golden ticket to the chocolate factory.
The plural collective shop I don't think is something I can pull off. It's a lot of variables to keep track of, financial success could easily run me afoul of the savings limit, and physically carrying the wares means weight, bulk, and table space considerations. I'm not up to it. Ditto a plural mutual aid fund; same savings limit problem, plus I would rather not become a milking cow for every polyfrazzlemented. For my sanity, I cannot spend my time digging for dirt on everyone who approaches me. Ick!
But @pluralstories seems to have been a modest success. Boosting plural work, buying what interests me, encouraging others to do so as well, now that I can do! That I WANT to do! As an artist, it is vey important to me that my colleagues thrive and prosper. In fact, I will argue that your revolution ain't shit if you aren't planning to help people eat, have a safe place to sleep, and get the healthcare they need. If your "revolution" is just "work for free, disabled people, for (insert ostensibly noble nonsense here)" you are actually being the most regressive dipshit imaginable. You can't eat revolutionary fervor. Also, our society already devalues disabled labor purely because we're disabled. (That's a legal fact. In America, disabled people are exceptions to minimum wage regulations.) Of all the mainstream values to replicate!
Lest you think my reasons are all noble, I also want to do it out of self-protection. If I'm the only plural in the chocolate factory, I become the sole example all others are based on, the projector screen for everyone's hopes, fears, and neuroses. That helps brace a whole complex of bad social behavior. (How do a lot of terrible marginalized people maintain their positions? Because if they're the only one of their demographic in the chocolate factory, the choice becomes not "this jerk or better" but "this jerk or nobody at all.") It's an exhausting position to inhabit, and the more people in here with me, the more counterexamples, the more proof that there are many ways of being, which paradoxially frees me up to make more personal work. Also, the more plenty there is to go around, the less pressure there is on me alone, and the more we can build together.
I choose to do free work because I can afford to, because I want to. When I was homeless and crazy and scared, people helped keep me alive. Now it's my turn to pay it forward.
Eiesland was talking about Christian disability liberation theology here, but it's applicable to a lot of things, and I've been thinking about it a lot.
We have the fortune to be in a financial position to do what we do pretty healthfully: $6k a year in art income (after expenses) plus $10k a year in disability payments equals a lot of disposable income, by our standards. It feels deeply uncomfortable, like I'm a bad person for having that money, even as I acknowledge the capriciousness of both disability and self-employment (and disability laws that obligate me to never own more than $2k in savings). I am stating this publicly, though, so people know what I make and where it comes from. (Patreon is over half that art income; the rest is scattered across online sales, in-person events, and miscellaneous random stuff like commissions or donations.)
Having this financial security, as much as such a thing is possible in this chaotic world, has given me the freedom to look around and realize I want other people to have this security too. I want it for others, despite my shame for having it myself. I don't want to be that one special plural who got the golden ticket to the chocolate factory.
The plural collective shop I don't think is something I can pull off. It's a lot of variables to keep track of, financial success could easily run me afoul of the savings limit, and physically carrying the wares means weight, bulk, and table space considerations. I'm not up to it. Ditto a plural mutual aid fund; same savings limit problem, plus I would rather not become a milking cow for every polyfrazzlemented. For my sanity, I cannot spend my time digging for dirt on everyone who approaches me. Ick!
But @pluralstories seems to have been a modest success. Boosting plural work, buying what interests me, encouraging others to do so as well, now that I can do! That I WANT to do! As an artist, it is vey important to me that my colleagues thrive and prosper. In fact, I will argue that your revolution ain't shit if you aren't planning to help people eat, have a safe place to sleep, and get the healthcare they need. If your "revolution" is just "work for free, disabled people, for (insert ostensibly noble nonsense here)" you are actually being the most regressive dipshit imaginable. You can't eat revolutionary fervor. Also, our society already devalues disabled labor purely because we're disabled. (That's a legal fact. In America, disabled people are exceptions to minimum wage regulations.) Of all the mainstream values to replicate!
Lest you think my reasons are all noble, I also want to do it out of self-protection. If I'm the only plural in the chocolate factory, I become the sole example all others are based on, the projector screen for everyone's hopes, fears, and neuroses. That helps brace a whole complex of bad social behavior. (How do a lot of terrible marginalized people maintain their positions? Because if they're the only one of their demographic in the chocolate factory, the choice becomes not "this jerk or better" but "this jerk or nobody at all.") It's an exhausting position to inhabit, and the more people in here with me, the more counterexamples, the more proof that there are many ways of being, which paradoxially frees me up to make more personal work. Also, the more plenty there is to go around, the less pressure there is on me alone, and the more we can build together.
I choose to do free work because I can afford to, because I want to. When I was homeless and crazy and scared, people helped keep me alive. Now it's my turn to pay it forward.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-03 02:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-07 06:54 am (UTC)Appreciated reading this, in more ways than one. Our brain is whirring as we have a think.