Edition 2

We held post-show panel discussions with local advocates, donated a portion of tickets to two local organizations supporting and advocating for sex worker rights, and hosted an interactive website where you could learn more about our local sex trade through mini documentaries. I wrote to my local MP and posted regularly online to spread the word about how our laws were affecting these women’s lives. I felt this sense of accomplishment like I was opening people’s minds or something… And maybe I did. But was that enough? Does that qualify as activism?

My theatre practice represents my contribution to both disability activism and to theatre and performance. I join the long line of Canadian disabled artists such as David Freeman, Persimmon Blackbridge, and Lyle Victor Albert, whose work frame impairment and disability in terms of identity and culture. Much of my work focuses on masculinity, disability, and sexual relationships. Through the use of dramatic narrative, comedy and movement aesthetics, I strive to present impairment and disability as valid parts of identity, as critical sources of artistic exploration, and to expose social barriers.

I’m someone who has enough conventional signifiers in place that I get all the privileges that a straight, white, married, procreative, able-bodied professional woman can get in this racist, hetero-patriarchal world, Although I know how to accuse the world of hetero-patriarchy, I still benefit from that oppression every day. I feel like I just don’t deserve to call myself stuff. Stuff like queer. Stuff like survivor. I am so straight-seeming that sometimes people forget that I’ve told them I do gay things, like fuck women.