Repost: Freak Liberation Front Manifesto

THE FREAK LIBERATION FRONT MANIFESTO

We, the Freak Liberation Front, stand opposed to the oppression of freaks.

What is a freak? A freak is someone who does not naturally conform to the ‘normal’ way of thinking, communicating, acting, and being. A freak is someone whose mental or physical blueprint is deviant from the dominant accepted form. A freak is a person singled out and victimized, abused, or dehumanized for not fitting into the box of normalcy. We call ourselves freaks because we promote the unity of all such people, not as individual and separate movements for deaf rights, or wheelchair rights, or neurodiversity, but as a single alliance against the apparatus and culture that is the source of our problems. We call ourselves freaks because we will not use the powerless language of ‘differently abled’ and ‘people with disabilites’, but opt instead to seize and reclaim those words used to marginalize us and remake them into tools of our empowerment.

We maintain that the greater part of the difficulty and disenfranchisement of the freak is due, not to the inherent weakness of the freak, but to the exclusive structures of the unfreak world. Your society, your culture, has shaped itself in such a way as to exclude us. When a wheelchair user cannot access your building, have you not excluded them by default? If a blind person cannot study because there is no Braille in your libraries, has your system not disenfranchised that person? If an autistic cannot bring forward their abilities because they cannot utilize your unspoken social rules and methods of communication, have you not robbed them of their right to contribute? In each case, whether or not you have openly established an exclusionary policy, the very structure of your society (and of your structures!) sets a de facto segregation against those who do not fit your model of normalcy. That is the very definition of structural and institutional injustice.

This is an injustice that permeates every facet of how the freak is treated in society. This injustice is present, when prenatal testing seeks to weed out the abnormal. It is present when the parents of the freak pray for a cure, and an end to their child’s freakishness, and in every freak that internalizes that hatred and begs for the abolition of their personhood. It is there when we are subjected to compulsory medication and abusive therapy, segregated in both public and private schools, forced into dehumanizing institutions, degraded in self worth in public dialogue and media, and disproportionately both victimized by and convicted of crime. It is present, when we look for work, and find positions, regardless of disability legislation, closed to us, forcing us once more into the ranks of the unemployed and the powerless.  It is present when the art and literature of our culture, and when means of communication, tailor themselves only to the sensory and interpretive needs of one type of person, and when the physical environment is shaped to accommodate only one body type. It is present when our self-appointed advocates perpetually infantilize us, presume to speak for us, and take upon themselves the normal man’s burden, to patronize and pity us. It is present when, against all odds, a freak triumphs and achieves, and is congratulated for overcoming themselves.

What we demand to end these injustices is the end of these and other abuses against us, and the exclusionary culture and institutions by which these injustices are propagated, and the establishment of a culture and structures based on inclusion, acceptance, and respect, which accommodates the needs and desires of the freak as well as it accommodates the needs and desires of the privileged normal. We moreover recognize that this change can only come about through the multi-tactic and multi-tendency coalition of all freaks, directed by and for the freaks themselves.

Across this world, the age of supposed acceptance and pluralism, the age of alleged individuality, tells us to think outside the box. What is the box, but lines- lines which must not be crossed, lest one stray from that box of normalcy? The sick farce, then, is that while we are encouraged to think outside the box, those who truly lie outside the box have crossed the line, and must be corrected, by coercion,  or excluded from the treasures of the box itself? This is a box whose structure does not serve us- a box meant to contain only one way of being. We have tried to conform to this box, and it is hostile to us. We have tried to bend and expand this box, but it is stern and unyielding. We have tried to live outside the box, or to construct our own boxes, but in the face of the dominance and power of the box, these efforts are meaningless. We are left with but one recourse in our grievances, one strategy left in our struggle. Let us unite, freaks of the world, against abuse, against stigma, against prejudice, reprogramming, and assimilation! Let us come together, not to find a way into the box, not to find a way to make the box bigger, not to change the box’s shape, but to tear down the very walls of the box itself!