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Beyond Disability: The Fe Fe StoriesWhen was the last time you saw a positive (or even negative) image in the media of a teenage girl with disabilities? It wouldn’t surprise the Empowered Fe Fes to hear that you can’t remember. So, rather than wait for a reflection of themselves to show up in the media, the Fe Fes, a diverse group of 12 young female Chicagoans with disabilities, created their own video instead.
"The Empowered Fe Fes is a group of young women with disabilities who have to go through life learning how to deal with disabilities, so the Fe Fes are like a support group,"explained 19-year-old Fe Fe Chaka Stovall before the October premiere of "Beyond Disability: The Fe Fe Stories." "This movie is just a reflection of how we live our everyday life." The documentary shares the young women’s journeys as they come to terms with their lives and explore the power of wielding a camera. It opens with a collage of their voices:
The Fe Fes appear on camera and behind, taking on all the roles of video making. Through footage from their meetings, "person-in-the-street" interviews and individual testimonies, they explore the obstacles they face and the accomplishments they achieve. They also reveal their growing awareness of the possibilities their lives hold.
"Remember my story of trying to get involved in that TV production class?" Nico Echols, now 20, asks her fellow Fe Fes during one meeting. Echols, who has a seizure disorder, cerebral palsy and is visually impaired, wanted to take a video class at her high school to pursue her interest in journalism. After weeks of stalling her registration, the school finally told her that she couldn’t be in the class because the teachers weren’t willing to adapt the equipment for her. "My first thought was, ‘Now wait a minute!'" recalls Echols. "I may be legally blind and I may not be able to do stuff with the video equipment, but at least I could do the audio equipment." 17-year-old Krystal Martinez, who became disabled and in a wheelchair suddenly two years ago, reflects on how her life changed. "My outside life got messed up by my condition. My boyfriend and I broke up after a long relationship. My friends didn’t come over and call me like they used to. And, when I went outside everyone would stare at me like I was weird or something." She later adds, "My disability didn’t change who I was. It did change the way I feel and look at life."
"My name is Terrah," announces smiling Terrah Payne. "I’m too crazy. I came to this world a very happy girl as you can see. I came with a disability called cerebral palsy. For short, it’s called C.P. My disability doesn’t put me down. I want to know more. I want to do more. This disability cannot put me down!" Susan Nussbaum, Transition Project Coordinator at Chicago’s Access Living and a disability-rights activist, organized the Empowered Fe Fes about six years ago. Nussbaum, who is 50, had been an antiwar activist and participated in the women’s movement before she became disabled suddenly at the age of 21. Forced to consider life anew, Nussbaum gradually found her way to the nascent disability-rights movement and her work at Access Living. She found that after she became connected with the first generation of disability-rights activists she wanted to help foster the next one. "It became clear to me over a period of time as I started getting older that I didn’t want any young women going through what I had gone through," recalls Nussbaum. "There was this opportunity at Access Living to work with young people at the same time there was this movement in the broader progressive women’s movement to pass on the lessons to young women without disabilities," she continued. "So, I sort of jumped on that bandwagon. We got some funding. I organized a couple girls and we started meeting. They invited their friends. We went to high schools. We would get a girl here, a girl there."
One of the early members suggested "Empowered Fe Fes" as a play on the word females and the name stuck. Soon, a core group of stalwarts formed. When Nussbaum received funding earlier this year from the Department of Labor to provide job skills to teenagers with disabilities, she knew immediately that she wanted to work with the nonprofit organization Beyondmedia. For almost a decade, Beyondmedia has been active in the Chicago area with a mission of collaborating with underserved women and girls to increase their visibility through video training workshops and media-equipment access. "They had a good rep, and I thought it would just be so cool for the girls to do something that had to do with technology," Nussbaum said. Beyondmedia Executive Director and founder Salome Chasnoff said she welcomed the opportunity to work with the Fe Fes and saw it as a natural fit for her organization. She made a commitment to adapt the workshop for the Fe Fes regardless of their disabilities. To get a sense of the Fe Fes’ needs, Beyondmedia held an exploratory session with the equipment. "[It] was so much fun," recalled Chasnoff. "They had never done anything like this, so it was like a celebration."
In the end, Beyondmedia needed to make only a few accommodations for the Fe Fes such as getting special attachments to fasten the video cameras to the girls’ wheelchairs and printing training materials in extra-large fonts. They also produced the final video with accessible features like captioning and verbal cues throughout. "I think it’s urgent we get funded somehow to continue working with Beyondmedia," said Nussbaum. "Because I have never seen anything like the growth I have seen in the past few months. It’s totally surpassed my wildest expectations. I think their sense of pride and identity comes from an awareness that is not forced upon them, but that’s all around them [during this process], and that’s that life with a disability is going to be okay. It is as valid an experience as any kind of journey that one undertakes in life."
Alysha Kostelny, 19, supported Nussbaum’s observation, "I feel much more confident than when I started with Beyondmedia. I am smart. I can do stuff. I can help people more than I think I can." Chaka Stovall added, "Holding a camera made me feel like I was in control. It was like, I can handle this. This is cool." Many of the Fe Fes have since headed off to college, but they created a new group called the Divas in Charge. They hope to remain active with one another, and if possible, with video making. At the very least, they seem intent on carrying their sense of empowerment with them. "If anybody says a visually impaired person can’t do a video," says a beaming Echols at the end of "Fe Fe Stories," "I just showed them the proof." Jennifer Roche is a writer and former acquisitions editor for a major publishing company. She lives in Chicago. Visit the Web for more about the Beyondmedia Education: http://www.beyondmedia.org/ Original CAN/API publication: December 2004 CommentsPost a comment Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out) (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.) |
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