TPP 297: Jennifer Natalya Fink on Disability Lineage — What It Is and How it Impacts Families
episode
Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
41 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 13 hours ago
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is “disability lineage” and why does it matter for families?
Part of the way we've told the story of family. Which is always a combination of fact and myth, right? When we talk about grandma so-and-so and great grandpa so-and-so, is to excise disability from that family myth. So every time somebody's diagnosed, it's like it's never happened in the history of the universe before. And what I'm trying to do is to explore why that's true. how we would change that, right? And what it would mean for destigmatizing, valuing, and understanding disability in all our families.
Welcome to Tilt Parenting, a podcast featuring interviews and conversations aimed at inspiring, informing, and supporting parents raising differently wired kids. I'm your host, Debbie Reber. I'm excited to share this conversation with Jennifer Natalia Fink and get into the nuances of her fascinating new book, All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship. The premise of Jennifer's book is that disability is often described as a tragedy or crisis or an aberration, even though, as we know, more than one in five people worldwide have a disability. So Jennifer wanted to explore the question, why is this common human experience rendered exceptional? Instead, Jennifer is advocating for a reclamation of disability as a history, a culture, and an identity.
She's pushing for a world where families see disability in the context of a collective sense of belonging, as cause for celebration, and as a call for radical reimagining of care work and kinship. So we went deep into this idea of disability lineage, and Jennifer shared what's at stake if we don't know and claim our family history. We also discussed why getting a disability diagnosis can be traumatic for families and how that is accentuated by the way our society thinks about disability. Lastly, Jennifer shared her thoughts on making the care system more equitable by embracing disability as a collective experience rather than something individual families have to deal with. And let me quickly tell you a little bit about Jennifer.
Jennifer Natalia Fink is a director of the Program in Disability Studies and a professor of English at Georgetown University. She is the author of six books and founder of The Gorilla Press, a nonprofit promoting youth literacy through bookmaking. Jennifer is the winner of the Dana Award for the novel and the Catherine Doctoro Prize for Innovative Fiction, as well as a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. But first and foremost, she is a mother. The transformative experience of parenting her autistic daughter is at the center of her work. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. Hey Jennifer, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much, Debbie. I'm so excited to be here. I'm really looking forward to getting into your book and your work.
But before we do that, would you mind just giving us your own introduction to yourself? I've already read your more formal bio, but I'd love to know how you would describe who you are and what you do in the world. Oh, that's a great question.
I am a mom, first and foremost, of an autistic 15-year-old, and I am the director of the program on disability studies at Georgetown University, as you probably mentioned. And also an experimental novelist. So a winding peculiar path, perhaps. And I'm also queer. And I think that's an important part of who I am and how I come to thinking about disability and parenting.
And I just have to ask, what's an experimental novelist?
Nobody knows I Let me know if you you figure it out. I write novels that play with form as well as content and work from the premise that the way we tell a story has everything to do with who we are. So our identities, our histories have and that are central to how we tell the story. And how we tell it is as important as what the story is and kind of changes what that story is. Yeah.
All right, that is fascinating. I haven't heard that before, but makes sense the way you describe it, and I love that. But today I really want to talk about your new book. I was thankful to get an advanced copy of it before it came out.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is “disability lineage” and why does it matter for families?
0:00–5:45
2
How did Jennifer’s personal family story lead her to research disability lineage?
5:45–11:06
3
Why can receiving a disability diagnosis feel traumatic for parents and children?
11:06–15:51
4
What did Jennifer discover about hidden disabled relatives in her own family history?
15:51–20:42
5
What are the consequences of not knowing or claiming your family’s disability lineage?
20:42–26:17
6
How can we re‑imagine care and kinship to make the system more equitable for disabled families?
26:17–29:54
7
What practical steps does the book suggest for families to claim their disability lineage?
29:54–34:52
8
How can listeners support broader disability justice and inclusive community building?
34:52–41:00
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
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TPP 521: A Conversation with Dr. Peter Gray About Restoring Childhood
TPP 253a: Advocate and Author Jonathan Mooney on Why Normal Sucks
TPP 520: Dr. Özgür Bolat on Why Rewards Backfire and the Real Science of Motivating Kids