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" This Brain Had a Mouth: Lucy Gwin and Her Path to Disability Activism "
Odato, James M.
Bosco, Ronald A
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1052703
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| Doc. No
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TL51820
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| Main Entry
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Odato, James M.
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| Title & Author
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This Brain Had a Mouth: Lucy Gwin and Her Path to Disability Activism\ Odato, James M.Bosco, Ronald A
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| College
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State University of New York at Albany
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| Date
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2019
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| Degree
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M.A.
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2019
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| Note
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62 p.
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| Abstract
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Author, advocacy journalist, disability rights activist, and magazine founder Lucy Gwin made a name for herself in the handicapped community in the 1990s. She left her deepest mark by giving those in “handicaptivity” a voice in her publication, Mouth, which spanned 18 years. Gwin produced 102 editions of acerbic, biting, sometimes funny, and often hard-hitting and illuminating articles about people from the wide spectrum of the disabled, what Gwin called the largest minority group in the United States. She identified with the group, having suffered a brain injury in a car accident in 1989, triggering her crusade against oppression of the disabled. She succeeded in most things she pursued during her 71 years, including her goal of exposing corrupt operators of head injury rehabilitation centers and shutting down the corporation that ran a center from which she escaped. She supplied federal investigators and congressional panels testimony against the big chain, New Medico, which she said had been ripping off patients for their health insurance. “This Brain Had a Mouth: Lucy Gwin and Her Path to Disability Activism” amounts to the opening chapters of a biography that tells the story of how Gwin became a leader in the disability rights movement, a fighter of institutionalization, and an organizer and promoter for the group Not Dead Yet, which challenged physician-assisted suicides. Gwin interacted with the drivers behind the Americans With Disabilities Act, which was signed into law as her magazine debuted. Justin Dart, considered the father of the ADA, listed Gwin as one of the influencers who empowered his life of advocacy. She covered, poked, and prodded leaders of ADAPT, a national group that organized marches and demonstrations for rights legislation. Gwin’s personal story is one of hardship, obstacles, and tragedies of a complicated feminist. Her hair-trigger temper and a fight-or-flight defense system led to numerous clashes. She quit lot of things—an advertising career, Zen practice, three husbands and two daughters. But at age 46, after her life-changing bang on the head in the car crash, she found and stuck with her civil rights mission.
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| Descriptor
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American literature
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Biographies
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Disability studies
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Bosco, Ronald A
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State University of New York at Albany
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