The Skin You're In: My Skin, My Reality With Maya Spencer-Berkeley

The Polyester Podcast

Society & Culture, Arts

4.5 • 533 Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2020

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With so much pressure placed on marginalised people to advocate for their existence at all times in URL spaces, how can we make more room for joy online?

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⁣This week on The Skin You're In we are joined by the incredible Maya Spencer-Berkeley, a model and disability activist. Maya told us all about her refusal to be a diversity hire, advocating for change in a meaningful way, and why she took a step back from sharing all parts of her condition — and life — online. Ione, Olivia, and Maya also chat about how fear of saying the wrong thing stops us from saying anything at all, what effective disability advocacy looks like, and whether things are really changing in the right direction.

This is the fourth episode of our brand new limited podcast series, The Skin You're In! Each week, for six weeks, we'll be exploring what it means to be alive today, and the biggest issues affecting our generation. From period poverty to body positivity, gender, disability, feminism and race, we want to know where the conversations are at, and what we can do to move them forward.

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The Skin You're In, a Polyester Podcast, is brought to you by Polyester's founding editor in chief Ione Gamble (@ionegamble), and co-hosted and produced by Olivia Graham (@og.irl), in collaboration with Monki. Polyester is a self published culture zine exploring intersectional URL feminism in the IRL world. Have faith in your own bad taste! And follow us on Instagram!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, Maya.
0:00.8	Hi, Maya.
0:02.3	So thank you so much for joining us.
0:04.4	For anyone who may not know of you and your work,
0:06.7	do you want to just give us a little bit of an intro?
0:09.4	So I have done modelling and activism for my skin condition,
0:17.2	which is called epidermolysis, Belosa.
0:20.5	But most people just say EBB because it's easier than
0:23.4	trying to get that mouthful out so i've been doing that for a couple of years so i do a lot of
0:29.4	campaigns and like a lot of instagram work to do with like promoting body positivity and living
0:35.7	with disabilities i think definitely when we were kind of thinking and talking about this series,
0:41.4	it was really important to talk about disability and I really kind of admire, that's a word word,
0:48.6	but like the way that you kind of incorporate body positivity into disability activism
0:53.6	is really interesting to me,
0:55.5	especially as someone who has like an invisible condition. But obviously that's still manifest
1:00.2	in physical ways, which I think is like a big misconception. When people think of disability,
1:04.6	they think it's like one thing when really like chronic illness disability is so many things.
1:09.3	So what made you kind of want to enter this space,
1:12.5	especially modelling and the fashion industry,
1:15.3	is so hard and shitty.
1:17.4	So what kind of made you want to do that?
1:22.0	Oh, it's kind of a, it's a like long-winded story,
	...

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