reeddisability2016-blog

[reeddisability2016-blog]

Post 3

One of the most common strategies in representing varied embodiments is the redemption of the child’s perceived bodily defect through a narrative that stages the “overcoming” of the limitations of their embodiment as a “miracle.” While not always construed as miracles in the religious sense, these bodies achieve beyond the limits of what is thought possible given their embodied limitations through their innocence and industry. The image of “Heaven’s special child,” so coined by Paul Longmore in “Heaven’s Special Child”: The Making of Poster Children,” presupposes a certain unconscious, yet pervasive idea about the nature of the body and the meaning of “ability”: disabled children are the ultimate tragedy and unspoken fear of every vulnerable embodiment. They are the most tragic images for us to see because their condition cannot be explained away as some flaw of character. Thus, the mainstream culture cannot look the other way. Further, the image speaks to the universal fear, and eventual inevitability of one’s mortality and fragility. Quoting a film called The Crippler, Longmore highlights the anxiety which plays to the image’s success in drumming up charitable donations, telling us disability is cast as “a figure leaning on a crutch-sinister in its invisibility- [it] stalks the land like death itself… [its] ‘especially fond of children” (36). When “TinyTims” exert themselves to the extent that they pathetically perform “ability,” or plead for help in finding a cure so they can be “normal,” abled-bodied people are challenged to both seek personal excellence and lend their sympathy to an otherwise unbearable tragedy. As embodied “miracles,” the burden of navigating one’s way through the social and physical environment with a “disabling” embodied characteristic is shifted from the oppressive, “normative” identity to the disabled body through this narrative. In addition to “Heaven’s special child,” Longmore broadly terms this representational strategy as “poster children,” and “TinyTim.” The conflicting narrative aspects central to the poster child’s body mirrors the refusal of the “normative” body to acknowledge its own mortality and the temporality of one’s lived experience. All at once, the poster child’s body must be pitiable, lest the consumer be forced to despair when she recognizes the fragility of her own embodiment in that of the “Other”. The body must also be inspiring -worthy of praise or grief- but the performance of modal binaries implicitly acknowledges the “crippled” plight as an act of self-determination or total dependency; thus, representations are frequently depreciative and paternalistic. Bodies must also be negotiable, for any attempt identify with the “defective” body subverts the authority of “normative” embodiment’s preeminence. By pushing the limitations of the human body, the “cripple” is a site of self-evaluation, a critical exercise in questioning the limits of the consumer’s own abled-embodiment. On the other hand, it can be a site of grief, a site on which one can project unconscious anxieties about their lived experience. Both spur the obligation of the affected consumer to acknowledge their own failure to master the world around them, much less their own bodies, and to pay penitence to the “champion” of the afflicted in order to relieve their own anxiety. Longmore demonstrates how penitence is paid not only through charity, but also through the obliquity conferred on the disabled child’s body as a universal litmus test for one’s good character. Laws, entire agencies at every level of government, and national discussions on a range of issues often spring from the discursive site of the poster child.

Here I examine a news report about a young girl who, though once able-bodied, has become disabled. Her life-long dreams to model seemingly crushed by forces beyond her control, her future spent in a wheel chair seemed bleak. However, she heroically demonstrates brave determination to succeed despite her tragic circumstances and walks down the run way, with the assistance of a walker, performing the overcoming of her intrinsic limitations. It’s hard not to feel some emotional reaction. While we should never take a position that discredits the ways in which variably embodied people at the margins of acceptability come to internalize and express their situated experience, it is worth noting how well the coverage of the child and her embodiment fits the criteria for “poster children” used to solicit charity and stabilize “normative” ideas about embodiment, as Longmore theorized in the paper quoted above. She is pitiable: young, and through no fault of her own, she is robbed of her capacity to navigate and fulfill her lived experience before she ever has the chance to explore the world. It inspires the able-bodied person to push their own bodily limitations, their mental constructs of “ability” and “disability” having been shown to be a matter of one’s “choice” to perform one way or another. That the young lady is able to overcome the barriers between disabled and abled redeems her existence in the eyes of the consumer, who is now relieved of the guilt of innocence lost and the dread of universal fragility. Her choice to perform ability reaffirms our desire to believe that “able-bodied” is beautiful, desirable, and at all costs the preferred mode of being. While we may acknowledge these cultural interactions to be taking place in the production and consumption of the media item itself, we do not have to disregard the humanistic beauty to be gleaned from the embodied totality that is this young lady who does negotiate her own terms of personal identity and forges her own path in navigating her body through her immediate and social environment.

[reeddisability2016-blog]

Post 4

One of the most iconic television sitcoms of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, Malcom in The Middle chronicled the (mis)adventures of the painfully unimpressive Malcom, the third of five boys in a white, middle-class family in American Suburbia. Malcom’s scrawny frame, suggestive of a level of “inability” to perform “normative” masculinity, renders him “disabled” as far as navigating his environment in terms of gender, and is only off-set by his extreme intelligence. However, this does not help him socially: at the intersections of “queer” (in that he doesn’t fulfill the gender roles expected of him), male, and variably embodied as a “frail” boy, Malcom is decidedly an outcast. His one close friend is Stevie, who exists at similar intersectional locations as Malcom. Paralyzed from the waist down (unable to move his body in “acceptable” and perform sexuality in a hetero-normative context, he is more so “disabled” than Malcom), asthmatic, and black, Stevie struggles in similar ways as Malcom. However, in Episode 3, Season 7 (prod. Boomer), the literary critic is quick to notice a difference in the level of violence enacted upon the two multiply oppressed social locations by Malcom’s older brother, Reese, a trope character representative of the “normative” constructions of masculinity, bodily ability, and the character flaws of “non-identities” who exist in a social context tailored specifically for their success (malevolent, dumb, arbitrary, and narcissism, to name a few), and who are defined in relation to everything Malcom and Stevie are not. Whereas Malcom is an embodiment Reese seeks to subject to his authority, Stevie is the object of total hatred. His social location, so far from the tolerability of the “norm,” is unspeakable and an insult to all that allows Reese to exert power over others. The critic sees this when Reese complains that he can’t hit Stevie because he is in a wheelchair; otherwise, he would have already destroyed Stevie and reaffirmed his unsteady status as “top” in their shared microcosm. His plan is so embedded with ableist language, it is difficult to determine if the show’s producers were being ironic or were truly guided in writing his character by outdated social models. Knowing he cannot attack Stevie given the dynamics between them as able-bodied and “disabled”, Stevie decides to numb his legs to the point that he cannot feel them, making him “disabled” too. This shows how ableist and racist oppression converge at certain social locations to enact violence upon bodies which are “unspeakable” for their divergence from what is “normal.” I see this episode as a good example of how black and disabled people are portrayed according to Everelles and Minear’s “Unspeakable Offenses”.

[reeddisability2016-blog]

Post 2

According to Shakespeare’s “The Social Model of Disability,” notions about “disability” and “ability” have been crafted by medical interpretations of the body that have left variably embodied social locations on the fringes of acceptability and “worthiness” in almost every aspect of life. This view of the body, which categorizes bodies in accordance to their variation of “median” (or the unrealizable “normal”) body characteristics. This model has made disability a flaw of the individual, something to be negotiated and overcome on a case by case basis. The “social model” of disability emerges out of the Disability Rights movement, and argues, in contrast to the medical model, that disability is a factor of the environment, not the body. Instead, bodies may be “impaired,” or embodied in “non-normative” ways, which society excludes from participation.

             One example of society “disabling” variably embodied folks is poorly maintained side walk infrastructure. Especially in Corpus Christi, sidewalks are something of an afterthought to the majority of able-bodied citizens, and especially their elected leaders. However, to a disabled person, poorly maintained sidewalks are a direct hurdle to social participation. If one relies on side walk cut-outs to navigate streets and access public/private institutions, then failure to provide such access is a clear case of disability as caused by social limitations. A medical interpretation of disability would posit that “disabled” people are simply unable to overcome the small limitations of cracks on sidewalks, or differences in elevation; a social model of disabled would coun ter that in this instance, the “impaired” body in a wheel chair is not in and of itself disabled, but is marginalized by a society not interested in that body’s inclusion.

[reeddisability2016-blog]

Post 1

When I first told my brother I was taking a Disability Studies course, he was very skeptical that such a class had any merit in being the topic in a collegiate curriculum. He asked me: “How much more can you complicate the basic premise that it’s not ok to be mean to disabled people?” It seems to me like such a fundamental challenge deserves attention. Do Disability Studies have any place in scholastic conversation? If the purpose of scholarly work is to impact the “real world” in any pragmatic sense, the answer is a resounding “yes.”

One need not look any further than the 2016 Election to see why Disability Studies is a discipline deserving of its own study, ripe with opportunity to theorize broad social criticism on account of its subjects’ status as “Others.” If there was any doubt that discriminatory attitudes toward so-called “disabled people” are still prevalent in this day and age, Donald Trump put them to rest by publicly, and quite loudly, discrediting the credibility of a “disabled” journalist critical of his divisive rhetoric and misleading claims about his past performance and credibility as a candidate for leader of the “Free World.” With eyes squinted, and hands flailing wildly as he mimed rocking back in forth in a wheel-chair, he proceeded to cruelly mimic the speech impairments many disabled people overcome every day. If there was no need for Disability Studies, Donald Trump would have become a political pariah overnight, his followers abandoning ship by the thousands. Instead, Trump remained a beacon of hope to so many millions of disaffected (largely white) voters who dismissed any notion of Trump’s clearly troubling attitudes as the natural response of a “pampered snowflake,” who, unable to confront the “real world,” is obsessed with the ever-so-menacing “political correctness” that is characteristic of all that is socially liberal, empathetic, and equitable, or in other words “un-American,” if you take some pundits’ word as gospel. While this is a rather charged representation of how his voters, and Trump himself, explained the quagmire, I wonder if there’s much room for a reasoned, unbiased rebuttal. His only excuse, that he had no idea the reporter was “actually” disabled, does nothing to address the fundamental problem that he thought miming and mocking people in this way was even ok. That he did in fact know the reporter, as was quite quickly proven to be the case, confirms that he is both a liar and an unapologetic ableist. I would be delighted to hear any reasoned debate to this claim, but I suspect I would only be called a “snowflake” as semantics gave way to even the slightest rhetorical challenge. I won’t make any judgement on the eventual results of the contemptuous election season that spanned an unprecedented two plus years, for such a thing takes away from the purpose of this brief introduction to my journey in studying Disability Studies. I will, however, point out what is inescapable, and in need of immediate attention in light of Trump’s dramatic entrance to the political circus: there is something wrong with how we, collectively, conceptualize and treat “disabled” people.

             One could write an entire volume on Donald Trump’s bizarre rise to power, and no doubt such a work will be written almost as soon as the man has run his course through history and ceases living. There will be many different attempts to explain the society which allowed such a peculiar spectacle to flourish, and there will likely be few agreements from one commentator to the next. Our job, as critically thinking, informed participants in a democratic society, is to make sure the manner in which we respond to the social forces Trump seems to embody leads to histories we would be proud of our children’s children writing, and willing to inherent ourselves. If something seems unsettling to you about an old, rich, white, male candidate, and eventual victor, of a National election being revered by so many despite demonstrating such distasteful behavior, and feel obliged to act in defense of those who will one day inherent the dividends of our labors, buckle up, because this project is for you. Examining cultural objects and literature spanning thousands of miles (in some cases, literally) and situated in many different milieus, I will be looking at representations of Disability as its own category and at the intersections of other marginalized social locations. The lessons and observations that follow, if they succeed, should invite one to reevaluate their own ideas about self-embodiment and the lived experience of other bodies. If we scholars and students wish to inspire cultural and political change that impacts the subjects of our discourse, we must present a coherent narrative about the representation of disability which readily lends itself to empirically and rationally sound inquiry. At the same time, we must not let down our guard, and resist letting our emotions and interests build the framework through which we seek navigate this narrative. As such, one further condition for success then, is the extent to which the findings contained herein find applicability in any number of disciplines within the Social Sciences. I hope you enjoy reading this series, and that in bearing with my oftentimes inadequate attempts to frame Disability as a site of identity and social critique, you find yourself enriched, and inspired to act in defense of all your fellow humans. We won’t make it any other way.

Oh, I’ve included a clip of Donald Trump mocking a respected, capable journalist, delegitimizing his place in society and his fundamental worth as a human being. Attempts to discredit the voices of those who stand in the way of ideological purity and political expediency in virtue of their being “abnormally” embodied are eerily similar to the tactics of humanity’s worst actors. In reading literature from the perspective of a marginalized social locations, we find warnings from those who failed to prevent the rise of tyrants, and accounts marginalized experiences provide us with first-hand accounts of the injustices arbitrarily committed for the sake of ideology. If anyone asks: this is it. This is why we study Disabilities Studies.

[reeddisability2016-blog]

Post 8

As a child, my favorite character was Daredevil, played by Ben Affleck. I think the reason I was so attracted to this character was because as a young child I always wanted to imagine my own disability as the gateway to a super-ability, as blindness is with Daredevil. While this week’s reading focus on Snyder and Mitchell’s “Narrative Prosthesis,” I am similarly reminded of Tobin Siebers’s formulation of the ideology of ability, where he says that disability is the gateway to super-ability. As a young child, this notion was deeply ingrained in me, and my choice of comic book hero reflected it. According to “Narrative Prosthesis,” disabled characters within narratives follow a set structure: their deviance is explained, their deviance is a key to extra-ability, and finally a “cure” (Snyder and Mitchell). In Daredevil, we can see this at work. The timeline begins shortly before his blindness, he undergoes the suffering of being disabled, he learns to use echo-location, and finally is “cured” of his position as “disabled” by donning a crime-fighting mask that in effect makes him “super-abled.”

In my opinion, this week’s theoretical writings go to great lengths to demonstrate the oppression disabled people are exposed to through the sub-conscious, permeating representations that reinforce ableism.

[reeddisability2016-blog]

Post 7

I was most impressed this week with how the ideology of ability as Siebers describes it is so simply, yet effectively upended through Marlin’s embodiment as a father to a son with disabilities. In trekking the journey he did, Marlin stared the assumptions of ableism that categorized and rendered his son as lesser in value square in the eye and staked a conceptual space that allows for his son Nemo to be a valued constituent of a larger social environment. Where “Me Before You” challenged the merit of the assumptions of ableism, it fell short of outright deflecting the ideology of ability with a competing theory of embodiment in the way that “Finding Nemo” does. I will focus on what each of these two separate criticisms says about ableism in my coming paper.

As far as my understanding of the film, my perceptions of it are completely changed by the application of Siebers to the characters in the movie. It is astounding to see how early it was that I was already beginning to be impressed with ableist ideas governing the way bodies operate and what they’re capable of. It really does go to show just how imbricated the ideology of ability is in all of us.  @jasonsfarr

[reeddisability2016-blog]

Post 6

I will admit: when first beginning the unit over “Me Before You,” I was highly skeptical that a highly-grossing film and celebrated bestseller would actually be an “ableist” text. However, after doing some exploring of the disabled community on social media, I opened up to the idea, and now find myself in agreement: “Me Before You” is rampant with expressions of the “ideology of ability,” as described by Tobin Siebers.

In “Disability and The Theory of Compex Embodiment,” Siebers posits a list of ideas and attitudes he believes are central to the ingrained cultural preference for able bodiedness over disability (i.e, the ideology of ability). Two of these ideas are:

-”It is better to be dead than disabled” (280).

-”The value of a human life arises as question only when someone is disabled...” (280).

If one has read the book, it is fairly overt that Moyes voices these exact attitudes through the narration of Will. As the Twitter user above pointed out, a story about an able-bodied man wishing to commit suicide would be in incredibly poor taste if written as a “tragic romance.” Instead, Moyes gains for her work the status of “tragedy” by creating a character for whom we might weep if they die, but whose death we would ultimately understand and applaud. Moyes, as an author, seeks to illicit a certain response (grief layered with admiration) from an average reader untrained in disability studies precisely by appealing to the two ideas mentioned above. Rather than a critique of Moyes for making the creative decisions she did, this blogpost attempts instead to demonstrate just how pervasive the ideology of ability really is. If you were anything like me, you absolutely weeped at Will’s decision to end his life, but never did you fault him. Rather, it was “tragic” that he had to do what he had to do, rather than go on living. However, as Siebers points out, we are participants in a culture that believes it is better to be dead than disabled, and so we can make sense of and have an emotional response to Will’s suicide in ways we couldn’t if Will was able-bodied.

Recognizing our participation in this ideology of ability through our experience of the death of Will, we begin to realize the absurdity of the almost natural and expected plot line that stems from Will’s initial accident. We might wonder why Moyes wouldn’t instead chose for Will to embrace his embodiment and live happily ever after with Lou. But really, who would read this story? Most readers would find it absolutely unrelateable to read through the life of a fulfilled disabled man, but why is it all the sudden so easy to relate to a depressed disabled man? The answer lies in that the latter image speaks to the ideology of ability’s pervasive assumptions about disabilities so ingrained within our psyche that art can create new experiences for us by appealing to it alone. @jasonsfarr

[reeddisability2016-blog]

Post 5

During the wedding scene on page 294, I noticed the possible use of a humorous, sexualized innuendo that I read as a push on the part of Moyes as the writer to subvert the ideology of compulsory able-bodied heterosexuality as it is described by McRuer in “Compulsory Able- Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence.”

After a few drinks, Lou asks WIll, “What do you say, Will? Going to give me a whirl?” Reading this, I couldn’t help but realize what she was in effect asking Will to do: to let her take a “ride” in his lap around the dance floor. She even acknowledges the compulsory able- bodied heterosexuality ingrained in the other attendees, stating: “Let’s give these fuckers something to talk about.” This statement affirms her conscientiousness in the way their bodies will disrupt the normative attitudes towards sexuality.

I find it more feasible that this innuendo was purposed especially when given the more explicitly sexualized dialogue later when Will sees her breast. She contends that Will would never have seen her breasts had it not been for his disability, because otherwise he would be chasing “more able- bodied women than her. Thus, the interaction clearly subverts and disrupts the socially constructed expectations for Will’s sexuality (that he is not privy to participate in the heterosexual experience because of his disability), but also images a new future for Will’s performance of heterosexuality where his disability is not an excluding factor but a positive aspect of his identity that opens new avenues for him romantically and sexually. @jasonsfarr