AIDS and Disability

Week of 11/7-11/10

Just this past week we analyzed the film “Philadelphia” and the encounter of AIDS in a discriminatory, judicial battle. Tom Hanks plays the role of the protagonist, and because his business partners believe he has AIDS and is a homosexual, they try to fire him based on these beliefs. But Tom Hanks eventually wins the court case and falls victim to HIV. Back in a time where little was really known about AIDS, the reality that a virus doctors couldn’t explain was a scary one. They knew AIDS could be transferred through sexual means, but they didn’t know how it could be prevented or stopped. Even in the film, Denzel Washington’s character holds some qualms about being Tom Hanks’ counselor because he thinks the doctors will find out that AIDS can be transmitted through the skin. So what is the relation of AIDS and disability?
With AIDS, just like disabilities, one may feel shameful of having procured this illness. The shame is linked to an imputation of guilt, and sometimes even flushes out an identity that might have remained hidden from friends, family, and co-workers. This brings about isolation, harassment, and persecution because, back in the early 90s, they did not fully understand. Inside of normal sex, AIDS suggests a sexual deviance from that norm—a disease not only of sexual excess but of perversity as well.
Labels such as “fag” or “queer” show up in this crisis surrounding heterosexual identity and able-bodied identity. Compulsory heterosexuality is intertwined with compulsory able-bodiedness; but only because these systems depend on a queer/disabled existence that can never be contained. In combining queer theory with disability studies, there is hope that the norms of sex will disappear over time, since the combination of the two could exacerbate the authority that currently besets heterosexual/able-bodied norms. Queer/disability studies can continuously invoke the inadequate resolutions that compulsory heterosexuality and able-bodiedness offer us. This critical queerness and disability could, and will, collectively transform the uses to which queer/disability existence has been put by a system of compulsory able-bodiness.

Disability and Feminism

Week of 10/31-11/6

This week I thought it would be interesting to appeal to the gender based ideas and notions about disability, specifically how feminist theory is transformed by it. My girlfriend was wondering if the issues surrounding disabled people also recognized disability in identities that reflect women. Our talk took the issues of feminist theory and categorized methods and perspectives that could be used to delve deeper into disability studies, even though feminist theory may live in the assumptions that particularizes and narrows a theory, even though doesn’t really do much to broaden into the academic and scholarly world.
After using the Disabilities Studies Reader, Rosemarie Garland-Thompson writes another useful chapter on this topic. She states that her juxtaposing of disability and feminism invokes and links two notions fundamental to the feminist movement. The first is integration, which suggests achieving parity by fully including that which has been excluded and subordinated. The second is transformation, which suggests reimagining established knowledge and the order of things. In her allusions to both these concepts, she sets the project and study of disability into a relation of feminism that supposes it between intellectual work and commitment to creating a more just, equitable, and integrated society.
So what does feminism disability studies approach as topics? For one, it tries to foster a more complex understanding of the body and its cultural history. Disability, like gender, is an issue that pervades all aspects of culture, especially in its institutions, social identities, practices, historical communities, and shared human experience of embodiment and normalcy. So in a way, feminist theory introduces the ability/disability system as a category of analysis in all topics related to feminism. The critical areas in which critical inquiries are the most profound can be found in the domains of representation, the body, identity, and activism. She finds that the particular espouses the partial and provisional. But such an intellectual habit can be informed by disability and acceptance. To embrace disability and feminism, to embrace the flawed body of disability, is to critique the normalizing fantasies of wholeness, unity, coherence, and completeness of something that centers around contradiction, ambiguity, and partiality incarnate. Disability issues, like gender issues, are all around us, we just have to know where to begin to unravel these issues to understand what it truly means to be fully huma

Complex Embodiment and Galehead

Week of 10/24-10/30

This week’s entry is dedicated to my friend who said to me in a conversation, “I’d rather be dead than disabled any day”. That just sent off an alarm in my head. The statement seemed off-handed, but he undoubtedly has a perspective on what it means to be able-bodied. So playing the devil’s advocate, I started to think, “What does he deem as disabled”? A certain ideology comes from his kind of thinking, one that centers on ability and its relation to human capacity. And what is the measure of his ideology of the human body and ability? To my friend, ability is the ideological baseline by which humanness is determined, and as such, thinking as someone having lesser an ability makes him or her seem lesser than human. Is there any way to bring disability out of the shadow of the ideology of ability, and to illuminate disabilities of its kinds, values, and realities? Here is where a complex theory of embodiment comes into play, in a way that defines ability as the fear of disability. It becomes a revolving point in which all our central actions of ability circle around, something that determines whether or not ability gives or denies human status.
According to Professor Linden in the Disabilities Studies Reader, reversing negative connotations of disability, like my friend exemplified, is not an easy task. But once it becomes identified as a positive identity, the extent of the ideology of ability collapses. But it is here we find that some people would say, in changing the ideology of disabled people as a positive identity it also changes disability into ability, instead of doing away with the meanings entirely. Inevitably, disability is regarded as a paradox in this sense.
If we question these sorts of theories of complex embodiment, it makes it possible to move forward in arguments currently about social construction, identity, and the body. Take the Galehead hut in the Appalachian Mountains for example. It became a big controversy when they were forced to make the hut accessible to people with disabilities. Even though the hut is at the end of a long trail through the mountains, people with disabilities still want to be able to access the hut at one of the stops. So if they can make it through a tough trail on a wheelchair, why do they need a ramp for building access? This example exposes the ideology of human ability, one that demands that people with disabilities always should be presented as able-bodied people as much as possible. This reveals how constructed our attitudes are about identity and the body.

In the Eyes of the Beholder

Week of 10/17-10/23

This week, it has been brought to my attention that when people do not fully comprehend a situation, they tend to stare. When I was walking through Copley with some friends, this idea of staring was clearly apparent. There was a disheveled looking man, maybe a veteran, on the side of the park there with a sign that read “Missing Leg, in need of change”, and all people really did was stare at this man and walk past. And if anything, these were stares of judgment and contempt. Applying this to the Disabilities Studies Reader, I found a specific chapter by Rosemarie Garland-Thompson on the act of beholding and the assigning of value we give to it. Staring is a communicative gesture, no doubt. But where does the act of staring at a disabled person become a positive occurrence rather than a negative one?
According to Thompson, a stare is a response to someone’s distinctiveness. And these stares are an important factor in interpreting our relationships internally and externally. Many people that stare at others find themselves in an uncomfortable position because of a relationship that Susan Sontag fleshes out as a “repulsive attraction”. But rarely its because people think other people are ugly. Take the man without a leg: I do not think people were staring at him because they found him to be particularly ugly; I just believe they did not know how to look at him in the appropriate fashion. So the reactions are decidedly negative ones. According to Harriet Johnson, what people usually see when they look upon someone disabled, especially if that person is on the streets, they see unbearable pain, insurmountable adversity, and a desire for a normalcy. She would rather have people look upon these “repulsive attractions” as merely unremarkable encounters. In doing so this allows her audience to find common ground between who they are staring at: someone with a live as uninteresting as theirs. In doing so, these strategic staring encounters do away with Sontag’s worries of stigmatizing.

On The Use of the Disabled in Photography

Week of 10/10 – 10/16

My roommate is in an Emerson’s history of photography class, and he was showing me some examples of work one night. After seeing a selection of photos, I made him stop at one that showed a Chinese man in a wheelchair. The photograph was taken by a man named Victor Chin, and apparently he contributed most of his work to an exhibition that focused primarily on disability in photography. After doing some research on my own, I encountered his web blog entitled “A Digital Awakening”. His pictures are primarily taken with a positive outlook on disabled culture, which isn’t always the case when viewing disabled artwork. There are pictures of what I assume is himself sitting in wheelchairs and trying to do things that normal people can do, like getting on the subway. My thoughts of a positive spin of the disabled drifted to the extreme opposite, where I have encountered the disabled in a negative light in photography. What I thought about were the many circus flyers and posters that take someone’s disability and change it into enfreakment or unnaturalness.
In The Disabilities Studies Reader, chapter 37 deals with the oppressiveness of the disabled in photography and what that represents as a culture and for our society. David Hevey explains that there is a constructed oppression toward disabled photography. Either they are represented in the work as “meaningful or meaningless bodies”. And he goes to say the disabled is only meaningful if they serve to convey polarized anchors of naturalist humility or terror. Basically, as long as they are trying to show the truth about disability, it doesn’t matter what light they are shown in. Famous artists, such as Arbus, Winogrand, and Mohr, only use the disabled as a subject to flesh out their thesis or embody the work. And to this matter, Hevey says its as if these photographers’ spirits can be summed up as pure manipulation of the disabled person’s image. The problem lies in the fact that the disabled “emerge like a lost tribe, to fulfill a role for these photographers but not for themselves.
Throughout history, disabled people’s role solidifies the “weird” against the “norm”; they are used as a symbol of enfreakment or the surrealism of all society. It is only through progressive works of art, or in this case, photography, that we may see the oppression of the disabled break their representational stigmas of fear, loss, or pity, and replace it with notions of hope and normalness.

Erevis Cale and Narrative Prosthesis

Week of 10/3-10/9

During this week, I encountered a topic that we covered and discussed briefly in the first week of class: the perspective of disability in a narrative context. I am currently reading a series of books by Paul S. Kemp called The Erevis Cale Trilogy, and what I have discovered is the disability is very much prevalent in the representation of characteristics between certain characters and as a jumping off point for discursive metaphors. For example, a character named Azriim—one of the main antagonists in the book—is blind in one eye. This disability emphasizes the villainous aspect the author is trying to achieve. Not only does this lead to a breakdown the structure of a character that desires not to embrace normalcy, but it also becomes a metaphor signifying a social and individual collapse of the character.
In chapter 21 of The Disability Studies Reader, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder cover this topic of disability in a narrative context. They call it “narrative prosthesis”, a thesis which centers around the idea of people with disabilities being the object of representational treatments, a two-fold aspect found both in the literary notions of character models and literary devices related to the body and mind. This serves as a symbolical symptom on the studies and interpretation on the body, defining the “able” bodied as merely average and having no “definitional core”. On the other hand, the “disabled” are labeled as being “outside the norm”, and in literary schemes this makes it easier to discuss the overbearing physical and worldly “weights” normally attributed to an interesting protagonist or antagonist. Thus, Kemp’s character of Azriim, is assumed to be created upon a prescriptive analysis of a physically, and therefore spiritually, overburdened character.
But surprisingly, narrative prosthesis doesn’t need to always be viewed in a negative light. A positive view of disability in literature takes away the notion of it historically being a crutch in which stories convey “representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight”. Instead, this dependency creates disability as a foundation, and not as a crutch. Mitchell and Synder state: “…disability is foundational to both cultural definition and to the literary narratives that challenge normalizing prescriptive ideals” (277). Disability in characterization and metaphor become a trivial prosthetic in which literature, and more importantly culture, heavily relies upon.

"Radio" and Autism

Week of 9/26 – 10/2

Over the weekend, my girlfriend and I watched the 2003 film Radio, starring Cuba Gooding Jr., and inspired by true events in 1976 in Anderson, South Carolina. What made this movie something to comment about in my journal is because the story centers around a mentally challenged man named James Robert Kennedy, nicknamed Radio. The young man drives around in a grocery cart, collecting radios and listening to radios, and yet he talks to know one—he’s a social outcast because everyone insists he has lost his mind. But at this point in time in America, the term “disability” really covered everything structured outside of the norm; though, in Radio’s case, he was autistic—not disabled. After I did some research of my own, I learned that the genetics attached to autism didn’t surface until the early 1980’s, and even then there was little knowledge surrounding the conditions. If anything, autism would be classified under Galton’s theory of eugenics, labeled as a “defective” and under the category that included “feebleminded, deaf, blind, and physically defective”. During the 1970’s and especially after World War II, the elimination of deviance from the norm and human perfectibility were not subjects to be taken lightly anymore, so the result is public isolation. And this isolation really came from not understanding what autism truly was.
Even though we haven’t covered this chapter in class yet or if we will, I went ahead in The Disability Studies Reader and took a look at Joseph Straus’ chapter on autism in culture, thinking this might be an interesting topic to consider for the final paper. Coinciding with Radio, Straus includes a section about autism in music and the way they comprehend and perceive it. He states “autistic listeners may be more attuned to private, idiosyncratic associations than larger shared meanings…[whereas] normal hearing involves the creation of hierarchies, autistic hearing involves the creation of associative networks (547)”. In this sense, rote memory and association constitute autistic hearing, which is a perfect example of Gooding Jr.’s character’s aptitude for radio music. I never knew that this type of engagement of memory and fixity of focus was attributed to autism, but as I recall from class it makes perfect sense in relation to Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man.