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.

The One-Legged Professional Wrestler

Week of 9/19 – 9/25

For this week’s entry I would like to focus on one of the most successful handicapped professional wrestlers in the United States, Zach Gowen. On Wednesday my friend, who is a huge WWE fan and professional wrestling fan all-around, showed me a clip on Youtube.com about this one-legged wrestler named Zach Gowen. In this video, Zach successfully climbs the ropes of the ring using his upper body strength and powerful leg and does a very difficult move called a moonsault. I was intrigued, so I did some research of my own. I found out his career was a social exchange of sorts, one where the outcome outweighed any costs he had to suffer to get there. Using Resource Theory, it boils down to his optimistic interpretation of his disability. People in the wrestling community show him love and respect, and in turn, he gives them a service coming from his heart. Because of the respect and status they show him, he goes all out. There is rarely anyone in the audience that makes fun of how he only has one-leg; instead, they embrace his willingness to overcome odds that would seem career-threatening to anyone else. Especially since Zach is a professional wrester, the cameras are a tell-tale sign to show his non-verbal communication on the screen. Even though pro-wrestling is sometimes over the top, his emotions and reactions are pretty clear. For example, Zach’s kinesics are major insights on how he regulates a fight between his opponent. His posture is more of a body lean on his shin rather than his foot because of his disability. His gestures illustrate when he is going to execute a move, especially when he waves his arms to maintain a balance on one foot. As for facial expressions, he normally shows an astonished and excited face to the crowd after he executes a move, more to show how amazed he is that he just did it handicapped and to get a roaring crowd anxious for more. As for the opponent Zach wrestles, their haptics are centered on making him get discouraged because of his handicap (though it is a staged performance). His opponent usually goes for his good leg, either by kicking it or grabbing it and tripping him up. Even though this sounds unusual and cruel, it really is just for the crowd. It communicates that even though someone might be disabled, people can actually ignore the common misconceptions associated with the term and treat the person with the same respect as someone labeled as “normal”.