phenoms's blog

Last week I was reading some chapters from "Agendas, Alternatives, and Public policies" for my political science seminar and came across a passage that really resonated with me.  
"There is a difference between a condition and a problem. ...As one lobbyist said, 'if you only have four fingers on one hand, that's not a problem; that's a situation.' Conditions become defined as problems when we come to believe that we should do something about them. Problems are not simply the conditions or external events themselves; there is also a perceptual, interpretive element." (109).

Although the author is speaking specifically to the challenge of agenda setting in public policy, the sentiment stretches beyond his intended meaning. It fits nicely into the themes of this week's reading: culture as disability. The broad consensus (although they diverge on the particulars) between Grobstein, Varenne, and McDermott is that culture creates the confines within which certain characteristics or abilities are valued. It sets us up for cognition based on normative values. For example, one is born a certain sex (whether it is male, female, or intersex), and in the US, the condition of sex becomes a problem when the child is born intersex (i.e. as a culture, we decide something needs to be done to fix the child's sexual assignment). However, when looking at non-western cultures, for example India, intersex (Hijra) is accepted as a legitimate alternative to the dichotomous male/female binary.  

I have never studied disability before. Never mulled over the intersections of disability and gender. I found both Fiona Shaw and Eli Clare's sections on freakdom palpable. They seemed to emphasize the cultural rather than (perhaps less constructed) need we have to stare. Theresa Tensuan provided a quote by Rosmarie Garland-Thompson that explains staring in more forgiving, understanding terms, as "an ocular response to what we don’t expect to see…. when ordinary seeing fails, when we want to know more...Staring begins as an impulse that curiosity can carry forward into engagement."

For activists, maybe. Maybe we stare in order to understand, to normalize. But culture has a funny way of impairing pure eyesight. Because we already know what's normal, right? We already have a notion of the bell curve of physicality and what's outside of it. In Eli Clare's chapter on freaks, he understands it as a mode of strengthening and fortifying a person's notions of self/other, "normal and abnormal, superior and inferior." But he paints a complicated picture, layer upon layer of exploitation and status quo reinforcement, with the realities of the historical time period. Was it still exploitation if the freaks used their 'taken-for-granted' inferiority to dupe the circus-goers out of money, getting moderately rich in the process?Is it right for "freaks" to perpetuate a negative societal stereotype about their own bodies? And is empowerment through such a process possible?

Hey all,

I'm a senior (yikes!) political science major at Haverford College, and so excited for this class. I love the idea of interdisciplinary courses, and wish the bi-co more fully embraced them. I'm particularly interested in the interception of race and gender, because I think we (as a society) too often get stuck in the bogs of white middle class feminism while unintentionally marginalizing other movements. Other than that, I'm extremely interested in public health as it relates to sex, gender, and identity.