Blogs

The Andy Warhol of Marilyn Monroe. “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” by Journey. Campbell’s Soup. We all know what “LOL” stands for, and we can recite the basic plot of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale or two.

I recently attended "in/visible: Disability & The Arts”, a symposium that took place at Haverford College on Friday that explored the role of art in relation to disability studies. The event featured five speakers: Tobin Siebers (author of Disability Aesthetics (2010)), Georgina Kleege (author of Sight Unseen (1999)), Katherine Sherwood (artist and co-curator), and Ann Fox and Jessica Cooley (co-curators of Re/Formations: Disability, Women, Sculpture and Staring at Davidson College (2009)).

        How easily our minds can be changed when presented with certain evidence. Last month I wrote my first paper for the class The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories, arguing for freedom, choice, and control over one’s life. However, I have come to see the limit of this argument, especially when faced with the influential control culture has on individuals. A classmate’s idea intrigued me when he wrote, “in a way, we have been programmed by these influences [of culture] to act and behave a certain way whether or not we like to admit it” (ib4walrus, 2/20/2011).

...Rather than striving for any sense of completion, it’s this act of becoming, this perpetual refashioning of ourselves, that seems to be both my own and Lady Gaga’s focus.         

....Gaga asks us to take our own depravations and turn them into over abundances—relishing our “lipstick” and “rolled…hair” and opting not to be a “drag”, but instead striving to be a “queen."       

A Journey Through Cultures: Becoming Fit in American Society

A certain type of evolution is notable through an immigrant’s arrival to the United States, in which there is an evident transition from their ethnic ties to that of American ways. This can be seen as a form of cultural evolution, whose permanent results can be seen over the spread of various generations. It is interesting to note the external factors that cause this change to occur; that which makes an individual believe they must detach from their old customs and take up new ones. This cultural evolution truly becomes a matter of survival of the fittest in American society today.
   

"The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered"

-Jean Piaget-

Lady Gaga’s recently released single “Born This Way” relates to a lot of what I’ve been thinking about this semester in relation to issues of disability.  My opinions of the song waver.  As a big Lady Gaga fan, I have to admit that I love it (I love all of Gaga’s songs), but at the same time I feel like its sentiment comes off as being somewhat simplistic and cliché.  Luckily, Gaga—perhaps because she is so avant-garde—seems to get away with it, she appears to really mean what she says.  One of my friends (who’s probably a bigger Gaga fan than I am!) recently wrote an article for the College News about “Born This Way” and seemed to have similar reservations.  She wondered, do these sentiments of loving yourself and being proud of who yo

When Anne and I met a few days ago she asked me to describe my brain.  Her question surprised me.  I’ve never really thought about my brain as something tangible; I haven’t thought about its tactility or what it might look like.  So just now I closed my eyes and took a few minutes to envision my brain, to think about metaphors.  I see it as being covered in Chri

One of the main questions we have to ask when thinking about mental disability in relation to “physical” disability is the dichotomy of invisibility and visibility.  I use the term “physical” loosely because more and more studies are finding that mental illness is a result of physical abnormalities in the brain and that it, too, is bodily.  Nonetheless, mental illness is often something we can’t see.  It can alter one’s behavior and mood, but these things aren’t quite as tangible as an actual disfiguration of the body’s surface