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LizJ's picture

A quiet presence of disability in the past present and future

I was interested in what Anne had to say about someone saying something to do with percieving "gayness" as a disablity. I then thought about how people percieve things such as being over weight, too tall, too short, etc. as disablities as well, which then makes what people might call "severe" physical disabilites be seen as much more problematic. If differences such as sexuality, height and weight can be viewed as disabilities in "marked bodies", other more severe physical disabilities seem "grotesque" when they are not. I believe that this view on disablity is the reason that it is not talked about at length in a lot of open forums of discussion, it is the reason that it is still an up and coming field of study.

Because a lot of our society is so obsessed with obtaining the "ideal" body (which I do see as different from normal that I think of is more of an average), people are very uncomfortable talking about what is outside the "norm" on the disability side. It is telling of our society that disability is still not widely talked about and how Kristen mention that eugenics is still very present. This got me thinking a lot about dystopian novels, movies, and other portrayals of where our future is heading. In "Brave New World" people are classified by castes that are presubscribed to them by getting rid of natural reproduction and impeding people of the lower castes to have mental and physical disablity through chemical interference. The different castes don't interact with each other and everyone is ambivilant to the way their society is structured. This futuristic society shows the problems of present society (even thought the novel was written in the 1930s it is still very relevant) with disability on an exaggerated scale, but it is not too far off from where we could easily go in terms of diversity in the future, particularly with disability. The movie "Gattaca" was also brought to my mind where the society portrayed allows humans to choose the genetics of children before they are born to reduce disease and other "unwanted" genes. People who are natural born are seen as lesser. This take on the future of our society once again shows how much present society really does not know how to deal with disability or varience in any way and that's a scary thought. I hope that made a little sense and is applicable to our conversation...

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