Precarious, Performative, Playful, Potential...Perspectives!

Beware what you ask for! I tracked down the source for those models in pink. Whaddya think??

My Flesh and Blood

2003 UR 84 minutes 

Winner of both the Audience and Directing Awards at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, this inspiring documentary tracks a year in the life of Susan Tom, a single parent from suburban Fairfield, Calif., who has adopted 11 children with special needs. Directed by Jonathan Karsh, the film obliterates stereotypes about people with disabilities, sharing joyful moments and everyday challenges without shying away from the family's heartbreaking losses.

http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/My_Flesh_and_Blood/60032556?trkid=2361637

My Flesh and Blood is available on Netflix instant watch

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?

In our discussion of Mimi Swartz’s “Living the Good Lie,” we talked about what resulted in, for these men, the inability for the coexistence of homosexuality and devotion to religion. Judith Glassgold, the chair of a taskforce on LGBT issues from the American Psychological Association, stated in an interview for the article, “Among therapists — both among gay activists and the religious — we can have a discussion. We all agree that arousal and orientation are not under someone’s volition. What we can work on is self-acceptance, integration identity and reducing stigma.” I continued to think about whether homosexuality and religion are necessarily mutually exclusive, or rather if there are ways in which the two can coexist within an individuals’ identity. I kept thinking back to interviews that I’ve conducted with scholars in Argentina regarding their passage of same-sex marriage legislation. One of them, Daniel Jones, explained to me that evangelicals weren’t ubiquitously opposed to the bill. I found a paper he recently wrote where he lays out some of the tactics used by various evangelical groups to approach homosexuality. One strategy in particular stood out to me; the Evangelical Church of the Río de la Plata published a document in 2000 stating that the sexual orientation of a person is fixed and predetermined; homosexuality is a concept from the nineteenth century that, as a word, never appears in the original words of the Bible.

Eli Clare’s discussion of the Ellen Stohl magazine spread for playboy and her cover-shoot for New Mobility: a disability community magazine touches on many important questions surrounding disability and sexuality. Clare introduces this subject within part ii: bodies, “reading across the grain.” In this section he critically evaluates a few visual representations of disabled individuals and related advertisements.

Clare acknowledges the importance of the Stohl images as groundbreaking in their representation of a disabled body as a sexual being. Stolh echoes this goal in an interview she conducted with CBS in June 2011, nearly 25 years after the playboy spread debuted (http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2011/06/21/disabled-woman-looks-back-at-posing-nude-for-playboy-challenging-stigmas/). In the interview she relates that in her proposal letter to Hugh Heffner she explained that “sexuality is the hardest thing for a disabled person to hold on to.”
 
Clare argues that although good intentioned, the playboy spread and the cover-shoot for the disability magazine are more problematic than beneficial. Clare problematizes some of the essential characteristics of the representations including Stohl’s conformation with the industry standards of beauty, and the choice of photos and text.

For one of the first times in my college experience (kind of surprisingly, I guess) I am re-reading a text I encountered in a previous course. Eli Clare's Exile and Pride was also on the syllabus for an English class I took with Theresa Tensuan as a sophomore (hardly a coincidence, as her work on these topics is part of the other online reading for Tuesday). Since initially reading the book (largely for the way it adapts the autobiographical form in creative ways) my perspectives have certainly changed. Again, the metaphor of approaching the same questions from multiple angles, key to the interdisciplinary nature of our work in PPPP, maps well onto this revisiting of a text with different (gender-oriented) set of questions. However, the fundamental, unavoidable complicatedness Clare tries to convey -- especially the interrelatedness of social justice movements -- hit me with a memorable force both two years ago and this time around. We can get caught up in the specifics/feasibility of some of his recommendations, but I think he makes a pretty good case that the underlying forces of oppression cannot be parsed out into neatly divided identity categories, and that creative collaboration strategies -- whether his or our own -- are therefore necessary to social justice movements that wish to have more than shallow successes.

Clare, Wilchins, Swartz, Barard…when trying to make sense of all of the authors swirling around in my head, the idea I keep coming back to is that of self versus identity. I’m concurrently taking a psych course that deals with this distinction, and we’ve read the works of researchers who claim that while an idea of the self is present in even the youngest of humans because it denotes the acknowledgement of an “I,” an individual being with unique likes and dislikes, the idea of an identity only develops around adolescence when one separates oneself as an individual in society, finds a social niche, and establishes a set of morals and a life philosophy. If one commits to these things during adolescence, he or she has achieved an identity. If one does not, he or she is in some sort of limbo, ranging from a state of moratorium (having gone through a period of self-exploration but not having committed to an identity) to foreclosure (commitment to a certain identity without any self-exploration) to the worst of all, diffusion (no self-exploration and no identity commitment). *

Like rachelr, I've been getting a little frustrated with Eli Clare.  I haven't read enough of his book to feel like he is being overly repetitive; rather, my frustrations lie with his attitude.  He consistently makes remarks where I just stop, put the book down, and think, "Really?"  I can't stop thinking about and really being bothered by the following passage:

"At an anti-war protest not long ago, I saw a placard announcing 'An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.'  This slogan is one of many that turns disability into a metaphor, reinforces that disability means broken and is fundamentally undesirable, and ignores the multitude of actual lived disability experiences connected to war.  For folks who know blindness/disability as a consequence of crushing military force, the 'eye for an eye' slogan offers a superficial rationale for nonviolence but no lasting justice.  In response, I'd like to stand next to those anti-war activists and hold a placard that reads 'Another crip for peace,' or maybe, 'Blindness is sexy; military force is not'" (xii-xiii).