Disability

Ellen Samuels sets out to " queer disability".  Critques Swains idea that homosexuality and disability in general have a lot in common because people  from either or both communities experience a coming out process in that society assumes that everyone is straight and able bodied until told otherwise. Samuels find that Swain' and Cameron's anaolgy is that "coming out" is implied to be a single event when it may be an action, self acceptance, or political shift. Samuels talks about how people with non visable disabilities and non heterosexual people both share the ability to "pass". There is a privilege that people with non visable disabilities have because of their ability to be able to assimulate.

Disability is highly linked to temporality. For one, "the abled/disabled distinction is neither permanent nor impermeable" (25). People shift in and out of disability over time, and there is no person that is untouched by it. Secondly, disability can distort people's perceptions of time thus affecting their ability to operate within our normative confines of time. Furthermore, disability calls for a flexibility in time whether it be for delays with transportation, mental or physical state, interactions with others or the environment, etc.

Samuel’s essay discusses similarities and differences between non-normative identities. She compares lesbians who present femininely as people with an invisible impairment similar to people with invisible disabilities. One major similarity is the shared trade off of being able to fly under the radar without regular discrimination while also having a harder time joining communities of people with the same identity. Samuel discusses the pressure to prove to the world that you fit into an identity when it’s not immediately clear, and the privilege that comes with not having to prove yourself as anything. She also discusses the act of coming out as anything but an assumed normative identity as a continuous process rather than a static and singular event that takes place and ends. 

Laura Swanson’s photography plays with the history of portrait photography and disrupts the viewer’s expectations of how to interact with portrait photographs. To explore this, I look at two very different examples of her work: the first is part of her “Anti-Self-Portraits” series, and the second is part of her series of Bryn Mawr and Haverford students following her work on the two campuses two years ago. I argue that the different goals for each series and the different subject matter impact how each may be read, and highlight the ways photographic portraiture has been used to represent people.

Fire with Fire: http://vimeo.com/54668275