I completely forgot to post my contribution up here (though it's been uploaded to the google drive). My apologies, but here you go! (see attached pdf).

For my intersectionality paper, I am strongly compelled to discuss the relationship between disability, class, and representation, specifically focusing on the story of Mary from the Mutter museum.

Mary was a little person of low income, as we can assume from that fact that she was found in a house of prostitution. Not only was Mary's body was taken and put on display without consent, but her baby's body as well. Mary's low status and physical abnormality somehow allows the Mutter and its audience to view her as an object unworthy of respect.

As I emailed this morning to the folks,

I only have text. You can decorate if you want!

Finally figured out how to save it to my computer without it being too long

I just edited it sorry found another mistake!!

Since we didn't discuss a length, mine might be a little long? If it seems long, I can put something together before printing that is shorter (it's the essay I did on the intersection on race and the transgender identity). Or I can add an image or two to the mix to break up the text more. Idk, whatever makes things easier.

EDIT: correct attachment added

Selena Martinez

Esem

Paper #13

12/7/14

Fiction often tackles the issue of western society’s exploitation of the environment. It allows readers to view a world without them and see certain causes and effects without any real-life repercussions. Inevitably in this type of fiction, there is one person who is more ecologically aware than the rest, usually due to some predisposed connection with the environment. In both Ursula Le Guin’s sci-fi short story “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” and Nickelodeon’s fantasy cartoon Avatar: The Legend of Korra, each showcases a character like this. How applicable are these stories and characters to real life?

The cultural, political, and materialistic myth of disconnection and destruction: people are unique, alone, and more intelligent than any other species. It seems that we are only separate from the natural world in the way we use language and politically shape the identity of our species. Part of people’s resistance to accepting the idea that people depend on and are dependent on nature is that to fully accept this idea means that people must therefore succeed to “nature” and all of its systems, which are mostly unknown and unexplored. To admit that people are a link in a flow of entities that run through all life is to relinquish a dominating human idea that dictates that people are above and separate from their surroundings.

Achieving “Ecological Intelligence” sounds like a power-up in a joystick arcade game. I guess, in a way, it can be seen as a power-up of sorts, but not for the player, for our planet.  I feel like if we understood the rules of the game more, things would play out better, but the world doesn’t come with an instruction manual, or a rule book. 

Our current way of living is destroying the world. Our society thrives on the exploitation of others as well as the exploitation of the environment. We have surpassed several of the limits placed on pollution and CO2 levels. There are countless species nearing extinction because of our exploitative ways. However, even faced with these facts, we rarely make changes in our lifestyle. We either don’t want to be inconvenienced or don’t have the means to afford to change the way we live. Bruno Latour has hailed the enlightenment as the turning point in the way the western world thought about the earth. The viewpoint changed from the acceptance of the earth as a being to the viewing of the earth as a combination of non-living “stuff”.