Attached in a word document is my mid-term project!

Thanks,

Lindsay

I loved the way in which Tim and Andreana emphasized the full inclusion of "outsider artists" into the art community, while still acknowledging disability as part of the work. It was a balance of these two sides that I felt made sense, as this has been the trend with other marginalized groups such as women, queer artists, and artists of color. Their framework did not flatten the work of disabled artists to being only that, but it also did not erase disability or the identities of the artists either. One question that stays with me coming out of the talk, however, surrounds this framework of inclusion.

            During the eugenics movement, the concept of the perfect citizen began to take form as technology had given society the ability to prevent certain individuals from reproducing. As this idea took shape, the disability community was negatively impacted, since society held a belief similar to that of Peter Singer’s such that an individual with disability was not a “person” (Gabbard). While gene-editing technology continues to advance, issues raised during the eugenics movement have begun to resurface as we ask ourselves which conditions we should aim to eradicate.

I have been thinking a lot about how toward the end of the film, Deej tells the viewer that Rooy wants to show how Deej has put a lot of strain on his family. It is true that his parents basially uprooted their entire lives so Deej could go to the college of his choice, but in nearly every one of their interviews they made it clear that it was their decicision too and that they genuinely want to do everything they can to support their son. Ultimately, the film does more to document the way Deej was able to get to where he did and the important people in his life than it does to depict Deej as a burden. I wonder if both Deej and Rooy saw their work coming together in the way that it did.

 The theme of talking and self-expression stuck out to me in the readings and videos for this week.

I found the video "In My Language" to be particularly powerful to watch. As I watched the the video, I found myself thinking about "normal" ways of communicating and interacting with the world and how these ideas of "normal" get constructed. Going back to last week's reading on "normalcy," I began to think about how we don't have to live in a world where communication styles that are different than the norm are considered to be purposeless, wrong, or not human. I began to wonder how we can change the mindset of the world to stop viewing everything through the lens of normal as good and deviant as bad, and to accept every variation as beautiful and worthwhile. 

Harriet McBryde Johnson ties together the themes of stereotypes, ignorance, and systematic exclusion that are prevalent in the readings this week in the third-to-last paragraph of her article “Unspeakable Conversations.” She states: “the peculiar drama of my life has placed me in a world that by and large thinks it would be better if people like me did not exist. My fight has been for accommodation, the world to me and me to the world” (Johnson).

The relationship between rational thought and disability came up in slightly different contexts in the Price, Gabbard, and McBride Johnson articles. Price examines the complicated relationship between academia and the mentally disabled (mentally ill,neuroatypical, or psychosocially disabled) community and the tendency for the former to exclude the other. Society's assumption seems to be that the structure of academia as it is and has been is the best way to teach and learn; unfortunately this leaves people with mental disabilities at a serious disadvantage more often than not because the "topoi", as Price calls them, frequently demand abilities that not everyone possesses.

Although I've read this piece by Singer before, I was equally shocked the second time through. Although he presents a clear logical flow for his argument, his entire belief system rests on the assumption that disabled people are worse off than nondisabled people. To me, this assumption is incredibly unfair and I don't have much patience for reading Singer's arguments. 

In the article "'Sometimes We Need to Get Uncomfortable:' On Working with Artists in the Disabilities Community," Lisa Sonneborn and Matthhew Higgs discuss the complexities that arise when outside art joins a broader conversation on contemporary art. Both Sonneborn and Higgs emphazise the need to avoid generalizations in this confluence: "Successfully addressing these issues depends on our willingness to let our process be complicated. As practitioners, we avoid complications because they slow things down and often feel a lot like barriers" (Sonneborn).