Drawbacks of medicine

Anne Fadiman’s “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” makes so many excellent points about modern medicine, the biomedicine model, and the importance of cultural in medicine. One of the most interesting points that I think that the book makes is the importance of negotiating one’s belief system with one’s medical treatment. Fadiman presented Neil Ernst as a capable and caring doctor, however, I think that she personally agrees with the type of doctor that Roger Fife tries to be. Ultimately, I do not think that Roger Fife is compromising treatment when he simplifies treatments and medications according to certain cultural traditions of the patients. To have simplified Lia’s medication regime may have meant saving her brain function because her parents would have agreed to give her the medicine on a consistent and regular basis. However, I understand that to make such a statement is pure speculation and that Lia’s grand mal seizure was actually caused by septic shock and not by her parents’ failure to administer the medications properly.

Also, I thought a lot about Fadiman’s book during my PE 101 lecture on Tuesday. As many of you have had the pure joy of taking PE 101, you may remember the speaker on living with AIDS. The speaker (his name is Jamey) talked about his twenty year struggle with being infected with AIDS and how he had been under the care of doctors for AIDS since September of 1987. At the end of his lecture, Jamey opened the floor to questions and one student asked him about his medications. Throughout the lecture, Jamey had been animated and upbeat, but when answering the question, he smiled and said that he had to take about five pills a day for AIDS and two “mental health” pills because “sometimes the other medicine gives me the blues.” I thought a long time about Fadiman’s book and the overall effectiveness of medicine about Jamey’s lecture. Obviously, Jamey needed the AIDS medication to live, but the medication had drawbacks, just as Lia’s medications did on her personality (it made her hyperactive.)

Response to "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down"

I have greatly enjoyed reading Anne Faiman's "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" and believe it is one of the most compelling, heart-wrentching, interesting, and thought provoking books I have read in a very long time. While the book describes an extremely sad and depressing story, I believe that every chapter contains numerous important lessons. For example, the struggles immigrant cultures experience in a new country (the new government, religions, practices, and social norms that they face), the interactions between differing cultures, western vs. eastern medicine, parenting, and different people's values.

I often find myself agreeing with one side of the story, either the Lee family's position or the doctor's, and then quickly switching to the other. It is so hard to favor one side when both are trying so hard to do the "right" thing for Lia. Fadiman does an excellent job portraying each side's points of view and explaining the whole story. The book would be completely different if Fadiman decided to only interview the Lee family or only Lia's doctors. The chapters regarding Hmong history are also extremely valuable because they let outsiders into the Lee family's culture. Therefore, I am able to understand, at least a little, why or why not the family may have reacted a certain way or made a certain decision.

Fadiman's story reminds me of the numerous stories my father tells me about his family's struggles as new immigrants in America. My father, along with his Argentinian mother and Russian father, immigrated from Israel to America when he was a teenager. They arrived in America with $400, my grandfather had $200 in each pocket, and a birdcage filled with pastries. With absolutely no knowledge of the English language, my grandparents spoke Spanish, Russian, and Hebrew, my father and his parents were thrown into a new world with different customs and norms. In Israel, my grandparents had been bakers and owned a small farm. Because they moved to an urban area of Washington D.C. and were therefore unable to farm, my grandparents established a bakery. My father started school, learned English, and became my grandparents translators. My father worked at the bakery before and after school everyday and was the only person able to communicate with customers.

One specific incident greatly reminds me of the Lee family's struggles in America. My grandmother, who was very superstitious and had only seen a doctor on a few occasions, began to complain about terrible stomach pains. Thinking she had cancer, which she knew nothing about, my grandmother thought there was nothing she could do and refused to go to the doctor. My grandmother was actually pregnant and unfortunately, because she did not see a doctor immediately, loss the child due to complications.

It's very interesting to learn about the cultural differences between ethnic groups and how when forced to coexist, these groups struggle to see eye-to-eye.

And now for something completely different

The most interesting chapter thus far has been Chapter Eight in which the fourth wall of the narrator is finally deconstructed as Fadiman places herself in the story. The function of the narrator until this next section has been adding distance to the story, giving me, the reader, a chance to make up my mind about the characters and actions. The Spirit Catches you and you Fall Down has been a valuable text in this course because for most of the book, there’s a sense of impartiality in contrast to the more personal texts we’ve read recently. In this way, Fadiman establishes her credibility. She provides a full picture of the conflict, allowing me to form my own opinions. Moreover, the “informal cultural anthropology” is accessible as she avoids jargon and provides context for the story without assuming knowledge. Her standpoint then seems neutral; she laments the Lee’s experience and sympathizes in her side notes, and also provides the doctors’ opinions and others involved in the conference, giving them a literal voice. Until now, the book has been mostly a presentation rather than an analysis, allowing us to feel for both the Lees and the doctors, as we mentioned in class today.
Once she injects herself into the story, describing her experiences with the Lee’s and others, her standpoint changes and thus our impressions change. In some ways now, it is an autobiographical story, one of how she came to be interested in this experience and then reported it. Someone noted in class today how the story goes from the Lees’ problems with Lia to the Hmong experience in general chapter by chapter. This is her prerogative, an example of her standpoint. She is not solely examining the medical paradigm in the US, but simultaneously exploring the Hmong immigrant experience. Fadiman, writes, “The European immigrants…came to the united states because they hoped to assimilate into mainstream American society. The Hmong came to the United States for the same reason they had left China in the Nineteenth century: because they were trying to resist assimilation” (183). Here Fadiman presents a deeper current in the story. It is one of assimilation, immigration, the plight of the refugee, and how these themes are brought into the limelight in a time of an emotional medical emergency within a family. The Lees’ story became less about Lia for me at this point, and more about how Lia’s problem forced them to confront western society, exposing a larger immigrant/refugee problem in the U.S. It may not be directly related to our course work, but this question of U.S. acculturation and the role of the melting pot is one that interested me in this latter section of the book, and I thought this would be a good forum to discuss it.

Fadiman reading

From the first few chapters the connection between this book and some of our other readings and discussions was apparent. We earlier discussed the need and importance for consent of the patients in the context of sterilization, vaccinations, and genital "corrective" surgery of intersex patients. In all these areas I think we as a class came to the consensus that it was imperative that the doctors contain consent, but it was also further discussed, that simply signing a consent form isn't really enough. Especially in the case of sterilization the idea of informed consent was brought up a number of times. The woman, or the husbands more often than not, may have given consent to have "la operacion," but that was not an indication that they fully understood what that meant. In the video we watched, many women were interviewed that said that they were never told by anyone, including the doctors, that this operation was a permanent procedure. Giving consent and truly understanding what is being done and all the consequences of that are two very different things. I saw a parallel to this within the first chapter of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman.
In this case, Foua and Nao Kao Lee, were not aware of what was going on within the hospital, although they filled out the necessary forms and signed in all the right places. The situation here is slightly different; unlike the example of sterilization, the issue isn't a social or political demand for a procedure, at the cost of informed consent, it's a language issue. However, the parent of Lia Lee were also unable to make an informed consent. They spoke no English and the doctors spoke no Hmong, there is no way that Foua understood the forms that she was signing. This point is clearly stated throughout the first chapters of the book. After Lia Lee was released from the hospital her mother had to sign a from and "since Foua cannot read and has never learned to recognize Arabic numerals, it is unlikely that she followed these instructions. However, she had been asked for her signature so often in the United States that she had masterd the capital form of the seven different letters contained in her name, Foua Yang." (8). It's obvious that there is no way Foua Yang could have given informed consent on any of the hospital forms.
The question that arises out of this situation is whose responsibility is it to make sure that a language barrier doesn't create this issue? Should it be the responsibility of the patients to make sure they fully understand what they are signing, or is it up to the hospitals to be sure that everyone makes an informed decision? I would think that it's the responsibility of the hospitals to not proceed without informed consent. Then the issue comes up of should the hospitals be obligated to have a translator for every language. This, I believe, directly connects with another very controversial issue, should immigrants have to learn English?

Emory Center for Women Homepage

http://www.womenscenter.emory.edu/

The purpose as it appears on the main page:

There is a place at Emory where women can gather for lively discussion or quiet contemplation. The Center for Women at Emory, established in 1992, offers learning experiences that help Emory women transform themselves and society. Its educational programs link the individual woman’s personal creativity to a life lived in community and reflect the diverse views of women in all walks of life. The center provides advocacy, support, and the opportunity to transform concerns into action.

As a forum for women’s intellectual, cultural, ethical, and spiritual life, the Center for Women is a prototype of interdisciplinary perspective. It serves as an advocate for gender equity throughout the University and encourages inquiry into gender issues. Its programs are about women but relevant to everyone. It is our mission to provide a strong informational network for all members of our community.

This bothers me. This honestly bothers me. As much as the center claims to be open to everyone and accepting of all, the main statement (with a different text color, for the specific purpose of standing out) seems otherwise. While I can understand that the second statement (in the black text) opens the center to all, I still wonder why the main statement on the page limits the center to women. As much as the center tries to get rid of the stigma of the word "women" in its title, and encourage all sexes and genders to explore the center, doing so will be impossible if the first/main statement on the website is as stigmatizing as it is.

Patient-doctor relationships

One topic that returns again and again during our discussion of medical practices (and especially with regards to medical experimentation) is the distortion of the patient-doctor relationship that usually accompanies what today is often regarded as bad medicine or uncaring doctors.

I was especially struck by Audre Lorde’s description of the scare tactics used by her doctors to sway her decision about what treatment to use when her cancer returned: “What he [the doctor] said to me was, ‘If you do not do exactly what I tell you right now without questions you are going to die a horrible death.’ ” While it’s expected that a doctor would know more about treating cancer than the average person, statements such as these exploit that knowledge gap. If my life were at stake in a similar situation, I’d definitely want to know about all the options available to me and receive honest answers to my questions. An the end, the decision is still the patient’s to make. When patients are considered too ignorant to make these decisions on their own and doctors try to take that right away using scare tactics, it leads to abuses that we’ve seen in other readings and videos, such as the clitoridectomies forced on the Victorian era women from “Managing Women’s Minds” and on intersex babies.

The Grey’s Anatomy clip where Bailey confronts Izzie about her reasons for anonymously paying for Heather’s surgery also touched the topic of how emotionally involved a doctor should be when treating a patient. There seems to be this balance between remaining calm and objective and becoming emotionally vested in the patient’s recovery. But there’s also the danger of forgetting that the patient, too, is human when this sort of emotional distancing occurs—in the rush to protect their own emotional well-being, doctors may forget that in front of them is another human being with feelings and a life, not just another customer, experimental subject, oddity, or learning tool.

Overweight and Disabled Due to the "Normal"

One of my favorite discussions we have had thus far is about how obesity/being overweight is a disability in our society today. We discussed the idea that being overweight in itself is a greater problem according to society than the actual side effects of being overweight (high blood pressure, risk for heart disease, etc.). We discussed the overall concept that defining someone as obese or overweight requires the statement and definition of a weight that is considered "normal." The problem, however, is that there is no "normal" when discussing bodies because they are supposed to vary by race, gender, ethnicity, etc. However, society strives to create an image of "normal," (with merely two subcategories, one for male and another for female) not just regarding weight, but regarding height, skin tone, poise, and even minute details almost required to vary from person to person such as the existence of pores on one's face. As an individual, to fulfill our societal obligation, we are supposed to strive to be as close to "normal" as we possibly can be.

Inquiring into the aspect of "normal" and society's portrayal of the term, I refer to a paper I wrote last year for Introduction to General Sociology. In the paper, I analyzed advertisements and their portrayal of women in society. The two primary sources I used for locating these advertisements were Glamour and InStyle, two popular feminine magazines. I used the most recent issues of the magazines available at the time I did the study (April 2007). In the study, I found that a significant portion of advertisements in both magazines was used to either sell something (with an idealistic female using or modeling the item to be sold) or to advertise the negative consequences of a slightly out of shape body. Regarding the sale of products, the models had to sell themselves, rather than the actual product. By selling their "normal"desired body, consumers purchased the products they advertised, thinking that if the model ("normal") uses product X, I should also use product X and will soon become the "normal."

In my paper, I continue to explain that these above magazines (and other similar magazines) are available in highly developed countries such as the USA. However, in the documentary, Beyond Killing us Softly: The Strength to Resist, Professor Carrol Gilligan asserts that there are no eating disorders in Ethiopia including overeating and obesity or anorexia and bulimia. In other words, the industrialized nation notion of a tall, slender, seductive female ("normal") as the maxim of physical humanity does not exist. The reason for this cultural difference (and benefit) is simply because television and magazines that define what is culturally beautiful or what should be culturally accepted are nonexistent in Ethiopia. There is no overbearing, universally available source to dictate the norm.

The reason understanding this is important is because we need to realize that first off, the notion of a norm is created by us as a society. Second and more importantly, we must realize that it is possible to live in a society without a default norm (as in Ethiopia). Most importantly, to prevent our industrialized world from becoming monotonous, striving for the ultimate norm (which , by the way, is completely subjective), we must remove the norm from society. Luckily, we're in the process of moving in that direction (Dove Campaign for Beauty advertisements use genuine females without digital body touch ups). However, based solely on the fact that our society's extreme norms exist in magazines dated from just over six months ago proves that we still have loads of progress to make.

Beyond Killing Us Softly: The Strength to Resist. Dir. Margaret, Lazarus. Videocassette. Cambridge Documentary Films, 2000.

The Diet Coke Paradox

Yesterday in class, Ms. Bailey mentioned that several of the topics we discuss in class tend to touch on one common theme: medicine tends to overlap into the world of what a healthy, "normal" person should look like. Rather than focus on the serious health risks of obesity, like having high blood pressure or kidney problems, popular culture relies on negative perceptions of fatness to try and influence societal perceptions of what is a "normal" weight.

The first example I can think of regarding our culture's true priorities is the popularity of one of my favorite drinks, Diet Coke. Why do so many people drink it? I do not believe Diet Coke's revenue relies on the money of people concerned with true health. We drink it because it tastes good, has caffeine, and (most importantly) has zero calories. Do we care that some medical professionals think it might create carcinogens while in the body or that ingested aspartame creates methanol, also found in antifreeze? Of course not. We won't gain any weight! Diet Coke, while delicious, illustrates the point that although society claims to value health, it really values non-fatness. Any health risks that may come as a result of attempted thinness are only secondary.

Gender Differences in Regards to Weight Issues

I do not think that the degree of pressure and criticism relating to weight is equal between females and males. At the same time I do not understand the reasons as to why this might be. There is certainly a greater amount of media attention focused on the ideal feminine form than there is focus on the analogous masculine form. Of course, as a male, I may be completley biased in this declaration. The only possible explanation that I could come up with revolves around the fact that in our society, it is typically the male that pursues the female. Consequently, due to this emphasis on initial male choice, females feel greater pressure to fit societal models of ideal beauty and attractiveness. To an extent, I think that females willingly search for ways to make themselves more attractive and in doing so they put themselves at greater susceptibility to the media and societal representations of "beauty."

As far as I know, there is no Cosmopolitan for guys. This is not to say that there is not societal pressure placed on males, just that the amount of attention focused on the ideal male image is slighted in comparison. It is also important to note that for males, while there is not as much pressure to diet and stay "thin," there is a lot of pressure on the other side of the spectrum. The Adonis Complex seems to be a widespread condition wherein males feel that they do not match the seemingly normal image of the muscularly fit man. Simply, there is a lot of pressure to gain muscle mass to acheive a better body image.

Still, these differences aside, I feel that overall, weight-related societal pressure falls harder on females. This imbalance seemed evident to me while reading the introduction to "Bodies out of Bounds." The focus only shifted directly to males when discussing the idea of overweight performers. From the example given (Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle) to multiple recent examples that I have come up with (John Candy, Chris Farley, Kevin James, etc.) it seems that, especially in comedy, there is plenty of room for overweight individuals. I feel like the male overweight comic arose before the female (Jo Brand). Another important issue to address stems off of this acceptance in the comedy circuit. Is it enough for overweight comedians to be accepted because they mock themselves and their body image? Or does this only further the marginalization of fatness? While I appreciate the ability to laugh at oneself, I feel that the acceptance of an overweight performer who does not objectify his or her body would be ideal.

"Corpulence"

The "Bodies Out of Bounds" article raises many interesting points regarding the way the United States views individuals that are heavier than what is considered the "norm." The authors challenge the notion that an individual's weight is a characteristic that individuals have full control over and the current societal perceptions with being overweight.

The authors brought up a very interesting point how the obsession with staying "skinny" and losing weight has overtaken the mentality of society to the point that they take synthetic products that may help lose weight, but at the same time cause other potential health issues. This is perplexing to me, since it is very clear that individuals are losing weight for materialistic reasons as opposed to health reasons, demonstrating the impact of society on an individual's perception of weight. But still, I feel that an individual's health has priority over their image. What's the point of being skinnier when the things being taken to lose weight is just as detrimental to an individual's health?

As discussed in class, the article argues that the "concept of obesity is historical, not ahistorical or universal." This is clearly supported in the class discussions held, regarding how societies in the past have often viewed individuals that have more weight to them to be of higher social status. It is interesting to note now the perspective of society today has switched completely. The majority of the social elite today spend money to hire trainers and the like to maintain this image of being "fit." It is clear that some negative connotations with being heavier is a product of society.
I personally feel that this is true only to an extent though. There is definitely a line that is drawn when an individual's weight becomes a detriment to the individual's health and when the individual's themselves would not want to celebrate their "corpulence". But that idea, with the combination with the belief that individual's have full control over their weight is responsible for the negative image of being overweight. Even then, I agree with the sentiments of the authors, that weight cannot be used to represent an individual's character. The other night watching TLC, there was a documentary titled, "Inside Brookhaven Obesity Clinic." Although the documentary deals with individuals that have extreme issues with their weight, it is an example of how individuals do not have full control over their weight. The documentary portrayed extreme cases of obesity as a cause of an addiction that some of the individuals continued to struggle with even while in the clinic. A few of the members of the clinic broke rules and ordered take out food, while others fully committed to sticking to the program looked down upon these "cheaters" a term that was used by the documentary. Perhaps illustrating how difficult it was to manage their addictions, these cheaters, individuals who had enrolled themselves into the clinic, could not fully commit themselves to the program. Although the article viewed weight from a more moderate viewpoint, the TLC show highlighted how difficult it is for individuals to manage their weight as a fault not of their own in the traditional sense since many of these individuals were dealing with an addiction. For individuals with addictions that cause their weight to increase, it would not be right to judge them. In addition, although many of these individuals that had enrolled themselves into the clinic did so with improving their health as the number one priority, they also wanted to decrease their weight to allow themselves to get a job and fit into society, demonstrating the authors' views of how "corpulence" is viewed so negatively that these individuals cannot lead normal lives.

Response to Guest Speaker Mia Mingus

While I must give credit to Mia Mingus for her efforts to spread her views and fight for equality on several fronts, gender, sexuality, and ability, I was angered by her response to one of our classmates personal stories and by her disdain for the medical field. I feel as if Mingus was over generalizing by claiming all her doctors were only interested in the financial aspect of medicine and in advancing their careers. In addition, I thought Mingus would appreciate our classmates personal story and jump on the opportunity to show a positive side of the medical field. However, she quickly responded to the story with the idea that one shouldn't be so focused on the ability to walk. I was completely shocked.

I feel as if Mingus was extremely pessimistic and judged the entire medical field solely on her experiences. While I have no way to possibly comprehend the pain Mingus endured or the poor beside manner of her doctors, I feel as if she was too harsh. Mingus may have accepted her outcome of being reliant upon a wheelchair but what about the people who have not? Should they be forced to stay in a wheelchair just because other "disabled" people want society to change and become accommodating to all? Why shouldn't he/she try to walk?

When I hear people criticize the medical community I find myself thinking about ways in which it has enriched people's lives. For example, this past summer I was a nanny for a set of twins with cerebral palsy and their younger brother who was healthy. While the twin sister will never be able to walk or talk, she has made great strides since birth due to medicine. She wears braces on her legs at night and for several hours a day, stands in a special device that strengthens her leg muscles, and attends weekly physical training sessions. With a lot of hard work and patience, she has gone from being completely immobile to being able to turn onto her stomach, push herself up into sitting position, and pull herself up in her crib onto her knees. With a little bit of help, she is know able to pull a shirt over her head, hold a cup, and use a spoon and fork. In addition, due to all her medical help, she is only now coordinated and strong enough to start using a wheelchair. Without medical advancements, she would be completely dependant upon her parents and guardians for the rest of her life.

Compromise!

First, I would like to apologize for my mini outburst in class. I felt it was something we were all confused about. The “it” in that sentence refers to coming to terms with the criticism we’ve recently heard about the medical paradigm in treating disability. Mia Mingus’ presentation was interesting in that it was a first person account related to Susan Wendell’s ideas of fixing society instead of disabled individuals, but we all seemed perplexed as to why it can only be a social paradigm or medical paradigm as a solution. In this piece too, Kathleen Lebsco’s and Jana Evans Braziel’s introduction to their book, was equally as related, but did a better job synthesizing the material for me and helping me resolve my confusion. Like Wendell, they began with introducing fatness or corpulence as a social construct, commenting on its differences from race and gender because it is a choice in order to further explain the cultural taboo of “being fat.” They comment on the horrible truth that people really do view obesity as one’s choice, as a sign of recklessness, irresponsibility, and lack of self control. In making this observation, they also discuss how fat is an aberration from normality, and moreover, some sort of transgression of space and not only of “healthy” choices. All of these points made sense to me, but it was harder for me to see science as a bad guy in this case. In past discussions, it was easy to discern how standpoint and bias plays a role in science, but in this case, it seemed like science and medicine could eradicate the myths that fatness and obesity stems from “wrong” choices; it seemed like medicine, instead of validating these myths like we’ve seen in other cases in the course, was shifting the blame off the individual. While I have some problems with the NIH’s method of categorizing bodies as healthy or unhealthy, I agree with Ashley that obesity is inherently different than sciences of race or gender or disabilities because it is something that can actually be dangerous. Our country has in some way built this problem through socioeconomic influences and has categorized it as a problem, and now we must help those who suffer. It’s one thing to treat them unfairly, as aberrations, or as irresponsible individuals, but seeing as how obesity is a disease with health repercussions, research should also be done to see how to help. Maybe it’s too early to tell if this is just a social construct like race or gender, allowing people later to perhaps marginalize and even dehumanize those who suffer, or maybe I’m naïve, or maybe we need to find a balance between social reform and medical reform. I agree that fat phobia or fat-oppression are very bad results of social perception that need to be rectified, and that we should build this world to be more understanding of the overweight, but we should also strive for better healthcare, a reformed medical industry without greed, and better solutions for people who truly do need them to live a fuller, healthful life.

Role Models

In our discussion today of "Bodies Out of Bounds", the point was made that what is acceptable as normal is often what is average, which by no means reflects the range of diversity along the spectrum. Among all the people out there, a handful of them are singled out and extremely visible to rest of us through the media. They reflect some ideal, not necessarily even representative of the average but one that plays a big part in defining the norm because other people use them as role models.

With respect to weight in particular, fashion models are viewed as ideal in the sense that clothes look the best on them and are essentially designed for them. Yet, models and people just as thin are mocked for their bodies, much like overweight individuals are. They are frequently described as being gross and unhealthy. Just last night, they made fun of Lara Flynn Boyle on Family Guy (she had to sleep under Peter's stomach to use his fat for warmth). Every sort of body type is under scrutiny, to some degree. In advertising there is the promise of the perfect body, but in the media and in our lives we are all too fat or too thin or too something else. Otherwise, what would we buy? Beauty is a business. Medicine and health are a business in many ways,too. I know I'm interested in anything that claims to help me live a long, healthy life and/or become more attractive, and I hate to admit that the latter tends to be a more pressing priority.

But while I'm on the subject of role models, I want to mention the Dalai Lama. If you didn't get the chance to see him speak, I can best describe his demeanor as joyous. Talk about inner beauty and the greatest smile I've ever seen! His Holiness explained viewing everyone, including himself, simply as a human being. Regardless of race, gender, religion, status, whatever - we are all brothers and sisters with a lot to learn and a lot to laugh about. There's nothing like humility and a sense of humor.

closed mindedness gets us nowhere

I was deeply offended by Mia Mingus' response to my comment in class on Monday. For those who were not there, I will explain the situation. Mia Mingus defines herself as a "queer disabled woman of color." For the purposes of this post, I will speak only of her disability. As a result of the polio she contracted as a baby, Mingus had problems with one of her legs. To correct the impairment, and aid her to walk properly, she wore a leg brace for (if I remember correctly) about twelve years of her life before finally deciding that she no longer wanted to wear the braces, even if it meant that she would eventually be in a wheel chair.
Mingus had a terrible experience with the bracing-- she described doctors who spoke over her head and never asked how she was feeling as well as immense pain and discomfort. Ultimately, Mingus blamed society, and specifically targeted the medical world, for her disability. She explained the theory of disability as a social construct, but took this one step further to state that doctors never consider patients as people and instead think of them only as a problem they need to correct.
She explained her belief that doctors only motive was money-- citing the multimillion dollar business of brace making as an example.
Since I had a somewhat similar story, with a very different outcome, I thought sharing my own personal struggle with bracing would be relevant and provide another perspective. After being diagnosed with scoliosis at age 9, I began bracing immediately. For 24 hours a day I wore extremely uncomfortable back braces for 5 years before my doctors and I accepted that the bracing was not working for me. I was devastated-- I felt that my doctors had given me a false hope. I felt betrayed. Luckily for me, corrective surgery was an option. It was a huge surgery- 8 hours, 2 weeks in the hospital followed by another full month in bed, then six more months in a back brace, but luckily it worked. It was my doctors unyielding hopefulness and determination to allow me to walk for the rest of my life that inspired me to become a doctor-- so I can devote my life to affording others the opportunities I was afforded all because of the dedication of my doctors.
Mingus immediately attacked me-- even despite my apparent appreciation for what medicine had done for me, I was overlooking the fact that walking shouldn't be an ultimate goal. What's wrong with being in a wheel chair? She asked. Unfortunately, class was over before I had a chance to respond. I am certainly not arguing that there are problems in the accessibility of the world to disabled people- clearly there are improvements that need to be made, however, ultimately the shortest distance between two points is a straight line-- I don't really think you can argue that being in a wheelchair is an easier means of getting around than walking. Again, this is not to say that people in wheelchairs shouldn't be afforded the opportunities of people who can walk, all I am saying here is that, if given the opportunity, I imagine everyone would rather be able to walk than be confined to a wheelchair.
While I can certainly appreciate that Mingus may have had a terrible experience with the medical field growing up, I think her generalizations targeting the entire medical world as money grubbing and uncaring of people are insulting and benighted. As a few people pointed out, sure, there are doctors, as there are professionals in every field, who are in it for the wrong reasons. But I think broadening this example to include the entire medical field is not only hurtful and ignorant, but undermines the power of her beliefs and distracts from her desire to open minds about the social construction of disability.

One point that I found interesting in Elaine Showalter’s article “Managing Women’s Minds” was the impact of the patients’ image in the determination of their insanity. Showalter described how if a female patient was able to dress and groom herself according to Victorian standards then she showed progress. It amazed me that such a superficial thing could qualify as an indication of any progress. I realize that the doctors considered this an improvement because the women met society’s expectations for a woman, which only exemplified yet again how social constructs influence the way science is practiced. Instead of creating new methods to treat mental illness or observe mental progress, the treatments and measurements relied on how well the woman moved back to the norm of a Victorian woman. We saw the same societal influence in the development of the radical new therapy of doing laundry. We can see how the doctors reasoned that the therapy would work by reminding women of how they should be in society through domestic chores.

We saw this same focus of women’s physical appearances in Londa Schiebinger’s article “Theories of Gender and Race”. Schiebinger described that even though anthropologists collected data on the intelligence of men of different races through the ridiculous measurements of their skulls, they did not consider using the same technique to measure the intelligence of women. Instead they focused their research on the appearance of women from different races and recorded physical traits such as the “redness of lips, length and style of hair, and the size and shape of breasts or clitorises” and most importantly the pelvis. By how much the appearance of the woman deviated from the norm determined her inferiority or superiority.

In both cases there was little attention paid to the mental capacity of women. In the mental institutions there was never a mention of mental tests for improvement, only the doctors’ concern for whether the woman appeared normal by either dressing in the correct fashion or by performing the proper domestic duties of a woman. In the case of the anthropologists, there is not even a curiosity to see how the intelligence of a woman compares across races, even though the experiments to do so were faulty with prejudices.

Thus the social construct of normal appearance for a woman is one factor that has hindered the objective study of women’s minds in science because they set a predetermined norm.

Some thoughts related to Friday's discussion

Thanks to everyone for contributing to Friday’s class. To keep the discussion continuing on the blog, here are a few questions to consider:

• Involuntary commitment: who decides that a person can be locked up?

• Nature versus nurture: the creation and social construction of disability becomes especially important to feminist theory when biological differences between the sexes enter the discussion. I’m sure everyone remembers the controversy that arose when former Harvard president Lawrence Summers suggested that innate differences between men and women might account for the lower numbers of women successful in the fields of math and science. How does this relate to the topics that we have been discussing? What other factors might account for this discrepancy?

• Does having a mental disorder mean being unhappy, ignorant, or inhuman?

• How does money (or the lack of it) affect the treatment of mental disorders?

One topic that received a lot of treatment in Friday’s reading but that we didn’t discuss much in class was the use of photography to document insanity. Even though photography ostensibly should have been more objective than previous methods of recording the symptoms of mental disorders, it was subject to a lot of manipulation. The photographers often posed and dressed the subjects and placed them in environments to fit their own ideas of sane or insane, with the mad queen or Ophelia being the most common models of insanity. It reminded me of how descriptions of fertilization in textbooks were molded to fit the aggressive male/passive female stereotypes. Rather than recording events just as seen or as the data proves, the descriptions of both female insanity and fertilization became molded to fit preconceived notions.

The diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders seems especially suspect to manipulation by culture’s standards for “normal.” Given that intellect and morals are regarded as humanity’s distinguishing characteristics, those that are regarded as deviant in these areas are often stigmatized even more than those with physical disabilities as being less than human, as “life unworthy of life” (to use the chilling phrase from Rosemarie Garland-Thompson’s presentation).

Such callous devaluation of those regarded as mentally disabled or deviant ties directly with the dehumanization of marginalized groups. As discussed on Wednesday, once abuse of the disabled begins, it opens up the door to dehumanization of other groups that are placed under the same label for political or even scientifically “justified” reasons. The perceived mental deficiency of women in the past, for example, was used to tie them closer to the animal aspect of humans; they were not granted equal status as full humans along with the males. The validity of the deficiency itself is a problem unique to that situation, but the dehumanization of those deviating from an established norm is a problem stemming from the treatment of the disabled as less than human.

The Invisibility of Disability

I found Dr. Garland-Thomson's lecture yesterday as interesting and fascinating as one can be on genocide, and it brought back some personal memories as well. This past summer, I went with the German Studies Department to Vienna, Austria, and on the last week of our trip, we went to Mauthausen, the site of a former concentration camp outside of Linz. I found the trip to be surprisingly mundane-all that is left on the site are a couple of barracks (which we did not enter due to structural damage) and a couple of other buildings used for rounding up prisoners. The rest was desolate fields. Even the gas chamber, while creepy (Dr. Garland-Thomson was right; this was the only way to describe it), still generally looked like a harmless shower. Our bored tour guide did not seem to care if we understood the gravity of our setting or not.

As with a lot of experiences I had overseas, however, I did not fully appreciate what happened that day until much later, including today. One of the first things we saw upon entering the camp was a set of memorials-each respective country had a monument for its victims who died at this camp and throughout Europe during the Holocaust. This camp was mainly used for political prisoners, so I do not recall seeing a memorial for the disabled whose lives were taken. While I understand that not every single group could possibly be represented and that very few disabled individuals walked through the gates of Mauthausen, in retrospect, I feel that this was a grave oversight. I'm sure I wasn't the only visitor to Mauthausen who had never been to a concentration camp before, and a memorial to the disabled would have educated myself and others about the grave injustices that occurred not only on the bases of race and class, but of bodily abilities as well. As Dr. Garland-Thomson mentioned, the extermination of the disabled exemplified the Nazis' uniquely "medical" reasonings for murder. If we do not remember the "reasoning" behind such atrocities, we will miss an invaluable opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others.

Height, Scars... Disabilities?

At the end of Monday's class, I ended by getting a word in about Presidents of the United States and their increasing heights. I have located an article that expresses this trend and calls height a "heuristic for dominance." It's interesting that a journal article, something of academic value, directly relates height and dominance. Does this mean that it is not possible to be short and be dominant? Is being short a disability? While I don't think so, it seems like the general population has progressively voted for taller and taller presidents (see the source from our good friend Wikipedia...I verified random heights with other sources to check for accuracy). I don't want to assert that presidents are elected on the basis of their height because I most definitely don't believe that they are. However, the general trend in increasing heights is interesting.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/79/Potus-heights.png

In the article we discussed on Monday, Susan Wendell brought up an interesting point about the cultural construction of disability. She stated, "physical 'imperfection' is more likely to be thought to 'spoil' a woman than a man." I've had a personal run in with this scenario. When I was in junior high, I performed a feat that resulted in 21 surgical stitches on one of my feet. I now have a scar that spans across the width of my foot. After reading this phrase in Wendell's chapter, I was reminded of what my doctor and the nurse were discussing as I sat on the patient table. The doctor (male) and the nurse (female) literally said that my scar didn't matter much cosmetically because I am a guy. A couple of things interested me about these notions. First off, the scar is on my foot, and I doubt that it really would have mattered even if I was a girl, cosmetically. I don't stare at people's feet, even when they are wearing flip-flops, and I'm willing to assert that most people also don't stare at feet. Therefore, why does it matter whether or not I am a girl and whether or not I need plastic surgery. More importantly, I am taken aback when I think of people held in such high authority, reaffirming stereotypes that "'imperfection[s]'...'spoil'...women," but not men. I don't think anything was 'spoil[ed]' at all, nor would anything have been 'spoil[ed]' had the scar been on a girl. The 'imperfection' is barely noticeable and would lack just as much attention on a women as it does on me. I personally don't see how a scar can be disabling to anyone (no matter where it's located, including as mentioned in the article, a facial scar).

Subjectivity and Disability

The concept of 'disability' is so subjective, and the authority of the medical community has largely shaped the social constructions surrounding disability that Susan Wendell's article addressed. The attempts of scientists to define, diagnose, and treat whatever they view as against the norm both reflects the values of their society and reinforces them. Science often times has the agenda of factually proving something that is already widely believed, like we've talked about in anthropology with regards to race or as Rosemarie Garland-Thompson mentioned in her presentation about medical experimentation conducted by the Nazis on those they considered deserving of death. In every case, scientists are approaching their research with preconceived ideas and it's no surprise that subjectivity seeps into the body of medical knowledge.

Ideas about what abilities are valuable and what kind of physicality is most desirable change drastically in different historical contexts. Within the last hundred years in the U.S., being a woman was considered being mentally and physically inferior and pregnancy and menstruation have been considered nothing short of temporary disabilities. I don't know if any of you have read the novel College Girls by Lynn Peril, which I had to read for U.S. History, but it has a chapter about girls beginning to join sports leagues that was absolutely fascinating. It caused an uproar in the medical community and there were publications and personal letters from doctors about the dangers of women engaging in strenuous activities. The description I remember most was that the uterus is attached to the body by a delicate string, and when a woman exerts herself too much it might snap.

The social construct of people with what we currently consider disabilities being a drain on society stems from the misconception that the abilities that they do possess aren’t a valid contribution to society. It’s very similar to the once widespread misunderstanding of women’s bodies in medicine, simply because of the social constructs about women being more passive.

Another transgender- themed article

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15327911

Interesting intersection of a lot of the themes we've talked about...maybe someone wants to use it for their final paper?

Some chilling procedures

Friday’s reading was not only a transition from the articles on disability that we have been discussing, but the reading itself had some shocking information. The reading entitled “Managing Women’s Minds” by Elaine Showalter talked about the treatment of women in the realm of psychiatry during the 1800s. The bulk of the article talked about stereotypes of women and what types of practices were done to alter the behavior and appearance of women who strayed from the norm. Although most of these practices were done in asylums, there were several examples of doctors with certain procedures or different treatments that were done to women outside of the confines of a psychiatric ward. The treatments that struck me the most included injecting ice water into females’ rectums or actually icing the cervix. Along with clitoridectomies, these procedures were all done to combat the nymphomania in women.
With the description of the gentile female with a certain appearance, it reminded me of the lecture by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson today about the medical genocide during WWII. The two events appear to relate because they both involve treatment of people who supposedly have something wrong with them by using a medical ideology. The main component of the success of the treatment of a group of people on the basis of conforming to a certain set of society ideals, is the use of doctors. By having the suggestion for outrageous procedures to curb female sexuality come from doctors, the methods are often trusted and the doctors are entrusted to do as they wish. The unfortunate event of manipulation of medicine as a result of societal pressure has happened throughout history, with women in psychiatric asylums in the 1800s and the extermination of disabled people during WWI are just two examples. What I do wonder about is if this is happening now, in the US.
The last paragraph of the article was equally as interesting when Showalter brought up the point that “despite its limitations, asylum superintendents thought it offered a more tolerant, comfortable, interesting life than some women could expect outside” (98). Although I do see the irony that women receiving oppressive treatment to attempt to conform them to society, it is the pressure of society’s values that brought them there in the first place. In this respect, the women outside, though not receiving psychiatric treatment, are experiencing the pressure of society every day. This also makes me wonder what sort of pressures women face today that are comparable to the feminine, dainty woman of the 1800s. One idea that I did have is the pressure today for women to be skinny and the eating disorder clinics are modern asylums, though I am sure that there are much better examples.

False Assumptions and the Relative Nature of Disability

Society is constructed under the assumption that every participating individual is fully functional and capable of attaining their maximum level of productivity. Architectural design is constructed with the needs of a strong and youthful man in mind. These assumptions are simply incorrect. They rest on another assumption that people are either disabled or they are not, and that those that are disabled do not participate in society at any level. These assumptions are also false. The reality of the situation is that disability is not clear-cut; it is not white-and-black. Like many other things we have talked about, disability occupies a range from no disability, to slight disability (in a rare environment), to mild disability (in the occassional environment), to severe disability (in most environments). Furthermore, disability can occupy the gaps between these arbitrary categories.

Upon realizing this, the next step seems to be a social reconstruction of disability. Stated simply, this step would involve a perpetual effort to create public structures of society that accommodate, to the greatest extent possible, a wide-range of disabled individuals. In doing so, it is crucial that we understand the relative nature of disability to the environment in which the disabled exists. This relative nature of disability will make large-scale accommodations an incredible (but still worth-while) challenge.

Most definitions of disability fail to include the role that the environment plays in determining disability. To understand the relative nature of disability it is important to recognize that disabled people are incapable of functioning in a particular setting. In an extreme case, an individual could be disabled in one setting and, not only functional, but, advantaged in another. Consider an individual over 7 feet tall. This person would be slightly disabled in some environments because some structures are not built with such a tall individual in mind. Conversely, the same individual would be "extra-functional" as a basketball player (or tennis player, etc.) where the environment is completely different.

"Learning to Listen"

In reading, "The Rejected Body" by Susan Wendell, the first statement that I found to really stand out was, "Disability activists and some scholars of disability have been asserting for at least two decades that disability is socially constructed." I thought to myself, what does that mean? Through further reading of her text I began to answer my own question. Social factors or social conditions construct many forms of disability. For example, many forms of physical disabilities or even mental disabilities are a result of wars, civil wars, terrorism, the spread of diseases, or even the deprivation of basic needs and the chaos that such deprivation causes. Other social factors such damaging the environment, creating a toleration of high-risk working conditions, and allowing low public safety standards also promote environments for disabilities to be constructed.

So why then if disability is something that is socially constructed, is it not something that is socially accessible? The best answer that I could come up with is the fact that we do not live in a Utopian Society. We live in a Capitalistic society that is built upon the strong getting stronger and the weak getting weaker, which is a terrible structure, but I feel like that is just the way it is. I mean our society does give help to people with disabilities; however, I think what we need to remember is the many of the people who are receiving help for disabilities are people who have been damaged by social condition, or because they cannot meet the social expectations of performance, or because they have simply been placed at a disadvantage by society. People with a disability will tend to move at a slower pace, and I would like to think the world would move at a slower pace to accommodate them probably because some of them are moving slower because the world has caused their problems, but our world just doesn't function that way. I think the best thing that we can do is not to feel sorry for those who are disabled, but rather to help when we can, but not to pity those who aren't moving as "fast" as we are. I really was able to see this and understand this idea of not pitying those with a disability during out guest speaker in class today, who shocked me more ways than one.

Our guest speaker today, Rosemarie Garland Thomson spoke to us about the T-4 Medical Genocide of persons with disabilities done in Germany by the Nazis. The first part of her speech that caught my attention was the fact that the house where the T-4 project was launched was located on the German street in English meaning, "Animal Park St". For some reason that stuck in my head during the presentation because through the Holocaust and through much of what we have discussed in class regarding the Eugenics movement I have felt that individuals who have believed themselves to be superior have treated groups of people almost as though they were animals. They have performed experiments on them, tested them, and have deemed a life with a disability a life not worth living. I feel as though those people were treated as animals. I think it was at this point in the presentation that Ms. Thomson removed her sweater and I noticed for the first time that her arm was deformed. At that moment I stopped listening, and I don't know why. I just was thinking about her arm. I then proceeded to count her fingers on her other hand and realized that she was missing one. After this continued for about five minutes I realized that I was doing exactly what people with disabilities do not want done to them. I was starring, thinking, pitying. I needed to learn to listen to her story again as the person that began because the fact that her arm was disfigured did not make her any less of a person than when she had began speaking. Once I realized that and refocused I was able to listen to the rest of her speech and listen to her story as opposed to focusing on her appearance, but rather I listened and attained her message.

The social construction of disability

The one disappointment I had with Susan Wendell’s The Social Construction of Disability was her connections between disability and feminism. I understand how both women and the disabled deviate from the norm, and that this norm is solely created by society. Wendell makes it clear that like gender, disability is a social construct as it stems from societal pressures and divisions and also from actual problems in society such as health. I liked Wendell’s argument that the world was made for young, healthy men, and not for women or the disabled; however, I found her examples a little farfetched, especially as there are movements to rectify some of these. For example, she talks about how the lack of acknowledgment of menstruation or childcare in the workplace relates to that of certain disabilities and their limitations, but I feel that the workplace does acknowledge these hardships for women. I have not had that firsthand experience, but I do feel that there are other integral similarities between disabilities and gender which she could have drawn from instead. Firstly, the stigma that women simply cannot do certain things because of their physical inability or emotional instability seems much more relevant. This idea is something that is not limited to the workplace, but to attitudes towards women in general; it affects everything our daily life. Similarly, misunderstanding and stigmatizing mental and physical disabilities spreads the myth that the disabled cannot perform well, when we actually just create that false idea. I wish she had made the connection more clear as it has interesting ramification for our course.

That critique aside, I found her analysis of how we create disabilities to be really provocative, especially considering a new disability in the US: that of obesity. It is said that there is this “obesity epidemic,” and our society is bent on health, fitness, fad diets, and thin celebrities, so could it be that we’re only furthering this disability? We have had a history of cheap, bad fast food influencing this epidemic, but furthermore, we have also created a very narrow norm of what is fit. I understand obese people are not healthy or fit and that they face health risks, but we stigmatize them because of our norms of healthy and fit. We blame them for becoming this way, preventing our understanding of the truth behind their disabilities. As we discussed in class, we even think that maybe they do not deserve the accommodations we have made for the disabled as they may have caused their own disability, but it is this thinking that only furthers the myths of the causes of obesity. It is in part an obstacle that can arise from choice, but as the article points out, we also create obstacles. Wendell sites poverty as the number one factor in causing disability; maybe that applies here as fast food is typically what can be afforded. Additionally, we are only now changing our country’s attitudes towards fast food and fitness. We also must acknowledge how we stereotype these people because of our idea of a normal, ideal body. This example of obesity is just one of many, but it is one to consider when we paint a portrait of the disabled and what they deserve in our society.

A cross-cultural perspective

This week in class we started a new subject of disability and medicine. A new concept that stood out from Susan Wendall’s article “The Rejected Body” was that of the “pace of life” factor. She describes this as something similar to that of the male or white advantage that we talked about before, but this stands out from advantage in that non-disabled people are aware of the marginalization and continue the inaccessibility.
In class when we discussed this article, the idea that disability is also a cultural construction got me thinking about how disability is defined in other cultures. I spent last semester studying in Uganda and for several weeks my group and I focused on public health and development. As part of our hands-on learning, we went on field visits. One such visit was to the house where a mentally disabled person lived with his family. We were unaware at the time where we were going and what we were going to do, but were brought into the house and sat around in the living room. The brother of the man that we were apparently supposed to see went to get him and when he saw all of us sitting in his house, he started screaming and fell to the floor. Needless to say, after we left the house we explained to our guide that we did not feel comfortable in that situation and that we would have never gone if we had known.
It turns out that disabled people are kept more or less as a secret in Uganda and even their families keep quiet about them. I spent time in Northern Uganda later in the semester at a rehabilitation center for former child soldiers and the disabled. The staff at the center told us that they would go to villages and try to persuade people to let them know where disabled children might be living so that they could offer them an opportunity for rehab. They also told us horror stories like one child at the center who used to get tied to a rope attached to a tree in the middle of a field while his parents worked during the day. It seems in these situations that not only were the disabled being denied access to the pace of life, but from life in general.
Obviously there are going to be different conceptions of disability across different cultures, but it was difficult to try to look outside my cultural lens or to see anything but human rights abuse. I wonder if, in a society so obsessed with productivity, people ever resent trying to give disabled people aid and access and why there is such a substantial difference in the construction of disabled people in various cultures.

Disabilites and Society

Susan Wendell's "The Social Construction of Disability" brings up the profound idea of how the pace of society and the expectations create disabilities. Wendell states that increasing the pace of society would lead to "fewer people [meeting] expectations of 'normal' performance." This was a new perspective at looking at disabilities, since I had previously associated the term with more conventional ideas of disabilities like blindness and deafness or mental illnesses that in some way or another, limited the individual. I immediately thought of the educational system, where individuals are all forced to cover the same material as their classmates at a pace dictated by the teacher. It is interesting to note that even amongst individuals not officially diagnosed with any learning disabilities, there are variations in the speed with which the student would be able to process information. Under Wendell's idea of disability, the students that learn at a slower pace would be considered disabled relative to their peers, yet they are not diagnosed with any learning disability. Should they be given additional time to learn the information or should they be punished through their grades for not being able to learn fast enough? Given the society that we are in, the latter route seems to be taken. Due to social and economical constructions, there definitely is an emphasis on production. It seems that the reasons why an individual cannot perform as expected is often overlooked, and instead what the individual produces or does not produce matters more in our society. And by creating a strict set of standards, it is easier for the people that hire jobs and admit students to discern who can produce for them and who cannot.

Accommodations for available access to all is something that should undoubtedly be done. Anyone should be able to go to their favorite restaurant and eat there. In addition, like the example Wendell brought up, a situation where a typist whom cannot walk is denied a job due to a companies frugality demonstrates how much value our society puts on money and reinforces Wendell's idea of disability being a social construct. It seems though, as time passes that situations like that will occur less frequently through various acts that will require new buildings to make provisions for disabled individuals. Even my own experience in high school illustrated the growing ways in which disabled individuals were beginning to be given the same opportunities as the "norm". For example, when I played on the water polo team, one of our two goalies was deaf. During games and practices, an interpreter working for the school, would use sign language to relay what the coach said to him. Of course, he played in a position that allowed him to periodically turn to look at the interpreter during the game, but his skills were important enough for the coach to keep him on the team. Still, even without totally reforming our society and economic systems in place, strides are continually being made towards realizing Wendell's dream to allow disabled individuals the same opportunities as "able" individuals.

Disability and poverty

In reading Susan Wendell’s “The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability,” I learned several new things about disability that were of particular interest to me because I have a close family friend with a nonphysical disability. Wendell’s argument that disability is partly a social construction is quite valid, especially in the light of what we have learned recently about how gender and race can also be socially constructed.

One point that Wendell makes that I find particularly interesting is her argument about how poverty is the single most disabling circumstance for people with disabilities. Poverty, in essence, keeps people disabled because I think that many people could reach a level of functionality if not impoverished. Wendell cites the inability of many disabled individuals to earn enough money to buy medicine, personal care, and technological aids that they need to live comfortably. Governing insurance benefits and social assistance have “irrational rules” (as Wendell says) that keep people from getting care because those that run disability programs (and some others) often jump to the conclusion that disabled people take advantage of or try to manipulate the system to get more than what they actually “need” or deserve. In this manner, people with disabilities are thought of just like people on welfare, as the Hampshire College pamphlet described the stereotype of the welfare “queen” who manipulates welfare checks.

As I discussed in class, my mother’s experience working in public schools has taught me about the lack of proper medical care that physically and nonphysically disabled children who live below the poverty line receive. Learning and behavior disorders often go undiagnosed because the parents cannot afford to take their children to a doctor because of a lack of proper insurance. Most importantly, it is these disabilities (among others) that prove to be a huge obstacle in social and educational advancement in their formative years in school, thus socially constructing their disability.

More on Normal . . .

The problem with normal obviously, or perhaps not so much, is that "normal" in this society is perceived as "correct" or "proper"or "right" and everything else becomes or is seen as "incorrect," "improper," etc.

I'm blind and there is nothing wrong with me being blind; there is also nothing wrong with being sighted. They are simply two different physical traits, like blonde or brown or red hair. While one may be favored by a society, that doesn't make the other colors of hair wrong or less than. At the same time, our society has made it seem so via representations of beauty, advertisements for hair products, etc. I don't need to be nor do I desire to be sighted and I know this is a difficult notion to fathom for most average people.

My problem isn't being blind; my problem is I live in a society that assumes I can see and makes little or no accommodations for those who can't so that we can live our lives without extra added expenses (monetary and otherwise). So, my problem isn't that I can't read print. My problem is that manufacturers of the texts refuse to make things available for me to read in computer formats (something they put the printed word in before it is turned into ink based text) and the government does not believe it is cost effective to teach people (even blind children) Braille in this country (90 to 97% of all blind people in this country are functionally illiterate - they can't see ink-based texts and they can't read Braille). My problem isn't that I can't drive; it's that this society does not value public transportation. My problem isn't that I can't work; it's that no one is likely to hire me even with all of my degrees, job skills, experience, etc. (there is a 70% unemployment rate amongst the EMPLOYABLE Disabled people in this country --"employable" in sociological terms means that one is not only capable of working but actively seeking employment). And so on, and so on.

To put it another way, I'm also left handed and in this society left-handedness is seen as "wrong". I know this because when I enter a classroom, if I'm lucky, one whole desk will be for someone like me (god forbid there be two of us in the room at once!), scissors are made to cut one way, when I was growing up I got smacked with a ruler every time I picked up a pencil, I'm the one who has to make sure I'm sitting in the proper place at the table so I don't bump elbows with the "normals", and so on and so on. There is nothing wrong with being left handed anymore than there is anything wrong with being right handed or ambidextrous; left handedness simply isn't the average way of doing things and that doesn't make it wrong and I shouldn't have to change or be made to feel inferior but there's rub.

In this society, certain things, certain people, are made to feel inferior not because it is meant to be or because it has to be but rather because we chose to make it so at some point in time and now believe it to be "normal." In sociology, this is called a social construct; it's an arbitrary notion about something (good or bad) that appears or feels natural and this notion creates real social consequences. Disability, like race, gender, sex, etc. is a social construct. It is a made up category that changes across time, space and place, it has the appearance of naturalness or that it has always been that way and this category has real social consequences for those who are identified as disabled and those who are not. After all, there is advantage given without merit for those who are perceived within a particular norm just as there is disadvantage given (also without merit) to those who are perceived as abnormal.

Carolyn Tyjewski
Cultural Studies Program
University of California, Davis

Links to more info on disability

In case you're interested...

This is a very informative article by the speaker coming on Wednesday
http://www.centerwomenpolicy.org/pdfs/DIS2.pdf

Here's the film making one with all the film clips and info
http://www.roaring-girl.com/

And this is a great compilation of all kinds of different topics, including a few blogs
http://www.disabilityhistory.org/links_new.html

Enjoy!

Overlooking Disability

Susan Wendell’s article, The Social Construction of Disability was unlike anything I’ve ever read or considered before. When she first stated that pace of society affects disability rates, I had no idea how she would form her argument. As I continued reading, however, I found myself embarrassed that I had never considered “pace” a means of establishing, highlighting, or increasing perceived disabilities. I found her example about quick travel, and those who are incapable of moving quickly, most relevant.
At times, I did feel like her argument failed to note some of the allowances society has made for “real people.” At one point in the essay, she states that society assumes a strong, healthy male as its citizen and explains that while exceptions might be made for the common cold, they are not made for menstruation. I think that here, Wendell fails to recognize some comman allowances society has made. For example, what about an allotted number of “sick days” that most jobs give employees? Or maternity leave—also allowed by most jobs to allow women to rest during their final months of pregnancy and not have to return to work immediately after giving birth? Later she describes how the architecture of many buildings assumes that people will be able to walk long distances, climb stairs and reach door handles. I could be wrong, but I believe that since the 90’s any renovations of old buildings or construction of new buildings must be more accommodating—such as the inclusion of an elevator. (I know this because of rumors when I was a freshman that the reason Emory didn’t renovate my freshman dorm was because they would have to add an elevator which would be very expensive.—I’m not sure if this is true, but it might be relevant to this discussion).
By the end of the article, Wendell ultimately claims that an ideal society would not cure disability, but accept and make accommodations for disabilities. This reminds me a lot of our discussion regarding intersex and transgender individuals. Like with that discussion, I’m really not sure how I feel about this idea. I think pondering this “ideal” world seems somewhat pointless. Personally, in my ideal world, disabilities wouldn’t exist, but since this will never be the case, we should just work with the society that we have, and make accommodations as necessary. While I certainly feel that Wendell overlooks some accommodations society has made for disabled individuals, I do agree with a number of Wendell’s points and think we need to continue to think about possible disabilities before we assume that everyone works the same way.

Disability in a New Light

I found this article really interesting. Before reading it, I initially was confused. I thought of disability only in the context of someone physically or mentally incapable of doing things; someone that was mentally handicapped or someone with a broken leg. How was society responsible for their injuries or incapabilities? This article shed a lot of light on the subject of disability for me. I was forced to think of it differently. I thought really interesting how Wendell stated that "public health and sanitation that increases lifespan causes more disability because the number of old people with disabilities increases." I have never thought that an increase in public health and sanitation causes disability. These are seen as positive and beneficial to society. To think of the negative impact it does have on society is interesting. To know that society is progressing so as to increase lifespan, yet not supporting that increase is hard to fathom. Society has caused these people to live longer lives and yet is not taking any steps to help these people live productive, longer lives.

I also found interesting her notion that as pace of life increases disability increases. This is a notion well known to many. There are many articles on how the pace of life in the United States has increased and how this increase has lead to health issues such as hypertension (a major cause of cardiovascular disease). In this aspect the U.S. is often compared with Western European nations. The U.S. tends to have a higher percentage of hypertension than many of these nations, and the pace of U.S. citizens' lives is often noted as the cause. I have thought of this before but I had never really put together how this can be a debilitating issue for people. Society creates a world where people are forced to live at a pace they cannot handle. They are still capable of doing their jobs and doing their jobs well, but are forced out of the workplace because they can no longer keep up with the pace.

I really liked how Wendell pointed out the architecture of society, how society was "planned with a young adult, non-disabled male paradigm of humanity in mind." Thinking about this I realize that it is true in many cases. I injured myself in high school, had to have surgery on my leg, and had to use a wheelchair at school for a couple of weeks. When using my wheelchair I realized just how not handicapped accessible my school was. I could not enter school from the front anymore because there was no ramp, only steps. I had to go to the library one day, and in order to get there I literally had to wheel myself around the entire campus because the usual path to the library required going up and down several steps. I felt completely helpless when in the wheelchair. My two week disability is nothing compared to many people that are debilitated for life, but thinking back on that experience I realize some of the struggles they face. I was still capable of getting to class, but I was late to everyone. Special accommodations had to be made for me: I left class early so as to not be too late to the next class, use the elevator to get upstairs in the main building. I realize how real their struggle is. Society creates this world that is supposed to be better, faster, more productive. However, by doing so they take many productive people out of productivity. If a few accommodations could be made more people could stay in the work force and there would be a smaller burden on society to take care of the disabled.

Overpopulation

The other day in class we discussed the ethics of population control. The discussion was sparked by our assignment to watch the movie “La Operacion.” This film analyzed the process through which Puerto Rico’s government has coerced one in three women on the island to be sterilized. I think most people agree that it is unethical to trick women into being sterilized without their knowledgeable consent. Furthermore, I believe that most of our class agrees that without a change in socioeconomic structure of Puerto Rico, sterilization will not fix the economic difficulties the country faces.
However, my question is not if the travesties performed against the women of Puerto Rico is ethical, but instead if under different circumstances population control can be an ethical solution to the problem of overpopulation. After completing some outside research into the subject area, I have come to believe that population control may not be the only answer to the problem of overpopulation. However, if humans continue to live with the current lifestyle we have developed, population control may be used as an ethical means of aiding the problem of overpopulation.
It is only with an understanding of our natural environment and the interaction between the environment and human beings that we can begin to tackle the reason of why overpopulation exists. Humans, unlike other species, view themselves as a master of nature, while other animals are a part of nature. Urbanization, a typical effect of rapid industrialization, has led to the explosion of infectious diseases and the destruction of the natural environment. Through the common practices of deforestation, construction of dams and irrigation, the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides human beings have attempted to control the environment. Although the efforts are typically thought to improve the economy of a given population, environmental degradation usually leads to further economic inequality within a population, which furthers the growth of poverty. A large population size contributes to the contamination of our natural resources: air, water, and natural foods.
Population control may not be the only answer to fixing the economic and social inequalities that are found across the globe. However, it is due to the choices that humans have made in our very recent history that there is a need at all for mandatory population control. Other species are not faced with the issue of population control because the environment should control population size naturally. Humans have tried to conquer nature, and that is the reason for unwieldy overpopulation. If we continue to dominate our environment then population control though techniques like mandatory sterilizations may be necessary. Enforcing population control may appear unethical, especially after being performed immorally in areas like Puerto Rico. However, I argue that it is the blatant abuse of our environment that is the more unethical issue at hand. Furthermore, obligatory population control techniques can be used in an ethical way to deal with the problem of overpopulation that human beings have created.

"The Social Construction of Disability"

Susan Wendell's article describes "the social construction of disability" as "the interaction of the biological and the social to create (or prevent) disability." She goes on to explain that the world is structured as though all people are physically strong, all people are shaped the same, as though all people can hear and see equally as well, and as though no one needs to take a rest in a public facility. This concept sparked numerous realizations including the fact that all cars have the same size seat belts despite the fact that no two people are the same size; people requiring a larger seat belt on an air plan must request one in advanced instead of all seats being pre-equipped with such a belt; chairs in classrooms, buses, airplanes, roller coasters, and waiting rooms only accommodate the "normal" sized person; doors to many buildings are extremely heavy and only accessible to stronger people; shelves and clothing racks are arranged at certain heights not accessible to all; very few stores carry clothing for extreme shapes and sizes and therefore, many people are forced to seek out specialty stores (for example, petite and larger sizes); and the fact that many dorms on college campuses are not wheelchair accessible (for example, only a few of Emory's dorms have elevators. However, what if a student on the fourth floor break his/her leg? How is he/she expected to get to his/her room?).

Upon finishing Wendell's article, I tried to think of ways in which society is structured in a way that hampers my abilities. As a lefty, I have run into numerous problems. While companies have developed tools such as left-handed scissors, desks, and baseball gloves, these products are not usually available at general stores or in classrooms. As an elementary school student I struggled to learn how to cut paper for art projects because my teachers never had left-handed scissors and I always bumped into others while writing and eating. I have been forced to conform to society in several ways. For instance, I can use right-handed desks. However, they are uncomfortable and I have had to modify my writing style in order to use them. In addition, in large lecture rooms and the average classroom, very few left handed desks are provided and if they are present, they are usually in the far back corners of the room. Other everyday products I have had to "learn" how to use include the computer mouse, car gears, spiral notebooks, golf clubs, and screwdrivers.

While I have been able to overcome my "disability", I can't help but think of others in much more severe cases. For example, this past summer I was a nanny for 4-year-old twins with cerebral palsy and their little 2-year-old brother who was "normal". Because one of the twins was unable to walk or talk, daily activities were very difficult. Wherever we went, I had to have a stroller and therefore, struggled with entering many buildings due to the smaller doors. I had to take a longer path to the neighborhood playground because I could not push a stroller up cement stairs. Fortunately, there were several facilities catered specifically toward children with "disabilities". Our local Jewish Community Center had just built an enormous playground that was wheelchair and stroller accessible. Therefore, parents with different children could participate in numerous activities that once only "normal" children could. Also, when I brought the kids to the swimming pool, there was a ramp I could walk down while carrying the child who could not walk. Wendell's article brought to light many issues I had not previously thought about.

Also

http://valleywag.com/tech/transitions/microsofts-sex-change-309008.php

Interesting article about coming out as a transgender individual.

What about now?

In her chapter The Dark Side of Birth Control Dorothy Roberts discusses birth control’s ties to the Eugenics movement in the US as a way to determine whether or not it is truly a racist tool. Initially, I was confused as to Roberts’ own view on the issue. She makes it clear that Margaret Sanger, the mother of birth control, was indeed an ally of the Eugenics group to the point that the American Birth Control League was a side project for the Eugenics movement. Roberts cites some disturbing quotations from the Eugenics movement such as, “…America is seriously endangering her future by making fetishes of democracy, equality, and universal education,” from E. Huntington’s review of Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race and, “it is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind” from the decision in Buck v. Bell (65 and 69). These are clearly racist remarks that Roberts includes so that the reader may understand the ramifications of Sanger’s alliance with the Eugenics movement.

Roberts, however, is also hesitant to condemn Sanger as a racist. She writes how Sanger wanted to avoid opposition from women’s and religious groups that focused on chastity, forcing her to seek support from the eugenicists. She also testifies that Sanger’s goals were about a woman’s choice, but the question remains throughout the article of what color woman should enjoy that choice and what color woman should not have a choice. This ambiguity allows the reader to decide for his/her own what Sanger’s purpose was in actuality.

Just like the reader, the black community decided for itself with mixed opinions. Some like DuBois believed that birth control signified opportunity for advancement whereas other black leaders like Francis or Garvey believed it was a new type of genocide or interfered with nature and god. Even today, black groups like www.blackgenocide.org believe that birth control and Planned Parenthood are tools to eradicate the black race. Take a look: http://www.blackgenocide.org/planned.html

Planned Parenthood, though it does not acknowledge its controversial roots on its website, does address the issue of race in its mission statement. It states, “Planned parenthood believes in the fundamental right of each individual, through the world, to manage his or her fertility, regardless of the individual’s income, marital status, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, national origin, or residence….we believe that reproductive self-determination must be voluntary and preserve the individual’s right to privacy…” Who are we to believe? If anything, we can take from this case the lesson that we are to question things we may even always accept as good. Here it is with the practice and implementation rather than the experimentation.

"The Truth About Drug Companies"

During our last class, we discussed the concept about how drugs companies are extremely rich. I bought up the point that some poor countries, such as India (see the link in my previous blog post) use reverse engineering tactics to manufacture drugs which they cannot afford economically, but need as a population. Doing so, however, often breaks intellectual patent laws and results in drug companies losing profits. We continued our discussion, discussing the idea that profit created in a drug company usually doesn't go toward further clinical research or employees' salaries. Rather, the money goes toward further marketing and advertising. I was taken quite aback by this idea and decided to look a bit more into the details. A quick Google search, once again, revealed this article: "The Truth About Drug Companies" by the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Marcia Angell.

Before I even read this article, I wondered to myself why a drug company would really need to advertise. I've seen tons of drug company advertisements in tons of places, ranging from on billboards at major sports events to advertisements during prime time television. On the basic level, one may wonder why drug companies are advertising to the general population. Afterall, you need a prescription to receive just about any type of medication one may see on television. I always thought that it would make more sense to target physicians and hospitals with drug advertisements rather than the general population. I think this in itself creates a problem when I a patient sees a doctor and says, "Doctor, I've seen the Requip commercials on television and am pretty sure that I have Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS)." The doctor then proceeds to see if the patient actually has RLS or if the patient simply believes he has the disease. While this scenario may get more money for drug companies, I think it results in many extra diagnoses of RLS, earning the drug company more money. Morally, I think the right thing for drug companies to do is to present their drugs to physicians and hospitals only. Then, when a patient comes in with the symptoms of RLS, or complaining about symptoms that could be RLS, the doctor should see for himself if the patient has RLS rather than letting the patient self-diagnose and reveal his/her "professional" opinion.

Looking at the actual article, I am first taken aback by the fact that "the top U.S. drug makers spend 2.5 times as much on marketing and administration as they do on research." What bothers me most about this is that it's not a problem that's hard to fix. Budget reallocations done by the top administrators in any given fiscal year could solve this problem. I further don't understand why a drug company needs to spend so much money for advertising purposes. If they followed my earlier idea of advertising drugs, I'm more than confident that the drug companies could same tons of money on advertising. Drug companies could quite easily reallocate a portion of their marketing budget toward research and development. However, the way drug companies currently operate leads me to believe that there is actually some sort of an advantage to discovering drugs later than earlier. I'm not sure if it's a political or financial reason, but I would definitely like to know the reason.

The article continues to say that a major drug company "[paid] the NIH only 0.5 percent in royalties for [a] drug" which the NIH created and the drug company sold. We all know that drug companies are extremely rich...are they withholding funds from those that can research drugs and actually create them for financial reasons or political reasons? Are they holding money for purely greed or for other, more subtle reasons?

http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/09/09_401.html