 Subjects -> DISABILITY (Total: 100 journals)
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- HERO WITH ZEROES': Tensions of Using an Anti-Discrimination Framework
and an Impact Case Approach for Disability Rights Advocacy in China
Authors: Zhiying Ma; Zhen Ni
Abstract: In 2014, a blind massage therapist named Li Jinsheng took the National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) in Braille, the first to do so in China. To everyone's surprise, he turned in blank answer sheets for two of the four subjects, which generated strong criticisms from the general public and blind communities. This article examines the conditions, process, and aftermaths of this event to consider what it means to use an anti-discrimination framework and an impact case approach for disability rights advocacy. Data comes from observation of media representations and discussions, interviews with key actors and stakeholders, and a focus group with blind college students.Our analysis of Li's case shows that in China, anti-discrimination actions often take the form of using individual cases to attack single, identifiable policy barriers, and they are typically carried out by people who are not directly impacted by the state's paternalistic biobureaucracy or the vulnerabilities it generates. As such, these cases might not sufficiently represent the desires and struggles of most people with disabilities, and the individualistic approach might further alienate the disabled communities. While effective in dismantling the particular policy barrier, such anti-discrimination actions may fall short of addressing more systemic, structural issues. This article ends with reflections on the tensions in using anti-discrimination impact cases in China and beyond, and on how to work on deeper struggles and build broader alliances in disability rights advocacy.
PubDate: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 14:59:42 -050
- Will's Story: Managing Culturally Irreconcilable Identities in
Everyday Life
Authors: Tara A. Fannon
Abstract: This paper presents a case analysis from a larger research project surfacing visually disabled men's experiences of masculinity and disability in everyday life. Using the Listening Guide, a voice-centered relational method of narrative analysis, and the work of Erving Goffman and Critical Disability Studies, I present Will's story of self-exploration and illuminate how he navigates and negotiates relationships and social life in American culture, where masculinity and disability are commonly constructed as irreconcilable statuses. This paper advances knowledge about the mutuality between identities and social-structural experiences, with impairment situated between these processes as an embodied tether, that gives meaning and provides nuance to one's understanding and experience of himself in the world as a visually disabled man.
PubDate: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 14:59:41 -050
- The Voices of Typers: Examining the Educational Experiences of Individuals
Who Use Facilitated Communication
Authors: Aja McKee; Audri Sandoval Gomez
Abstract: As the number of students with autism grows, professionals must find ways to understand how to best educate this student population. Although current research addresses teaching students with autism, studies on educating autistic students with limited or unreliable verbal speech is nominal. In this qualitative study, interviews with eight autistics who type using the method facilitated communication are analyzed in relation to their educational experiences. The study resulted in a number of key findings that play significant roles in the participants' educational experiences, including (a) the notion of disability hierarchy and the presumption of competence, (b) the importance of building relationships and the perceptions of friendship, (c) developing a sensory friendly environment, and (d) understanding behavior and body movement. Results suggest that the educational needs of these students must be reexamined. Teachers must establish a deeper understanding of the disability and develop innovative practices to best meet the needs of autistic students with limited or unreliable verbal speech in their classrooms.
PubDate: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 14:59:41 -050
- Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Disability, and the Injustice of
Misrecognition
Authors: Amber Knight
Abstract: This article makes the case that the normative aspirations of recognition politics are worth pursuing as a dimension of disability politics— although the tactics need to be revised— through an interpretation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Specifically, I read Frankenstein's Creature as a visibly disabled subject, as someone who is misrecognized and mistreated due to his body's physical features, in order to analyze the tragedy of the novel: how the not-so-monstrous Creature can never see himself as anything other than a monster since he is never afforded the positive recognition he desires. The article concludes by considering how the tragedy could have been avoided in an attempt to envision a better path toward social justice for people with disabilities and other victims of identity-based subordination. More broadly, this article attempts to bring Mary Shelley into the political theory canon, casting her as a progressive social critic who believed that misrecognition creates monsters out of those who are negatively labelled as such.
PubDate: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 14:59:41 -050
- Shakespeare and the Construction of Intellectual Disability: The Case of
Touchstone
Authors: Alice Equestri
Abstract: In this article I analyse how Shakespeare uses early modern paradigms of intellectual disability to construct the identity of Touchstone, the fool of As You Like It. Although Touchstone is no real fool but simply performs like one, his actions and mocking reflections on the characters he faces expose how Shakespeare was very well acquainted with socio-legal and even medical definitions of natural folly in his time. A reading of the character as a natural fool according to specific paradigms of the period further reveals how Touchstone enacts an expanded 'complex embodiment' of disability.
PubDate: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 14:59:41 -050
- Prenatal Nondiscrimination Laws: Disability, Social Conservatism, and the
Political Economy of Genetic Screening
Authors: Jennifer M. Denbow
Abstract: This article analyzes recent state laws and legislative debates in the United States concerning the prohibition of abortions performed because of a diagnosis of fetal disability. The article brings together critical theories to analyze the legislative records—including floor debates and committee hearings—in the four states that enacted disability PRENDAs before 2019. This analysis shows how social conservatives use disability PRENDAs to present themselves as the protector of the oppressed, while advancing their views about family and gender. Furthermore, I argue that PRENDAs place the burden for structural economic and political concerns on the shoulders of individuals, especially pregnant persons, while largely ignoring the medical-industrial complex as well as the government's own poor funding of social services for people with disabilities. Critical attention thus needs to be paid to how factors such as the ascendancy of genetics, the privatization of medicine, and the state's facilitation of capital accumulation for biotechnology corporations help constitute the ideal self-regulating risk-averse pregnant neoliberal subject. To bring attention to these factors, the article examines the political economy of non-invasive prenatal tests (NIPTs).
PubDate: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 14:59:41 -050
- DSQ Family Photo, Fall 2020
Authors: Brenda Brueggemann; Elizabeth Brewer, Kelsey Henry, Ashley Roy, Greta Schmitz
Abstract: No abstract available.
PubDate: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 14:59:40 -050
- Disability, Climate Change, and Environmental Violence: The Politics of
Invisibility and the Horizon of Hope
Authors: Julia Watts Belser
Abstract: This article brings disability theory and activism into conversation with environmental justice, a conversation that has often been stymied by a fundamental difference in approaching disability. Environmental justice movements position disability as a visceral marker of environmental harm, while disability movements claim disability as a site of value and vitality, a position I call "disability embrace." Rather than adjudicate these differences, I use them to pinpoint a barrier to political alliance: environmental disability is a consequence of structural violence. I argue that disability politics offer vital resources for grappling with climate change. Applying insights from disability studies and disability activism to the analysis of environmental damage reveals the political stakes of diagnosis—the way power contours how, when, and to what ends we recognize human and ecological impairment. Disability insights illuminate pervasive cultural patterns of invisibility and climate denial. Disability critiques of futurity and cure can also reconfigure the way we approach hope and help fashion a new narrative of what it might mean to live well in the Anthropocene.
PubDate: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 14:59:40 -050
- The Royal Treatment: Temporality and Technology in The King's Speech
Authors: Jared S. Richman
Abstract: This essay examines the intersections of class, technology, and disability manifest within The King's Speech. It argues that the film obfuscates modern scientific and critical understanding of communication disorders by rendering stuttering as a moral failure rather than by attempting to understand it as a socially constructed condition contingent upon established societal and temporal norms. The essay identifies the social codes enforcing correct and eloquent speech that create a political and social climate for "compulsory fluency"—the socially imperative verbal facility promoted as necessary to participate in public life. Crucially and somewhat ironically, with its emphasis on the nobility of the title character, the film sublimates an inherent tension between media technology and the lingering social stigma surrounding disability. The King's Speech thus situates compulsory fluency as an essential component of modern kingship. By reading the film's strategic deployment of radio technology alongside its troubled representation of class and his fraught invocation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the essay reads attitudes towards vocal disability within the context of royalty, patriarchy, and national identity. Ultimately, the essay locates The King's Speech as a film whose image of modern kingship grounds itself upon a notion of imperial authority as technologically constructed but ultimately disabled by a national fantasy of historical wholeness in the fabricated kinship between a monarch and his people.
PubDate: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 14:59:40 -050
- Star Performances: Ed Roberts on the Speaking Circuit, 1983-1995
Authors: Scot Danforth
Abstract: This article uses historical research methods to explore noted disability rights leader Ed Roberts' performances on the speaker circuit between 1983, when he left his position as director of the California Department of Rehabilitation, and his death in 1995. This article examines how he managed his performed identity, his self as presented on stage, in order to be a disability star. Using his own life story as a poignant example, he narrated an autobiography of how a paralyzed man could live a vigorous, successful, indeed a joyful life. His personal stories communicated his lived experiences of battling discrimination and stereotypes. Roberts skillfully and strategically marshalled his own growing celebrity as the most prominent disabled American while he promoted the cause of civil rights for disabled people.
PubDate: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 14:59:40 -050
- Friday night disability: The portrayal of youthful social interactions in
television's Friday Night Lights
Authors: Ewa McGrail; J. Patrick McGrail, Alicja Rieger
Abstract: Youth with disabilities negotiate social interaction with peers with several notable disadvantages in ableist culture. In addition, the characterizations of both real and fictional characters in mass media, particularly television, have an impact as well. However, youth with disabilities are significantly underrepresented in television series. Using the model of social relations by Alan Fiske and descriptive research design, we quantitatively examined the televisual characterization of a youth who acquires a disability in the television drama Friday Night Lights. We found that using the Fiskeian social model helped to uncover the social reality of disability as portrayed through youthful social interactions, which we closely tracked in the first season of this program. We situate this reality in the broader context of cultural narratives about disability in mass media.
PubDate: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 14:59:40 -050
- Triangulating Disability, Relationality, and Communication
Authors: Brenda Brueggemann; Elizabeth Brewer, Kelsey Henry
Abstract: No abstract available.
PubDate: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 14:59:39 -050
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