At 12:23 AM 5/1/02 -0400, Shane Holten wrote:
>).....some of the attitudes expressed in these threads are very
>hypocritical.....people with disabilities "know" what people without
>disabilities "think" about people with disabilities....
Shane and all:
I have to take exception to what you say here. The idea that people with
disabilities are very aware of the Ableist paradigms that dominate much of
our world is, it seems to me, very real. It seems to me that conversations
say, around the built environment, exist because societies were set up,
unwittingly or not, on a majority model where bodies were bipedal and
ambulatory. And why not? Most people of the world are. That, however,
doesn't make it right or acceptable.
Now, please, before the hate mail starts a flying, I am not talking
individually as in I think of everyone who isn't disabled as Ableist. I'm
speaking in general terms of a minority being aware of majority
thought. There is, after all, a social and cultural history at work from
Nazi experimentation (thanks Susan) to newscasts which label disease and
disability as tragic, or inspiring (and little else) to telethons for
cures, to Ugly laws, which tell people with disabilities what kinds of
lives and bodies are socially acceptable/"healthy" and which are not.
This "double consciousness" idea is not new. WEB Dubious wrote about
Blacks being aware of Whiteness (and he had things like language tests, and
Jim Crow laws that Whites imposed on Blacks in America) to point to. The
idea of Asian-Americans as a "Model Minority" was a label applied by the
mainstream (White) media here in the early 80's. Similarly, Feminists have
written long and hard about Women being aware of being in a "Man's
World" (corporate glass ceilings and the like) and GLBTIA folks are
aware of dominate heterosexual paradigms (socially/legally unrecognized
marriages, etc.) of the world we live in. Why can't the same idea apply to
the disability community at-large.
Now, back to the question of simulation exercises, (and still not something
I have the "right" answer to) My question is: Why must an audience "act it
out". Why can't we ask them to use their imagination? (I know, that still
doesn't eliminate the potential for pity). We talk about race and
ethnicity, religion, abstractly in these awareness workshops-- and yep, we
may ask them to role play -- but we don't feel the need to simulate a
synagogue to talk about anti-semitism. The most we might do is one of
those "cocktail party exercises." And have a discussion about what they
imagined. I said, when asked, on another listserv once that I often ask my
students to imagine a particular emotion such a grief or anger from their
own experience and write/speak from that place. I did not think that they
needed to say, handle a gun at a shooting gallery to really "know" the
emotion anger. I trusted their intelligence (mostly) and their
imagination, and talked their writing and thoughts through with them. The
same kind of logic could apply here I think.
We're talking here about "awareness training". It's not supposed to be a
class in method acting.
Ok, off my soapbox now.
Johnson
Johnson Cheu
http://people.english.ohio-state.edu/cheu.1
The Ohio State University, Dept. of English
421 Denney Hall, 164 W. 17th. Ave.
Columbus, OH 43210
(614) 292-1730 (Office); (614) 292-6065 (Dept.); (614) 292-7816 (Fax)
****************
Curriculum Consultant, Project LEND
http://www.osu.edu/units/osunc
Nisonger Center, McCampbell Hall
The Ohio State University
1581 Dodd Drive, Columbus, OH 43210
(614) 247-6073 (Office); (614) 292-3727 (Fax)
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