I discussed this film as soon as it was shown on TV but feel I should
join in again-the TV showing was my second viewing and I had the same
reaction both times-I found nothing positive about it-it was abeist
and used a medical model construct-will someone help me with the positives.
Phyllis Rubenfeld
On Wed, 14 Oct 1998, Ron Amundson wrote:
> I have mixed feelings about the documentary. On the one hand, it was a
> _heroic doctor_ show, about fear of disease, and not about disability at
> all. On the other (and I didn't even fully recognize this on first viewing)
> it exhibited a lot of the bigotry against the "afflicted" without the
> producers even seeming to notice that bigotry was being depicted. (So it
> _was_ about disability; it just depicted an unselfconsciously bigoted
> version.)
>
> [from Simi]
>
> >"...Bad enough to be crippled, worse to be a constant
> >reminder."
> >If that kind of narrative had been analyzed to uncover the impact on
> >disabled people, and the prejudice on which those views are based, I
> >would have no objection - but it was dropped in with no comment.
>
>
> Right. The quotation that jarred me was a mother talking about her son
> after he came home from the hospital, and his horrible "Frankenstein walk"
> in his braces. When I first heard this kind of statement I thought "Ok, now
> they're going to talk about disability prejudice" but no, they just
> exhibited the prejudice and walked on past.
>
> > The dcotors and nurses were portrayed uniformly as good and
> >benevolent people. We know this wasn't always the case.
>
> Yep. They hinted at how horribly the kids were treated in hospitals, but
> nothing like the truth. The truth (that children with polio were often
> treated in a way that would be universally characterized as abuse if it
> happened today) would spoil the heroic doctor story. I didn't go to a
> hospital when I had polio ... they were too full (lucky me) ... but I've
> seen some of the stories on Polio Listservs. The producers had to have made
> a conscious decision not to describe the lives of hospitalized children in
> too much detail. They just described what they looked like to "normals".
> They had "Frankenstein walks". Even the technique Simi mentioned of
> interviewing most survivors as talking heads, with no indication of their
> permanent disability, allowed the viewer to keep the image of pathetic
> crippled children (not disabled adults) as the theme of the show.
>
> It might be an interesting classroom exercise to show this film late in a
> course on disability studies and see how students reacted. The film elicits
> the same kind of pitying attitude that certain students develop in DS
> courses (mine anyhow). So reaction to the film might be a good test of
> which students were really catching on and which ones were just learning to
> mouth the slogans.
>
> Ron
>
> __
> Ron Amundson
> University of Hawaii at Hilo
> Hilo, HI 96720-4091
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
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