Hi
I am currently teaching two undergraduate disability courses at The University of Toledo where the topic of discussion has sometimes been Christopher Reeve. The results have been fascinating, and I would like to share them with you.
In one, a group of students did a research project on Reeve and also the criticisms which Mary Johnson has made in her book, Make Them Go Away. This discussion occurred two weeks before Reeve died. One of the disabled students in my class argued that Reeve was the most famous disabled person alive, and that she understood Johnson is a nondisabled person, and that this impacted on the way she read Johnson's criticisms of Reeve. She felt that Reeve's lived, embodied experience of impairment and disability gave him more credibility in these debates than Johnson, who she understood was nondisabled. This was bringing an issue associated with identity politics into the "cure" debate -- and that is something we have not discussed much so far on this list. She added that she felt that Johnson's likening of Reeve to Clint Eastwood, who has waged a pulblic battle against the ADA, was also unfair, given the support which Reeve gave to a number of disability organisations that addresse!
d both
disability and impairment - such as the National Organization on Disability and the Spinal Cord Injury Association. She also discussed the comments Reeve made at a Democratic Convention about disability rights.
Another student said that a rights movement such as the disability movement can often experience a conflict between minority and majority rights. So for instance, she likened a person who chooses to work as a "freak" and another who chooses to abort a disabled fetus, as two individuals who might be pursuing their own rights, even though they might conflict with the broader rights of other disabled people. I wonder if this is a topic that often comes up in other discussions about these issues?
Another interesting thread of the discussion involved the impairment/disability distinction.
What my class discussed was this - even accepting the social model as simply a heuristic device - that a thorough discussion about either prevention or cure cannot be conducted in the absence of a sociology of impairment as well as a sociology of disablement. In this regard, they found a number of social issues (such as war, poverty, domestic violence) where it seemed rather unproblematic to them to argue for prevention of impairment... and of course, disability scholars in general work for the prevention of disability.
Another week, the class discussed the large numbers of D/deaf people who have chosen to have cochlear implants as a problematic development in the "cure" debate. In the US, national Deaf organisations originally regarded these implants as a form of eugenics, but more and more Deaf people have come to regard them as similar to a prosthetic, rather than a cure - or a "cure" that did not take their D/deaf identity away. So they seemed to believe that issues of identity were more complex than some of the discussions of "cure" might have us believe.
In these discussions, the students in my class seemed to find that the rhetoric which sometimes pervades activist discussion of these issues rather shallow.
Within a week of one of these classes, Reeve died, and I personally was really disappointed that few American scholars expressed the sadness about his passing that Tom Shakespeare did. Almost immediately, attention was diverted to a discussion of the media representation of Reeve's death, rather than any genuine empathy for the loss of a life. I was personally sad to hear that he had died, but also sad that there seemed little empathy for Reeve as a human being.
Another class I taught actually engaged with Tom Shakespeare's work - and many students were incredibly impressed by his balanced and careful approach to these issues. In fact, they probably related better to his work than many other scholars they examined. He offers careful analysis, rather than diatribes, and they were impressed by that. His work really did seem to challenge them to move beyond the binaries. I wonder what other teachers have experienced in their classrooms? Have your students had similar reactions? What teaching techniques or strategies have you used to engage them in these discussions?
Cheers
Mark
Mark Sherry
Ability Center of Toledo Endowed Chair in Disability Studies
University of Toledo
University Hall, Room 2100
Mail Stop 920
Toledo, Ohio 43606-3390
Phone: 419 530 7245 (w) 419 297 7026 (cell)
Fax 419 530 7238
email: [log in to unmask]
---------------------------------
ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun!
________________End of message______________________
Archives and tools for the Disability-Research Discussion List
are now located at:
www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/disability-research.html
You can JOIN or LEAVE the list from this web page.
|