Let me begin this post with a sad, potentially very sad, story which turned out to have a happy ending.
Continue reading ‘Dear NSW Liberals and your media mates: judge not lest ye be judged!’
Archive for the 'Disability' Category
Update: I’ve written a post on the latest development in this affair, the suspension of Hookham and MacLennan for six months without pay, which I think is a completely over the top reaction, and says something very dodgy about QUT. I still hold to my original criticism of the two academics, but the chilling effect of this over-reaction on freedom of speech is deeply worrying.
The latest entry in the culture wars comes from QUT academics John Hookham and Gary Maclennan, who wrote an op/ed in The Australian yesterday, which in true Donnelly-esque style, was recycled in the same rag as news.
A PhD student’s TV comedy about disabled people has sparked outrage from senior academics and prompted an investigation. Michael Noonan’s thesis, “Laughing at the disabled: Creating comedy that confronts, offends and entertains”, has been attacked for its reality TV-style depiction of two intellectually disabled men interviewing locals in a country pub.
Gary MacLennan and John Hookham, of Queensland University of Technology’s film and television school, believe that work such as Mr Noonan’s is being validated under the rubric of postmodernist or poststructuralist thought, where “you abandon any idea of individual worth”.
“For us, this is symptomatic of a wider intellectual and moral problem,” Dr MacLennan said.
I want to make two points about this. One about the ethical questions raised by the op/ed itself, and the second about the politics of laughter and disability.
The vileness of the American conservative noise machine is unbelievable. Even more unbelievable is the fact that the mainstream media constantly picks up on right wing talking points (saves journos and hosts from having to think for themselves). The latest case in point is the new stock anti-Edwards line - he’s placing ambition over compassion by continuing to run for President while his wife, Elizabeth, has incurable cancer. The sub themes are “what about the kiddies?” and “he won’t be an effective President if his wife is dying”. All of this is to second guess an incredibly difficult decision, and perhaps worse, to totally ignore Elizabeth Edwards’ own will.
It started with Rush Limbaugh:
Political people are different than you and I. And, you know, most people when told a family member’s been diagnosed with the kind of cancer Elizabeth Edwards has, they turn to God. The Edwards turned to the campaign.
That’s where it should have stopped, but it didn’t.
Cancer survivor Jane Hamsher tracks the spread of this meme at Firedoglake. And Crooks and Liars writes on its wholehearted and sickening transmission to Katie Couric on 60 Minutes. Atrios cuts to the quick:
I think one of the worst habits we have is telling other people not just how they’re supposed to live their lives, but what the appropriate emotional responses to life events - births, deaths, triumphs, tragedies - are supposed to be. While we’re not all twisted freaks like Rush Limbaugh, I think the impulse is a fairly universal one.
People who get a serious illness, or become disabled, lose both their agency and their humanity in the eyes of many. They become freaks who have to prove they are human in every interaction, and have to reassert their own agency at every moment.
For some reason the most natural and seemingly healthy impulse - to go on with your life as you had intended to the best of your ability - seems to be the most alien to those not experiencing a tragic illness.
As someone who has been through cancer, I can only nod and wholeheartedly agree.
This is partly a riff from my previous post about Pamela Bone’s absurd attack on “Western feminists” for alleged blindness to the concerns and rights of women in the developing world (well, actually, she only mentioned women in Islamic countries, but hey…). I don’t want to re-open that debate here, and I’m not going to debate it again myself, but I did want to note an excellent post from Helen at Cast Iron Balcony (cross-posted at Surfdom), who shared my reticence to even bother with Bone, but when she did, made some very powerful points. And also her link to another excellent post from hilzoy at Obsidian Wings wherein she asks why war is seen as the most appropriate solution to a range of problems. She’s constructed a really powerful argument that war is not the answer to tyranny or a deficit of democracy. Why war indeed? It would be interesting to analyse the bellicosity of the chicken hawks in terms of gender relations, but that’s another post, I guess.
What I did want to share was a deep ambivalence I have about one particular campaign to draw attention to the plight of women in Angola who’ve lost limbs through landmines. In some instances, they ran across a mine because they were escaping violence - either domestic or military. In others, they were tending fields because male relatives had been killed, imprisoned or abducted.
What’s ethically ambiguous about this project? The way in which it’s framed as a Miss Landmine Contest. The site says:
Conceived and directed by Norwegian artist Morten Traavik, the MISS LANDMINE project puts the global landmine problem and its survivors in the spotlight in a new, celebratory and life-affirming way.
Much of Barry Humphries & Friends - Back With A Vengeance! has the feel of a greatest-hits concert. Dame Edna can still effortlessly embarrass audience members, and Humphries’ grasp of his old home town is remarkable for a man who has spent most of his life away from it. And Les Patterson’s crassness can still raise a hearty laugh. But these characters, hilarious as they are, did not have the contemporary political and social bite that they once did. The joke, these days, is partly about the incongruity of the characters themselves; when seemingly half the British arts world is run by Aussie expats, Sir Les is a chance to laugh at the Australia we once were, not the Australia we like to think of ourselves as today.
Continue reading ‘Barry Humphries, voice of his generation’
There are relatively few topics of interest to LP where I can actually claim relevant professional expertise but electronic voting is one of them. It’s a topic that keeps popping up for some reason. And this time around, it’s the Victorian Electoral Commission which is considering recommending to the Victorian parliament the introduction of electronic voting to reduce the number of informal votes, after a small trial for the vision-impaired. The electoral commissioner, Steve Tully, thinks much of the informal votes relates to language and literacy issues:
“I suspect that it’s not just a protest vote. I think that there are literacy and language issues in there that we need to explore with the Parliament to see whether there are some administrative changes we can make to the law to improve that,” he said.
“I think electronic voting, particularly if (voters) are not comfortable with English, is something that Parliament might want to consider.”
Reducing unintended informal votes, as well as making it easier for people like Rachel to vote in secret, are admirable goals. But badly designed electronic voting systems have huge consequences for the integrity of our elections; both in terms of their fairness, and, just as important, whether they are seen to be fair.
Continue reading ‘Electronic voting’
I can’t get my head around this.
Essentially, Ashley X is a three-month old child mentally, despite her physical age of nine years, thanks to brain damage of some sort.
Her parents and the medical team at Seattle Children’s Hospital decided, when Ashley was six, to pursue a course of treatment to ensure that her body remained essentially childlike for the rest of her life. According to The Gaurdian this involved removing her “uterus to prevent fertility, excision of early buds on her chest so that she would not develop breasts, and medication with high doses of oestrogen to limit her growth by prematurely fusing the growth plates of her bones”.
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