Daily Archives: 12 May, 2010

Recommended Reading for Wednesday, May 12, 2010

In case of emergency, sprout wings and fly

I am sure we have all seen this one in its many guises, but I thought it was a particularly spectacular example given that nobody of historically recorded human height could have reached this pull cord. It’s about 10 feet up.

Access win? Calling all adventure service dogs

I visited a cafeteria and store at a venue along Hadrian’s Wall. Let us for the moment overlook that they had a gravel path leading to their disabled toilet facility, which then had a step on the door and look at this win for service dogs with a yen for an adrenaline rush.

The Beginning

Things quickly went downhill from there. Without a break in my mania I took LSD. Everything becomes a blur at this point. I ended up in the psych ward and was immediately diagnosed bipolar. They wanted to hold me past the 72 hours they could hold me without a legal hearing. They strongly encouraged me to stay and not go to the hearing. I went to the hearing and appeared before the judge completely lucid in my presentation. I was released. I threw away the medications they had given me.

It’s Easy [Trigger warning for violent imagery]

When you assume that something that’s simple for you is going to be simple for me, you’re making many assumptions about my ability level. Just because I look like you doesn’t mean I am like you. When you belittle the struggle the making a phone call or looking you in the eye is, it’s like a slap in the face. Just because you can’t see the fight doesn’t make it not real.

The views of a Disabled Lib Dem Supporter on a Coalition with the Conservatives

The Tories want to destroy the welfare state and the NHS. As a disabled person reliant on disability benefits and the care system, and pleased to live in a country that offers these things to its citizens, I am terrified that the Tories will leave me destitute and without care or medical support. Please stand up for the welfare state.

Nick Clegg himself has been outspoken on the Tory ‘marriage tax allowance’ policy, which privileges marriage over alternative families, including my own LGBT partnership, and the many single parent families and extended families of all shapes and sizes that make up the UK. Please stand up for alternative families.

Niqab in Quebec: The Misguided Protection of Gender Equality

While reading this deeply engaging work, I was thinking of women wearing the niqab and the recently introduced Bill C-94 in Quebec that allows many government funded institutions to refuse basic services to these women. These include government departments, crown corporations, hospitals, daycares, schools and universities which receive funding from the province. The Bill is being promoted on the premises of gender equality, requirement for integration, and security concerns. Jaques Charest has characterized the Bill as being necessary to “draw the line” in religious accomodation. Quebec Immigration Minister Yolande James further explains, “If you want to integrate into Quebec society, here are our values. We want to see your face.”

The Politics of Book Selection

And it’s not that books by women and non-white and non-heterosexual cis-gendered people haven’t been nominated before. They have. I’ve even nominated them myself. A select few have made the final short list, but for whatever reason, they don’t get picked. I have a theory about why this keeps happening, and it is not that my department is run by smelly old white dudes (the chair is a dude, but his hygiene seems fine, also young, and the co-chair is a lady). I think it’s just risk averseness. These texts keep getting picked because they are “safe.” We live in a world in which the voices and perspectives of non-white/straight/cis/male people just seem, well, inherently more “political” and therefore more likely to piss off the conservative state legislature, students, parents, and confirm that our school and department are, in fact, the stuff of David Horowitz’s fevered nightmares.

Carnivals!

Inaugural Blog Carnival: Challenges of Doing Diversity and Environment

Dance Party!

A range of women’s voices in rock

Psychiatric Hospitals and Music Videos: Part 2

People seemed to like the first edition of this series! So here are some more music videos set in psychiatric hospitals! In the last post, all of the videos used the mental hospital setting as a visual demonstration of the depth and intensity of love, depicting institutionalization as a result of loving someone a whole lot. These videos do not do that.

One video that especially doesn’t do that is Green Day’s ‘Basket Case’

Visually, the video seems similar to the previous ones. The band plays in the common room of a mental hospital in which they are patients. There is no padded room, but several people are being wheeled around passively as if they are catatonic or sedated. Later in the video, both staff and patients appear wearing masks from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. So what is different? The song itself (lyrics here), which is about lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong’s struggles with anxiety and panic attacks. So while in the same setting, instead of declaring his love for someone, he is saying:

Sometimes I give myself the creeps
Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me
It all keeps adding up
I think I’m cracking up
Am I just paranoid?
Am I just stoned?

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s Eminem with the video for “The Real Slim Shady.”

There’s a lot going on in this video and I really don’t want to describe or discuss very much of it at all, because it is offensive up and down and across and diagonally in 17 different ways. (Wikipedia has a very detailed description of the video and an explanation of all the references and insults in the lyrics and the video.) Let’s focus just on the portions set in the mental hospital, where Eminem and other patients, in scrubs or hospital gowns, fidget and wander in a waiting room while Kathy Griffin and another nurse try to control them and hand out their medications. It is just as cliched as the other videos’ portrayals of hospitals, but seems to be played for laughs. And the message of the song and the video are that Eminem is so much better than other celebrities and musicians, so much more clever and original and “real,” that he’s been institutionalized to control him for speaking truth to power. This message could be read as a good reminder of the use of institutions to control and punish people both with and without disabilities for being political and advocating for their rights! Like happened just recently! However, the whole rest of the song and the video is so puerile and hateful that the comparison itself is offensive.

Ugh. I dislike Eminem very much.

Let’s move on and look at a video that is utterly ridiculous and is a tie-in to a movie that is also utterly ridiculous – Limp Bizkit and ‘Behind Blue Eyes,’ from the Halle Berry movie Gothika:

I have a really hard time doing any kind of critical analysis of this video due to the aforementioned ridiculousness factor. The song (lyrics here), which was originally written and performed by The Who, can be read as expressing the lived experience of mental illness? Maybe? But the video – which starts with Limp Bizkit lead singer Fred Durst as a patient in a phsyciatric hospital and Halle Berry as a doctor, and then they kiss, and then they have magically switched bodies? souls? something? So now Berry is the patient and Durst is the doctor! Gothika the movie featured Berry as a doctor in a psychiatric institution who became possessed by a ghost and murdered her husband and then was a patient in the institution but only because of ghostly possession, not because she had a mental illness or anything. But even putting all of that ridiculousness aside – and that is a boatload of incomprehensible creative choices – Fred Durst’s efforts to engage in “acting” when he becomes the doctor and leaves Berry in her padded cell make me laugh so hard it’s impossible for me to focus on anything else in the video.

I have a few more videos for a part 3, but if you know of any I’ve missed, please let me know in comments!