By Anna on 31 December, 2010
That’s right. And we’re tired of preaching to the converted. I mean, we’re all sitting here, all of us here are sitting in the room talking about these things that we talk to each other about all day every day. It would have been nice to have someone like Ryan Murphy sharing practices that those people, like the Breaking Bad people, sharing their best practices with those who could learn something. But, it didn’t happen.
Posted in disability activism, how to be accessible, identity, invisibility, justice, media and pop culture, mental health, movies, normality, othering, politics, race, representations, social attitudes, television
By Sasha Feather on 28 December, 2010
The song “Wonder” by Natalie Merchant is one of my favorite songs. I regard it as a disability anthem. Here is the music video of the song in which the singer and many women and girls sing along to the music. The women and girls are a variety of ages, body types, and races. At least one of the people in the video has Down Syndrome. I love everything about this song. It is joyful, it centers the narrative on the disabled girl/woman’s experience, and it pokes back at the abled people–doctors and journalists– who are so fascinated by her.
Posted in introspective, media and pop culture, Videos
By Staff on 27 December, 2010
Welcome to FWD retrospective week! We’ve taking a look back at some of our favourite posts on a variety of themes over the next week. s.e. smith: Hipster Ableism Hipster -ism is a type of humour which people use because they mistakenly identify it as edgy and transgressive. The idea is that it’s funny because [...]
Posted in media and pop culture, recommended reading
By Anna on 23 December, 2010
I don’t have a t.v. at home so I don’t actually watch a lot of advertisements, but when I do, there’s one thing I notice: Unlike the rest of my life, advertisements only include people with evident disabilities when they want to make some sort of point.
I’m really bothered by this. I know, I know, it’s advertising. We also don’t get excited about brighter brights in our laundry and aren’t followed around by wind machines when we get new shampoo. It’s certainly not supposed to represent “real life” in any way, because it’s all fantasy to sell you stuff. But part of what advertising sells us is ideas about people. And part of what I think it sells us is that disability is a punishment, a novelty, a metaphor, or a joke.
Posted in gender, invisibility, media and pop culture, representations, television, Videos | Tagged advertisements, advertising, disability, self esteem
By s.e. smith on 22 December, 2010
I’m in a marathon rewatch of Six Feet Under right now because I’m working on an ongoing series over at I Fry Mine In Butter on the show’s depiction of the funeral industry1. One of the recurring themes of the show is mental illness and a number of regular characters including Billy Chenowith and George [...]
Posted in media and pop culture, mental health | Tagged Billy Chenowith, bipolar disorder, Six Feet Under
By Anna on 14 December, 2010
Interviewer: There’s a suggestion that you were rolling towards the police in your wheelchair. Is that true?
JM: I think justifying a police officer pulling a disabled person out of a wheelchair and dragging them across a concrete road is quite ridiculous and I’m surprised that you’ve just tried to do so.
Interview: So that’s not true, you were not wheeling yourself towards the police.
JM: Well I can’t physically use my wheelchair myself. My brother was pushing me. I think it’s quite obvious from the footage that I was 100% not a threat to anyone.
Posted in activism, blaming, media and pop culture, news, resistance, Videos, violence | Tagged budget cuts, cuts, jody mcintyre, police violence, transcript, tuition increase, UK
By Annaham on 9 December, 2010
I have an ongoing peeve that relates to medication and social attitudes surrounding it: often, for some people on various sides of the political spectrum, trashing Big Pharma translates into trashing people who use prescription medications at all, for a variety of health conditions — especially for chronic conditions, both of the mental health and [...]
Posted in gender, marketing, media and pop culture, medical practice, normality | Tagged advertising, Big Bad Pharma, depression, drugs, drugs are bad mmm'kay, fibro, fibromyalgia, gender, media and pop culture, medicine, prescriptions, wtf
By Chally on 7 December, 2010
This piece contains lots of spoilers. I wanted to love this book, I really did. I have enjoyed the couple of Julie Ellis novels I’ve read, but this one just tipped the charming/not happening scale a bit far. It has a really strong heroine in Vicky, who escapes the Russian pogroms to build a new [...]
Posted in books, feminism, gender, media and pop culture, race, relationships, representations, sexuality | Tagged book review, disability in fiction, disabled women, fiction, problematic attitudes, reviews, sex, wheelchair users, women
By Anna on 7 December, 2010
I think that this trope, like yesterday’s one about Crazy Roommates, comes from an exaggeration of the natural fear of being forced into medical treatments you don’t want because somehow you’ve lost control. The problem with this particular trope is it’s not based on fiction: this is the real experience of thousands of psychiatric patients and survivors. This is frightening to me because it’s true, and I wish that particular truth wasn’t used as fodder for genre shows to add depth to their characters.
Posted in media and pop culture, mental health, movies
By s.e. smith on 6 December, 2010
Pity Jeannette Catsoulis. This poor New York Times film critic recently faced quite a conundrum when she was sent out to review Me, Too, written and directed by Álvaro Pastor and Antonio Naharro. I’ll let her tell you about it: Fiction films with disability as a central theme (especially those that feature disabled actors) are [...]
Posted in creative work, media and pop culture | Tagged criticism, disabled actors, film
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