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 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 Annaham on 6 July, 2010
jadelennox (DW): How to fight ableism: some easy steps So I thought it might be valuable to gather together some ways in which able-bodied people can do something about ableism in the world. Then, next time a person is feeling frustrated about ableism, and is thinking about doing some signal boosting of, say, some crappy [...]
Posted in activism, bodies, media and pop culture, movies, race, recommended reading, representations, social attitudes, work | Tagged ability, ableism, accessibility, activism, advertising, conceptions of disability, disability, intersectionality, language, movies, personal stories, pop culture, privilege, protest, race, racism, social attitudes, social inclusion, writing
By abby jean on 10 May, 2010
Oh, American Apparel. For those of you lucky enough to evade their reach, AA is a good company with a lot of problems. They started out selling themselves as the sweatshop-free, made in the USA, source for cotton basics like t-shirts, primarily wholesaling to people who would print and resell the clothes. In 2003, AA [...]
Posted in bodies, media and pop culture, normality, othering | Tagged advertising, american apparel
By Annaham on 20 April, 2010
Scott Carney (Mother Jones magazine): Inside India’s Rent-a-Womb Business Despite the growth in services, surrogacy is not officially regulated in India. There are no binding legal standards for treatment of surrogates, nor has any state or national authority been empowered to police the industry. While clinics have a financial incentive to ensure the health of [...]
Posted in activism, bodies, disability activism, gender, global, justice, news, race, recommended reading, reproductive justice, violence | Tagged advertising, awareness, awareness campaigns, bodies, global, health, health care, India, media and pop culture, news, reproductive, reproductive rights, shaming
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