Reaction Post: "An Enemy of Fate" -
This happy ending signified by Etta safely coming home with her parents could only happen if two disabled characters were separated from their families forever. And given that Walter is a member of Etta’s extended family, this has the Unfortunate Implication that the Happy Family can only exist if disabled members are out of the picture. Rather than placing Grampa Walter in a nursing home, they put him a hundred years into the future.
It’s important to understand that Glee let down Becky’s character in other ways than just the school shooting.
(via flutterflyinvasion)
Late last night and in the early hours of this morning a lot of coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing kept focussing on “zomg! Runners have lost legs! They loved running and now they have no legs!”
Imagine that’s you. You’re a passionate runner and now you’re watching TV from your hospital bed because you want to know what’s going on out there. To know how the events that injured you are unfolding.
The story you need to hear is that many, many amputees are runners. As an American you didn’t see any Paralympic coverage because it was only on telly for 90 minutes 2 weeks after the games ended. The only amputee runner you’ve ever heard of is Oscar Pistorius.
You don’t need the news intimating that you’ll never run again. You’ve already got enough on your plate.
I can understand why that angle would appeal to unimpaired newsreaders looking to tug on heartstrings. But it’s not helpful to the people who’ve just acquired an impairment; hearing you suggesting that they’ve just lost the hobby they love along with their leg.
“Taking a gun to school is something very serious and would likely come with a mental health condition. That’s not appropriate for someone with Down syndrome and not a stigma they need.”
So, “Glee” did a school shooting episode. My first reaction was “Of course it did.” Of course you would do that, Ryan Murphy. Of course you would take recent pressing media events and use them for entertainment and controversy. Now, to be fair, all media creators do this and anyone who claims otherwise is totally lying, but some people do it better than others.
(Source: se-smith)
'Glee' School Shooting Episode: Lauren Potter, Who Plays Becky, Opens Up About Shocking Moment
this ain't livin': Disability Tragedy Porn, Defined -
And the reason the name “tragedy porn” is so perfect as a name is because it is a body genre, just like real porn. Its purpose is to evoke a physical response in the reader/viewer. OK, for most people the physical response induced is tears of sadness (though I’d imagine tragedy porn can promote sexual arousal in devotees) but that still places it in the body genre field alongside pornography.So, and thus, disability tragedy porn. This is a particular type of narrative about disability that can appear in fiction and nonfiction, in a wide variety of media. It conceptualises disability in a very specific way, tragedising the lived experience of disabled people and underscoring the idea that disability is the worst thing ever, the most awful imaginable thing that could happen to someone. It collapses all disabled experiences into one umbrella of misery.
(Source: se-smith)
apologies to all the disabled people i spoke to today at the High Court.i’m afraid the new #pope ousted you from #c4news
Channel 4 reaffirms commitment to disability programming -
Channel 4’s chief creative officer Jay Hunt said its commitment to disability programming was not “tokenism’” as she announced the return of The Undateables, I’m Spazticus and Adam Hills’ acclaimed The Last Leg.
Global Comment: Celebrating Deaf Culture: Switched At Birth’s All ASL episode -
To see the beauty of ASL openly used and celebrated on mainstream, primetime television, and on a very popular show to boot, is amazing, and it illustrates how far we’ve come culturally. For viewers to be exposed to a celebration of Deaf culture is to challenge norms about Deafness, disability, and society; for D/deaf and hard of hearing viewers, of course, this episode marked a departure from the usual offerings of television, which center very much around auditory cues. So much so, in fact, that despite legal requirements, captioning still isn’t available on a lot of online content.
(Source: se-smith)