mairs-+disabilty

Disability – Nancy Mairs As a writer afflicted with multiple sclerosis, Nancy Mairs is in a unique position to examine how the culture responds to people with disabilities. In this essay from //Carnal Acts//, she examines the media’s depiction of disability and argues with her usual unsentimental candor that the media must treat disability as normal. The essay was first published in 1987 in the //New York Times//. For months now I've been consciously searching for representations of myself in the media, especially television. I know I'd recognize this self because of certain distinctive, though not unique, features: I am a 43-year-old woman crippled by multiple sclerosis; although I can still totter a short distance with the aid of a brace and a cane, more and more of the time I ride in a wheelchair. Because of these devices and my peculiar gait, I'm easy to spot even in a crowd. So when I tell you I haven't noticed any woman like me on television, you can believe me. Actually, last summer I did see a woman with multiple sclerosis portrayed on one of those medical dramas that offer an illness-of-the-week like the daily special at your local diner. In fact, that was the whole point of the show: that this poor young woman had M.S. She was terribly upset (understandably, I assure you) by the diagnosis, and her response was to plan a trip to Kenya while she was still physically capable of making it, against the advice of the young, fit, handsome doctor who had fallen in love with her. And she almost did make it. At least, she got as far as a taxi to the airport, hotly pursued by the doctor. But at the last moment she succumbed to his blandishments and fled the taxi into his manly protective embrace. No escape to Kenya for this cripple. Capitulation into the arms of a man who uses his medical powers to strip one of even the urge toward independence is hardly the sort of representation I had in mind. But even if the situation had been sensitively handled, according the woman her right to her own adventures, it wouldn't have been what I'm looking for. Such a television show - as well as films like //Duet for One// and //Children of a Lesser God// - in taking disability as the major premise, exclude the complexities that round out a character and make her whole. The show was not about a woman who happened to be physically disabled; it was about physical disability as the determining factor of a woman's existence. Take it from me: physical disability looms pretty large in one's life. But it doesn't devour one wholly. I'm not, for example, Ms. M.S., a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease. In most ways I'm just like every other woman of my age, nationality, and socioeconomic background. I menstruate, so I have to buy tampons. I worry about smoker's breath, so I buy mouthwash. I smear my wrinkling skin with lotions. I put bleach in the washer so my family's undies won't be dingy. I drive a car, talk on the telephone, get runs in my panty hose, eat pizza. In most ways, that is, I'm the advertiser's dream: Ms. Great American Consumer. And yet the advertisers, who determine nowadays who will be represented publicly and who will not, deny absolutely the existence of me and my kind. I once asked a local advertiser why he didn't include disabled people in his spots. His response seemed direct enough. We don't want to give people the idea that our product is just for the handicapped, he said. But tell me truly now, if you saw me pouring out puppy biscuits, would you think these kibbles were only for the puppies of cripples? If you saw my blind niece ordering a Coke, would you switch to Pepsi lest you be struck sightless? No, I think the advertiser's excuse masked a deeper and more anxious rationale: to depict disabled people in the ordinary activities of daily life is to admit that there is something ordinary about disability itself, that it might enter anybody's life. If it is effaced completely or at least isolated as a separate problem, so that it remains at a safe distance from other human issues, then the viewer won't feel threatened by her or his own physical vulnerability. This kind of effacement or isolation has painful, even dangerous consequences, however. For the disabled person, these include self-degradation and a subtle kind of self-alienation not unlike that experienced by other minorities. Socialized human beings love to conform, to study others and then to mold themselves to the contours of those whose images, for good reasons or bad, they come to love. Imagine a life in which feasible others - others you can hope to be like - don't exist. At the least you might conclude that there is something queer about you, something ugly or foolish or shameful. In the extreme, you might feel as though you don't exist, in any meaningful social sense, at all. Everyone else is there, sucking breath mints and splashing on cologne and swigging wine coolers. You're not there. And if not there, nowhere. But this denial of disability imperils even you who are able-bodied, and not just by shrinking your insight into the physically and emotionally complex world you live in. Some disabled people call you Taps, or Temporarily Able Persons. The fact is that ours is the only minority you can join involuntarily, without warning, at any time. And if you live long enough, as you're increasingly likely to do, you might well join it. The transition will probably be difficult from a physical point of view no matter what. But it will be a good bit easier psychologically if you are accustomed to seeing disability as a normal characteristic, one that complicates but does not ruin human existence. Achieving this integration, for disabled and able-bodied people alike, requires that we insert disability daily into our field of vision: quietly, naturally, in the small and common scenes of our ordinary lives.


 * __Summarizing__**

It’s usually good practice, especially with more difficult essays, to summarize the content in writing to be sure that you understand it. In summarizing a work of writing, you digest, in your own words, what the author says: You take the essence of the author’s meaning, without the supporting evidence and other details that make the gist convincing or interesting. You may want to make this a two step procedure: First write a summary sentence for every paragraph or related group of paragraphs; then summarize those sentences in two or three separate sentences that capture the heart of the suthors meaning. Here is a two step summary of “Disability”. (The number in parentheses refer to paragraph numbers in the essay.) First the longer version:

(1) Mairs searches the media in vain for depictions of women like herself with disabilities. (2) One TV movie showed a woman recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, but she chose dependence over independence. (3) Such shows oversimplify people with disabilities by making disability central to their lives. (4)People with disabilities live lives and consume goods just like everyone else, but the media ignores them. (5) Showing disability as ordinary would remind nondisabled viewers that they are vulnerable. (6) The media’s exclusion of others like themselves deprives people with disabilities of role models and makes them feel undesirable or invisible. (7) Nondisabled viewers lose an understanding that could enrich them and would help them adjust to a disability of their own. Now the short summary:

Mairs believes that the media, by failing to depict disability as ordinary, both marginalize viewers with disabilities and impair the outlook and coping skills of the ‘temporarily abled’.