history: February 2005 Archives

February 21, 2005

Why Disability Studies Matters
By Lennard J. Davis < ahref="mailto:info@insidehighered.com">>mailto:info@insidehighered.com

You know there is something wrong when 100 of the major film critics in the
United States say that Clint Eastwood's film Million Dollar Baby is a great
work and every disability scholar and activist rails against the movie. The
film continues to garner praise and awards -- a Director's Guild Award for
Eastwood, seven Academy Award nominations, as well as Best Actress
and Director Golden Globes -- while in Chicago and Berkeley people using
wheel chairs, service dogs, and red-tipped canes organized protests at
which they held up signs that read "Disability Is Not a Death Sentence" and
"Not Dead Yet."

This op-ed is an interesting response to Lawrence Summer's recent sexist remark about women in science and technology. I like their use of temporality as the real issue, that such comments have a retroactive effect of pulling people's attention toward the past instead of focusing their gaze on the future.

~ from Ximena to the social justice list

I'm thinking, only on p. 30, that it makes sense to me why so many intellectuals commit suicide. The quote by historian Douglass McKie suggests a hands-off policy from government toward business until business goes bad, when a moral discourse is invoked. The blatancy of fear-based policy decisions in the relations between nations is no less today than it was then.

I'm puzzled by this though: "The tension between the logics of negotiation and those of security/insecurity was too tangible to render credible the first efforts to construct a system for regulating international relations" (30). Meaning it was so real that it couldn't be faced? Or accepted as requiring significant, deliberate, and direct mediation? I'm not disputing Mattelart's judgment, but wondering about the intensity of denial, and how that still plays out in so many ways and places.