Eli Clare’s discussion of the Ellen Stohl magazine spread for playboy and her cover-shoot for New Mobility: a disability community magazine touches on many important questions surrounding disability and sexuality. Clare introduces this subject within part ii: bodies, “reading across the grain.” In this section he critically evaluates a few visual representations of disabled individuals and related advertisements.

Clare acknowledges the importance of the Stohl images as groundbreaking in their representation of a disabled body as a sexual being. Stolh echoes this goal in an interview she conducted with CBS in June 2011, nearly 25 years after the playboy spread debuted (http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2011/06/21/disabled-woman-looks-back-at-posing-nude-for-playboy-challenging-stigmas/). In the interview she relates that in her proposal letter to Hugh Heffner she explained that “sexuality is the hardest thing for a disabled person to hold on to.”
 
Clare argues that although good intentioned, the playboy spread and the cover-shoot for the disability magazine are more problematic than beneficial. Clare problematizes some of the essential characteristics of the representations including Stohl’s conformation with the industry standards of beauty, and the choice of photos and text.

Here is the link to the story about baby Storm, who is being raised gender-less. Sorry it took me a week to post. 

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/baby-storm-raised-genderless-gender-dangerous-experiment-child/story?id=13693760

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The articles and books that we have read thus far, and will continue to read, in this course have not just been interesting to me, but experience and thought-changers for me as well. I come from a very homogenous community - white, upper-middle class, mostly Jewish, suburban town. Our next biggest subgroups of people are Asians and Indians. Gay people are rarities - maybe one per grade (at least one "out of the closet" per grade). Transsexuals and transgenders do not exist. Those with disabilities are taken out of mainstream schools early on or never mainstreamed at all.

For one of the first times in my college experience (kind of surprisingly, I guess) I am re-reading a text I encountered in a previous course. Eli Clare's Exile and Pride was also on the syllabus for an English class I took with Theresa Tensuan as a sophomore (hardly a coincidence, as her work on these topics is part of the other online reading for Tuesday). Since initially reading the book (largely for the way it adapts the autobiographical form in creative ways) my perspectives have certainly changed. Again, the metaphor of approaching the same questions from multiple angles, key to the interdisciplinary nature of our work in PPPP, maps well onto this revisiting of a text with different (gender-oriented) set of questions. However, the fundamental, unavoidable complicatedness Clare tries to convey -- especially the interrelatedness of social justice movements -- hit me with a memorable force both two years ago and this time around. We can get caught up in the specifics/feasibility of some of his recommendations, but I think he makes a pretty good case that the underlying forces of oppression cannot be parsed out into neatly divided identity categories, and that creative collaboration strategies -- whether his or our own -- are therefore necessary to social justice movements that wish to have more than shallow successes.

Enjoy!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the readings from last week, especially the Wilchins book. I was struck by Riki’s frustration with what she perceives an unwillingness of the feminist and at times the gay rights movement to collaborate with the transgender movement in order to help achieve some transgender goals. Wilchins points out that members of the constituency of feminist groups are often directly affected by issues that gender activists are working on.

She emphasizes the overlap between the gay, transgender, and feminist movements, but I think fails to adequately flesh out the unique goals of each movement. Although the three seem unquestionably related, they are by no means the same movement and do not necessarily share the same goals. It would be interesting to have seen her attempt to explore different explanations of the feminist movements’ periodic hesitancy to collaborate with the gender or gay rights movements, instead of immediately writing these decisions off as misguided and in conflict with their goals.

Enjoy!

-Meg