The Underwire - Wired Blogs

Well, just as I wrote A. that I was ready to kick back and have a glass of wine, here came this lovely story over the wires from WIRED. I must say, that's one beautiful poultry hutch. It rivals the poultry tractors we created to house our white wyandottes. They seem to have Rhode Island Reds in there, though they could also be heritage Buckeyes, or even the red hybrids whose name I can't quite remember. In any case, here is just one more bit of evidence that chickens are the source of all wellbeing. (Though I must admit to being shocked that Philip and Bonnie are selling eggs. I think they should be giving them away, and encouraging people to keep their own urban chickens. That's what I do. . .
The Underwire - Wired Blogs

exhaustion

I've been writing non-stop for two weeks, it seems. But I've finally finished. The question of parody still is up in the air, and I can't figure out how to compress the power point to send it to Aspen, but at least the essay is finished, the power point is finished, and luckily I'm not quite finished. This isn't exactly the high-life in the big city, but maybe I'm at least en route to the wisdom my chicken expects from me.

But until I get to it, here's one tidbit from the talk I've just finished:

I have been talking about medicine here, but let me push on that category a bit As Howard Brody has pointed out, the challenges posed by feminism and disability studies call on us to redraw the boundaries of medicine, to realize that issues of gender, race, and ability are crucial in our framing of medical issues. We’ve discussed race and gender, but it’s crucial to extend our understanding of medicine to encompass disability as well. Scholars distinguish three models for conceptualizing disability: the moral model, which sees disability as the result of a moral or spiritual failing that triggers stigma; the medical model, which understands disability as the result of an illness or injury that it is medicine’s task to cure or ameliorate, and that triggers pity; and the social model, which holds that a physical or mental impairment only becomes a disability when society refuses to accommodate it, and that triggers self-actualization.

Though disability studies scholars consider these modes roughly chronological, earlier perspectives on experience can persist even within later ones, imperceptibly shaping what can be thought, as philosopher of medicine and microbiologist Ludwik Fleck demonstrated in his brilliant study of syphilis.[i] So, in these comic books, the moral model of disability (with its stigmatization and sense of moral failing) persists even into the medical model, with its attention to adherence to the doctor’s regime for managing chronic illness.

[. . . ]
What have we learned about communicating medical information from the comparison of these four comics instructing children in diabetes management? We have learned, first, that we need to consider intersectionality when we do patient education, building attention to gender, race, ethnicity, and ability into every text we create. Second, we shouldn’t actually be writing the texts in the first place; the patients should write them, speaking for themselves about the challenges they are facing first hand. Third, and finally, we must understand that realistic, mimetic representation is not our only option. Popular genres like fantasy and science fiction, and popular media like comics and hypertext, may even be more suitable, if they leave open spaces for counter voices. So one more application for Butler's important strategy of performativity: the act of holding space open for the performance of different roles, voices, identities and images, whether as parody or in earnest, is a politically effective way of re-imagining health care.

1. [i] Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. [1935] Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

VIDEO: Director of the documentary "Mississippi Chicken" John Fiege (independentfilm.com)

Here is a brief trailer for Fiege's wonderful documentary, mentioned in the previous post. When it was screened to a group of scholars working in animal studies, the audience focused primarily on the opening scene in which the pig was butchered, and a later scene on the killing floor of the poultry processing plant. However, the overwhelming power of the film lies in its exploration of the emotional and social death suffered by illegal immigrant poultry workers in Mississippi. The shadow of Tyson Foods hangs over this documentary, reminding us of the corporation's multiple indictments for smuggling of South American workers into the USA to work for substandard wages at its poultry plants.
VIDEO: Director of the documentary "Mississippi Chicken" John Fiege (independentfilm.com)

Isthmus | The Daily Page - Collecting MadVideos -- A teaser trailer for Mad City Chickens

Check out these trailers for MadCity Chickens. There is a whole genre of chicken videos out there, spanning reports from the urban chicken trenches that advocate for the obvious--the pleasures of city chicken raising--to broad-ranging documentaries that use the chicken industry as the focus for an analysis of the conditions facing immigrant workers in the US South. I'm thinking particularly of a wonderful little documentary film entitled Mississippi Chicken. More on that soon, except to say that this film was made by an erstwhile geography student now activist artist.

Isthmus | The Daily Page - Collecting MadVideos -- A teaser trailer for Mad City Chickens

Isthmus | The Daily Page - Collecting MadVideos -- Mad City Chickens to hatch in 2008

Isthmus | The Daily Page - Collecting MadVideos -- Mad City Chickens to hatch in 2008

Thinking about performativity, and how it happens on all scales, from the familiar and obvious human scale to the invisible sub-cellular. Can there be performativity in the subversive sense without intention? Consider the pluripotential stem cell and how differently it performs depending on its 'stage': the changed form of the neural crest when duck cells are transplanted in to quails, or vice versa. (More about this in the future.)

As I write this, I am interrupted by an NPR report that scientists in New York have found stem cells that are 'just as promising' that don't start with an embryo. A researcher at Memorial Sloan-Kettering and his colleague at Weill Cornell Medical College have just found how to use GPR-125 to distinguish one set of viable stem cells from others in testes. They've done this in mice, but can they do this with human cells? "One of the more grandiose uses might be to take a testes biopsy, coax them to develop, and use them as any cells they need," a researcher explains. But can they get volunteers to donate testicular cells? the reporter asks. Nervous laughs ensued from the researchers in the lab. Now that would be a reparative form of gender performativity.

What a week to think about disability.

First I saw the stunningly awful "Removable Parts" with A. and S. The evening was appalling, excruciating, and ultimately (thankfully) fun. But the fun came only at the very end, during dinner, and even then was laced with frustration.

It wasn't fun to make our way through the remote hallways to the locked elevator leading to the impossibly steep ramp into the theater, where no acceptable spaces for wheelchairs awaited, so that S. and A. had to park themselves right in the front of the house, just to one side of the first row, at an uncomfortable position raised about a foot or so above the rest of the seats behind them. And it wasn't fun to watch the two performers--the singer and pianist--respond with discomfort to our stark presence right in front of them, as they performed a series of appalling song-and-dance routines about a psychological or psychiatric disorder resulting in self-mutilation that they persisted in characterizing as something other than a disability. It certainly wasn't fun to sit furious in the first row during the post-performance talk-back while the four members of cast and crew (all white and able, as far as I could tell) made the distinction between disability (which they viewed as certainly worthy of pity) and BIID, which was worthy of scorn, merely crazy and absurd. No acceptable choice, the one between pity and scorn! And while it was fun to take notes during the performance, in the excellently lit first row, getting many of the most disturbing lines from the performance close to verbatim to their evident discomfort, it was not fun trying to educate people so profoundly unaware of the multiple ways they were being offensive and cruel.

And no fun at all was the experience I had when the talk-back concluded. The audience had filed out. As A. , S. and I prepared to leave as well, the singer-songwriter-author of this dismal spectacle reached out and touched me on the arm, thanking me. He distinctly did not do the same to S. and A. It felt like a mark of complicity: you and I, it seemed to suggest, aren't like those two people in wheelchairs. We're both normal, and on the same side. I felt tainted and offended, for myself and for A. and S. Yet, tell the truth. During the performance in addition to being angry and appalled, I had also felt sympathy for the writer and pianist. I imagined their discomfort with us in the front row. I pitied them during the talkback, as we (even so gently) took issue with their ideas, and pointed out ways in which they should rethink the performance. Those emotions of pity and sympathy mark my liminal position in the whole encounter. Visibly able (though smarting inside at their scorn for those who struggle with psychiatric issues, as I have and do, and angry at their visible discomfort in the presence of my friends) I still experienced a kind of 'ability privilege' akin to white privilege. Simply by being seemingly intact, I earned the performer's sympathetic touch, acknowledging our kinship. A kinship I don't want, and don't feel.

Our dinner was much more fun, even though it didn't start out that way. Here we were at one of the four most accessible restaurants in NYC according to the NY Times (or could it have been one of the minimally accessible restaurants with the best food?) but the ramp had to be fetched (which took time) and required bracing before S. and A. could maneuver their chairs up it (with some frightening backslides and skids). Our dinner conversation was an uproarious relief as we trashed the performance and talk back, and the food was ample and delicious. But at the end of the meal there was still the difficulty of negotiating the trip to the bathroom next door (the small indignity of having to announce one's need to use the toilet, one of many such smaller and larger indignities) and then the trip up the broken pavement and inadequately curb-cut intersections of the West Village.

Tonight I went with M. and B. to see The 3:10 to Yuma, and found still more DS issues worth mulling over. The father in the film is a gimp--wounded in the Civil War where he fought for the North--and his missing leg is a plot point throughout the film. Shown first as cause for his son's disdain, then later as the reason he signs up for the impossible mission of bringing the criminal to the train to justice, the loss of his leg is finally invoked to express the incommensurability of disability and restitution. "I was paid the one hundred seventy five dollars and forty two cents not so I would leave the Army, but so they could leave me." Both men in the movie have been abandoned, in short: the soldier by the army which frags him and then deserts him; the criminal by his mother, who abandons him to a useless Bible. There's something going on here about a non-nurturant State and non-nurturing mothers: how both disable, the former physically and the latter morally. But I can't go farther into that question now: I've been writing about comic books, chronic disease management, and power all day, my legs ache after walking to and fro the Writer's Room, and my eyes are closing.

My wise chicken wonders what this has to do with the book I've promised her. It'll come. It'll come.