So much knowledge about chickens is disappearing as the chickens themselves go inside--into the large corporate poultry hatcheries and grow-out houses, and into the zone of technical expertise rather than commonplace know-how. But here is one instance in which the very knowledge itself is a product of technical innovations. At one point we didn't need to sex day-old chicks, because we weren't sending them through the mail as sexed lots of pullets. We'd just sex the chicks by observing them: we'd notice whether their behavior was starting to indicate cockerels, as for example when two lanky chicks go head-to-head in the daring stare down and head bobbing ritual I've seen so many times. Or we'd realize that the tail feathers on a chick were starting to arc out and down in the beautiful fountain characteristic of roosters, as opposed to the stubby, rounded tail of a hen.
http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=T&ct=us/0-0&fd=IG&url=http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article%3FAID%3D/20070924/OPINION04/709240309/1035/OPINION&cid=0&ei=cLf3Rur7EaSE0gHB8KWmDw
Monday, September 24, 2007
Friday, September 21, 2007
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.
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.
- [i] Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. [1935] Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
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)
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 -- A teaser trailer for Mad City Chickens
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.
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