In the essay “cripple” (1992), Nancy Mairs, implies that the word cripple is the better suited word for her because it does not hide the fact of what she really is and because handicapped or disabled is just a nicer way of saying cripple. Mairs made it clear that she wanted to be called crippled and not handicapped and/or disabled, it made her feel undeveloped and insecure. Mairs said society is no readier to accept crippledness than to accept death, war, sex, sweat, or wrinkles, in order to prove her point that society cannot see anything other than the way a person looks. The intended audiences are people that base their opinions on the looks of people and not their personality.…
Nancy Mairs's essay “Disability from Carnival Acts describes how the speaker, Nancy Mairs, lives every day with a disability. She reveals her view on the handicap and disabled. Nancy Mairs has multiple sclerosis, weakening of the bones, and she feels as if she is being judged and is inferior to everyone else. The audience is definitely aware of how she feels. She is very blunt about her feelings and everything else. She wants to make a stand for all the disabled people. The essay displays desperation, as well as hope. She is desperate to be equal and to no be judged; She has hope that one day all handicap will be equal. Nancy Mairs is a true symbol of how handicap people can persevere, stand through anything, and triumph over adversity. She lives a competent life filled with judgmental people looking at her poorly, simply because of her disability.…
In the passage, Nancy Mairs suffers from multiple sclerosis yet she feels no sympathy for herself. She chooses to face her inability to use any of her limbs, something the society around her fails to do. By calling herself a “cripple” Mairs presents herself as a straight forward, strong individual.…
Nancy Mairs author of Disability- a self-claimed “radical feminist and cripple” with many accomplishments and degrees under her belt, Nancy is known to “speak the ‘unspeakable’” in her poetry, memoirs and essays, especially in Disability which was first published in the New York Times in 1987.…
In the essay “Life is Too Short for Someone Else’s Shame” by Amanda Leduc, Leduc discusses her lived experience as a disabled writer. The essay begins with a conversation she had with her manager at an organization that specialized in disability support. Leduc analyzes how her response correcting her manager from saying “disabled writer” to “writer with a disability” while ignoring the merit her manager was placing on Leduc’s potential contributions as a disabled writer, was incorrect. She notes her responsibility as a representative in arts spaces to represent disability, and the internal conflict of disclosure that many writers face. She asks the question “what kind of world makes this discomfort possible”.…
her condition, and how she feels calling herself “crippled” best defines her situation. According to Mairs, “‘cripple’ seems to me a clean word, straightforward and precise.” Although Mairs doesn't mind being called “crippled”, she understands there are other words used to describe someone who might have a similar condition. Mairs proves to be a smart and straightforward person when discussing a topic that others might find uncomfortable.…
Topic: Mia Mingus in her article “Changing the Framework: Disability Justice, How our communities can move beyond access to wholeness” advocates how the issue with society in regards to the treatment of the disabled community is not just about access, but also about understandment. She calls for her audience to question the stigma of disability and move to an integrated society. A society united with interdependence within various communities to be part of a collective disability justice movement. Argument: Mingus’ argument in her article is that the disabled community is often very misunderstood by the abled body community who do not face the same oppression and challenges.…
“I am a cripple.” In this essay, Nancy Mairs, who has multiple sclerosis, refers to herself as a “cripple.” Throughout this essay, Mairs is very straightforward and has a unique use of word choice and rhetorical structure.…
Author of disability Nancy Mairs who’s a feminist and a cripple, has accomplished a lot in writing and teaching. Her remarkable personality shows in many of her essays especially in Disability which was first published in 1987 in the New York Times. In this essay, Nancy Mairs shows how disabled people are constantly excluded, especially from the media. By giving out facts and including her personal experiences, Mairs aims for making some changes regarding the relationship between the media and people with disabilities. Mairs thesis is shown implicitly in the first and last paragraphs. Her main goal is to show everyone that people with disabilities are just like everybody else and they should be included and accepted in all daily activities. By using irony, intensity, humor and self-revelations, Nancy Mairs succeeds to get her message through.…
In her essay “Disability as a New Frontier for Feminist Intersectionality Research,” Nancy Hirschmann argues that feminism’s approaches (for the purpose of what we might assume to be understanding forms of systematic oppression (Hankivsky, 2011)) have been limited, mainly due to the conceptualizations of intersections and actual application of intersectionality in feminist work (Hirschmann, 2012). Disability studies, she asserts, can enrich feminist analyses because understanding the intersectionality between disability, gender and sexuality demands the development of more complicated conceptions of intersectionality. Intersectionality in disability studies recognizes both the differences and the connections within and between groups, therefore…
We tend to hear a lot in the media that most violence comes from people with mental illness, but do we really know if this is the truth? As Anaya states in her essay “Mental Illness on Television” that “the media tend to always isolate or not mention people with a disability or show that they are not normal which is wrong” (54). This relates to Nancy Mairs essay “Disability” were she talks about physical disability and how the media doesn’t show it as a normal feature of life, but since she wrote it thirty years ago there has been progress in the media. On the other hand Anaya‘s main point is that the media should show mental illness as a feature of normal life as well not a threat which I strongly agree with.…
Throughout the essay, “Becoming Disabled” by Rosemarie Garland-Thomas, her main claim that she argues is that she wants the disabled community to be politicized in the eyes of society. First, Garland-Thomas talks about politicizing disabilities into a movement. She compares and contrasts movements for race and sexual orientations to the movements about disability (2). Disability movements have not gained as much attention as race or sexual orientation movements because so many Americans do not realize how prominent disability separation is in America. She wants people to start recognizing that disability is just as important as race and other movements. Next, Garland-Thomas speaks about different types of disabilities and how they aren’t always…
In this essay, Nancy Mairs shows how disabled people are constantly excluded, especially from the media. By giving out facts and including her personal experiences, Mairs aims for making some changes regarding the relationship between the media and people with disabilities. Mairs thesis is shown implicitly in the first and last paragraphs. Her main goal is to show everyone that people with disabilities are just like everybody else and they should be included and accepted in all daily activities. By using irony, intensity, humor and self-revelations, Nancy Mairs succeeds to get her message through.…
Society ultimately has made progress with its views, though the views are still prurient majority of the time. Photographs of the disabled can be repellent yet amazing at the same time, and Thompson explores the logistics of why and how this…
Society comprises individuals and communities of remarkable diversity. In addition to racial, ethnic, social, economic, and religious differences, people also have physical differences, which include a wide spectrum of abilities. Along this spectrum lie a range of impairments, or disabilities, and to fully understand the implications of impairment and disability, it is important to define the two terms. In an effort to accomplish this, and to illustrate two opposing views on impairment and disability, the ideas of artist-activist Liz Crow and film director-producer Josh Aronson will be examined. In doing so, the argument will be made that in order to move toward a society where prejudice and barriers no longer…