Glee Post and Eli Clare

In Eli Clare's The Mountain and the Wheels episode of Glee, the subject of disabilities is presented and shown through the everyday challenges that people must face. In The Mountain, Eli Clare explains the challenges that she must face to climb a mountain. However, the literal mountain that Clare climbs is also a metaphorical mountain for the challenge that people with disabilities go through and overcome. Some of these obstacles that Clare speaks of are shown through the Glee episode. In this episode, people become aware of the hard times that people in wheelchairs face. Artie is in a wheelchair and the Glee Club is going to sectionals but the school will not provide a wheelchair bus for them. Therefore, the club needs to raise money to get the bus and in turn they have to spend 3 hours a day in a wheelchair to realize the difficulties that Artie faces. In class, we discussed if this would be a productive way to understand their challenges. Some argued that if people are to "copy" other people with difficulties that it would be seen as them taking pity on them. The disabled would feel that they would be offending them and it would be very disrespectful. Also, it would be not accurate for they could get out of the wheelchair whenever they wanted. Therefore, they would never understand the difficulties that the disabled face on an emotional level.

To fix this problem, we argued ways that people can understand the challenges that the disabled face without offending them. I suggested that if people wanted to experience being in a wheelchair they should stay in it 24/7. That way, it takes out that problem that it would be fake and unfair that they could just stand whenever they wanted. Others stated, depending on the person, that the disabled might rather have people come up to them and just ask how it is to live that way. It all depends on your tone of voice and the attitude of how you present yourself in order to not offend them. However, through Clare and this episode, we are presented with some of the ideas of how life is for the disabled. We learn that the disabled just want to be like everyone else and that we should treat them equally. The challenges are very hard to overcome but they are people just like you and me.

-Bethany Davis (Post #9)

Eli Clare & Glee Post

Eli Clare and the Glee episode both incorporate how disabled people face challenges while displaying how people without disabilities can easily overcome that task. In Glee, the student in the wheelchair needs a specific bus to ride while his classmates can just ride any bus they want. He also must enter the school through only one entrance, the entrance with the ramp, while his classmates have a greater selection. This can cause a huge inconvience because if the disabled student's classroom is on the opposite end of the building, he will most likely be late or really have to hurry. Eli Clare displays people with disabilities facing the challenge of climbing a mountain. People without a disability will have a hard time climbing the mountain, so being physically disabled makes this task nearly impossible. Climbing a mountain can be a metaphor for any challenge people with disabilites must face - driving, sports, stereotypes, etc. Driving can be possible, if for example, the disability is that a person does not have any arms. Special pedals can be installed in the car and the person can learn to drive with their feet. (I saw this on a tv special - this girl got electrocuted so she lost her arms.) Despite having a disability, people should not treat them differently because they want to be like everyone else. The cheerleading coach in Glee treated the disabled girl just like she treated the girls that did not have a disability. Although I admire how she didn't patronize the disabled girl, I have to question the way she was yelling at her. This reminds me of a good point my boss brought up with running a restaurant. He said when he had all male staff at his old restaurant, he could discipline his male staff by yelling or talking loudly to. When he gained females in his staff, he could no longer do that because women do not usually respond positively to yelling. I think the coach should discipline her, but without excess yelling and telling her how much she needed to improve when she was trying her hardest. Pam Kawalerski Post Number Nine

My post is just food for thought I guess; I missed my original presentation on Audre Lorde's "Transformation of Silence into Language and Action." This post is that presentation to provide my insights into her work; like I said it's late but it's food for thought. The critical article I chose was not a book review of Audre Lorde's work; however, I do feel that it is very useful in understanding what Audre Lorde stood for as well as what her message is in her piece, "Transformation of Silence into Language and Action". The article is entitled, "Breaking the Silence A Black Feminist Response to the Thomas/Hill Hearings." It deals with a Supreme Court case of sexual harassment of a black woman by the name of Anita Hill. Judge Thomas had allegedly sexually harassed Anita when he was her boss. The issue, besides the obvious one of sexism and possible racism, is the fact that Orlando Patterson, a Harvard professor and supporter of Thomas claimed that Thomas was justified by publicly denying the allegations even if he committed them. This suggests that Anita, black women in general, should remain silent about such sexual encounters; as if to elude that the primary distinction of this case is its sexual nature rather than the violation of Anita's rights. The author of this article, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, makes a valid observation; she suggests that if the trial had not been aired via television than perhaps the negative connotation of "dirty laundry" would have ceased to be relevant and the real issues could have shown through rather than the media generated propaganda.

"Transformation of Silence into Language and action" is primarily about Lorde's struggle to break her, self-proclaimed, lifetime of silence to conform to white society and male domination. She has this change of heart after hearing she has a tumor with a 60-80% chance of being malignant. For three weeks she is faced with the trial of living with the devastating notion that she is running out of time. This frightens and aggravates her because she feels her silence has held her back.

My discussion question is: How many of us can honestly say were not constrained by the same notion of silence? Furthermore, who thinks they would have the courage to speak out for what they believe in even if the odds are mounted against you as they were for black, feminist, lesbian, warrior, and poet; Audre Lorde.

Eli Clare vs. Glee

Eli Clare's Freaks and Queers, along with The Mountain can relate in many ways to the Glee episode that we watched in class. Clare discusses the issues regarding disability and the ability/lack of to climbing a mountain per-say which references climbing the societal mountain as to fitting in. Clare allows the reader to interpret her questions on their own while providing them with history and knowledge of said disabilities or 'hurtful words'. In comparison to this, one can recognize the purpose of the "Wheels" episode of Glee. In this episode we learn the struggles that people face in wheel-chairs. In class, we discussed this in depth. We discussed whether or not it was a good decision to portray a disabled character that was played by a real life non-disabled person. Personally, I think that it's the talent that matters. I mean, lets use a more popular example...if someone if portraying a person with an eating disorder, that topic is highly talked about and many people can relate...and in saying so, it may be more difficult for a person actually suffering to portray that in character for television.

All in all, Clare in her works, and the hit show Glee share many similarities when discussing and portraying 'disabilities'. It is however, up to the reader/watcher to determine for themselves the relevance or 'lesson' that is to be learned.

Courtney Bisher

Extra Credit Blog

For the extra credit I read, "Death Watch" by Aimee Bender. This is a story about ten men who are told that they only have two weeks to live. Some men are angry, others are sad, one is happy and another does not have any reaction at all. All the men react differently and do different things on their last two weeks. Soon after, the doctors seemed to have made a mistake and only two of the five crying men are actually going to die. The one starts a new life because he realized what he was missing out on. The other continues his regular life and just says that it was a close call. The other was unable to be reached because he was in Greece living the rest of his life. After three years and realizes he is not going to die, he starts a new life in Denver. In the end some of the men died when they were told, others before and some lived longer than expected.

Like all of Bender's stories, there is a moral embedded in the story. I feel like this is a very important one because it talks about living your life to the fullest. The men were told when they were going to die and they all had different reactions to that, however the doctors messed up and were not actually sure when they were all going to die. I feel like Bender is trying to tell us to just live our life, knowing that we are not going to live forever. We obviously can not live everyday like it's our last or else we would spend all our money and not have a job but we should live our life so that we are happy because we never now when were are going to die. Like the doctors say that can not account for murder or accidents so they are not sure when the men are actually going to die, but we should live by doing things we like and by living with people we love.

Octavia Butler Post

Octavia Butler wrote science fiction stories.  Her story "Sensory Sounds" was especially interesting in that it was based mostly about communication and how our society is slowly growing away from human interactions and lacking in the communication department.  She came up with an interesting scenario in which the reader had to ponder what would be worse: not being able to read and write, or not being able to speak.  This is an interesting dilemma, in that losing either would be a major handicap when trying to converse with others.  On the one hand, not being able to speak would mean that one would not be able to express tone and differences in pitch to express meaning.  If one could not write or read, then sending messages over long distances or passing a message widespread would be impossible.  This phenomenon brought up interesting class discussions with how people in their situation could adapt to the sudden change in how the world had to work, in order to keep communication similar between people. Sign language, for example, could be a possibility, as well as pictographs or glyphs that could be used to portray meaning.
Her stories are very thought provoking and she writes in such a way that the lesson she is trying to discuss is very subtle and well woven into her fiction.

Allison Weening, Post 7

Octavia Butler Post

Octavia Butler's sci fi writing style is very unique. She challanges the readers to decipher her commentary of society in her works. The two stories we read were Speech Sounds and The Evening and The Morning and The Night. In Speech Sounds she poses the question of what is the more efficient form of communication; speaking or the ability to read and write. In the story The Evening and the Morning and The Night Octavia Butler creates a new disease that raises a big moral dilemma. The disease is called Duryea-Gode, its a side effect from a cancer cure all drug where the victim begins to "drift" and mutilates themselves and those around them.

In the case of Speech Sounds I feel that the ability to speak is a more valuable form of communcation in today's society. The writen word can have many interpertations and if one is unable to clarify the statement through speech than this skill becomes very frustating. In the second story the moral dilemma is: can peoples' rights to reproduce be taken away because they inherited a genetic and dangerous disease? I believe that while you can't take away a persons rights, the decision to reproduce needs to be taken seriously and if I had the disease I would chose not to have kids.