Summary Of More Effective Then Disability By Nancy Mairs

In the movie they show many people who share their stories of oppression due to the fact that they are either deaf or hard of hearing. They discuss that they don't want to be seen as people who need help or want sympathy because being deaf is not a disability. In the movie they state just some of the misconceptions that people have of deaf people. One being that they can’t do the same jobs as hearing people because its hard for them and theyre going to need assistance; that is not true; it’s sad that people believe that just because they can’t hear that they’re anything less than intelligent in a certain field.

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

Having the disease multiple sclerosis can affect ones' life tremendously. In the essay "On Being A Cripple" the author Nancy Mairs suffers from the disease and has a love/hate relationship with it. Socially, it appears that although Mairs has the disease she accepts it and does normal things like go on vacations with her family; personally, it's hard for her at times and she gets into a depressed state and wishes she didn't have the disease when she has a falling or an incident.

In Nancy Mairs’ article for The New York Times, “Disability”, published in 1987, she expresses her distaste with the media's representation of handicapped people. Mairs, who struggled with multiple sclerosis herself, clearly and sharply conveys this disgust by stating, “I’m not, for instance, Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease.” (Mairs 13), and that she is actually, “the advertisers’ dream: Ms. Great American Consumer. And yet the advertisers, who determine nowadays who will get represented publicly and who will not, deny the existence of me and my kind absolutely”(Mairs 14). Mairs is greatly upset that disabled people are defined by their disabilities and, therefore, are underrepresented in public media. This might lead to one asking themselves, but why are they? And the answer, according to Mairs, is quite simple, “To depict disabled people in the ordinary activities of daily life is to admit that there is something ordinary about disability itself, that it may enter anybody’s life”(Mairs 14). Mairs concludes by pointing out how this effacement could have dangerous consequences for both disabled people and, as she called everyone else, TAPs (Temporarily Abled Persons) alike. Treating disabilities as an abnormal characteristic (as opposed to viewing them “as a normal characteristic, one that complicates but does not ruin human existence” (Mairs 15)) can cause one of these repercussions, as it makes the

The National Disability Strategy 2010-2020 (NDS) came about because in a federal system where state governments have different arrangements, services depending in where people with disabilities lived were uniformly unfair or fragmented. Thus, The National Disability Strategy 2010-2020 was an attempt to create a single, nationally consistent, equitable, fair and sustainable policy so people with disabilities could live good lives. Therefore, the NDS is for the commonwealth and state governments. It guides public policy to improve access and make sure the rights of people with disability are considered.

“Through Deaf Eyes” was a documentary that really opened my eyes and allowed me to understand just a small fraction of what it may be like for a Deaf person to live in a hearing world. The first thing that really stuck with me was the fact that the film was all silent. The part that made it easy for me to understand was the fact that there was closed captioning. All throughout the film, all participants, both Deaf and hearing, were signing at what seemed like lightning speed. If it were not for the closed captioning, there was no way I would be able to catch up and really engage in the film. Then it hit me: this must be how Deaf people feel if the situation was reversed. I always used to get irritated

In the early 1970’s parents of students with disabilities went to federal court when their local school districts did not provide services to meet their children’s educational needs. In Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Citizens (PARC) v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (1971), a Pennsylvania court ruled that all children, regardless of disability, have a basic right to an education under the Fourteenth Amendment. In Mills v. Board of Education of the District of Columbia (1972), a federal court ruled that the District of Columbia schools could not exclude children with disabilities from the public schools. Cases like this focused public attention on the issue of educating children with disabilities. The social and political pressure then resulted in landmark federal legislation to address the educational rights of these children.

All throughout the entire "Deaf President Now" movement, the message was clear that deaf people have the self-determination and capability as any other hearing person. To watch hundreds of deaf students and supports protest from Gallaudet University to our nation's capital, using American Sign Language as their only medium of communication. Only shows the effect of the "power and intelligence" (Van Cleve p. 173) behind sign language. "With similar unity in the future, they may move into a

In Nancy Mairs short story, “On Being a Cripple”, she reflects on her life handling her disability of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and how it has changed different aspects of her existence. She defines herself as a cripple despite the negative connotations the word may have. Over the past ten years, Mairs has had her MS slowly progress as her body deteriorates. She sees her life as fairly average, but seemingly small tasks have become difficult to her and has required help from her family. Despite their support, Mairs still fears that people's kindness is out of pity. The stigma around physical disfigurement and being crippled causes added suffering to her life. Although the disease dictates much of her existence,

Usability is a critical portion of web design that one must be ever mindful of when constructing websites. Whether creating a personal web space or building multiple pages for a large corporation, it is the burden of the designer to guarantee people can access that content. According to the United Nations, disabled people compose roughly 10 percent of the world’s population (United Nations, 2010). Many regulations and standards have been set forth to provide disabled people with the same opportunities to access content available on the World Wide Web, as it is most of the World’s population.

Douglas C. Baynton argues in his article, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History”, that the concept of disability is culturally constructed and has been paid little to no attention to throughout history. He also argues that the term disability plays an important role in justifying discriminations against minority groups, based on gender, race, and ethnicity. He states that “Disability has functioned historically to justify inequality for disabled people themselves, but it has also done so for women and minority groups. That is, not only has it been considered justifiable to treat disabled people unequally, but the concept of disability has been used to justify discrimination against other groups by attributing disability to them.” (Baynton 94) He used women’s suffrage, African American freedom, and immigration restriction as examples to show how disability played an essential role in illustrating how minorities who were labeled as disabled were treated with discrimination. As they were labeled with disability, discrimination against them became justifiable, which ultimately proves that discrimination against disabled was thought as justifiable and were looked over.

If you saw a person in the mall in a wheelchair, would you judge them? Or would you look at them like they are a normal human-being? People who have a disability whether they are physically disabled, mentally disabled, or learning disabled, are still themselves. Nancy Mairs was forty-three year old woman with multiple sclerosis. She wrote an essay, “Disability”, that explained her views of her physical disability.

Nancy Mairs in her “disability” has done a good job in delivering her message. I believe she managed to persuade the audience that there is no reason to exclude disabled people from the media. Her information was clear and made sense, her examples were enough to support her thesis and her tone added a certain flavor to her essay. “Disability” can actually make certain changes if it is addressed to its right audience and I certainly recommend it to my friends and anyone who might be interested in this

In Rosmarie Garland -Thomson: “The politics of Staring”, expresses how our society has changed over time. She views human’s theories in four different visual rhetoric’s which in this case I am going to call them speechmaking’s: the wondrous, the realistic, the sentimental and the exotic. From these four figures of speech Garland has shown our inclination to see disabled people by the way they are discriminated by the rest of society. Garland makes references to this by showing pictures and examples that highlights how the modern American world views disability.

This is not just a disadvantage to disabled people in the United States, it is a problem world wide. In the United Kingdom, only 6 percent of young disabled people are employed (O'mahony). All this leaving the United Kingdom with just “less than one in 20 people with a mental or physical disability are in paid employment”(O’mahony). Disabled people around the world in different nations are taken away the feeling of usefulness and the feeling of accomplishment. Affecting the disabled both financially but also emotionally.