Comments for Dis/Embody

Comment on Bodies, in theory and practice by Tweets that mention Bodies, in theory and practice » Dis/Embody -- Topsy.com

Tweets that mention Bodies, in theory and practice » Dis/Embody -- Topsy.com — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:46:20 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Annie Petersen, liz ellcessor. liz ellcessor said: New blog post: Bodies, in theory and practice http://lizellcessor.org/?p=153 [...]

Comment on Catching up by liz

liz — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 02:35:03 +0000

I’m trying Couch to 5K, because I’m inept. It’s going ok so far!

Comment on Catching up by bro

bro — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 03:25:32 +0000

What running program have you started? I’m not good at much- but I know that area.

Comment on Lost and masculine mobility by uomoartificiale

uomoartificiale — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:53:07 +0000

Ok, I clearly see that ‘The tragedy model of disability’ is still the common prime-time TV view. Still, in the 6th Lost season Locke’s disability has been pictured once again. Now he’s married, and his wife begs him to accept himself. She convinces him not to fantasize anymore about a miraculous cure because she loves him as he is.

Comment on Lost and masculine mobility by Rebecca

Rebecca — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 15:41:15 +0000

I think the end of the episode when Helen and Locke ripped up Jack’s card did start to touch on resisting a cure narrative– good for them. Certainly alternate universe Locke is the one who got the girl. I noticed in a Lost message board that at least some people were very uncomfortable with his decision not to be “fixed,” which leads me to believe that this episode is resisting cliches and stereotypes, at least more than the average TV show.

Comment on Lost and masculine mobility by Lindsay H. Garrison

Lindsay H. Garrison — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 04:48:20 +0000

Great post, Liz. As I was watching the episode, I was wondering what you were thinking about it and hoping you’d take to your blog! I like your point about alternate-universe Locke and disability as a narrative obstacle for male heroes. It’s something I was also thinking about as Ben was giving the (awkward) eulogy for island Locke, saying “Locke was more of a man than I’ll ever be.” I was thinking, is it because of his (Locke’s) ‘faith’? Is it because of his optimism? And did he become this ‘better man’ only on the island, after he regained his mobility?

Also, interesting read of the Dodge Charger commercial – hadn’t seen it that way until reading it here. Great point.

Comment on Everyone’s a little bit disabled? by liz

liz — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 03:25:19 +0000

Thanks for that comment, Ang – I’d heard such positive things about this ad elsewhere, I wondered if I was the only one who read it the other way.

Comment on Everyone’s a little bit disabled? by Ang

Ang — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:09:17 +0000

“Plus, the ad can easily be read in reverse – rather than “people with disabilities are just different, like everyone else,” it could be seen to be asserting that the girl in mis-matched clothing is “disabled” – a move that minimizes the experience and voices of those who do face challenges due to disability.”

That’s how I read it, and it’s painfully close to the times when people have told me, ‘Oh, I get a bit of IBS’, as if that’s somehow comparable to me having very severe, aggressive inflammatory bowel disease that has required five major operations in ten years, plus a feeding tube. No, it’s not like ‘a bit of IBS’. I can’t bear this concept of supposed ‘equivalency’ that in reality reduces everything to, as you say, a quirky trait. It’s all about making the temporarily-abled more comfortable around us by making them identify with us in a spurious, superficial way – which in itself is a kind of denial of the deeper and more important similarities we share. The more I look at it, the more bizarre it seems, and it just reminds me that society as a whole isn’t even at the Disability101 stage yet.

Comment on YouTube Captioning by megan ankerson

megan ankerson — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:32:48 +0000

liz, have you seen Greg Downey's book Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television? i saw him give him a presentation on campus a couple years ago and it was pretty interesting. he tracks the history of speech-to-text technologies and labor practices, pointing out that deaf and hard-of-hearing educators and activists had been pushing for this technology for decades but it was only when tv industries realized the value of captioning in an era of digital convergence (ie, it supplied metadata for indexing and retrieving digital assets) did D/HOH audiences witness a wider embrace of captioning.

Comment on YouTube Captioning by liz

liz — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:55:07 +0000

Glenda, I totally agree. There’s a long way to go before speech-to-text technology works reliably, and I think there are some concerns about voice quality, tone, and accent that will remain problematic – will only male native English speakers be understood by the machine? Google voice can never manage to translate the voicemails I leave into text.

Plus, there are always judgement calls in this kind of work, always a stage at which human interpretation seems to be the only way to go.