Jessica Marie attempts to break the social and cultural stigmas of the language and attitudes towards “people with disabilities” (not “disabled people”) with a visual, public approach through Youtube media.
This week in my ASTU class, we have been studying memoirs of marginalized groups, particularly people with disabilities, in terms of representation and roles of hegemonic society in reinforcing stigmas upon the group. This is crucial to study because, as critical readers, we must be conscious of the societal and systematic reinforcement of identities made for others, especially for groups that are already marginalized and do not have much power and authority to construct their own. The reinforcement becomes problematic when negative stigmas are placed upon those groups, which as a result further marginalize them, as Couser indicates in his article, Self-Representation in Disability Memoir, arguing with the roles and effects of hegemonic publication of disability narratives upon the disabled group in society.
After reading Couser’s article, I realized how powerful language can be in shaping how we perceive the narrated groups (their identities), and how people who can relate to those groups perceive themselves, discovering, and more importantly, also taking up self-identities made for them. For example, with the use of “gothic rhetoric” (Couser 34), disabilities are deemed as horrifying, physically unappealing, or merely undesirable. With these constant attitudes, and with the constant reception and absorption of them by the audience (readers), the ideas start to become reality for both the marginalized and non-marginalized people (society as a whole). Stereotypes or identities institutionally and culturally forge (click here to see an individual attempting to break these stereotypes of ‘people with disabilities’ through this video clip), and perspectives get taken up and used in daily lives. People have become so numb to these conceptions that stereotypes like, taken from the Youtube video, “retarded” or “insane”, get thrown around in daily language, and the words seem to lose meaning, becoming easy weapons of further marginalization or stigmatization. Jessica clearly indicates the use of language in her video and the harmful effects of the language upon the definition of disabled people, or as she restates, “people with disabilities”. I found her video particularly effective in raising awareness of the unconscious misuse of language with her use of cue cards. My point is, as Couser ultimately also makes, is that rhetoric plays a large role in shaping or representing social identities of the marginalized.
If people start to be conscious of the effects of the language they’re using, so simple as word choice, and collectively change their use of it, society may be able to gradually remove and demolish the current deeply embedded stigmas and stereotypes of the marginalized, and perhaps even potentially remove marginalization itself.
“A Spread the Word PSA created by youth” in attempt to end the “r-word” in society.
