Images used in society reflect the way a culture views disability, said Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, a professor of women’s studies and English at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Garland-Thompson presented a lecture Tuesday that encouraged community members and professionals who attended to view images of disability in a different way. She is a visiting speaker for the first annual Disability Studies Forum.
“Images of people with disabilities are out in the world. I read images for the stories that are in them,” Garland-Thompson said to the audience in the Health Sciences Education Building.
Garland-Thompson analyzed how people take these received stories, remake them and recirculate them to make them new and change them into different kinds of stories. She showed photographs of conjoined twin slaves, a paraplegic Playboy model and a Barbie doll that uses a wheelchair.
She also showed how people with disabilities are used as inspiration, such as Bethany Hamilton, a teenage surfer who lost her left arm to a shark attack.
“Disability is a new way about thinking about difference, and we’ve talked a lot in the university community about issues of gender, race and class,” said Nadja Durbach, a history professor at the U. “Now we’re starting to talk about disability, and I think it’s a great way to think about how cultures organize difference in society. I think disability is kind of the wave of the future.”
Garland-Thompson presented a slide show that portrayed stories about disability found within a variety of different images, including historical and modern images. The photographs showed examples of how people with disabilities were depicted through contemporary portraiture. She discussed how different techniques, such as posing in a different way, gave the subject of the portrait dignity, value and recognition.
“Portraits are important to look at because they are public stories,” Garland-Thopmson said. “They are made to be displayed in public, and they do a lot of important cultural work.”
During the lecture, Garland-Thompson also addressed eugenics.
“Decisions are being made in reproductive technology and genetic engineering about who it is we want to be in the world, and those decisions primarily involve deciding that we don’t want disabled people in the world,” Garland-Thompson said.
She cited the attempt to find the supposed gay gene as an example of eugenics and compared the desire for human diversity to how environmentalists try to maintain the diversity in non-human species.
“It’s a form of eugenic euthanasia,” Garland-Thompson said. “I think we should have a lot of ethical conversations about a kind of reductive set of assumptions about who we want to be in the world and what we’re going to lose when we reduce human variation the way we’re doing through reproductive technology.”