Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability - normalization

Dinosaurs are Extinct, but Normalization is Alive and Well

Visitor — Thu, 17 Mar 2016 22:18:32 +0000

My son hugs a stuffed dino.

By: Emily Beitiks

Lately, I've been learning a lot about dinosaurs. Or, I should say, my three-year-old son has been learning a lot about dinosaurs, and I have been caught in the crossfire. My mind is often churning to relate any new information I take in to my own passion of disability studies. I didn’t expect to find a link to dinosaurs... but I did.

Dinosaur science has advanced remarkably since my childhood. (Did you know, for example, that scientists now believe many dinosaurs had feathers?!) But while our notions of what dinosaurs could have been is constantly evolving, we still cling to certain tenets of what I like to call “dinosaur normalization.” (I haven’t lexis-nexis’d it, but I think you just witnessed the birth of a completely original school of academic thought!) Dinosaur normalization is the idea of prescribing what dinosaurs would have been like based on our own narrow worldview. For a quick example of dinosaur normalization, when scientists first discovered the Iguanodon (see left), they assumed he had a rhino-like horn on his nose. After further skeleton discoveries, it turns out the Iguanodon actually has two horn-like thumbs, something we’ve never seen before. But you don’t have to be an obscure dinosaur like the Iguanadon (that only three-year-olds and their parents are likely aware of) to be a victim of dinosaur normalization. Here’s a children’s song about the stegosaurus:

My name is stegosaurus, I’m a funny looking dinosaur…. My front two legs are very short. My back two legs are long. My body’s big, my head is very small I’m put together wrong!

You know... a little judgmental. Plus, if the stegosaurus is “put together wrong,” isn’t that kinda our bad since we literally put them back together? But even the almighty T-Rex is not spared from the hammer of normalization. There's a general fascination with the T-rex's tiny arms, each with two small claws. Many books ask: why did such a ferocious beast have such puny, useless arms? One fictional children's film that I watched recently spent a solid 30 seconds joking at the t-rex's expense. When the newest movie in the Jurassic Park franchise was released, I was itching to see it for it promised a genetically modified dinosaur. I don’t condone genetic modification, but I thought this premise was brilliant, as it would allow the filmmakers to take all the scariest parts of dinosaurs and jam them together (which, inevitably, makes a really strong argument against genetic modification). Much to my surprise (and many other disappointed fans), the resulting dinosaur mostly just looked like a t-rex with longer arms and a full hand of claws. Sure, it had a few other hidden tricks but if you freeze-frame the film, that’s it. It’s as if there were a bunch of dino-fans who were sitting around saying, “I’m not afraid of the t-rex because its got those tiny arms. But if you had a t-rex with proportionate arms, well, now that’d be scary!” There’s so much we are still learning about the t-rex. Scientists are now hypothesizing that the tyrannosaurus rex might not have made the ferocious roar we think of from the movies, but something more like a loud bullfrog croak. There’s also a lot of uncertainty about how fast the t-rex runs. Just yesterday even, an article announced the discovery of a pregnant t-rex, which is providing new data on egg-laying. So why aren’t we culturally more open to exploring what purpose the t-rex’s tiny arms might have served? The paleontologists are, but the children's books and films don't seem to be. The disability rights movement pushes us to rethink our assumptions about how the body is supposed to look and what the body is capable of. Many disabled performance artists celebrate how their bodies are “put together wrong” to show us what the anomalous body can do once you embrace creativity and challenge bodily assumptions (see, for example, the many examples in Sins Invalid's film An Unashamed Claim to Beauty). While the disability movement is pushing us away from normal, our dinosaur education for our kids lags behind. Everything about dinosaurs is so totally not normal. When I stop and think about dinosaurs, the t-rex’s tiny arms and the stegosaurus’s small head seem so completely uninteresting compared to how bizarre it is that there were dinosaurs like this once living in North America: Or knowing that this dinosaur-relative once swam in our oceans…yikes! That our normalizing tendencies have extended to a species from over 65 million years ago shows us just how far our counter-efforts to take down normalcy must also go. I’m going to encourage my kid not to think twice about the t-rex’s small arms. That’s just how they look, and from what we know about the t-rex (his FAVORITE dinosaur), they were pretty bad-ass, small arms or not. *Believe it or not, this is actually the second blog by someone at the Longmore Institute with a connection to dinosaurs. Read the other, about Pixar's access features in The Good Dinosaur, here.

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bodily difference

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A Thank You Note to the Disability Rights Movement

Visitor — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 20:27:02 +0000

By: Emily Beitiks

As a non-disabled person, I am often asked by other able-bodied folks what motivates my disability justice work. I explain my story: that my mother has been disabled since before I was born, that the experiences I had growing up made me realize the importance of eliminating barriers for people with disabilities, both physical and cultural. But often, I still get a response that makes my skin crawl with deep awareness of my able-bodied privileges: "That’s so good of you to help the disabled people!" I have long tried to develop a snappy response that articulates how completely off the mark this is. I am not a do-gooder, I'm selfish! However, I've previously struggled to come up concrete examples that make my case.

On November 15, I had my first child, a son named Carver. Like everyone says, it has been the most amazing experience of my life to date. After having now survived 9 months of pregnancy and the first three months with my newborn, I realize that motherhood has given me numerous illustrative examples of how the work of disability scholars and activists has benefits for us all, to which I for one would like to express my gratitude. Below is my thank you note. I encourage others to write their own!

Dear disability rights movement,

I apologize that this thank you note is so belated. You've been helping me out for a long time now - curb cuts when I travel with luggage, elevators at the end of a long day - but recently, I have really reaped the benefits of your efforts in ways that deserve acknowledgement.

Thank you so much for the accommodations you've fought hard for and won. While pregnant at San Francisco State University, my protruding belly made it hard to fit into the smaller bathroom stalls, but fortunately, there were accessible ones in every building. I took advantage of the disabled seating at the front of the bus. And in those final weeks of pregnancy, I could not have been more appreciative of elevators! Thank you!!!

I’d also like to thank you for teaching me that bodies can best function in many different ways and that I should throw "normal" out the door. During my first days home with my son, it seemed that I had permanently surrendered one of my arms to cradling my newborn, and the hourly task of breastfeeding required the use of my second arm as well. Like the folks I’ve met over the years without the use of their arms, I quickly embraced using other parts of my body in place of arms. That burp cloth that was just out of reach could be pulled closer with toes. An email-checking addiction could be appeased with a nose on the iPad in place of fingers.

When I returned to work, I found that I needed to be more public about my body’s different needs. I often had to use a breast pump machine without privacy, once in the middle of a restaurant during a lunch meeting, another time in a busy hallway. Without my background in disability studies, I might not have had the guts to be so public about my leaking appendages, but thanks to you, I quickly learned to stop caring about the oddness of it all and instead prioritize the needs of my body.

And if that wasn’t enough already, I have one more thing for which to give thanks: thank you for helping me realize that interdependence is a beautiful thing. While pregnant, I required help getting out of bed to go to the bathroom multiple times a night. I thought that this was what it meant to depend on my husband, but nothing compared to the hours of labor where he attended to my every need (which primarily consisted of holding my barf bag through each contraction) and the days of recovery that followed. Sometimes indepedence is just too exhausting to pursue, and my understanding of a disability rights perspective helped me quickly admit this to myself with immediate benefits.

I realize that there are undeniable differences between these experiences. Namely, pregnancy is a temporary condition, making it much easier to embrace my heightened needs knowing that they would soon pass. Additionally, pregnancy and childbirth are praised in our society so I did not face the stigma that disabled people encounter. My dependence on my husband would never be named a “burden,” and though public breastfeeding might be slightly awkward, I was never likely to hear someone say, “If I was like you, I’d never leave the house!” Together, we have more work to do, challenging what society values and why, but in the meanwhile, thank you, thank you, thank you for the gains I can already enjoy today.

Wishing you the best,
Emily

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