Daily Archives: July 29, 2010

Evidence

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Posted by maxporter on July 29, 2010 – 4:38 PM
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During the summer of 1998, I chafed at not being able to partake in my favorite summertime activity – swimming. I’ve been told that the recovery for the surgery is much simpler nowadays, but back then, I wasn’t allowed to immerse my head in water for about three months. We cleaned the scar site daily with hydroxide peroxide. After surgery, I came home from the hospital with my head wrapped up in a big bulky bandage. It hurt to put on a T-shirt. A few months later, a car door slammed into the side of my head – boom, an explosion of excruciating pain.

My mother says something.
“What, mom?”
She glances at the side of my head, then rolls her eyes. “Max, go get your cochlear implant.”

It is the summer of 2008. The subway clatters along. A thick layer of of voices overlap and clash with each other. Cars honk at everything for no particular reason at all. On top of everything else, the pigeons insist on jabbering to each other all the damn time. I have moved to Manhattan for a summer internship and I live in a tiny apartment with five women who let the garbage overflow and leave pubic hair in the shower drain.

I go back to my room, absent-mindedly straighten up my items, then head back out into the hall. Of course, my mother notices that I am not wearing my cochlear implant.

After yet another day of swimming through a smelly mass of humanity on the noisiest and slowest subway in the world, I finally am fed up with all of the sounds. Easy fix: I decide that I don’t really need to wear this thing while I’m in the city. I take it off in the middle of Canal street. Presto, instant bliss, just like that.

“Well then, how are we supposed to talk?”
I stand there with my mouth agape – she may be hearing, but I expected her to know better.

What am I supposed to say? How am I supposed to explain that sometimes, as nice as the universe of sound is, it can be even better to walk through Manhattan with one less distraction among this sensory bombardment?

I walk back into my room and grab my cochlear implant. I put it on, but I do not turn it on. I still can’t hear, but now my mother is satisfied. Ironically, I still understand her just fine – I can lipread what she’s saying.

[Note: this post is part of Disability Carnival #68; the July theme is "Evidence" and is hosted by Deeply Problematic. You can find posts by other participants here.]

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Diane Arbus

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Posted by maxporter on July 29, 2010 – 3:13 AM
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I’m currently taking a few online classes for the summer. Last week in one of my classes, we studied Diane Arbus, an American photographer who worked from the 1940s to her death in the 70s. Basically, the premise of Arbus’s best-known work is that she photographs “freaks.” (This is not my term, but the term that Arbus herself and many critics used.) In a similar vein, other famous photographs take “normal” people and make them look “freakish.”

A black and white photograph photo shows a boy in Central Park, with the left strap of his jumper awkwardly hanging off his shoulder, tensely holding his long, thin arms by his side. Clenched in his right hand is a toy grenade, and his left hand is held in a claw-like gesture; his facial expression is maniacal.
Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, New York City, USA (1962) by Diane Arbus

Arbus’s approach to her subjects made me really uncomfortable. It’s rather ambiguous as to whether or not Arbus actually got consent from her subjects. For example, that boy with the grenade? As he explained in an interview with San Francisco Chronicle, he didn’t even know it was in a museum until a classmate saw it years later.

Another part of my unease is the immediacy that I feel when I look at Arbus’s images – today, I have the privilege of being invisible, but I remember living in Manhattan as an androgynous person. Everybody stared at me. In Manhattan, for crying out loud. Once, some tourists took photographs of me on the subway. It is difficult to experience something like this, to go home feeling like a zoo animal, and then look at Arbus’s photographs and see this woman doing the exact same thing to her subjects. It’s not really such a leap to assume that, had I lived in the ’60s, Arbus would have gone crazy over how fabulously “freakish” I looked and put me on a museum wall for her own personal gain.

But it wasn’t just Arbus’s approach to her subjects that made me uncomfortable: the critical reaction to Arbus made me really uneasy. Academics and critics value “neutrality.” But I think that this is an illusory concept – if you look at it closely, the “neutral” viewpoint actually promotes a specific narrative. The narrative that I saw in many critiques of Arbus’s work was: “Everybody wants to be normal, because being normal is good. So when Diane Arbus made everybody, even normal people, look like a freak, that was totally disturbing because nobody wants to be a creepy freak.”

Some critics say that Arbus smashed the binary between “normal” and “freak.” I disagree: I think that she did the opposite and reinforced that binary. Personally, some of these “freaks” are my everyday life, integral parts of my social network. They are my best friends, my lovers, my second family. And me? I’ve been different all my life – I wouldn’t give up any of my differences because they make me me. I’m not a freak or normal in and of myself. Nobody is. It is society that arbitrarily applies the label of “freak” to some and “normal” to others.

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