| Contents >Defining Disability Linguistically or How to obstruct someone with a dictionary by Belinda Downes ( University of Newcastle) |
Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5  |
These models also do not distinguish between two different types of avoidance.
Situational Avoidance: May or may not affect the person with a disability directly.
An example: A person is so afraid of people with mental illnesses that they walk on the other side of the road from a drop-in centre. The regulars at the drop-in centre and their friends are totally unaware of the avoidance. The point is that even if they notice there is no direct need to say anything, though they may feel compelled to do so. There is no linguistic task necessary.
Linguistic Avoidance: Does affect the person with a disability directly.
An example: A person is late for a meeting and is waiting in line behind someone using synthesized speech and assumes they are also deaf – so instead of asking if they could be let through – they just push through. This affects the person directly even though nothing is said. It was necessary to communicate something.
When the speaker does not know how to frame the entire conversation, as per our whole discussion to this point, (for example, the internal linguistic conflict), nothing at all may be expressed. The example below unfortunately highlights this very well:
-
‘... A woman had just climbed, on crutches, one of the longest staircases in the New York subway system and was standing at the top, getting her breath back, when some well meaning cavalier materialised out of the crowd, grabbed her up and carried her down to the bottom again. Had he bothered to ask if she needed assistance no problem would have arisen. What is worse than the inconvenience caused by incidents such as this is the degradation of being continually robbed of control over our own affairs in this way.’ (Sutherland, 1981)
The fight within…
Therefore, language such as 'political correctness' can be defined as an over-accommodating answer to a speaker's uncritiqued internal conflict. This conflict is between the need to linguistically discriminate for a perceived functional need (for example building access issues), as per our earlier discussion about discrimination being necessary for language to work, and an internal dialogue of being afraid to discriminate difference. It may not be obvious at first, but this difference is more often than not seen (incorrectly) as a series of dichotomies, such as:
- If it’s not Right - it’s Wrong
- If it’s Different - it’s Wrong
- If it’s Asymmetrical - it’s Unhealthy
- If it’s not Familiar - it’s Dangerous and so on…
As can be seen, these dichotomies do not need to make logical sense, they are there to fill in the gaps in knowledge about how to talk about disability. These dichotomies are discussed below.
uncritiqued internal conflict means that people do not question their own assumptions and seek to find a solution to their linguistic conflict externally – either the other person is wrong to have a disability (untenable) or other nameless people or institutions are to blame for the context, (as per the Social Model) these people almost never question their own assumptions. When a person has a disability that can be perceived as ‘self-inflicted’, for instance AIDS, whether it was or not – this ‘It’s their fault I can’t find the words” idea sticks.
If it’s not Familiar it’s Dangerous
These assumptions / dichotomies tend to come as a package, that is, if one is either true or suggested, all of them are assumed true. They are often found in advertising. Above Michael Jackson's public caricature was presented as a case in point of a 'package' used against people who were perceived to have the same disability. Some examples of these packages are:
Good Package: Success, Wealth, Beauty, Health, Active, Complete, Wholesome, Friendly, Helpful, Order, Intelligent
Bad Package: Failure, Poverty, Ugliness, Illness, Passivity, Incompleteness, Dangerous, Unfriendly, Burden, Disorder, Stupid
As an example of this, think about the way celebrities are used in advertising. Thirty seconds is as much time as many advertisers get to inform, attract, convince and hopefully get the viewer to purchase their goods or services. What is needed is a shorthand way of 'injecting' those attributes the advertiser wants to communicate to their intended customers. When model Kate Moss was allegedly caught taking illicit drugs, she lost some advertising contracts. This was because she no longer had a package that represented the product she was representing. They wanted their product to take on Moss's previous perceived qualities. Qualities like attractiveness, success, wealth and fame are often used in advertising, since advertisers recognise that these are qualities that people want for themselves. (Traister, 2005)
People can be so tuned into these packages that they automatically ascribe attributes from an accessory that are not actually present in the object itself. For example, use of a beautiful, attractive woman in a car commercial can suggest popularity and success even though you buy the car and not the woman, without saying it overtly.
Unfortunately these 'packages' can be used in a negative sense as well. A recent example in New South Wales is the use of ugliness and incompleteness to suggest that smoking is dangerous. Of course smoking is dangerous, but the viewer does not need to see someone being ill in hospital - the 'ugly' pictures are enough. (For examples of this type of advertisement see: http://www.health.nsw.gov.au/cancer_inst/index.html)
The other side of these messages though is almost never spoken about, that these reinforce the 'package' and the stereotype, when the opposite attributes may be true. It should not be needed to be pointed out that people with ulcers on their legs are unlikely to be dangerous or unfriendly (as per the bad package above). This is not just a social inconvenience - in some cases it can stop people gaining employment or a meaningful relationship.
| Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Contents >Defining Disability Linguistically or How to obstruct someone with a dictionary by Belinda Downes ( University of Newcastle) |