Final Paper

Potential Topic Ideas:

1. Homeless people with a mental illness - in and out of jail, medication, etc.

How will your paper explore the "limits" of the body, body modification, or disability?
 Will it explore a combination of these categories?:

1. Limited social structure of U.S. makes it hard for homeless, especially mentally-ill ones, to get resources needed to have a sustainable lifestyles 
2. Why they can't get a job - lack of education, lack of medication, lack of support
3. Homeless shelters - how it's more dangerous to live in them then outside of them - usually robbed, held at gun point, shootings, etc.
4. Lack of government funding 
5. Political debate about how much "free money" should be provided for the mentally ill who are homeless (Free medicine trucks, organizations who wander the streets, etc)
6. The fact that the only real place they are safe and secure is in jail cells - provided meals, medicine, a bed, safety, etc.

Which of the following qualities/categories might shape your paper? How?

1. Social class - money factor, how they can provide for their mentally ill children/family members 
2. Mass Media - the ideas of being homeless as dirty, lazy, etc
3. Government - political party feuds on healthcare, lack of money means, look up court cases on disabled and medication, etc

-List all of the viewpoints/differing perspectives on this issue that you can think of.
Is there a dominant or popular viewpoint?

1. We should provide - it is important to provide medication and better facilities for the mentally ill when they are out on the streets so they can have a chance to undo the limits put on their bodies and go back into the world. A lot of the times people believe that medication is the answer and that people should be put on it so that they can live a sustainable lifestyle in the current world we live in
2. The opposite view is that it isn't the governments job to take care of people who are "mentally disabled," in quotes because a lot of the time people with these opinions undermine the meaning of a mental disabled, making it seem less-than a physical disability. 

How is this issue represented in the media? Can you think of any particular examples?

1. Movies, homeless shelters, governmental disputes about healthcare and who should get it/how much we should be paying for others, political party campaigns and ideals, etc Obviously I need to look up more specific examples to help support my case.

What is your own opinion on this issue?

• My opinion is that it is sad that the mentally disabled people are going from homeless shelter to jail back and forward for the majority of their lives. It isn't right that people are forced out into the streets because they are unable to find jobs and our economy is terrible making it hard to support people who can't support themselves. The political debate should be swayed from wondering why there are so many "slackers" to wondering how we can help our society in America for the better as a whole. It doesn't look good seeing people wandering around under bridges or in the streets of cities because they literally have no where else to go. I will need to look up more evidence on both sides however before I can make an opinion accurately. But, for the most part I don't really know how I feel about medicating all of the homeless people, not for the reason of money, but for the ethical reasons of what those medications can do to a person long-term (frying your brain, etc).

-What secondary resources do you think could help you with this paper?

1. Movies
2. Pictures
3. Newspaper
4. Interviews
5. Case Studies

Code switching, as simple as sending a text or an email

"People see celebrities, they have money and fame, but I’m a human being. I cry, I get scared, I get nervous just like everyone else.” - Beyonce

Beyonce attempts to portray her life in the videos as an average person rather than a celebrity. However, we as the viewers may feel connected to her in that moment, but we realize this is not true as the video progresses. They start to show her posing with cameras on her, lights highlighting her best features, and the fans flowing her hair. This made me realize that this video wanted us to envy her rather than relate to her.  In the next video, Beyonce is shown laughing with her friends, swearing, being silly, acting, well what we would describe as "normal." This is shown in a parallel between "sending an e-mail to your boss," and "texting your best friend," with the differences in punctuation, capitalization, and grammar. 

The article goes on to explain that everyone does what Beyonce has done in this video, we "Code-switch." Very rarely does someone act the same way towards every single person. I can already relate to this statement because I know I act a certain way with different friends, family, and adults. This relates back to our original conversation in the difference between White ASL and Black ASL. For one, the quote at the end of this article showed the annoyance of a black ASL user towards another one when they were using white ASL. They stated, "you're signing like the white students, you think you're smart. You think you're better than us," which clearly isn't the case. This reminds me of our perception while watching the first Beyonce video where she is the center of attention. Sometimes we question whether or not celebrities think they are better than us based on their physical actions. Another comparison I made between the two was the perceptions between how we talk towards one group of people and another. In class we discussed slang, formal language, and diction, etc which directly relates back to the way Beyonce acts for her professional career and the way she would act with her friends. This idea of Code-switching makes us able to have different personalities with different people without being things such as "fake." Some of the black ASL users would talk to their white peers in the white ASL and then when they went home completely switched back to the way they learned. 

"Super-abled" or "Disabled" ?

I couldn't help but post a blog about Aimee Mullins after we watched a few clips about her during class on Monday. I loved how she explained that the reason people are judgmental is because of how society enables people to learn facts. When children are told not to ask her question about her fake legs or even look at them, it gives her "disability" a negative connotation instead of a positive one. She explains that it is normal for children to be curious, making it essential to the child's learning ability to hear positive things about disabilities sooner than later. It is the new generations responsibility to start teaching our kids not to find it "weird" when they see someone "not-whole," as the definition of disabled would say.

After Aimee Mullins looked up the connotation of the word disabled in the dictionary and found it to all be negative, she realized that these labels lead to conclusions. If these names are presented to children when they are young, it may limit or shadow their true potentials. Instead of passing on these stereotypes, we as a society need to learn how to accept it and move past them. We need to learn how to make language positive for people with disabilities and teach these new ways of speech to our children and so on. Until we can learn how to accept people for who they are, we will be living in a cold world. Aimee Mullins really opened my eyes to the potential of advocacy and what it really means to spread awareness for a cause.