Author: KenzieWard

Kenzie Ward’s Final Exam Paper

 Characterization of Autism in Troubleshooting

The book “Troubleshooting”, by Selene dePackh, is about a dystopian world that revolves around this idea that autism is something that should be treated, and that autistic people are lesser than able-bodied allistics. The author takes these prominent issues in our society dealing with autism, and creates this perceivable future of what would happen if laws protecting disabled people went away and cure based research became more idealized. The main character Dax is an autistic woman that goes through many points in her life where she struggles to survive in this society that treats her poorly. Her struggles provide insight into the barriers autistic people face in the real world, including getting and keeping a job, cure-based research, and overall ignorance and discrimination of autistic people. In spite of those struggles, the author still depicts Dax as an autistic woman shown creating and maintaining sexual and platonic relationships and gives her other qualities that extend beyond her diagnosis, making her a positive representation of an autistic character.

Many depictions of autistic characters in media represent a very similar profile as to what is considered an autistic person. A lot of autistic characters we see in media have traits such as social awkwardness, high intelligence, asexuality, being gullible or unable to lie, and usually end up being portrayed as white or male. Even though many of these things are characteristics of autism, it shouldn’t be the only thing that describes that person or character. A lot of famous characters that come to mind include Sheldon Cooper from “The Big Bang Theory,”, Dr. Shawn Murphy from “The Good Doctor”, and Sam Gardner from “Atypical”. Although these characters can be beneficial representations of people on the spectrum that spread awareness, this specific profile focuses more on the high functioning, savant-like white males that are on the spectrum. This tends to shine the light away from those who are low-functioning, people of color, and women who also exist on the spectrum. “Troubleshooting” shines a light on those people on the spectrum, and the author successfully portrays Dax as a more positive and multidimensional autistic female character. This portrayal of an autistic person is very refreshing in comparison to the other characters previously listed.

Throughout the book, while Dax is fighting for autistic rights in this allistic and ableist society, we also get a glimpse of who she is as a person with characteristics that coincide with her autism. We see a character who takes control over her circumstances and fights for her independence and rights of all people on the autism spectrum. It is also a rare thing to see an explicit view on an autistic person’s sex life because they are usually viewed as asexual and are overall infantilized. With this viewpoint of Dax’s intimate relationships, we also get to see her as this more powerful woman who demands to be in charge of what happens to both her and her partner. In the book, we see her relationship with Chill become more intimate which entails a closer look at how Dax openly expresses her dominance. She also finds herself in a position of power as she takes her independence into her own hands. While she is in an abusive relationship with The Mistake, she finds solace in her work as she discovers the organization Polaris.

Oftentimes the portrayal we get of autistic people tends to show them hating the idea of having relationships with other people. This is just an example of an overgeneralization of a characteristic that is on the spectrum. Although making relationships with people could be difficult and uncomfortable for someone on the spectrum, we see Dax seeking and maintaining relationships with a multitude of people throughout her life. This disregards that stigma that autistic people try to avoid others as best they can because usually that’s just a misunderstanding. Even though it might be more difficult for her to feel comfortable making friends, it is important to see that certain things motivate her to do it, similar to how neurotypical people think as well. For example, the author writes, “I went up and introduced myself even though making social is usually something I’d rather scrub a free public toilet than do; stomach-twisting lust is a powerful motivator” (dePackh, 3). As a reader, this gives us another aspect of how forming relationships is something that autistic people want, and Dax clearly expresses that interest in the story. She also keeps in touch with quite a few people in her life and create close and intimate bonds with Chill Dark, Gabriel Dark, and Tom Webster.

Selene dePackh creates an almost unusual portrayal of someone on the spectrum because it is not what we usually see in books and movies. A character is usually written explicitly as part of a pity story and heavily victimizes the character and writes about how they “overcame” their hardships with autism. As an example, in the story “Of mice and Men” by John Steinbeck, an autistic character named Lenny went through many moments that involved misunderstandings between him and another character. He was written as a character that was much more infantilized than Dax which deemed him unable to take care of himself, as well as fully comprehend the actions of others. Because of this, Lenny ended up murdering a woman because he didn’t fully grasp how powerful he was and ended up dying because of it. In the story “Troubleshooting”, even though Dax is met with hardships such as being forced into prostitution, discriminated against, and abused, we are given a much more hopeful narrative where the character takes control of her circumstances.

There are many depictions of autistic characters in shows where the main protagonist is usually a straight, white male. Similarly, a lot of the narratives end up creating a character who is more victimized than uplifted in the story. The author Selene dePackh introduces a protagonist in her story that is a refreshing take on the characterization of autistic people. Dax is a multifaceted character that is autistic but is also written with having characteristics that are extensions of that diagnosis. She is an autistic character that is written in a positive light because she represents a part of the spectrum that is overlooked. She also has attributes presented to us throughout the story that creates a hopeful dialogue and represents a positive outlook on the characterization of autistic people.

I pledge: Kenzie Ward

Word count: 1069

Citations

dePackh, Selene. Troubleshooting. San Francisco: Reclamation Press, 2018.

Kenzie Ward’s Major Paper: Why Inclusive Classrooms Matter

In our disability and literature class, we have discussed the social model and how important it is to acknowledge that disability is not just an individual problem, but is the outcome of an environment that fails to include those who are disabled. These barriers found in these environments are written about in the article “Academic Ableism: Disability and Education,” written by Jay Timothy Dolmage. He discusses the exclusion of disabled people in higher education and how it is inaccessible both physically and socially for those considered intellectually or physically weaker than the idealized able-bodied. Exclusion in education can start as early as elementary school, especially when people argue that children with disabilities cannot properly learn in what is considered the “normal classroom”, and instead be separated into Special Education classrooms away from their peers. This leads children with disabilities to have an education that does not set them up for success and gives them an unequal opportunity to access the general curriculum and higher education. I argue that children with disabilities and impairments should be integrated into an inclusive classroom because it supports all children despite their personal differences and capabilities.

The exclusion of students with disabilities and impairments can happen as early as kindergarten. If a child is diagnosed with being on the autism spectrum, a learning disability, or any type of impairment, one of the first things considered is whether or not they need to be in a Special Education classroom full time. Many people decide that it is appropriate to have a classroom just for children with disabilities. They say it is because the general classroom and its curriculum is not set up for those kids to be successful learners. This leads to teachers having no idea how to properly teach any type of diverse learner, and it leads to the overall exclusion of children with disabilities. This mindset that we need a separate classroom and program altogether, not only deprives those children from accessing the general curriculum, but it deprives all children of a diverse learning environment. This form of separation takes away the representation of disability in the classroom and prevents students from having different forms of learning and social interaction. The belief that there are special ed teachers and general education teachers, creates barriers in the classroom when a “normal” education teacher is not taught how to properly engage all learners. Teachers are not usually taught how to effectively teach students with these impairments and can oftentimes get frustrated, which leads to an unsuccessful learning environment for everyone. A lot of the time, teachers will only notice visible disability and fail to look closely at “invisible impairments” that affect how a child thinks and perceives information. This leads to discrimination in the classroom.

Even though there have been laws passed to protect students with disabilities from discrimination in the classroom, such as the federal law IDEA, many teachers still bully and neglect their students. When my sister was in third grade, she was recently confirmed with having dyslexia and ADD. She had a hard time reading, writing, and paying attention in her classroom. She was in an environment that was constantly distracting to her and it led to negatively affecting her grades. She was in a Special education part-time, while the rest of the day was spent in her 3rd-grade teacher’s classroom. Because my sister had a hard time keeping up, her teacher would often get frustrated at both her and another student with dyslexia. This teacher bullied them, yelled at them and even slapped a ruler across one student’s knuckles. My sister’s teacher didn’t understand why they could not pay attention or why they needed more time on assignments because she did not think they had these impairments but that they were lazy. Her teacher didn’t bother to help those students, and instead, she isolated them from other kids and gave them failing grades. This 3rd-grade teacher was never taught how to teach diverse learners or create a safe and effective learning environment for her students. My sister attended this school in the early 2000s, and even though classrooms are a lot better for children with disabilities, things like this still happen. There are teachers out there who disregard the need to change their own way of teaching, and instead place blame on their students. This is where the importance of the inclusive classroom comes in.

The inclusive classroom is an environment that allows all children, both disabled and non-disabled, to thrive in a setting that takes account for diverse learners. Teaching inclusively allows for an equal opportunity for all students to become successful and engaged learners. Not only does it help non-disabled students access the curriculum through multiple ways of learning, but it also gives disabled students a sense of belonging in the classroom. Examples of some of these learning methods are encompassed within the Universal Design Principles. They deal with different ways of teaching information, testing formats, and setting up reasonable goals and expectations for all students. At first, this was a method created to integrate children with disability in the classroom effectively and allow them to be successful learners. Now it is a reform for all students and supports different ways of learning, and reduces barriers in the curriculum for all children. These design principles take into account how diverse everyone is, and how we should try to accommodate students as best as we can. Without these principles and the inclusive classroom, we are left with students excluded from the curriculum and hidden away from their peers.

There are a few arguments against inclusive classrooms, while some may think they are thinking of the wellbeing of the children with disabilities, most of them are more concerned about the wellbeing of the able-bodied student. Many people argue that inclusive classrooms are not beneficial at all. They say that students with disabilities will be set up for failure if they are put in a general education class and that they need a more individualized education in order to be successful. Another argument they make is that they think non-able bodied students will disrupt the class too much and negatively impact “regular” students’ education. This is a very ableist mindset that sets the blame on the students with the disability, instead of the blame on the classroom itself. If the environment is not able to support disabled students, then it’s not supporting diverse learners in general. The diagnosis of the student is never the barrier, it is ineffective teaching and a poor learning environment that leads to unsuccessful outcomes. A way to improve the classroom learning environment is to redesign it and include more flexibility in learning. UDL creates a redesigned classroom that supports engagement, representation, and expression in teaching the general curriculum. I know that it is easy to say that we should do all these things and that the hard part comes through actually implementing them. Changes like this cannot happen overnight, especially if money is a problem accessing things such as more aides, technologies, and other resources to improve accessibility. However, it is something that definitely proves its worth and allows more equitable access to education. Through modifications and accommodations, all students are able to reach their goals and attain higher education, something that is not very accessible for students with disabilities. Historically, higher education has been a disabling environment for students with impairments because of disability discrimination throughout education as a whole.

Higher education was built in a way that kept people with disabilities from entering the building, let alone accessing education. Jay Timothy Dolmage quotes Ellen Cushman saying this, “Even as universities have become more accepting of diversity, academics tend to stay “inside,” as Ellen Cushman suggests. And the steps are not the only way in which the university is inaccessible, even if they might be the most physically arresting and apparent.”(Dolmage) What she means by this is that as a society, we often glorify those big sets of stairs that lead up right to the doors of possibility, without giving accessibility another thought. The architecture of these higher education buildings represents the exclusion of people with disabilities and how they are left out of these opportunities so many able-bodied people have. This is just another example of an environment that is disabling to those with impairments, and show how inaccessible the general curriculum can be without any effort to support inclusion. This history of stigma has lead to this ableist mindset that if you have any physical or mental impairments, then there’s a very small possibility you’ll be able to go to a university that glorifies perfect bodies and minds. Dolmage discusses this idealized ableism in his article, which explains further why this inaccessibility is heavily implemented, especially in education. He states, “Further, the ethic of higher education still encourages students and teachers alike to accentuate ability, valorize perfection, and stigmatize anything that hints at intellectual (or physical) weakness”(Dolmage).

Going off on what Dolmage wrote, this idea that higher education is limited to this able-minded students is only further implicating that this is not trying to protect the disabled students from a non-beneficial education, but that they are being ruled out from attending completely. This is because they don’t follow that able-bodied model that most universities accept. By using principles that support inclusivity, as a society, we can break away from those ableist ideas and create a more accessible education for all.

Students with disabilities should be able to access the same education that is attainable for everyone else. It is important to take into account just how much needs to be changed in order to accommodate all students and create successful learners. Environments that are non-inclusive end up negatively affecting all children, especially ones with impairments. It is time to recognize these ableist beliefs that education is not built for those who don’t fit into this idea of a “normal learner”. Trying to separate or exclude people with disabilities from the same educational opportunities as able people is not solving the problem. Depriving these students from the general curriculum creates barriers from getting into higher education successfully. There needs to be more focus on creating an inclusive environment that takes into account the needs of all diverse learners and preventing barriers in the curriculum, as well as barriers that could inhibit them from being prepared for college. By utilizing tools such as the UDL principles, all teachers and students can benefit from incorporating them into the classroom. Not only does it promote the representation of disability in the classroom, but it diversifies learning environments and interactions with other students.

Word count: 1775

I pledge -Kenzie Ward

Work cited:

T., Jay. “Literary Studies: Literary Criticism and Theory.” Fulcrum, University of Michigan Press, 1 Jan. 1970, doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9708722.

“The UDL Guidelines.” UDL, 31 Aug. 2018, udlguidelines.cast.org/.

Kenzie Ward’s response to Tessa Fontaine’s extra credit book reading

Last Friday, I attended Tessa Fontaine’s book reading in the Mansion. As she read from her prologue, I was mesmerized by her ability to suck me in with her words. The way she nonchalantly talked about lying to get into the carnival sideshow, which led her to eat fire, swallow swords, and charm snakes. This led her into talking about her Mom’s strokes, her time in the hospital, and how it changed her both physically and mentally. She compared the fire she let dance on her arms to her own Mother’s paralyzed one. I thought that the juxtaposition between her adventures in the carnival and the stories about her Mom was very interesting. She then went on to say, “Life extends in all directions outside of that”. I thought that this was an interesting point because even though her Mom’s illness was a very difficult part of Fontaine’s life, she still wanted to make it clear that she still remembered the times when she wasn’t sick or paralyzed in the hospital. She wanted to look beyond her disability but at the same time acknowledge it.

She then went to talk about her experiences with learning how to eat fire and swallow swords, which amazingly she was able to do. She talked about how in order to do these things you need to “untrain your instincts” and “unlearn your self-preservation”. This ability to just let go and do the unexpected allowed her to go on this amazing journey where she learned about herself and the extent of her limits. When asked why she did what she did, Fontaine could only say that there’s no exact reason why we do the things we do. She was interested in it for a long time, but the reason why she went out and actually did it is something she’s still trying to figure out for herself. Her Mother’s bravery and adventurous nature might have pushed her in that direction but choosing the path she did was for a multitude of reasons still unknown to this day.

Kenzie’s reading response to Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”, and Tobin Siebers’ “Disability in Theory”

In the short story Cathedral by Raymond Carver, we are introduced to a story about a man’s wife and her friend who is blind. The husband is obviously uncomfortable with the idea of this man, not only staying in his house but also with his blindness. Earlier in the semester, we read Disability in Theory by Tobin Siebers and in his paper, he talked about disability, social constructionism, and people’s negative outlook on impairment. In the short story, it was clear that the husband’s perceptions of blindness were influenced by social construction. Not only did he strictly refer to his wife’s friend as “the blind man”, but as we read the story we notice just how uncomfortable the husband is when it comes to disability. This ableist man is compelled to recognize that there are other bodies besides the able body.

Before the speaker met Robert, he couldn’t understand how he was happily married due to his blindness. He felt bad for him and then, in turn, felt bad for the woman because Robert would never see her and compliment her appearance. Later on, when the husband meets Robert in person he was immediately put off by the man’s appearance and his judgments got the best of him. “He also had this full beard. But he didn’t use a cane and he didn’t wear dark glasses. I’d always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind. Fact was, I wished he had a pair”(Carver 217).

The husband’s misconstrued idea of blindness was proven wrong as soon as he was introduced to Robert. He didn’t look like the stereotypical blind person the husband had pictured him as, and later on in the short story, he finds out that this man is more similar to what he would consider normal and exceptional. Like any other person, Robert openly smokes and drinks regardless of his blindness which succeeds in leaving the husband dumbfounded. He originally assumes that if you’re blind you can’t smoke because you can’t see the smoke. The man being uncomfortable with Robert not wearing glasses forces the husband to come face to face with his impairment. In fact, Robert wearing or not wearing glasses has nothing to do with the husband and in no way does Robert have to present his body in a way that appeases him.

Tobin Siebers discusses how “people easily perceive when someone is different from them but rarely acknowledge the violence of their perceptions”(Siebers 174). It wasn’t until much later when Robert was forced to acknowledge Robert’s blindness one on one, that he stopped perceiving him as someone lesser than him. Even though I don’t agree with the idea that temporarily blinding yourself allows you to truly understand blindness, the exercise he did with drawing the cathedral did help him communicate with someone he had a hard time connecting with. The short story in its entirety showed disability through the eyes of the able-bodied person. Not only are we looking through the lens of someone who is dependent on his own views of disability. When he is finally introduced to someone who isn’t of the “exceptional body” he is taken aback and has to interact with someone who is different from him.

Word count: 540

I pledge: Kenzie Ward

Works cited:

Siebers, T. “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body.” American Literary History 13.4 (2001): 737-54. Web.

Carver, Raymond. “Cathedral” web.

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