Afternoon of Alterity - Nazareth College

they want to be treated. The interviewees have told me how they feelabout themselves in society and about how they believe that societyis placing more value on them. However, I do not agree that thedisabled are being valued as they ought to be. The mere fact I amnot agreeing with what the interviewees have said I am projectingotherness onto the disabled. The disabled have the power to beheard, but they are not listened to. Instead, they are pitied and thosewith the power in society try to fix them, however the intervieweesasserts that they do not need fixing. They need to belong.The projection of the disabled as monstrous others is eminentin various forms and is propagated through the media in print andfilms discourses. Society in its attempts to correct the injustices thatthe disabled have experience has instead valorized the disabled. Thefight is more a power struggle that propagates anger and hurt. Twoof the biggest monsters that appears when we least expect them.Monsters are in varied forms that may be cultural, but they mayalso be a natural form of embodiment (Margarit Shildrick 9). As anatural form of embodiment, those human bodies that are deformedfrom birth defects and those human bodies that Rosemarie GarlandThomson contends are “freaky” because they are products of the verysame people who are visually different and who they discriminateagainst. However, such discrimination is an attempt to “eradicate[the] distinctions among a wide variety of [disabled] bodies, conflatingthem under the single sign of the freak-as-another” (qtd. in Church4). The disabled are not freaks and should not be categorized as such.sancia s. huffman 27