“As I’ve become more aware of myself and my standpoint as a disabled person, I’ve become more aware of how many otherwise progressive causes ignore us. For example, in academia, critical theory often leaves out issues of disability from the triad of race, class, and gender, even though disability weaves its way through all of them. I was shocked when I realized that theories built on an awareness of the devaluation and stigmatization of bodily difference often ignore the category into which everyone might someday fit: disability. But perhaps that is exactly why disability is left out. Most people feel such fear and vulnerability about the possibility of becoming disabled that they simply want to push it out of their minds.
In the popular media, so-called “body positivity” campaigns leave out disability to a remarkable extent. The body about which we are supposed to feel positive is nearly always the able body. That body might be fat or thin, white or black, Hispanic or Asian, tall or short, rich or poor, but it is almost always able.”
[Cover Image: Photograph depicts model Jillian Mercado, she is a Latina woman who uses a wheelchair. She is against a brick wall. Her hair is in a blonde updo. She is wearing a black shirt with white letters and a black jacket. She also has on a sheer purple skirt and red flat shoes. Her hands are in her lap.]
Seems like barely anyone even cares about the clear and blatant ableism in the movies
My cousin is 75% deaf and losing what he has rapidly. He’s also 7 years old. I remember the day he came up to me with his flurry of hands and slurred speech because everyone was buying his brother spider man stuff and he didn’t have a super hero like him. And I remember leaning in front of him, pulling his hearing aids out and signing the best i could to him about Hawkeye being deaf, and how he was still a super hero and his deafness didn’t make him any less. Granted, it was choppier than that because my signing isn’t spectacular. But his big eyes lit up and he went off running to his dad about Hawkeye. And when he saw the movie, he was so excited, he thought Hawkeye would be signing in the movie. And when he wasnt, when He barely had any lines and when he was hearing, it broke his heart.
Dont tell me ableism isn’t a big deal, or that representation doesn’t matter. Deaf Hawkeye made that little boy feel accepted and happy and the movies stole that from every deaf little boy and girl.
THIS. THIS IS WHY DEAF HAWKEYE IN THE MCU WAS/IS IMPORTANT TO US DEAF/HOH FANS
And then you realize that Forrest knows about his condition all along and your heart breaks a little.
a little? A LITTLE?!
Of course Forrest knows. That’s the whole point. His best “friend” spends his life calling him an idiot, people go around calling him an ~*~inspiration~*~ for living his life as usual, treating him condescendingly because they think he won’t know any different.
But he knows. Of course he knows. And he doesn’t have the words to say “fuck you all, I’m not my mental condition, I’m Forrest.”
I’d like to add that my uncle is mentally retarded (i.e. that’s his official diagnosis, it’s never been updated to “developmentally challenged” or whatever the most modern official language is) due to scarlet fever as a child and the first time he saw this movie, he cried. He’s not Forrest (although he has shaken hands with Jimmy Carter and met Ray Romano, and he held a single good job for 30 years before retiring from it), but Forrest was the first time in his entire life that he saw someone like himself onscreen.
My uncle was born in 1950 and became mentally disabled at the age of ten.
Forrest Gump came out in 1994.
After 34 years of isolation, being made fun of at work and shunned by neighbors, beaten up for being “weird” and whispered about in his community, my uncle—whose life dream was to become a preacher and who instead spray-painted locomotives for General Electric—saw someone else like himself. And he knew it.
He never read the book because he doesn’t have the mental capacity to read anything more complicated than a newspaper. When I told him there was a book—and that there’s a sequel to the book—he got really excited. Not because he could read it; not even because he’d be able to follow the story if I read it to him, but just because it exists.
There are Forrests among us. Don’t treat them the way this one was treated.
Holding the Bowl 