#MeOnDisplay means exploding stigma!
Earlier this week, I received information about an open rehearsal/audition with Heidi Latsky Dance and thought it sounded fun; I haven’t danced in a while and I decided that, whether or not I’d be accepted into the performance, it would be a cool experience. I did not realize the experience would begin before I even got there…
After emailing the coordinator my headshot and resume, I visited the company’s website. I did not get very far when I encountered a link called #MeOnDisplay. I clicked on it and read:
“Every day we see people on display on magazine covers and billboards and we KNOW we are not reflected in those images. It’s time we own our truths, imperfections, and fierceness.
Join us in redefining beauty one image at a time.
Take a STAND. Take a PHOTO.
Tell the world what being On Display means to you…”
So before finding out more about the company, I injected myself into their “Social Media Revolution!”
After thinking for a moment about what photo to use–I knew I wanted to use one featuring my blind cane–I decided on “Behold my Unisphere!” a photo of me pointing at a giant metal structure of the Earth constructed for the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, as if I were a general indicating my territory, lately conquered.
I uploaded it to Twitter, but In my excitement I’d neglected one of the directions, so @HLatskyDance urged, “@DrMLGodin loving this! To us #MeOnDisplay means taking risks. What does it mean to you?! Let us know and we’ll add it to our gallery TwoHearts emoji [I don’t know how to make emoji on my PC!]”
My first thought was to write #MeOnDisplay means reveling in difference, but then I thought that might be too flabby, or worse, that someone else had already said it or something similar–I am a little OCD about uniqueness! So I read through a few of what others had said, then did a search for difference and sure enough I found something–wasn’t mine, but it was close enough, so I thought some more…
I’ve been reading Martha Nussbaum’s book Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, and my ears pricked up at her use of the word stigma. Referring to work by Erving Goffman she writes that “a central feature of the operation of stigma, especially toward people with impairments and disabilities, is the denial of individuality: the entire encounter with such a person is articulated in terms of the stigmatized trait, and we come to believe that the person with the stigma is not fully or really human.”
Ouch! But I take her point as she develops it into the recognition of the age-old amazement people who do not perceive themselves as disabled have when they discover something quotidian in the behavior of one they perceived as wholly different:
When such a person performs the most normal actions of a human life, “normals” often express surprise, as if they were saying, “Fancy that! In some ways you’re just like a human being!”
Though she is not speaking specifically of blind people here, it has certainly been my experience that sighted people get excited about the dumbest things with respect to my behavior and congratulate me on things they would ordinarily reserve for children. In other words, one who is disabled often feels the impressing people bar to be rather low.
I’m the first to admit that if you are going to judge me according to whether I do a bang-up job of walking a straight line or eating politely with a fork and knife, I will likely fail. But frankly, my expectations of leaving a mark on this world have absolutely nothing to do with the quotidian. Though I sometimes feel bad about my lameness at using my blind cane, mobilitying oneself to the bodega does not a genius make.
To take an extreme case, if we judge Stephen Hawking on the basis of normalcy, he too will fail, but of course, we do not. I’m not a (physics) genius and I shudder to think of the bodily sufferings he’s gone through, but when it comes down to it, there have been countless humans birthed into this world and deathed out again, and greatness is not always measured in physical ability.
Despite my shortcomings in using him, I love my blind cane, who, you should know by now is named Moses! My boyfriend and I do not agree who awesomely dubbed him Moses, thereby conjuring powers to part the endless Red Seas of New York City, but we agree there is magic in naming a stigmatized object–the lowly government issued white cane with red stripe and reflective tape–after a biblical man of power.
A couple years back, I was lucky enough to find myself in LA on a national commercial set and it was positively charming to see how the crew, when introduced to Moses, referred to him with no small reverence, and even, in some darkly fantastic way, seemed privileged to hang with him. This is what exploding stigma means: using the mark of shame to blow up perceptions!
I’m thrilled that Heidi Latsky’s #MeOnDisplay helped me articulate a thought that’s been rattling around my head for some time.
