Amanda Palmer IMHO engaged in some massive disability fail that put me off her completely. Mostly her refusal to hear people's cogent arguments and recognize her fail.

I wasn't sure what your objection was. Was that the Evelyn Evelyn project?

I'm really not sure how to parse the disability issues in the long history of marginalized "freak show" culture and representation which has been dealt with in everything from Tod Browning's movie Freaks to Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus to Katherine Dunn's Geek Love.

Though ultimately it tends to come down to nobody wanting to be used as somebody else's metaphor.

I'm sorry to hear that. I've recently become a fan of her music.

sj, here's a precis of the controversy.

Thanks for the link, Hec. I just did some googling of my own, and I'm not sure how I feel about the whole thing. ETA: Actually I think it doesn't bother me that much but that maybe it should.

and I'm not sure how I feel about the whole thing.

I don't either exactly. I get the objection. But I'm not quite ready to toss out Richard II or The Heart is a Lonely Hunter out and they both use disability as metaphor. As does...King Lear (blindness, insanity), The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Moby Dick (Ahab's lost limb), and on and on.

It is a deeply ingrained part of Western culture to use disability as a metaphor for otherness or estrangement or emotional damage or whatever. An attempt to physicalize interior states.

I mostly get annoyed with classic literature's often use of disability to equal either evil or sainthood, with nothing in between those two options.

Also, one would hope that we've evolved in our attitude towards disability since Shakespeare's time.

Having not heard the music on the Evelyn Evelyn CD, it's hard for me to judge, but mostly I don't have a problem with someone taking on a persona of someone with a disability to tell a story they want to tell. After all, most of the major characters I can think of that have disabilities on TV are not played by disabled actors.

I mostly get annoyed with classic literature's often use of disability to equal either evil or sainthood, with nothing in between those two options.

I mostly see it used as an expression of alienation. People feel freaky, or out of place in their culture and reach for a freak show example to express their emotional state. Similarly Bowie uses a literal alien for his sense of alienation, or space travel to evoke his emotional distance.

Also, one would hope that we've evolved in our attitude towards disability since Shakespeare's time.

I don't know if I really trust that idea of moral evolution. Every age is a prisoner of its own preconceptions. We're not the apex of human development. Though sticking narrowly to your point, yes, we do view disability differently than it was seen in Renaissance England.

I mostly see it used as an expression of alienation. People feel freaky, or out of place in their culture and reach for a freak show example to express their emotional state. Similarly Bowie uses a literal alien for his sense of alienation, or space travel to evoke his emotional distance.

Whatever the purpose of it, it feeds stereotypes and still affects the way disabled people are treated today.

Whatever the purpose of it, it feeds stereotypes and still affects the way disabled people are treated today.

Again it comes down to somebody else speaking for your experience. Using a disability as a metaphor to narrowly express some part of an ableist experience.

It's odd that as I consider the issues I realize the import of the word "exploitation." Because I'm very familiar with many subgenres of film which are so explicitly exploitative that they're called "exploitation films."

Which goes back to my earlier comment about each era being somewhat blindered by its own presumptions. To cite an example, you know more about the state of racial tension in the late sixties / early seventies by watching a classic blaxploitation movie like Superfly or Coffy than you will by watching a very middlebrow movie like Guess Who's Coming To Dinner.