Society is quick to judge and label people different from themselves. Whether it is because of different ethnicities or any form of disability. Most of the time these labels are put forward with intention to hurt the recipient’s feelings. In the passage Nancy Mairs challenges and rebels against society’s discrimination and use of improper labels. She emphasizes that she should only be called crippled rather than handicapped or disabled because from her perspective the other labels make her seem weak and inferior. Mairs establishes her claim through the use of rhetorical devices such as tone, diction, and anaphora. Nancy Mairs suffered calamitous disease and due to this she has gone paralyzed from the waist down. The people in society are …show more content…
Her diction makes the reader aware right away that this women is not weak. It demonstrates strongly how being called handicapped or disabled is rather offensive because it exemplifies inferiority to the rest of society. This is depicted in the statement, “And I certainly don’t like ‘handicapped’ which implies that I have deliberately been put at a disadvantage”. Through her use of strong diction her powerful message is established by force and strength rather than weakness and sympathy. Mairs is fairly repetitive throughout the passage in order to distinguish her mains points and build a deeper connection with the reader. Her use of first person pronouns makes the reading personal to the reader opposed to third person pronouns that would make her seem unrelatable. She uses the word “I” a lot to strengthen her beliefs and declare a more demanding feeling to the reader. In summation, Mairs challenges the labels brought forward to certain individuals that are different from the rest of society. Examples being differences because of mental or physical disabilities. She prefers to be called crippled rather than handicapped or disabled because the last two symbolically express inferiority and weakness. She establishes her message thoroughly through the use of tone, diction, and
The essays, “On Being a Cripple”, by Nancy Mairs, and “Living Under Circe’s Spell”, by Matthew Soyster are both about how each author deals with multiple sclerosis in their life and their opinions on it. Mairs’ piece is a careful examination of her experience with MS and her perspective towards her future. In contrast, Soyster writes humorously of a particular incident he had with MS and artfully weaves his ideas about the disease in with his story. In both instances, the authors share the purpose of narrating their encounter with MS to the world to raise awareness. Both employ the rhetorical strategies of appeals to pathos and varying sentence structures to achieve this goal, some more effectively than others.
According to the FBI, more than 75 percent of all murder victims are women, and more than 50 percent of the women are between the ages of 14 and 29 years old. A part of that statistic is Kitty Genovese,a murder victim who is the focus of an editorial, “The Dying Girl that No One Helped,” written by Loudon Wainwright. Kitty was a 28 year old woman who was brutally stabbed to death while on her way home from work. The woman, named Kitty Genovese, lived in a pleasant, welcoming, residential area, in New York. There was at least 38 witnesses that came forward, and they all heard her cries for help, but no one came to her aid. Wainwright effectively demonstrates how society has started turning a “blind-eye” toward problems that can endanger someone's
Her essay is arranged in such a way that her audience can understand her life - the positives and the negatives. She allows her audience to see both sides of her life, both the harsh realities that she must suffer as well as her average day-to-day life. According to Nancy, multiple sclerosis “...has opened and enriched my life enormously. This sense that my fragility and need must be mirrored in others, that in search for and shaping a stable core in a life wrenched by change and loss, change and loss, I must recognize the same process, under individual conditions, in the lives around me. I do not deprecate such knowledge” (Mairs, 37). Mairs big claim is that she has accepted herself and her condition for what is it, yet she refuses to allow her condition to define her. Through her particular diction, tone, satire, and rhetorical elements, Mairs paints a picture of her life and shows how being a cripple has not prevent her from living her life. She is not embarrassed nor ashamed of what she is, and accepts her condition by making the most of it and wearing the title with
Nancy Mairs - Crippled and Strong Throughout this passage , Nancy Mairs uses the word cripple to describe who she is and the beliefs of her condition. She does this by describing her condition in a few different ways: the opinion of others and the opinion of herself. As anyone should, she decides what her title as a person should be and she doesn’t listen or care for anyone’s opinion outside of her own. Her tone is very straightforward throughout the passage.
This thesis, in short, is her statement: “Despite looking decidedly ‘normal’, I am, in fact, a de facto member of the ‘other’” (9). She then spends the rest of the essay describing the many ways she is discriminated against. All of her evidence seems to support this thesis and her purpose of the essay. She speaks about social media and its influence in portraying disabled people, of the unemployment and victim rates in disabled women, and provides some examples of how many villains in day-to-day movies and shows are mostly disabled.
These euphemisms for her condition cause people to view her as something she isn't. Mairs believes that these words describe no one because "Society is no readier to accept crippledness than to accept death, war, sweat, or wrinkles." She continues her story of multiple sclerosis and the hardships she endured. Mairs goes into detail about how her life has changed since her diagnosis and how she has coped with the disease. She includes her need for help by the people around her but also delves into the fact that she can still teach and perform arduous tasks. She talks about her dependence on her family and how good her family treated her. She says she is scared. “...that people are kind to me only because I'm a cripple."(Mairs,8) Mairs hates that our society is obsessed with physical appearance and normality. She states that, "anyone who deviates from the norm better find some way to compensate." (Maris)This shows that she believes that American society has lofty expectations. She ends the essay by stating how she is getting used to having MS and how she isn't sorry anymore that she is a cripple. Mairs is thankful for what she has and the people who help her in her life. Overall, she is proud of herself and has recognized that life is what one makes it to be. Now from what you learned what do you
Nancy Mairs, born in 1943, described herself as a radical feminist, pacifist, and cripple. She is crippled because she has multiple sclerosis (MS), which is a chronic disease involving damage to the nerve cells and spinal cord. In her essay Disability, Mairs’ focus is on how disabled people are portrayed, or rather un-portrayed in the media. There is more than one audience that Mairs could have been trying to reach out to with this piece. The less-obvious audience would be disabled people who can connect to her writing because they can relate to it. The more obvious audience would be physically-able people who have yet to notice the lack of disabled people being portrayed by the media. Her purpose is to persuade the audience that disabled people should be shown in the media more often, to help society better cope with and realize the presence of handicapped people. Mairs starts off by saying “For months now I’ve been consciously searching for representation of myself in the media, especially television. I know I’d recognize this self becaus...
In the book, The Short Bus, Jonathan Mooney’s thesis is that there is more to people than their disabilities, it is not restricting nor is it shameful but infact it is beautiful in its own way. With a plan to travel the United States, Mooney decides to travel in a Short bus with intentions of collecting experiences from people who have overcome--or not overcome--being labeled disabled or abnormal. In this Mooney reinvents this concept that normal people suck; that a simple small message of “you’re not normal” could have a destructive and deteriorating effect. With an idea of what disabilities are, Mooney’s trip gives light to disabilities even he was not prepared to face, that he feared.
Mairs’s inferiority complex which made her question other people’s attitude towards her. In “On Being a Cripple,” Nancy Mairs. She kept believe the way how
This tone is also used to establish an appeal to pathos which he hopes to convince the audience of the fact that handicapped people are still people and not less than anyone else. A very prominent example of Peace’s emotion is displayed when he says, “Like many disabled people, I embrace an identity that is tied to my body. I have been made to feel different, inferior, since I began using a wheelchair thirty years ago and by claiming that I am disabled and proud, I am empowered,” (para. 15). This declaration demonstrates to his audience that Peace is honored by who he is and what disabled people can do and that he is tired of being oppressed by the media. Peace also makes this claim to support his thesis in the first paragraph that states, “The negative portrayal of disabled people is not only oppressive but also confirms that nondisabled people set the terms of the debate about the meaning of disability,” (para. 1). This is Peace’s central argument for the whole article and explains his frustration with society’s generalization of handicapped people and the preconceived limitations set on them. Peace’s appeal to pathos and tone throughout are extremely effective in displaying to his audience (society) that those who have disabilities are fed up with the limits that have been placed in the
Retard,’ we heard her say, and Margaret wilted” (118). This shows that she has been in situations where the word “retard” affected a person with mental disabilities, in this case her own daughter. To the reader this goes straight to their heart, making them feel bad for everything they have ever used the word “retard”. Later in the argument she show the word not only affects her daughter, but also anyone that cares about her daughter. She says, “For my daughter and my family, it’s more like a grenade, and we’re the collateral damage”. This explains that whenever the word “retard” is used, it’s not only hurts people with mental disabilities but also anyone that cares about people with mental disabilities. Then she goes into how she understands that people, usually aren’t trying to be rude or hurtful, that they are “just joking” or “didn’t mean it like that” but regardless of how it’s meant, it’s still hurtful to the people who are affected by mental disabilities on a daily basis. Falling back on to pathos again, she names of a handful of ways she’s heard “retard” in her day to day life. She says, “A clerk in a store apologizes for being ‘such a retard’... Ouch. Kids at the mall call one another ‘you big retard.’ Ouch. A friend tells a … story…about her recent fender bender, with a punchline about ‘some
In 1987, Nancy Mairs argued that physical disabilities are not represented correctly in the media and television. And recently, Rosie Anaya disagrees by explaining that mental disability is suffering worse representation than physical disability. People with mental disabilities are not realistically portrayed on television. Thus, this unrealistic portrayal results in a negative stigma on mental disability and can further isolate those with disabilities.
People go through many obstacles when they face their social identity. Some can overcome their differences, but others may not have they change to even face them due to the treatment that they get from society. Social identity is the one of many controversial and complex problems that many individuals deal with. Because, sometimes it used to be misunderstood making reference to racism and/or others complex matters. “On Being a Cripple” and “How It Feels to Be Colored” are two essays in which both characters suffer from some kind of discrimination. Indeed, in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston and “On Being a Cripple” by Nancy Mairs, each author shows different attitude, endures challenges, and change toward social identity.
Has one ever heard the saying a person’s actions speak louder than their words? In the short story, Harrison Bergeron, Diana Glampers’ actions speak louder than anything she ever said. Being the ruler of an all equal society has a lot to say about who a person is. Diana is the Handicapper General of her society. Even though Diana is the ruler of an equal society she herself is not equal.
In the essay “Disability,” Nancy Mairs discusses the lack of media attention for the disabled, writing: “To depict disabled people in the ordinary activities of life is to admit that there is something ordinary about disability itself, that it may enter anyone’s life.” An ordinary person has very little exposure to the disabled, and therefore can only draw conclusions from what is seen in the media. As soon as people can picture the disabled as regular people with a debilitating condition, they can begin to respect them and see to their needs without it seeming like an afterthought or a burden. As Mairs wrote: “The fact is that ours is the only minority you can join involuntarily, without warning, at any time.” Looking at the issue from this angle, it is easy to see that many disabled people were ordinary people prior to some sort of accident. Mairs develops this po...