Search results

Book reviewed in this article:Style WarsElectric Boogie

Book reviewed in this article: Palm Play. 1980. A film by Alan Lomax Step Style. 1980. A film by Alan Lomax

Inside Deaf Culture. Carol Padden and Tom Humphries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 208 pp.

The vulnerability of people with disabilities to HIV/AIDS is investigated. Data collected during the World Bank/Yale Global Survey on HIV/AIDS & Disability that measured the impact of HIV/AIDS upon the disabled populations of 57 countries is analyzed. The findings demonstrate that disabled populations are equally if not more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS than able-bodied populations; for instance, it is stressed that women with disabilities are more susceptible to rape, that women with disabilities are perceived as unmarriageable within certain societies & are forced into dangerous sexual relations, & that many nations fail to preserve the human rights of people with disabilities. In addition, it is demonstrated that people with disabilities may not be provided access to sex education programs & appropriate health care. Despite these circumstances, it is concluded that people with disabilities will likely receive additional attention from HIV/AIDS advocates since funding for HIV/AIDS programs are scarce presently. Adapted from the source document.

The Great Ape Project is an international animal rights movement with the goal of extending rights to nonhuman primates. While the authors of this essay are sympathetic with scholars who seek to ensure humane treatment for these species, they are concerned with the growing tendency by those in the project to draw analogies between nonhuman primates and humans with disabilities. It is felt that scholars in the Great Ape Project, ignoring findings from anthropologists who have begun to study the significant sociocultural matrix that has defined and often limited individuals with disabilities, rely on assumptions about disability that can be traced back to the eugenics movement.The authors of this essay argue that if scholars in the Great Ape Project want to make comparisons between humans and apes, it should be with all humans. They feel it is both unfortunate and scientifically inaccurate for those in the Great Ape Project to blur the boundary between apes and people by dehumanizing individuals with disabilities, individuals for whom human rights are often the most precarious, [great apes, Great Ape Project, disability, eugenics, human rights]

From the seventeenth century to the early years of the twentieth, the population of Martha's Vineyard manifested an extremely high rate of profound hereditary deafness. In stark contrast to the experience of most Deaf people in our own society, the Vineyarders who were born Deaf were so thoroughly integrated into the daily life of the community that they were not seen—and did not see themselves—as handicapped or as a group apart. Deaf people were included in all aspects of life, such as town politics, jobs, church affairs, and social life. How was this possible?On the Vineyard, hearing and Deaf islanders alike grew up speaking sign language. This unique sociolinguistic adaptation meant that the usual barriers to communication between the hearing and the Deaf, which so isolate many Deaf people today, did not exist