viz. - Abortion

One-Dimensional Issues and Characters In Orange Is the New Black

clsloan — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 14:21:01 +0000

Image credit: Orange Is the New Black Wiki

Remember when I said there weren't many things about Orange Is the New Black that made me cringe? Well, I recollected one. The show's ability to construct multi-dimensional, psychologically complex, believably flawed characters is one of its primary successes. One of its primary problems, however, manifests when the show occasionally forgets just how well it does create dynamic characters.

Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett, for instance, gets humanized very seldom. From the get-go, her overt racism, homophobia, zealotry and ignorance neatly label her villainous, imminently mock-able and nearly impossible to sympathize with. Now, I'm certainly not arguing that there aren't people out there ready to make life absolutely miserable for others, but Orange Is the New Black so beautifully emphasizes basic humanity in order to point out the cruelty of stripping it from incarcerated individuals. A brilliant friend of mine who has the uncanny ability to pick up precisely on what movies, shows and books want their consumers to feel told me that she positively rejoiced when Pennsatucky was placed in solitary. “Pennsatucky just makes the other characters' lives a living hell,” my friend confided. “She's really horrible.” I was shocked to find that I agreed. After the poignant Thanksgiving episode that worked so hard to establish the horrors of being placed in solitary confinement, I felt like I was being asked to celebrate a really wicked inmate getting her just rewards. Maybe I'm simply a terrible person and the situation actually boasts some complex layers. Rooting vindictively for Alex to take vengeance on Pennsatucky didn't precisely feel consistent with the other thematic points of the show, though.

I'm also a little antsy with how the show handles abortion, and I would love feedback from others about this. Given America's contemporary political climate, I'm highly interested in the way our culture's fiction handles the topic. I remember being genuinely shocked when an anti-choice group I ran into on the street a few years ago used Juno as an example of why we shouldn't worry about coercing teenage girls into carrying unwanted pregnancies through. Ever since then, I've been on the lookout for how abortion comes across in film and television shows. I was a bit taken aback when Orange Is the New Black felt the need to suggest that one of Pennsatucky's psychotic tendencies was seeking abortion after abortion. In a flashback, she sounds so horribly callous when she rejects her lover's suggestion that she should maintain one of her pregnancies. Pennsatucky also isn't the only one who confronts the decision about whether or not to have a baby. After accidentally getting pregnant in prison, Dayanara asks Mendoza to help her have an abortion. Dayanara's mother, however, conspires with Mendoza to sabotage the process. I was immediately outraged that Dayanara's response to this trick was to sympathize with her mother and agree to have the baby. Does this show vilify abortions and the women who undertake them or am I just far too sensitive?

The Politics of Tampon Jewelry

clsloan — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 23:00:18 +0000

Image Credit: Politix

In the wake of the menstrual pad confiscation outside the Texas senate gallery, protesters made some highly creative and intentionally jarring visual statements using, primarily, unwrapped tampons. Sanitary napkin accessories, as far as I know, haven't made a big nationwide appearance yet, but the compactness of tampons, coupled with the built-in string, makes it a relatively easy object to manipulate in craftsy projects. I noticed some bold souls stringing them together to make impromptu necklaces at the state capitol the day of the outrage, but the country tuned in when Melissa Harris-Perry daringly donned some tampon earrings on her MSNBC Sunday show. You can see a brief video capturing her demonstration here.

So, what exactly is the message behind hanging tampons from your ears? Harris-Perry's own statements offer a clue. As she put on the homemade earrings, courtesy of her producer, she noted “...the Texas state legislature said that you couldn't bring tampons in when they were going. These women who, in fact, stand up for their own reproductive rights, weren't allowed to, initially, to bring tampons, so just in case that ever happens again, ladies, you can bring them on your earrings.” This observation implies that the legislature was intentionally targeting medical equipment specific to the female body on a singularly biological basis. This focus served to viscerally emphasize an apparently essential or innate distinction between the “uncontrollable” and “dangerous” female body and, by contrast, the “normal” male body that could move between the public and private sphere without having to surrender any threatening toolkits. Melissa Harris-Perry caught on to the implication: women, according to general expectations, are medically bound to their menstrual cycles and can be neatly subjected to prejudice based on that condition.

The chosen retaliatory method? “Bring them in on your earrings.” Instead of identifying tampons and, by extension, menstrual pads and cups, as the symbols of an irksome but necessary biological burden, Harris-Perry suggests embracing them as representations of the cultural experiences women can share. Inserting tampon earrings and displaying them as accessories suggests that inserting tampons during a menstrual cycle need not be considered an anatomical necessity but, rather, an aspect of female culture. While you can't perfectly control your physical states, the idea is that you can pick your jewelry, and that your necklaces, earrings, anklets, nose rings and bracelets say something about your personality. The rhetoric of the accessory brings personal style, individual flair, and, most importantly, an aspect of choice to an altercation previously about innate anatomical conditions. Pretty appropriate given the context.

Ethics in the Abortion Debate

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:30:23 +0000

Credit: New York Times

H/T: Jezebel

I found an interesting article posted on Jezebel today about a New York Times story, with an accompanying video report, about anti-abortion protestors rallying together after the death of an anti-abortion activist, James Pouillon, in Michigan last month. The article specifically discusses the ethics of using such images within the debate, which is a particularly vexed question.

I happened to find Nate’s blog on here from February when several billboards were displayed in front of Gregory Gym with graphic pictures of fetuses. I also remember seeing such images, and feeling that their presentation seemed to lack enough context for me to judge whether or not the photos were credible evidence of the claim that they attempted to present: namely, that since fetuses look human, they are humans, and so that ending their lives via abortion is murder.

What impressed me in the article was the interview with Monica Migliorino Miller, the professor whose photographs are featured in the Times’ photo review. She claims in producing her images, she has “precisely documented each fetus she photographed, by date, location and — with the help of a doctor — gestational age.” It’s then important to note that all of the photographs presented by the NYT in their review are all of fetuses at least fourteen weeks or older, almost three months along, and thus are more fully formed than others earlier in the first trimester. What isn’t addressed is how the fetuses were obtained for her to photograph in the first place: does the mother have the right to decide whether or not her fetus should or could be so photographed?

Like Nate, I’m not sure what role such photographs should or can play in an ethical debate about abortion. The more the photograph’s context is described, the more it can usefully contribute. However, as pointed out to me by my colleague Sarah Orem, such images threaten to preclude debate by claiming an authenticity that cannot be easily disputed. What might also make these images especially fraught is how the photographic lens in these cases seeks to penetrate the intimate interiors of a woman’s body. I know that Andi has already discussed the ethics of war photography, but these images seem to hold a different status. Photographs make claims to presented “reality” which many of the images on this blog itself seem to disprove. How much responsibility does a responsible rhetor have to take on in using and arguing against such images?

Are some protest images too graphic?

Nate Kreuter — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 03:22:34 +0000

*Today's post is more of a question, and rather than reproduce the images of the discussion, I will write about them.

Today I witnessed what is an annual event at the University of Texas at Austin. An anti-abortion protest group was set up outside of Gregory Gym. Set up behind them were 30 foot tall billboards, a traveling road show of graphic photos that the group claims depict aborted fetuses. The appeal of the photos is obvious, an attempt to ask, "how can people kill tinier people." Note that the photos these groups use (and there are many such groups that hold similar protests at campuses around the country) are not necessarily depicting the same medical circumstances that the groups claim the photos depict.

What was interesting is that this event appears to have taken place under some guise of university sanction. University of Texas police were providing security, and the billboards were protected by barricades obviously owned by the University of Texas. Such marks of officialdom lead me to believe that the protest had to have been organized through some university sanctioned student group, presumably with a faculty sponsor. Obviously the University's allowing the event does not equal an endorsement of the group's message, but they certainly weren't trespassing.

As a colleague and I walked out of the gym, he asked an intriguing question, "I wonder what would happen if someone launched a similar protest with equally graphic images of dead US soldiers and Iraqi civilians?"

I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm captivated by it and its ramifications. What if a similar student group, operating through the same channels and meeting the same bureaucratic requirements, launched an anti-war protest graphically depicted some of the 4,000+ Americans who have been lost?

I don't know how UT would respond to such an event, but it would be explosive. How would your academic institution react?

*I have not included relevant images in this, our visual rhetoric blog, as a personal decision not to reproduce images that I feel inhibit, rather than enabling, civil debate.*

Representing Abortion

Nate Kreuter — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 16:28:09 +0000

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision to uphold a ban on "partial birth" abortions, I thought it would be worth mentioning how visual rhetoric is employed in the abortion debate, particularly by pro-life partisans. Anyone who has spent much time on a large university campus has likely seen the images of protest I'm referring to in demonstrations once or twice a year, protests often coordinated by off-campus religious groups. In their most confrontational manifestations, the groups frequently employ large signs depicting very, very graphic images that they claim show aborted fetuses. I don't have enough medical knowledge to evaluate whether or not such images depict the realities of abortion. But certainly such graphic depictions have an impact on passersby. And certainly visual depictions, whether photos or drawings, will influence how people feel about abortion.

I don't wish to post any of the more graphic images pro-life groups have tended to employ, but even in the image above, taken from a Catholic pro-life site, the ostensible medical drawing is certainly designed to have an emotional impact on audiences. I leave it to readers to decide what they think of all this, but would further add that there has been a move in texts such as Sturken and Cartwright's Practices of Looking to acknowledge that even medical imaging is framed and read in a variety of subjective ways.

I am reminded of the scene in Jesus Camp (which I recently screened in my RHE 306 class) where small models of babies in various stages of development were used to talk to young kids about abortion. Instead of looking, say, fish-like, as a fetus does in the early weeks of development, the models looked exactly like newborn babies, just much, much smaller.