Going off our discussion on disability, I found this particular article after we talked about the integration of disabled children and "normal" children in our schools. Like I mentioned in class, I grew up with my mom's best friend's son, who I did not know for several years had a disability. I noticed that there were differences in the ways we communicated with one another, but I did not equate that to him and I being different in any way.
That led me to find this article about Boden, an agency that has started to incorporate children with disabilities into their modeling. For example, Holly has cerebral palsy and Francesca has Down's Syndrome. But what I love about this article is how adorable they are. In class, we discussed how our society puts such a stigma on beauty, especially for women and for disabled individuals. I think this article really emphasizes that even individuals with a disability are beautiful whether it "lives up" to our patriarchal society's definition of beautiful or not.
This part of the article also really stood out to me:
Richard Hawkes the chief executive of disability charity Scope, says the high-profile casting of Greenhow and White represented "huge steps forward when it comes to changing the way we think about disability".
But he adds that "it's still too rare to see disabled children and adults in popular media. If we're going to change the way the public thinks about disability, then we need disabled children and adults to be much more visible."
Overall, I think this is a very powerful campaign with a message that having a disability is does not by any means mean that you are not beautiful. What do you guys think of the campaign?
I think it is great that people start to do this. The only struggle that I have is that I sometimes worry that companies are using these people to get attention for their business. It is similar to the aerie thing. Do you actually value this or are you doing this to get better business?
ReplyDelete