Human Service Agencies: The Road to Nowhere

The desire to help the different, the disabled does not come from sympathy. This desire comes from the medical world, the place where presentation is created by the "artifacts of changing social institutions, organizational formations, and world views" (Bogdan 35); world views taken as real and professional, scientific and central, to deny a group justice, individual agency, or support. The decline of presentations such as the freak show do not involve sympathy; they involve a society's changing motivations. Just as the entitlement of the medical world becomes direct control over the disabled, the feeling of pity justifies the sense of protection we feel from their isolation; instead of naming it eugenics, it becomes the meaningless and unanswerable question of how much a disabled person’s life is worth.

How do the disabled move from a presentation of amusement to one of pity? We can see from Bogdan’s definition that it is created by the way institutions have come and gone. The social construction of the freak has been replaced with the construction of the “poster child” because of the way that the powerful have chosen to shape it; taking all the processes of the 20^th century reveal the lack of the disabled’s agency to construct their bodies as their own deviation. It is the idea of condition that resonates with the public and which asserts the possibility of direct adversity in personal lives. The disabled are “meant” to be in a normalized body that disallows them from existing as they are, as unabashed owners of the deviation that constructs the world around them. One cannot understand the origin of this construction if it does not come from a presentation’s role in selling the disabled’s social construction for profit. Bogdan is right in the fact that the shift from the social institution of the freak show to that of human service agencies reflect a change in world views; the way that images are marketed to people accompany this change. As eugenics became a popular concept, the idea of bodily deviation became mapped to the human body by invading the personal space of what our normalized conceptions hold. The idea that bodily deviation can occur still in ourselves, in our children, and amongst people we love created a fear that has a deeply-held desire to be quieted. This construction based on disability allows pity that is so much more far-reaching than the subject depicted, it is insurance for the condition that we may be affected by.

Consider the case of Ryan White:

A poster child for the AIDS movement, his body was the advertising space for how AIDS charities and social service agencies took their profit. The spectacle of Ryan White made AIDS a disease that is not carried exclusively by homosexuals, but by his reception of the disease via blood transfusion, the concept of AIDS changed from a disease targeting a "depraved" subculture to "the general public"; allowing social service agencies to become more and more marketable through the perception of the victim's innocence.

As you can see in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNWCo-pIyPE,
Ryan White's constant attributes of heroism, social justice, and innocence seems to parallel no other AIDS patient. The human service agencies encourage a plea for Ryan's life rather than a plea for every AIDS victim's life; an ideal presentation of AIDS for profit would not have these other patients exist. There has to be a spokesperson that makes up for the negative connotations associated with AIDS, and while the presentation arguably generates more funding for AIDS-based research, it re-iterates the structural inequalities and lack of resources that will come from polarizing AIDS patients into those with high societal status and those who lack society's normalized values. As in the construction of the freak show, these charities are re-affirming status and re-defining people for the pleasure and "amusement" of the crowd; to get people interested, invested, and involved, for the good of the profiteer. One can see that Ryan White's role as "Aggrandized Status" among AIDS individuals, his comparison with such a "exotic" disease provokes that "irony" that makes him even more of an oddity and a greater character of dehumanization. The ownership of his life is stripped away, as evidenced by this People Magazine Cover giving away the last days of his life, as if they were a commodity rather than an indication of the suffering death by arespiratory infection can cause. 

In order to understand the disabled, as Robert Bogdan says, we must "get behind the scenes" and see the world from the "other's" point of view. We cannot choose to look through the presentation that these agencies give us, they are not only marketed, but tailored to the values that patriarchal institutional structures leave behind. Just as the freak show of the past century becomes synonymous with old-world injustice, we must evaluate the modern era for the possibility of both changing and subversive world views that exist in modern social constructions. It is not enough to establish the human service agencies as the "new" freak show; in order to uproot definitions made through the hands of the powerful, we must understand the presentation as constructing fantasy. If we seek to give power, agency, and individualism to the disabled themselves, we have to allow them the ownership of their own lives.



Bibliography:

Bogdan, Robert. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988. Print.
"Ryan White Official Site." Ryan White Official Site. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Apr. 2014.