She is lazy, which prevents her from getting ahead or improving her lot in life. Individual flaw, not systemic injustice, is the cause of the mother character's poverty. The representation is also strikingly lowbrow. Maggie's family members are tacky, incapable of restraint at the tourist trap gift shops. They are kitsch without the ironic awareness that the audience possesses upon seeing their Mickey Mouse apparel when they finally show up at the hospital. They are not in on the joke—objectified for a lack of refinement even while being objectified for their lack of morality.
Their fat bodies become yet another marker of this deficit, another demonstration of their lack of restraint, another reason to despise them, and another implication of their laziness. Recall Maggie's comments about the Oreos. She also comments that, in her family, "trouble comes by the pound.
It is curious to see, however, that the focus of the family on Maggie's money, and their lack of compassion for her "condition" as she lays in the hospital bed, is framed by the film-makers and read by the audience as evil, whereas Frankie's compassion when he ends her life is framed and read as heroic.
Even euthanasia has a particular cultural capital. In a very memorable scene in her room at "Serenity Glen," Maggie is forced to choose between her family and Frankie. She chooses him. Using the mother's classed, obese body, and the family's one-dimensional depiction, the film sets Frankie up as an angel.
He then makes euthanasia seem virtuous, aesthetically pleasing and, upper class. When Maggie hits somebody, when she inflicts pain on another body, she is working against her own, just as she denies the pain others inflict on her. And a veritable parade of other bodies is brought out into ring to do battle with her for class mobility.
These bodies are at least as much, if not more, other than hers maybe this is why she can beat them. These stereotypes are the working class markers of their respective countries, just like her Appalachian accent and her dishwashing as well as her fat, lazy mother are to be markers of her class in America. And, in case the audience doesn't get how "other" they are, we see them in contrast with "desirable," well-disciplined bodies—the thin, properly feminine, bikini-clad women who get in the ring and hold up signs to signify the start of a new round of action.
Yet it is a body that refuses to get into the ring that perhaps offers the most vivid snapshot of the ways that norms of class, ability and gender expression govern the semiotic economy of the film. In the beginning of the movie, he and Maggie are both teased because they don't fit: Maggie is a woman and Danger acts and dresses like one, wearing tights and refusing to spar with anyone.
His character is an important repository of stigma. His body is gendered, abled and class wrong. He is effeminate and won't deny his body enough to actually fight. His training serves as the opposite of Maggie's. Her gender transformation is the inverse of his, because he cannot deny his feminized body.
Failing to do so makes him less of a man. Pummeling others and being pummeled, on the other hand, makes Maggie less of a woman. And Danger's accent and speech translate for the movie's purposes as making him both "retarded" and backwoods. In some ways, as pure stigma, there's not a lot of difference, and the cinematic construction of Danger highlights that fact.
We aren't told whether he has a disability, but he sounds "funny," with a "hillbilly" accent like Maggie's. And the other men in the gym call him a "retard.
Of course, he is beaten to a pulp. His body then has the tension of many fronts focused upon it. The audience is to pity danger, but only a little bit. The discerning eye can't help but see his plight mirrored in that of Maggie.
When either character, Maggie or Danger, fails to overcome their gendered or disabled body, they become the target of violence. Danger is beaten, Maggie is euthanized.
She, too, is to be pitied once she becomes "irrevocably" disabled, but only a little bit. In the end, we are supposed to feel somewhat happy that she is killed. It is interesting to see the ways that stereotypes of ability and of class rely upon twinned disavowals of dependency.
Maggie is not part of a collective, not a member of a group united by common interests. Hers is a Horatio Alger, bootstraps myth because she works hard and because she does nothing to initiate or facilitate social change. Her working-class status is not a source of pride, in part because the version of "working class" the film imagines lacks attributes that could reasonably be sources of pride.
Working class in Million Dollar Baby means laziness and an under-achievement that results from poor character— lack of moral and ethical goodness. Even the Morgan Freeman character, a wise narrator, is a habitual gambler, damaged as much by his own sin as he is by the boxing injury that cut his career short.
His race, the injury, the sin, and the disability work together, albeit to create a more likeable character than Danger, or Maggie's mother. Yet to be working-class always means having a fallible and deficient body. Maggie's body becomes the marker for her class status, the embodiment of her rags-to-riches life project.
She must change her socio-economic status and as a means to that end, she must change her body. In order to control her financial situation, she must be in control of her body. She can't allow herself to become fat like her mother—clearly, the "natural" thing for her body to do. So she turns to boxing, an unnatural act, a way to beat the odds, a way to pick herself up by her bootstraps. Her body becomes a site of individuality. Her body is a personal achievement, a project. With hard work, she can control her body—until her injury at least.
And when she no longer can control her body, there is only one solution. So, for Maggie, class is something to be overcome, and something that she can overcome.
But disability—also imagined in the film as a personal and corporeal failure—is something that Maggie cannot overcome. The difference lies in individuality. Maggie's victory over socio-economics is based on her own individual hard work. Yes, she relies on the Clint Eastwood character to train her, but she always "pulls her own weight," and never leeches off her trainer's good if reluctant will. Again, Maggie's family's transgressions lie in this brand of lechery, as signified by their collection of welfare money and benefits.
At that time, Eastwood said that the ADA amounted to "a form of extortion. Although Eastwood didn't write the script, he did select it, act in it, direct and co-produce it. Is it surprising that "Million Dollar Baby" isn't particularly sympathetic to the views of people with disabilities?
If a film were obviously anti-gay, or anti-women or anti-abortion -- would all the film critics rally around it and tell us what a great film it was? So why do so many critics like this film? Could it be because they actually have very little knowledge or contact with people with disabilities, deaf people, blind people, quadriplegics -- except through the media? Many people, critics included, know very little about them or their issues.
While it is rare to find a college student who isn't well versed in race, class, gender and sexuality -- few if any know about their fellow Americans with disabilities.
Ironically, one of the ways that many people do actually know about this group is through movies. These films generally show us people with disabilities triumphing over their "handicap" or living the tragedy of the disease.
Great themes for an uplifting feel-good film or a tearjerker. These films, for the most part, are made by abled people who are using the issue of disability to rally the forces of hope and pity.
People with disabilities in film tend to be lionized or thrown to the lions. But they almost never are made or written by people with disabilities -- so the actual life experience of people who have walked the walk, tapped the cane, or wheeled the chair, isn't really reflected in many of these works.
Toole, who wrote the story on which "Million Dollar Baby" was based, had a heart condition throughout his life, his son said, and "had strong feelings about not wanting to live in a reduced state. So-called normal people are fascinated and haunted by the person with a disability, probably because, unlike any other identity, one can go from being a normal to a quadriplegic in a matter of seconds.
Most white people aren't going to become black in their lifetimes, and most men with a few exceptions aren't going to become women in the near future -- but the shaky and uncertain position of being normal can easily convert by a simple medical report into a state of being disabled overnight.
In this article, I argue that this mimetic paradigm obscures the interaction between representation and reality and diverts bioethicists from analyzing the tensions in the representational object itself.
I propose an anti-mimetic model of representation that is attuned to how representations can both maintain and potentially subvert dominant conceptions of bioethics. In my conclusion, I build off this case study to assess how an incorporation of representational studies can deepen—and be deepened by—recent calls for interdisciplinarity in bioethics.
Keywords Bioethics. Disability studies. Euthanasia Introduction What role should representational analysis play in bioethics? In this article, I argue that bioethicists have answered this question by assessing representations according to the accuracy of their depiction of bioethical procedures.
By making bioethical protocols into the criteria of judgment for representations, bioethicists remove these procedures from all scrutiny.
They ignore how representations support highly problematic bioethical protocols, H. In my conclusion, I will draw on this reading to propose a new model for an interdisciplinary bioethics. What is bioethics? Bioethics is the regulation of medicine and science by ethics committees, designed to bring medical and scientific practice in keeping with external legal protection. Bioethics thus arose to design and implement regulation that could allow safe and ethical medical and scientific practice to continue.
Kuhse and P. Singer Oxford: Blackwell Pub. Zalta, Such conditions included the supply of relevant medical information, certification of psychological rationality, and protection from paternalistic encroachment. These goals sprung from the confluence of various disciplines—medicine, principlist philosophy, theology, and legal studies—oriented toward the establishment and implementation of ethical regulations.
It is not clear what, if any, role representational analysis could play in such a vision, as such analysis would seem to be removed from the clinical setting of bioethical problems. Consequently, representational analyses were largely absent from the early years of bioethics. And, just as autonomy and informed consent were outside of representation, so, too, was bioethics itself.
Consequently, there was little place for representational analysis in the field. The joys of accuracy and dangers of the inaccurate A primary concern among bioethicists who study representation has been the danger of inaccurate representations of bioethical issues. In one of the few discussions of the role of visual representations in bioethics, Lauritzen argues that visual representations are potentially dangerous because of their ability to convince viewers of information that is not true.
It did not. Caplan and J. Friedman Durham: Duke University Press, , Kellehear Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, The result is a mimetic paradigm of representation that takes as its basis for judgment the terms of bioethics itself. This mimetic paradigm fits into the larger logic of the bioethical enterprise: The inaccurate representation of biological processes such as chronic disease or fetal gestation could lead viewers to make decisions about reproductive health or end- of-life care that are uniformed.
By inaccurately portraying reality, these representations undermine the foundations of the bioethics. The flip side of the danger of inaccurate representations is the potential that accurate representations can be used for bioethics education. This is a significant problem.
Alternative histories of the field, such as those of Cooter and Stevens, argue that bioethics, far from arising to protect the interest of vulnerable populations was primarily concerned with the solidification of physician authority against popular unrest. Whether representations are inaccurate or accurate, their very measurement according to their correspondence to bioethical practice ensures that representational analyses can only confirm the relevance of bioethics itself.
A new model for representational analysis in bioethics Contrary to the mimetic paradigm, representations do not passively represent reality; they actively produce reality, serving to maintain a certain vision of the social order. For example, in Human Rights, Inc. However, paradoxically, these representations are spotlighted because they cohere with the legal definition of human rights.
But the representational critic can read representations not only to highlight this process of stabilization but also to show the internal conflicts that they obscure. In this sense, representations exceed their hegemonic readings, containing both the maintenance of the current social order and the possible creation of a new form of existence. The work of the representational critic is thus not solely critical but can itself be productive of a new way of life.
Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc. J Med Humanit These authors pose a radically different model for representational analysis in bioethics. Rather than judging representations according to their correspondence to bioethics, representations should be taken as windows into how bioethics creates the illusion of its own rationality.
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