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Katy Rose Price’s Final Exam Essay

Literary Analysis of “Apologies to my OB-GYN” by Rebecca Foust

Word Count: 1044

Most often, birth is seen as a transcendent experience, the creation of new life and that life coming into the world for the very first time. Poems concerning birth often focus on themes surrounding joy, creation, beginnings, nurturing, or innocence. However, Rebecca Foust confronts those themes to depict the harsh realities of navigating the fear, uncertainty, and of having a child that was born premature and with health problems. In her poem, “Apologies to my OB-GYN,” Foust challenges the medical industry and beliefs held about whose life is valued and worth saving to demonstrate the inherent worth in each life.

“Apologies to my OB-GYN” has four stanzas, each consisting of six lines. A stanza with six lines is known as a sexain and doesn’t necessarily rhyme, as is seen in this poem. Foust employs anaphora in this piece to emphasize and illustrate her point with the repetition of the word “sorry” at the beginning of the first three stanzas, as well as at the beginning of the last line of the third stanza. Anaphora is a rhetorical device that consists of repeating a word or sequence of words at the beginnings of nearby clauses, thus creating emphasis on a certain word or idea.

Her use of anaphora calls the reader back to the word “apologies” in the title, leading the reader to believe that this poem would be atoning or asking forgiveness for something. However, it accentuates the irony of the poem, as Foust is not asking for forgiveness or lenience, but is calling out her doctors, physicians, and the medical industry for their treatment of her and her son. For instance, in the first four lines, “Sorry that my boy birthed himself / too early, took up so much room / in your prenatal nursery / with his two pounds, two ounces,” she calls attention to the ridiculousness of placing the responsibility of her son’s premature birth on him when his birth was uncontrollable and not determined by any specific person. Furthermore, she highlights the absurdity of deciding whether or not to save his life based on space concerns when her son weighed as much as a pineapple.

The use of anaphora can further be seen in this poem through the juxtaposition of the first three stanzas and the fourth stanza. The first three stanzas contain the use of the word “sorry” and communicate much of the emotion and rage that the author is feeling towards the people and industry that debated on the value of her son’s life. By switching abruptly from that emotion to the image of her child saving “nymph moths / trapped in the porchlight,” the reader can get a sense of the beauty of the child and his selflessness in trying to save little creatures that most people wouldn’t give a second thought. Additionally, one could assume that his empathetic and giving nature stems from his struggle and determination to live, despite the “prognoses” and “predictions” that counted against him. The beauty and value that he has now, as a child whose fate isn’t being debated, is the same as the beauty and value he had as that two-pound premature infant. This can be exemplified through the last three lines of the poem, “…blue wingbeat / pulse fluttering his left temple—there, / there again. Just like it did then.” In these three lines, one of the main themes of the poem is communicated—his life, like every life, had inherent beauty and importance from the moment he was born.

The ironic tone of “Apologies to my OB-GYN” is evident throughout the piece. In the first and second stanzas, the speaker shows her anger, frustration, and rage with her doctor and the medical industry through the irrational image of her premature infant showing his gratefulness for the doctors deciding to save his life (rather than casting it aside) by cooperating with the nurses. She further develops the irony of the poem in the third stanza, in which she “apologizes” for her child, through him receiving adequate care and living, “skyrocketed premiums, weighted the costs / in your cost-benefit analyses, / skewed bell-curve predictions / into one long, straight line.” In this stanza, Foust is criticizing both her doctor and the medical industry that values money and profits above human life. Rather than being joyful and grateful that their patient lived, the doctors and administrators were only concerned with how his long-term, expensive care impacted their costs and profits. By apologizing for how “he took so much of your time / being so determined to live…” Foust is highlighting the rage she feels toward her doctor and the industry, as well as the way she was treated during such a scary, frightening, and nerve-wracking time in her life.

In Foust’s poem, she employs the primary technique of anaphora to emphasize the ironic nature of her poem. She communicates the rage she feels toward the disregard of her son’s life by doctors and the medical industry through the repetition of the word “sorry” and the idea that her son living was an inconvenience to her doctor. Through this poem, Foust offers other people who may be experiencing something similar a voice and empathy for their emotions and frustrations. By juxtaposing her rage with the beauty of her son, both at his birth and as a healthy child, she communicates the theme of the poem, that people have inherent worth, beauty, and significance. Furthermore, she critiques the medical industry and its role in deciding whose life is worth saving and whose life is worth discarding.

Thus, a connection can be made between her poem and disability, as disabled lives are often seen as less than or undervalued. In the medical industry, disability can be seen as something that needs to be “fixed” or “cured,” rather than as an aspect of a person that should be accepted and appreciated. By calling attention to the importance placed by doctors and the medical industry on costs and profits, Foust demonstrates that disabled people are seen as less worthy of life because they may require more care and medical assistance than a non-disabled person. This belief is dispelled in her poem, as she demonstrates that every person is worthy of respect and has inherent value.

“I hereby pledge upon my word of honor that I have neither given nor received unauthorized help on this work.” -Katy Rose Price

Katy Rose Price’s Major Paper

Racialized Notions of Ability in Special Education

Race and disability are assumed to be fixed and relatively obvious but rather are categories that are socially constructed and constantly contested and redefined. Historically, both have operated to define, oppress, and segregate. In 1972, legislation was introduced to Congress regarding the education of children with disabilities and in 1975, Congress enacted Public Law 94-142, then called The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975. The passage of this act, now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), guaranteed students with disabilities a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment (Ferri and Connor 454). Despite this, many students with disabilities are placed in educational settings that distance them from their non-disabled peers. This is further confounded by the overrepresentation of minority students in special education, with Black students being overrepresented in nine of thirteen disability categories. Furthermore, Black students are more likely than their white peers to be placed in exceedingly restrictive and exclusionary education settings (Ferri and Connor 454). In education as a whole, but particularly the field of “special” education, which has frequently been recognized as a multifaceted and fraught area, race and class influences can significantly shape students’ experiences (Gillborn). Special education allows the larger educational system and broader society to function in the ways they do, in addition to upholding and reinforcing the social and cultural norms of said society. Special education has traditionally escaped critical scrutiny because it is understood to be synonymous with “benevolent humanitarianism” (Tomlinson, 2014: 16)—one that conceals and normalizes practices that impact different social groups in dissimilar ways. In this paper, I argue that, since the establishment of special education, the discourses of ableism and racism have become conflated with one another, thereby permitting forms of racial segregation under the façade of “disability.”

Until the implementation of IDEA in the mid-1970s, many students with disabilities were barred from any education based on the discretion of schools that could claim an inability to accommodate such students (Ferri and Connor 457). Prior to this, the first half of the 20^th century saw the increasing number of separate facilities for children deemed as “slow” or “r*******,” with it being no coincidence that the U.S. eugenics movement was occurring simultaneously (Ferri and Connor 457). During the 1950s, there was a marked rise in standardized testing that operated to help institute a set of inflexible norms surrounding academic ability based largely on white, middle-class American understandings, expectations, and principles. This designated students as “normal” or “average,” while those who deviated from those labels were separated (Ferri and Connor, 457). Furthermore, the process of labeling students progressively increased during the 1960s with the advent of the term learning disability (LD), as well as the escalation of the usage of the term emotional disturbance (ED) in the field of education (Ferri and Connor 458). According to Christine Sleeter (2010), the category “learning disabilities” arose as a calculated move to shelter the children of white middle-class families from possible downward mobility through poor school achievement. In this way, this category can be seen as part of overt attempts to protect the scholastic privilege of white middle-class America who were unable to meet boosted academic expectancies of post-Sputnik era curriculum alteration. Additionally, this allowed families of white, middle-class children an alternate and less stigmatizing avenue to justify their children’s difficulties and to gain access to special services (Ferri and Connor 458).

Throughout history, the perception of disability continues to be elucidated as the “natural site of abnormality and fearsome difference—the ‘abject’” (Erevelles 83). Many scholars and theorists have traditionally thought of disability as a biological category, one that is founded in the “medical language of symptoms and diagnostic categories” (Linton 8). However, disability studies scholars have imagined disability as a socially constructed category, one that “derives meaning and social (in)significance from the historical, cultural, political, and economic structures that frame social life” (Erevelles 85). The social model of disability also considers that even the most marked so-called “impairments” only become disabling when encountered with socially constructed problems and postulations (Gillborn). As such, disability brings to light the intricacies and assumptions that are intertwined in our social hierarchy and social categories—thus, lending to the idea that disability “can be theorized as constitutive of most social differences, including race” (Erevelles 85). Implicit in the construction of disability is the compulsory able-bodiedness that asserts that what is both desirable and moral is essentially heteronormative and non-disabled (McRuer 2). As Erevelles argues, “In these contexts disability is required to be simultaneously hypervisible and yet invisible in the medicolegal measurement of social and moral worth, serving as the yardstick that resurrects social difference only to hasten its instantaneous disappearance” (82). Thusly, compulsory able-bodiedness is often employed to separate conventional society from those who are considered threatening outcasts (Erevelles, 89).

In conjunction with compulsory able-bodiedness, it is necessary to understand the implications of Foucault’s theory of bio-power. Bio-power is thought of as the “explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (Erevelles 84). One of these techniques is the use of the medical model of disability to vindicate the continued segregation and removal of disabled people to alternative schools, special education classrooms, and segregated residential institutions (Erevelles 84). This exemplifies how disabled people are constructed to be unworthy, undesirable, and needing to be removed from the gaze of society. The construction of inferiority and mental deficiency contains entrenched and entangled histories of ableism and racism that function to place Black and minority students in segregated special education classrooms, as they are perceived as dangers to the “normal” practices of schooling and to the general education population (Erevelles 92).

In order to fully comprehend the confluence of race and disability in special education, first one must consider the status of both race and disability as socially constructed concepts by a society that values and aggrandizes whiteness. As Erevelles argues, “both disability/impairment and race are neither merely biological nor wholly discursive but rather are historical materialist constructs imbricated within the exploitative conditions of transnational capitalism” (87). This elucidates the concept that race and disability should be understood principally as interactive social constructs, not distinct biological markers as they are often thought to be. The U.S. rhetoric of race and disability are intertwined and interdependent and are employed to validate both exclusion and marginalization (Ferri and Connor 455).

When looking at the U.S. educational system, perhaps the most infamous ruling is Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), determining that racial segregation in schools is unconstitutional. Brown paved the way for the passage of IDEA in 1975, establishing legal precedence and many of the same principles seen in IDEA. However, this ruling was implemented in a society “with a dominant ideology that racializes notions of ability and merit” (Ferri and Connor 455). As such, systems of power that rely on the maintenance of said dominant ideology shifted divisions of students based on racial “difference” to divisions according to “disability,” as it became more accepted. Disability has become a more socially accepted, perhaps even normalized, sort of marginalization of students of color. While IDEA requires that students be placed in the “least restrictive environment” (LRE), this can often not be the case. Though IDEA has been greatly successful in affording students with disabilities access to public and free education, many students, especially students of color, have been placed in more, rather than less, restrictive placements. As a result, some have called LRE a “loophole” that has aided in the establishment of two largely separate and unequal education systems—general education and special education (Ferri and Connor 456). There are disproportionate numbers of students of color, particularly Black and Latinx, who are identified as disabled and placed in highly segregated settings. For example, Black males are more than twice as likely as their white peers to be labeled mentally disabled in thirty-eight states, emotionally disturbed in twenty-nine states, and learning disabled in eight states (Parrish). When given these three labels, students of color are more likely to be removed from general education classrooms (Ferri and Connor 458). Parrish determined that white students generally are “only placed in more restrictive self-contained classes when they need intensive services. Students of color, however, may be more likely to be placed in the restrictive settings whether they require intensive services or not” (26). Furthermore, research suggests that the amount of time a disabled student is placed in their general education classroom is highly correlated to their race (Ferri and Connor 459). Above all, this exemplifies how intensely racialized notions of ability are engrained in our culture and society. They are so deeply entrenched that the segregation of disabled students has also meant segregating students of color. The label of “disabled” was and is employed to resegregate classrooms along class and race lines after the passage of Brown.

In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, advocates for disability rights began to lobby harder for more inclusive placements for all students with disabilities (Ferris and Connor 460). Their efforts resulted in the reauthorization of IDEA in 1997 to what it is today. They further argued that exclusionary schooling practices are indicative of larger societal patterns that continue to struggle against the increased inclusion of people with disabilities in schools and society (Ferris and Connor 460). The public reaction to inclusion for people and students with disabilities was somewhat similar to the reaction to school desegregation, as it was met with strong opposition. For instance, Albert Shanker, the former president of the American Federation of Teachers, declared that inclusion was “a recipe for educational disaster” (Ferris and Connor 460). As a result of pushback to inclusion in school and the widespread belief that implementing inclusion in schools across the country would be unwise, it was argued that a more gradual approach was required. This argument failed to take into account that twenty years had elapsed between the passage of IDEA and any serious attempts to facilitate full inclusion of students with disabilities (Ferris and Connor 466). The approach of gradualism, the same approach taken with racial integration in schools, has been shown, both with inclusion and integration, as possibly being more damaging in the long run, as they result in backlash, resegregation, and little to no real progress. The decision to proceed gradually with inclusion shows the lack of commitment to it and the little value placed on students with disabilities, as many school districts continue to exhibit apathy towards students with disabilities in general education classrooms (Ferri and Connor 467).

Special education, despite being created to meet the needs of diverse learners, has been used to produce and perpetuate the marginalization of individuals founded on the interrelated discourses of race and ability. Individuals who have been deemed undesirable as a function of their race or disability or confluence of both have been designated as the “abject,” as the “other.” These designations are maintained by the dominant groups or ideologies in our larger society which are at least white, able-bodied, heterosexual, and middle to upper class. The dominant group retains and establishes its power over disabled people and people of color (who are outside of the dominant group) by labeling them as unambiguously inferior. These perceptions are deeply entrenched in oppressive legislation, educational practices, and practically every system that has been built for and by the dominant group. Schools uphold and reinforce these dominant beliefs and, as such, are instances of racism and ableism in practice.

As is always the question: where can we go from here? Ferri and Connor conclude that “until the population becomes committed to sharing power on a more equal basis, true diversity within our democracy can only remain an ideal out of reach” (471). While this may be true, there are practices and strategies that can be implemented to help students already in the educational system and those that will enter before we have reached substantial change. Due to the conflation of disability with race and class indicators, some disability studies scholars question the practice of labeling students at all. They argue that it is not necessary to deliver remedial instructional services in segregated settings. In place of these harmful practices, they promote inclusive education that is grounded in constructivist and differentiated instruction, as well as universal design (Reid and Knight 21). In creating an educational system that values and respects each and every one of its students, we must commit to anti-racism, anti-oppression, and a better future for people with disabilities.

Works Cited

Blanchett, Wanda J. “Disproportionate Representation of African American Students in Special Education: Acknowledging the Role of White Privilege and Racism.” Educational Researcher, vol. 35, no. 6, 2006, pp. 24–28. Crossref, doi:10.3102/0013189×035006024.

Erevelles, Nirmala. “Crippin’ Jim Crow: Disability, Dis-Location, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline.” Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada, edited by Liat Ben-Moshe et al., 2014th ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 81–99.

Ferri, Beth A., and David J. Connor. “Tools of Exclusion: Race, Disability, and (Re)Segregation Education.” Teachers College Record, vo. 107, no. 3, 2005, pp. 453-74, doi:10.1111/j.1467-9620.2005.00483.x.

Gillborn, David. “Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, and the Primacy of Racism.” Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 21, no. 3, 2015, pp. 277–87. Crossref, doi:10.1177/1077800414557827.

Linton, Simi. (1998). Claiming Disability. New York: New York University Press.

McRuer, Robert. 2006. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press.

Parrish, Thomas. (2002). “Racial Disparities in the Identification, Funding, and Provision of Special Education.” In D.J. Losen & G. Orfield (Eds.), Racial Inequality in Special Education (pp. 15-37). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Reid, D. Kim, and Michelle G. Knight. “Disability Justifies Exclusion of Minority Students: A Critical History Grounded in Disability Studies.” Educational Researcher, vol. 35, no. 6, 2006, pp. 18–23. Crossref, doi:10.3102/0013189×035006018.

Sleeter, Christine. “Why Is There Learning Disabilities? A Critical Analysis of the Birth of the Field in Its Social Context.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 2, 2010. Crossref, doi:10.18061/dsq.v30i2.1261.

Tomlinson, Sally. The Politics of Race, Class and Special Education: The Selected Works of Sally Tomlinson (World Library of Educationalists). 1st ed., Routledge, 2014.

Word Count: 2088

On my word of honor, I have neither given nor received any unauthorized help on this assignment.

Katy Rose Price’s Class Summary for 9/14/21

Word Count: 813

On September 14^th, our class was almost entirely focused on the novella, Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck. After mentioning the University’s new COVID policy regarding seating, we moved into a large group discussion of the novella, which lasted the entirety of the hour allotted for class. To get the discussion started, Dr. Foss began by prompting us to think about the title of the piece. The title is an allusion to a poem called “To a Mouse” by Robert Burns and parallels can be drawn between the themes of the novella and the poem. Both are centered around the harsh nature of life for those who are most vulnerable and how people have hopes and dreams that often don’t come to fruition. Dr. Foss then asked the class who’s read this work before and to what extent it’s been used to talk about disability, in everyone’s personal experience. While the majority of the class had read Of Mice and Men before, it had only been utilized to discuss race and gender, with the exception of a couple of people.

The large group discussion then moved to converse about Lennie’s character and its representations. We began with material from page eight of the novella in which Lennie is compared to a dog. Similar comparisons are seen throughout the novella, in which Lennie is likened to a dog or a bear. Although people felt that it was a dehumanizing comparison, there are similarities, in that Lennie is often subservient and does not have his agency. Furthermore, more similarities can be observed when looking at the relationship between George and Lennie. In many ways, George holds power over Lennie, as a dog’s master would over a dog. However, it could be said that Steinbeck is prompting readers to see that others may perceive Lennie as an animal but to critique and question that perception.

In discussing Lennie and George’s relationship as it pertained to the dog comparison, that allowed us a segue to have a more in-depth conversation about Lennie and George’s relationship and George’s overall treatment of Lennie. While many of us saw their relationship as extremely toxic and George’s treatment of Lennie as problematic, we also realized that the time period the book was written and set in must be taken into consideration. There was far less knowledge regarding disabilities, which can be seen in how George did not understand Lennie’s disability, nor did he know how to properly communicate with Lennie. While it appears that George loves Lennie, he gets extremely frustrated at times and we eventually came to the conclusion that George’s approach was flawed but his intentions may have been in the right place. We also concluded that, as Steinbeck portrayed their relationship, it was inherently problematic.

The conversation then moved to the disturbing final scene of the novella, which took up the remainder of the class. Dr. Foss asked the class to consider how it would feel to be Lennie and to have that kind of ending. Likenesses can be seen between Lennie’s death and the death of Candy’s dog, as both were supposedly “put out of their misery” and shot in the back of the head. Additionally, just as Candy remarks that he wishes he was the one to have killed his dog, rather than letting a stranger be with his dog in his last moments, everyone else wanted to kill Lennie, but George makes sure he is the one to do it. This raises the question: is Steinbeck ultimately wanting readers to sympathize with George and having to kill his companion or does he want readers to pause and consider that Lennie’s death is not the same as that of a dog’s?

We then discussed a question that Dr. Foss raised, about how the ending would change if it was Crooks that George shot, instead of Lennie, without warning. If that changes readers’ perception of the ending, what does that mean for how we view Lennie? Does that mean we see him as less than? It’s a difficult question to answer and the class was unable to come to a clear consensus. However, we did agree that Lennie should not have been killed for something that he didn’t understand was happening, especially considering the accidental nature of Curly’s wife’s death and Lennie’s lack of ill intent.

Overall, the class had a fruitful and thought-provoking discussion about Of Mice and Men that offered insights into Lennie’s status as a disabled character and how he was perceived and treated as such. What readers draw from this novella depends on how they interpret Steinbeck’s portrayal of Lennie and Lennie’s death, as well as his portrayal of Lennie and George’s relationship. This class functioned as an introspective view into the identity of disability in this time period and offered a valuable portrayal of characters who could be considered disability aligned.