What is beauty?  In high school, I was the only person who used a wheelchair, surrounded by a sea of more stylish, able-bodied, girls.  I didn’t feel pretty, or beautiful at all. That all changed when I moved from Los Angeles up to Berkeley California for college. In 2016, my good friend, Ace Perez, created an incredible art show named Complexities of Identities.  Ace, a person of color herself, photographed friends, including myself, of different abilities, body types, races, and expressions of gender, as a means of trying to combat society’s traditional ideas of beauty. Too often, American media portrays beauty as able-bodied, heterosexual, thin, and white. Sadly, this idea of beauty has been plastered all over television shows, magazines, and the Miss America pageants owned by the monstrously evil President Donald Trump (more about him later). We see this same image of the “ideal” woman everywhere from Reese Witherspoon’s iconic role as Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, to all of the cheerleaders on the Torros in Bring It On, to most of the Disney princesses that we grew up with as little girls. Ace’s photography challenges this extremely narrow definition of beauty, and challenges us to celebrate the differences that make us all beautiful.

Hey everyone, as a disability activist, who recently graduated from UC Berkeley, I decided to create a new blog to discuss disability related Issues of today.  First, I want to talk about the Golden Globe nominated series, The Act.  Did Gypsy Rose Blanchard, featured in this Hulu original show get justice? Gypsy Rose Blanchard, (played by Joey King) is in prison for 10 years for assisting in killing her mother Dee Dee. Dee Dee (played by Patricia Arquette) was an abusive mother forced Gypsy to pretend to be disabled, have an unnecessary breathing tube, feeding tube, and take medicine that were most likely poisonous to her. Was Gypsy Rose justified in helping to murder her mom, or was the court right to incarcerate Gypsy? What are your thoughts?

https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/object-lessons-/the-act-true-crime-ethics-represention-disability/TV-3