City of Angels 2017-18

Throughout the introduction and fourth chapter of Fit to Be Citizens, Natalia Molina continually touches on the significant differences between “citizenship” and “social membership.” She describes how being a legal "citizen” of a country/society often does not necessarily grant an individual “membership" in the social realm of that country/society. To quote the text, Molina states that “the highest levels of government determine legal citizenship, but institutions, such as public health departments, determine who has access to social membership.”  Depending on how you define "social membership," do you think it is just that institutions other than the government are in charge of deciding who is worthy and who is unworthy of societal participation? If not, whose responsibility should it be to decide this? Why do you think this responsibility has fallen upon the public health department, and what makes them good or bad candidates for deciding who is a deservin...

In class, we were discussing Fit to Be Citizens, a great new addition to our class that talks about race, my favorite topic. We all took a look at page 7, Table I. Population of Los Angeles Broken Down By Race, 1880-1940. Someone (probably Kate) touched on the fact that white people were able to claim who can be considered white and who can’t. That fact ties into racial “fluidity” or that race is just a social construct. What is your view on that? Do you believe that race is a social construct and why? Deeming a Person of Color white also ties into the fact that white people construct a social hierarchy and give themselves the power to consider someone white…? Also, why deem them white? Is white, right?

Sorry for the late post! Over the past weekend, I was fortunate enough to play at a benefits concert for HEARTBeats VIP, a high school extension of the Violence Intervention Program. As you may already know, VIP is a leader in developing sustainable programs to ensure greater possibilities for all victims of violence, abuse, and neglect. Based in Los Angeles, the organization is focused on elder abuse and neglect, child predatory abuse, and neglect, along with support for mental health patients and foster kids. In Fit to be Citizens, we have begun to look over the various measures taken to exclude certain minorities in Los Angeles in attempts to create a picturesque landscape of a white only city. With Los Angeles becoming a health haven for those diseased, the pristine image of L.A. was held up at all costs, just like many of its stereotypical images now. The original Chinatown and its inhabitants being labeled diseased ridden, Japanese being isolated with claims of Yello Peril an...

As we step into the next phase of our class, we will be analyzing the effects of imagery centered around AIDs and the set of tropes and stereotypes which accompany it.  A major part of Sontag's analysis of disease is centered around the associations which accompany a disease and the disjunction/gap which exists between the existence of a disease itself and it's perceived hyperbolic effects which creates a difference between the real and the created perceptions that we have.  Sontag succinctly describes the process of deconstructing stigma on page 7 "As long as a particular disease is treated as an evil, invincible predator, not just a disease, most people with cancer will indeed be demoralized by learning what disease they have. The solution is hardly to stop telling cancer patients the truth, but to rectify the conception of the disease, to de-mythicize it." Recently, California revised its laws such that if you are a person with AIDS and you knowingl...

"All this lying to and by cancer patients is a measure of how much harder it has become in advanced industrial societies to come to terms with death. As death is now an offensively meaningless event, so that disease widely considered a synonym for death is experienced as something to hide. The policy of equivocating about the nature of their disease with cancer patients reflects the conviction that dying people are best spared the news that they are dying, and that the good death is the sudden one, best of all if it happens while we’re unconscious or asleep. Yet the modern denial of death does not explain the extent of the lying and the wish to be lied to; it does not touch the deepest dread." As society gets more advanced in its ability to treat otherwise fatal diseases, the race away from death has reached a pace never seen in our species existence. As Sontage says, it has become impossible to "come to terms with death." Does society lose any benefits that could...

Susan Sontag's Illness as metaphor and AIDS and its metaphors explores the psyche of the diseases Tuberculosis and Cancer in a way that psychoanalyzes the intentions of the disease. The idea of granting the disease power by naming it is incredibly interesting to me. Sontag paints both Cancer and TB in way where they seem semi sentient in their actions and traits. Tuberculosis is an inherently sexual and passionate disease while cancer is a disease of repressed emotions. it seems like each disease has its own personality and needs to be treated in its own special way. How does the personification of these diseases contribute to the power that they have over people? If diagnoses of a disease were to not be shared with the patient, would that patient's ignorance contribute to their longevity? Can the  metaphors  and  stereotypes   ever be separated from the disease that they inhabit? If so, does that give them less power?