essay 3

As i was trying to get things together today to write my essay i realized how complicated this essay really would be to write. There are so many sides to this topic and so many different ways to look at it. I want to write my essay on body modification for medical reasons, and I am having a hard time picking a side to write about because there are so many different reasons for why different people get different surgeries done. I guess that I thought this essay would be easier than it really is, it ended up being extremly complicated to pick topics from the readings to write about.

removing of limbs

Today in class when we were discussing the removal of healthy limbs due to a psychological disease is really made me very confused on how to think about it. I understand that this is something that a person is born with and that they really feel incomplete and depressed about having a part of their body, and for that reason they want it removed. Also, I cant help but think about all the people who are born without limbs, and who would give anything to have a full functioning body, and these people are just giving their limbs up. I know that is isn't their choice, but it is still hard to think about it in any other way. Also I think about these doctors and hospitals who are risking their reputations when they amputate a perfectly healthy limb off these people. And patients know this so they will do to any cause like burning their body part, or freezing it, so that these is something wrong so the doctors are forced to amputate it. It is a very confusing subject and I'm not really 100% how i feel about it from either side because i see both sides of the argument.

Body modification

This week in class we have been reading a lot about body modification and different ways it can be preformed. I think that this topic is something that is very touchy and can be interpreted in many different ways. These body modifications can go from a simple tattoo to branding yourself and people have many different options on what these body modifications mean to them. We read about four different people who had 4 different experiences with body modification. One was a man who cut himself. He worked in a mental hospital and for his form of body modification he cut different patterns into his skin. this caused him a lot of problems because he worked with mental patients and he his boss didn't think that he himself was mentally stable, and in the end cost him his job. I think that sometimes these extreme forms of body modification do have negative impacts, but it also isn't my place to judge what they are feeling or why they do these things to their body.

when we did the reading on bleaching of skin, it really surprised me. I didn't know that this was something that a lot of people around the world struggled with and for this reason it really was rather shocking. i knew of Micheal Jackson bleaching his skin for whatever medical reason he claimed to have, but i didn't know that people in different cultures did this to fit in. I think that fact that people do things that drastic to fit in is really makes me happy that i live where i do, that i am not faced with these issues.

Last night when I was writing my essay I was having a really hard time figuring out how to put everything together. It was hard to pick a topic and then find the appropriate essays to help add references to it. Eventually I decided to write about illness and disability. I think that this essay was a lot harder to write the the first essay because it was something we had to research and then relate to us personally. Also, I wasn't really sure how well my essay met the assignment requirements, but hopefully I will get good feedback.

In class today i was having a hard time trying to figure out what to write about for this essay. There were so many different options that I could have written about, I was having a hard time getting down to one sound idea what I could write 5 to 7 pages about. I decided that I was going to write about body images, and focus mostly on that image of people with disabilities. This somewhat affects me personally because my sister has some physical disabilities, so I think that this topic is something that I can write soundly about, and produce a good essay from too.

After finishing the movie in class i realized a few things. One that i figured out after we summarized in class the section from the essay called "Cultural Fixions of the Freak Body: Conney Island and the Postmodern Sideshow," is that you never can tell who the so called "freak s." This depends 0n your setting and who is around you. On these side shows the freaks are the normal people and in the outside world, the term "freak" isn't something that should be used at all. Also from watching this movie is that people who these physical disabilities are actually very functional like the man with no hands or legs who can roll the cigarette, and has a complet family of his own. This surprised me and i found myself no on longer feeling bad for these people anymore, because they were making livings, had families and were living as normal of a life that they could.