The 18 February 2013 issue of Time magazine had a photo of the actor John Hawkes who starred in The Sessions, playing a man in an iron lung (in real life, the poet and journalist Mark O’Brien). The photo was accompanied by a quote from Hawkes: “Mark O’Brien used to say that disabled people are invisible to able bodied people … In between takes, I’d stay on a gurney, and crew members would set sandwiches and wardrobe people would lay coats on me … I got some idea of what it’s like to be thought of as furniture.”
In Social Role Valorization language: What can we learn from this quote about the devalued role of object, and of the negative treatment which so often flows from negative perception of societally devalued people? What gets in the way of seeing another person as a person, of interpersonal identification?
Marc Tumeinski