Note: This essay contains spoilers for Avatar: The Way of Water. There’s little I love more than surprise neurology in mainstream media. One such surprise occurred recently when one of the main characters in Avatar: The Way of Water has a seizure. Seizures are the proverbial bread and butter of pediatric neurology, and while…
Tag: Film
Ixcanul (2015) and the Precarity of Health Care in Iximulew (Guatemala)
Tiffany D. Creegan Miller, PhD // Ixcanul (Jayro Bustamante, 2015) is a film about a young Kaqchikel girl who lives with her parents in a humble shack on the edge of a coffee plantation on the slopes of a volcano where she and her father work during harvest seasons. The film was made in close…
Derrière(s): Chronos and the Gay Male
Dr. Brian J. Troth // “Le passé est passé. The future is now.” These temporal adages, for all intents and purposes platitudes uttered without much thought, suggest that we are obsessed with moving forward, going so far as to prematurely announce the impossibility that the future has already arrived. Yet we are also apt to…
Monstrous Myths of Disability in M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass
Diana Rose Newby // Warning: This piece contains mild spoilers for the film Glass. Difference is the bread and butter of the superhero genre. And to a degree, so is disability. Think X-Men’s paraplegic Professor X; the blindness and depression of Marvel’s Daredevil; the facial scarring that catalyzes Harvey Dent’s murderous mental illness; Iron Man’s super-powered…
“Mrs. Grey Will See You Now”: The Legacy of Victorian Pregnancy
Livia Arndal Woods The film adaptation of E.L. James Fifty Shades Freed was released this week.
Making meaning in the everyday: understanding autism through the interpersonal in Swim Team (2017)
Kathryn Cai The recent documentary Swim Team, which is currently being screened across the US,[1] closely tracks the lives of three teenagers in suburban New Jersey as they navigate their everyday lives. The teens are all on the autism spectrum, and the team was formed by Mike and Maria McQuay in part because their son…