Transforming Literacy of Robert P. Waxler; Maureen P. Hall as eBook reading on PaperC.

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Transforming Literacy

Changing Lives Through Reading and Writing

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About this book

What seems to be the conventional way humans have responded to this inevitable sense of human vulnerability? In her book, Nussbaum (2010) maps the dominant consequences and behaviors of societies and individuals who have refused to acknowledge this fact of human vulnerability. Rather than accepting human limitations, people usually have treated human vulnerability (often called “human weakness”) as something to avoid, something to fear and to hate. The results of this kind of resistance are clear. Attempting to distance that fundamental part of human identity, which is a central element of being human, people try to throw it off, become blind to it: they engage in abjection, that is, they disassociate themselves from it, make it the “other,” refusing to confront who they really are as sentient beings. The consequences of such acts of denial often create toxic results: scapegoating and bullying; stigmatization, stereotyping, and prejudice against minorities, gays, and women; rigid hierarchies and aggressive domination; irrational rage, harmful shame, and other negative behaviors and beliefs. In essence, when people distance themselves from their own vulnerability, they push it onto others, refusing to accept it in themselves, often preferring to project it on to the “other”—even attempting, at times, to crush it.