American Able (Or, Not Quite American "Amateurs")

What if American Apparel and their well known butt contests, pubic hair ads, and porn star models, just, well...weren't?

To help you envision it is disabled model is Jes Sachse and photographer / creator of the project is Holly Norris. The series, called American Able, was done by the Canadian women’s studies student "because of the company’s claim that its models are girls next door, when, in fact, the American Apparel model standard of beauty adheres to pretty traditional standards of beauty, at least by American standards." Yep, that sounds like a Canadian women's studies major to me.

So Norris replaced Sasha "Throat: A Cautionary Tale" Grey with Sachse, to put disabled women in places “where women with disabilities are typically excluded.” Read: such as American Apparel ads. “Too often, the pervasive influence of imagery in mass media goes unexamined, consumed en masse by the public,” Norris writes. “However, this imagery has real, oppressive effects on people who are continuously ‘othered’ by society.”

Wait, you think that the ridiculous, hypersexualized American Apparel ads are "unexamined" and simple consumed by the public? Do you not have interweb in Canada, because I can think of several blogs that routinely take aim at the ads: Copyranter, Jezebel (312 tabbed posts!), Gawker (477 tabbed posts!) and even on occasion, this site. A Google search will turn up thousands of different online versions of newspaper and blog articles on them - and we'll only talk about that because this is the web realm; there's plenty of other media that do their analysis. By the way, Sasha Grey's sweet ass is something I want to see in boyshorts because I find it attractive. Physically deformed asses in revealing clothes - not at all. And that's preference based on taste, not socieo-feministic handicapped discriminatory rhetoric, so let's not even waste time on that front.

And as for oppressing the "othered", how is it that you've singled them out in all of advertising and media? Is it more pervasive or influential than Vogue or Cosmopolitan or In Style or People? the answer is no. And why is it American Apparel's responsibility featured the disabled? Uh, it's not. According to this research, there's almost 1 in 5 that are classified as disabled, though they point out that:

While many people automatically think of physical limitations such as being in a wheelchair when they think of disabilities, more than 16 million of those with disabilities were classified as having difficulty
with mental functioning, emotional functioning and cognitive functioning. This group of disabled people included those who are severely anxious or depressed, and those who have issues concentrating, dealing with stress, and functioning in social situations.

Chairs, humps, limps or not, there's clearly too many disabled people out there to ever call them "othered" by a society they make up a fair portion of. And if there is disdain for the lack of representation, then where is the outcry from those groups and people? It really doesn't exist. Much like Sarah Palin's uninvited and unnecessary defense of the handicapped, is this just another able bodied person making a point that doesn't need to be made because it's completely wrong, and therefore doesn't matter?

Sure, supposing Harmony Korine started doing apparel ads, this would be mildly interesting, but I don't think it really qualifies as any statement, and certainly not even noteworthy on the women's studies / disabled front. You can sex up a disabled person in satire of pop culture, but anything beyond that is more exploitation than exultation.