Majority Rules

As I read Barton's "Textual Practices of Erasure," her concept of how United Way advertisements efficiently erased life experiences of people with disabilities reminded me of Gilbert and Gubar's "Infection in the Sentence." In the same way that Barton sees United Way as the agent with the power to erase "the complex experiences of [disabled] individuals" (172) through their campaign ads, Gilbert and Gubar make the case that the experiences of women authors are also being erased or refused by the patriarchal history of male authors.

In Barton's piece, the United Way ads create a stark difference between people with disabilities and the able-bodied donors. The ads are trying to pit the people with disabilities into the category of the "Other," while the donors are stabilized as "normal." Barton sees a problem with this tactic because the ads are representing people with disabilities in a stereotypical way, and as "pitiful cases, [and] dependent adults and handicapped children are lumped together into a class which has to make progress toward being 'normal'" (175). Barton proposes that these ads are exploiting people with disabilities to show "normal" people that they don't have these disabilities, so they should take sympathy and save those who are disabled and abnormal. This denies the experiences of those with disabilities because the ads only use their images to garner donations, rather than their stories or experiences to educate able-bodied people on how to better understand the lives of disabled individuals.

In a sense, this contrast between disability and ability worked for United Way, but for Gilbert and Gubar, the differences between male and female authors worked against women authors. Having a dominating male literary history erases female authors' experiences because "male precursors...fail to define the ways in which [a female writer] experiences her own identity" (Gilbert and Gubar 451). If women's literary works are not represented in literature and women are continually being shunned by critics and other male authors alike, then women's voices and experiences in literature are effectively being silenced.

Gilbert and Gubar see that the collective work of male authors is the the overwhelming representation in literature. The patriarchal history of literature can be seen as giving agency to only male authors and limiting agency to female writers. There's a correlation, then, between how United Way has represented disabled persons in a limited and stereotypical way and how the literature world has limited its representation of female authors. The struggle of a person with a disability and the struggle of a female author are in no way the same struggle, but they can be compared in that both groups of minorities are repressed, silenced, and limited by a more powerful and oppressive majority, be it a charity agency or a history of male literary legacy.