Driver's License and Organ Donation

At the age of 15 1/2, when most of us have just learned to drive correctly we are asked to make the decision whether we want to be an organ donor. If we choose yes it is indicated on our driver's license with a red heart (refer to the license to the left). The Washington State Department of Licensing includes organ donation as a part of "Getting Your License" on their government sponsored website. This portion of the website indicates why you should donate, what it means on your license, what organs can be donated, how to register and what happens if you change your mind. In addition to this, it also indicates where to register for organ donation besides at the department of licensing, what to include in registration, as well as sites for more information and donating money to the organ donation registration. This site also provides a brochure that promotes organ donation to the fullest extent, for instance one of the headlines is "You have the power to DONATE LIFE (WA DOL)." On the first page of the brochure the benefits of donating organs, eyes, and tissue is represented through a mans survival story, through statistics and the overarching theme that with becoming an organ donor and indicating it on your license you can contribute to saving someone's life, "it provides hope to thousands of people with organ failure (WA DOL)." The second page of the brochure presents everything that can be donated to help others. One of the section caught my attention in particular, "How the donation process works":

"Your commitment to donation will not interfere with your medical care. Organ, eye, and tissue donation becomes an option only after all lifesaving efforts have been made. Consent for donation is confirmed, and your family is asked to participate in the process by providing your medical history. Surgical procedures are use to recover donated organs, eyes and tissue. The body is always treated with great care, respect and dignity."

The brochure and website information provided by the Washington Department of Licensing tends to glorify the heroism of organ donation, but does not present the very real issues that doctors, patients, and family members are faced with the reality of deciding when personhood has passed and the person is considered dead.

"To Be Freed from the Infirmity of (the) Age" by Krakauer presents the new technologies of sustaining life and what it means for defining death in modern science. Because there is the opportunity to sustain life through artificial means it has presented the issue of trying to figure when sustaining life will bring suffering, More recently "patients, surrogates, and physicians have agreed that sometimes withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining treatments is best (382)." However, laws and government policies also play a role "for allowing life-sustaining technologies to be withheld or withdrawn under certain circumstance (Krakauer 382)." Organ donation and use also indicates how an individual can conquer death or contribute someone else's desire to live longer; "the body is composed of disposable and potentially replaceable parts," this indicates the replacement of organs to promote a longer life (388). Organ transplantation is thus performed to help achieve a optimal living standard, the goal of modern science is to master the human body so when disease effects organs they can be replaced, "the Cartesian dream is manifested in the organ-replacement and life-sustaining technologies applied to gravely ill people (Krakauer 388)."

The organ donation indication on a drivers license gets much more complicated after considering that the technologies that are in place are to sustain one's life rather than announce death and harvest the organs. Furthermore, the promotion of donating organs by the department of licensing in Washington also ignores belief systems that disagree with organ transplantation and removal of body parts. In relation, Krakauer states that "the fundamental technological goal of mastery displaces traditional cultural and religious values, meanings and goals (Krakauer 390)." Modern medicine prides itself on technology that presents knowledge and answers but it also presents several problems because "all mastery displaces and thereby conceals the unmasterable (Krakauer 392)."

In the brochure on the Washington State Department of Licensing they state that, "Your commitment to donation will not interfere with your medical care." Lock's article, "Living Cadavers and the Calculation of Death" indicates the complexities of medical care and organ donation when the calculation of death is required. She states, "Brain-dead patients remain betwist and between, both alive and dead, breathing with technological assistance but irreversibly unconscious (136). The patient is surviving because of technology and the person has left the body, the trouble here is though are they really seen as dead or just brain dead; In Japan, "it is impossible to procure organs from the brain dead in Japan (136)." Culturally implications make it incredibly difficult for family members to decide if there family member is dead so that the organs can be harvested, thus "together with official and popular discourse and valued tactic knowledge, work in associations to compound medical judgement and influence the meanings that are associated with a diagnosis of brian death (Lock 138). So even though an individual might indicate they are an organ donor on their license, this symbol gets convoluted when the question of when to get the organs is presented; "If organs are to be transplanted then they must be kept alive and functioning as close to 'normal' as is possible (Lock 140)." Although the person has left that body, the biologically organism is treated as a live to maintain the value of the organs so when family members are approached it makes it difficult to differentiate dead and a life, especially if a doctor does not know their religious/spiritual beliefs (Lock 141)

The trouble with indicating organ donation on your drivers license as such an easy process at the Washington Department of Licensing indicates that it is simple to prepare for procurement. Krakuer indicates that life-sustaining practices such as receiving an organ can help a person avoid age but getting to the point, presented by Lock, is not just a matter of life or death. It is a matter of doctors, the law and family members finding a happy medium in order to decide when and if it is appropriate. The slogan sponsored by the WA DOL is, "You have the power to GIVE LIFE," I argue that once the individual is unconscious and personhood as left the power (i.e. brain dead) it is the ultimate decision of the doctor and family to decide on death for procurement.

Finding Identity

The aspect of finding yourself and in turn identifying who you are is an obvious aspect of everyday life. Being able to ascribe an identity to yourself is complicated because there our so many components that contribute to how we are who we are; among the contributing factors to self are gender, body, consumption, education, and food. In this cartoon it speaks to many different levels of identity and the search for self through a global positioning system (GPS). In this comic a middle age women seeks out the electronics department in hopes to find herself. She appears to have gone down a long journey to discover herself; she has tattoos all over her body, several piercings, a choker necklace and what seems to be a mohawk. These traits she reveals physically tend to match the traits of an adolescent teen that is considered punk-rock or rebellious. The important point to note here is that although some sort of identity is expressed she is still on the road of self discovery internally as well as externally. The comic here represents a variety of pressures that human beings feel because of the struggle to represent the real you when your physical identity is not congruent.

In Elliot's "The Face Behind the Mask" he describes the medicalization of social phobia and how it effects ones ability to live life. The question he greets the reader with is why is "medicalizing a personality trait called shyness" so plausible in America and why do we need to (Elliot 58)? Personality is a way of presenting yourself to the rest of the world, "and you want your personality to be 'dazzling' (Elliot 60)." Self-presentation attracts others to and is what makes you appealing within our society, for instance being out-going, opinionated or creative versus being shy. As Elliot says personality is "to make yourself interesting and attractive to other people, how to make them like you and respect you and want to be around you (60)." Thus, the next step if people are not attracted to your personality is to seek self-improvement. This point is, as Elliot addresses, "You might have been given a certain kind of personality but with the right kind of help you could change it (61)." In the comic above the women is seeking to find her true identity, therefore in Elliot's notion her personality creates her social identity and how she is viewed but she can develop and change to improve herself to become socially acceptable. There is a constant desire to claim an identity, to be somebody, "We must master and control the qualities we already possess in order to gain the good opinion of others (61-62)." Therefore, it is crucial to overcome poor traits with medication because it allows the individual to master the desire traits as well as control them to the point where society is attracted to the personality. Elliot argues that the self-presentation in social spaces are a performance because of the social expectations involved which cause humans to regulate what they do and don't do. In the situation of social phobia and creating a better representation for society we are compromising our own feeling of self-identity.

In Elliot's article, "Amputees by Choice," he discusses amptemnophilia or the desire or attraction to become an amputee (209). The people desiring to amputate a body part often do so because they feeling that they are "stuck in the wrong body" or their "body is incomplete with their normal complement of four limbs (211)." Elliot recognizes though that in their description of their feelings they reflect "through language of self and identity to explain why they want these interventions (211)." Although their physical bodies are indicate our form of normalcy they do not feel fully connected. Therefore when the person loses a physical extremity they are actually gaining so much more of who they feel they are. The true self is thus "produced by medical science (211)." Identity in this is seen as self-improvement but not a societal norm of self-presentation. However, the amputees want their self-presentation to portray how they are feeling inside, as Elliot puts it there is "A struggle between the impulse toward self-improvement and the impulse to be true to oneself (211-213)." It seems to be implied that after the amputees reach their limbless destination that they have a sense of achievement or well-being that they lacked before, as one amputee proclaims "You have made me the happiest of all men by taking away from me a limb which put an invincible obstacle to my happiness (114)." Whether one was the amputated for desired it the social space available for them was invaluable in creating a subculture which they could be a part of, one individual who wants to be amputated even says to Elliot, "The internet was, for me, a validation experience (217)." The common experience here allows these individuals to publicly validate their identity, in turn.

A common theme between the two articles in the importance of feeling less stigmatized by society to seek out one's true identity. In the comic, there is an evident identity search going on that has materialized on the women through tattoos, piercings, and clothing. In "The Face Behind the Mask" a pill allows the people suffering from social phobia to reveal who they are in a matter of self-presentation to others. And in "Amputees by Choice" individuals are trying to creating a symbiosis between their internal self and how others perceive them, thus taking it one step further by going surgical to embody what embody's them.

"Eating and Thinking"

“Thinking and Eating at the Same Time: Reflections of Sistah Vegan” by Michelle R Lloyd-Paige illustrates Lloyd-Paige’s point of view on animal products and her quest to be spiritually sound as a result of the evident correlation, she found, between her academic work and the treatment of animals and humans. In this chapter of Sistah Vegan Lloyd-Paige portrays her identity as a black woman through food knowledge. Lloyd-Paige began her veganism through a spiritual movement at her church, her and many other church goers, predominantly black women, began a fast at the beginning of each year where participants were not permitted to eat meat, sugar or dairy (Lloyd-Paige 3). “The fast was voluntary and supposed to detoxify the mind, body and spirit (Lloyd-Paige3).” Routinely after the fasting, Lloyd-Paige would reintegrate body, meat and sugar back into her diet; however in 2005 she found that her body was reacting poorly to the reintegration and her doctor recommended that she reintroduce soy products (a staple during the fast) into her diet (4). In November of 2005 she recognized “how the food [she] ate contributed to social inequalities, and it “marked [her] transformation to eating like a vegan (4).” Lloyd-Paige states earlier in her realization of the need to eat vegan is that her lifestyle did not match up with what she believed and taught. She recognized that being able to choose what to eat was a privilege by middle to upper class citizens and when she made a choice in her food she was partaking in “patterns of indifference and oppression (2).” Thus, Lloyd-Paige came to the realization that her eating habits were radically different than what she taught and practiced, she states that “the contents of a lecture I had just presented four days prior on the global inequities in food distribution; a vague recollection of a statement from PETA about the cruelties associated with chicken production; the remembrance of how surprisingly good I felt physically while on a forty-day spiritually motivated fast from meant and dairy at the beginning of the year; and my own desire to live an authentic lie—yanked me into an uncomfortable realization that…I was not living according to my beliefs (1-2).” Her awareness of the mistreatment of animals also related to how she felt people of color were treated historically and in the present. She argues that the blatant disregard for how animals are treated is inhumane and we have no valid right to treat them this way. She states that although humans feel they have some sort of “dominion” over animals “we were [not] given the right to be cruel, brutal and heartless (Lloyd-Paige 4).” She compares this treatment and domination over animals to the treatment of Native Americans in the European conquest of Northern America (5). Although she does link her vegan practice to healthy living standards and the remarkably increasing number of obese African Americans and Hispanics (6), she mostly correlates it to her belief in the innate human and animal right that all are worthy to be treated humanely and with respect. Thus, her eating habits are recognition of how animal products are produced and marketed as a direct correlation to the treatment of people of color throughout time and she has continued a spiritual journey of veganism as a means to resist being a contributor for inequality and oppression. Therefore, her eating habits are also a representation of her ideology of social standards.

Adjusting food intake habits as a means to represent a particular ideology is a common practice among not only black female vegans but also in American Christianity (Griffith). In “Don’t Eat That” Griffith explains the Christian discipline of historically fasting, or obtaining thinness as a means to receive “true nourishment” from Christ (Griffith 36). Within the Christian doctrine the body should be perfectly modeled because the body was also seen as “central for pushing the soul along the path to progress (Griffith 38).” Thus, excessive weight from food intake would limit the progression of the soul and Christ’s workings within the Christians body. However, the Christian diet also influenced eating purposely and embracing the food one ate, “the pleasures of eating, like other physical pleasures, were to be savored and taken very seriously…lest one fall into gluttony (Griffith 39).” Thus the Christian dieters believed that they should eat foods that would replenish the bodies and eat with care because too much was a bad thing (Griffith 39). Griffith states, “The advice to eat only such foods as were individually pleasing was followed by a lengthy exposition of the proper and most spiritual diet (Griffith 39).” This concept of food intake is similar to Lloyd-Paige’s refusal of animal products because it is shaped by an ideology or spirituality that makes the individual or group pay particular attention to what they put in their body. In both situations the individual cannot consume what conflicts with their belief systems; for Lloyd-Paige she is a vegan because of the treatment of animals and the Christian dieters, Griffith speaks of, must control their eating and weight to take pleasure in their food experience as well as acquire a closer relationship to Christ.

On the same note Macrobiotics also shapes eating habits through a spiritual ideology of yin and yang, furthermore it allows women to balance gender inequalities, similar to Lloyd-Paige’s lifestyle to stop eating animal products to make an attempt to balance societies social inequalities. Macrobiotics is part of the “diet culture” that always pushes the practitioners to “do the right thing” because there are so many constraints on the individual to follow the right eating habits and attain balance (Crowley 37). Crowley argues here that Macrobiotics “in fact offers practitioners a fluid gender identity, and that this is one sources of its lasting popularity (Crowley 38).” Therefore Macrobiotics offers the individual the opportunity to “manipulate how the spiritual essences of yin and yang manifest themselves in the body (Crowley 38).” Different types of food can either be masculine or feminine and how they are prepared for instance “grilling a (yin) celery stalk changes the structure and quality of the celery’s gender—from female to male, from passive to strong (Crowley 40).” By identifying gender through food women are capable of adjusting sexist gender roles, as woman proclaims, “I could not be teaching or have published books, if it weren’t for the power macrobiotics gave me (Crowley 46)!” The practices of Macrobiotics enables these women to change the roles of gender practices so they are able to have a balanced spirituality, like Lloyd-Paige’s veganism as a means to stand up for social equality and increase the respect between humans as wells as animals.

Unfortunately though Nutritionism has become nationally accepted as a way to view food and in turn has affected consumption patterns in terms of what people think they should eat. Scrinis argues that the “focus on nutrients has come to dominate, to undermine, and to replace other ways of engaging with food and of contextualizing the relationship between food and the body (Scrinis 39).” The problem with this re-contextualization is it limits people to interacting with their food that allows for social identity, spiritual identity and gender identity. Furthermore reducing food into nutrients and numerical symbols limits its functionality and forces it to move on from “food discourses and consumption practices (Scrinis 42).” In the case of Macrobiotics the problem is that food here represents so much of being able to balance an entire gender identity—by limited foods to nutrient based ideology it ignores the cultural constructs that my enable a women to empower herself through use of yin and yang. Furthermore, Scrinis presents the marketing of food as a means to “distract attention from both the overall nutrient profile of a food” but by doing this it also takes food out of a political context, such as the political ties that Lloyd-Paige explains with meat products and the treatment of people of color. Food practices varying but in these situations it seems that food is tied to a spiritual belief or social order that enables the individual.

Ascribed and Achieved Status

Ascribed and achieved status tends to be a critical discussion in social science courses, especially sociology due to Ralph Linton, a sociologist who coined the term when discussing social structures. I’ve incorporated a short you tube video that discusses the basic meanings to supplement the article, "A Clarification of 'Ascribed Status' and 'Achieved Status' " by Irving S. Foladare.

Foladare's article concerns the misrepresentation of these terms to represent "individual variation" rather then the representation of social structure as a whole, which may be culturally variant but not individually subjective. Thus, he states that "the concepts of 'ascribed status' and 'achieved status' are designed to indicate structural properties of social systems" and individuals cannot determined if their status will be shifted (Foladare 54). Therefore, what he is ultimately saying is it is not up to the individual to give themselves a self-ascribed status because it is not socially recognized; the 'ascribed' or 'achieved' status muse be recognized by the given social structure. Foladare brings to light the misuse of Leo F. Schnore's further development of these terms in his use of 'reversible status' and 'irreversible status'. Schnore has deviated from Lipton's terminology because according to Foladare his "conceptualization is both empirically inaccurate and an additional source of departure from the social structural significance of the concepts (Foladare 54)." With this in mind though I have found comparative themes between Foladare's explanation of 'achieved status' and 'ascribed status' and Schnore's concept of 'reversible status' and 'irreversible status' to compliment "Medicalizing Homosexuality" and "Regulated Passions: The invention of inhibited sexual desire and sexual addiction."

The medicalization of homosexuality and experiences such as inhibited sexual desire (ISD) and sexual addiction are applied by medical authority, the historical context and theoretical approach have changed but the similar theme is that the medicalization has often reverted to an explanation of social status as well as self-identity. In the case of "Medicalizing Homosexuality" medical practitioners have been interested in homosexuality because of the 'abnormal desire' man had for another man (41), furthermore the homosexual body has been seen for centuries as "like savage bodies (40-41)." Ulrichs explained homosexuality as a "inborn benign anomaly" or as a third sex. Terry noted that his concept of homosexuality "was an attribute of a particular type of person, marked by the paradoxical presence of characteristics of both sexes (Terry 43). She also noted that the scientific approach he offered would be helpful in decriminalizing homosexuality because it was "inborn." Ulrichs concept represents ascribed status in the sense that he argues homosexuality is assigned prior to living in a given environment. According to Schnore biological sex is ascribed irreversible however he doesn't present sexuality or gender which in Ulrichs understanding of homosexuality would be ascribed reversible (Foladare Figure 1, 55).

Furthermore, the concept of nervous degeneration represents achieved status and how homosexuality can be achieved and reversible with increased maturity. According to Krafft-Ebing "The medical investigator is driven to the conclusion that this manifestation of modern life [homosexuality] stands in relation to the predominating nervous condition of later generations, in that it begets defective individuals (Terry 45)." The homosexual in this case has presented a achieved reversible status because with the struggles of modern life they have supposedly turned to homosexuality but have a means of reversing this sexual orientation. Foladare confirms that " 'Achieved statuses' are those in categories of statuses for which the society accepts change by individuals and, in many cases, expects efforts toward change in given directions (58)."

Krafft-Ebing correlates homosexuality with primitive human beings who are have not evolved as modern human beings (Terry 46). Terry states that to Krafft-Ebing "sexual dimorphism and monogamous procreative heterosexuality were taken to be indicators of evolutionary progress and maturity (46)" Likewise, Foladore states that " 'Achieved statuses' are those in categories of statues for which the society accepts change by individuals and, in many cases, expects efforts toward change in given directions (58)." A key term used in this statement is "expects" because as society expects these changes that are in term accepted by society, it is also expected that homosexuals eventually mature into acceptable human beings, in Krafft-Ebing's concepts.

Foladore's discusses in depth the change and fluidity of status with collective societies approval, he comes to the conclusion that "the essential point is that in their status categories change is not acceptable to the society. People are expected to be heterosexual males or heterosexual females, assigned one or the other on the basis of their biological characteristics (59)." Deviant statuses therefore illustrate a contradiction between societies ascribed status to the individual (Foladore 58-59). Therefore what is acceptable and unacceptable is determined collectively by the society however it is also decided by the popular authority. In the case of "Regulated Passions" it is the medical practitioner that assigns authority and meaning; "...The discursive elaboration of disease is shaped by myriad and complex factors, including the ideological and economic imperatives of the defining professions (Irvine 317)."

In Irvine's article he argues that "Diseases are artifacts with social history and social practice (314)" and they have created "medically legitimated boundaries of acceptable contemporary sexual experience (315)." These statements have forced me to turn to the concept of achieved status and how whole populations can be transformed due to class labeling and/or medicalization of experiences. The disease described in "Regulated Passions" as inhibited sexual desire and sexual addiction are admitted as being subjective to the individual and unable to medically define and apply universally (Irvine 322). With this in mind, subjective diseases correlate more so with the individualized theme behind "irreversible" and "reversable" statues to compliment "ascribed" and "achieved". Foladore argues that the first noted states are dependent on "individual variation" (53) rather then part of social structures.

The main point that I have strived to achieve is that according to Foladore "achieved statuses" and "ascribed statuses" are fundamental to understanding human behavior and therefore this may be the reasoning behind ascribing homosexuality to a type of status (i.e. primitive). These statues also represent the concept behind medicalization, and that is attempting to apply a universal notion to a very diverse population. On the individual level, which is subjective, it should be looked at after considering "reversible" and irreversible" statuses because it does not properly incorporate the social structures in place. In order to understand why these theories were formed and how even passion was medicalized it is essential to look a social structures in place.