I'm not at Worldcon in Glasgow. However, I get constant social media updates of what's happening there, courtesy of Sara L. Uckelman (of Ellipsis Imprints, who will publish my debut novel Cogwheel Souls in English! Yay!) For instance, she's been at a panel discussing disability and disability erasure in specfic. This got my mind going - first I wrote some long replies on Facebook, and then I thought enough thoughts about the subject for a whole blog post.
1. The magical cure and the medical perspective
There's this specfic trope of the magical cure - either a piece of literal magic or amazing technology that can turn the previously disabled character normal again. Off the top of my head, the examples I come to think of are superhero stories - discussions around this in the DC comics when Barbara Gordon was still in her wheelchair, Felicity in the TV show Arrow (a different character but clearly inspired by Barbara in the comics), and some of examples from the MCU movies - the first Doctor Strange movie, Ghost from Antman and the Wasp. So I'll go with these examples since they were the first to pop up in my head, but there are far more out there.
Now. From a mainstream, medical perspective, it's great if a disabled character can get a medical cure for their tragic impairment. And then, you've got your social justice conscious writers who see how this is problematic. I won't (obvs) try to recap all of the reasons why the medical model is problematic in a blog post, but there's tons written for anyone seriously interested. In extreme brief:
a) Aiming for a thoroughly "healthy" and non-disabled society will be a never-finished Sisyphus job. The bar for what counts as healthy enough constantly rises and you'll always have people deemed "problematic" due to their "defects". Also, when a disability-free society is an outspoken goal, no one is quite free to go against the flow. It might not be illegal to, e.g., not avail yourself of all techniques available for having children as healthy as possible, but expectations from medical professionals, what's default in a medical setting vs an active choice, and social pressure from everyone around you can be strong enough.
b) You will end up with a society in many ways more homogeneous than ours, which isn't a good thing. Some people might wanna say that they only strive to eradicate chronic illnesses and disabilities but not neurodivergencies that provide society with different perspectives and different ways of doing things etc. There are some philosophers who want to place a few conditions, like "high-functioning autism" (an itself problematic term, rejected by many autism advocates) in a the neurodivergence box, while still placing tons of other conditions in the box for disabilities to be eradicated. But because of the dynamics described in a), you'll likely have fewer and fewer conditions in the first box and more and more in the second over time.
c) Finally, the ubiquity of the medical perspective on disability makes it significantly harder for disabled people to fight for equal rights. Here in Sweden, disabled people are legally entitled to getting the assistance they need to live a normal life - with job, studies, their own flat, and so on. For some people, that means they require an assistant constantly by their side, so several employees with a rotating schedule, on public expanses (you'd have to be super rich to pay several employees out of pocket). However, legal entitlements on paper is one thing, what people get granted in practice is, unfortunately, quite another. Right-wing politicians (whether they call themselves "right-wing" or go by "social democrats") who constantly cut down on both taxes and public expenses will order the relevant clerks to make increasingly circumscribed judgments of what their clients actually need, with the wholly predictable result that disabled people are increasingly pushed out of jobs, schools, and overall public life. Adults end up living with their parents, who care for them until said parents die themselves. We're seeing the beginning of a new era of institutionalization.
There's no logical contradiction between embracing a mostly medical model, and yet argue that people should get all the assistance etc they need until we, hopefully, find a cure for their impairments. However, when people think of disability as something inherent and inherently tragic, something inside people's bodies and minds, it's much more difficult in practice to make them realize that withdrawing assistance and similar are political decisions, and to see disabled people as oppressed and discriminated against. The medical model helps, in practice, to cover up political injustices by presenting disabled suffering as a tragic but natural result of inherent impairments.
Magical cure stories tend to implicitly rely on the audience accepting a largely medical perspective on disability, and therefore cheer for characters who seek a way to erase their tragic condition and become healthy and normal. However, subverting this trope is often easier said than done.
2. The implications of truly magical cures
I'm mad and neurodivergent but able-bodied. No one, whether embracing the medical model or not, thinks my body is inherently tragic. However, imagine that I came across a wizard who gave me the following choice: either you can continue as before, or I can wave my magic wand and make you as fast as Usain Bolt and with the stamina of Kelvin Kiptum. That's it, that's your choice. You can't trade it for something more altruistic, or some different thing that serves your own interests. It's just this offer, which you can take or leave.
I'd probably go yeah sure! Cool! I'd take the offer.
Thus, the fact that you do not hate your body as is, the fact that you're perfectly fine with it as is, doesn't imply that you wouldn't accept an offer to make it more powerful. However, if I wrote a story about a wheelchair user who was offered "walkability" (is that a real word? Never mind, you all understand what I mean), and accepted the offer, it's probably impossible in practice to give the audience the same impression as when I accepted increased speed and stamina. Because regardless of how non-oppressive the fantasy setting where this takes place is, the audience still live in an ableist world, and this will inevitably inform their reading. Even though accepting the offer of walkability doesn't logically imply that the wheelchair user's life was tragic before it, anymore than accepting increased speed and stamina implies that it's tragic not to be an olympic level athlete, that's how it's gonna be perceived by most.
Now I was talking about how the audience will perceive things due to them living in an ableist society. However, it's often hard for creators, too, not to insert their own ableism into stories, even if they try to write something social justice informed. Take, for instance, the movie Gattaca. It clearly tries to deal with disability-oppression in a eugenics-obsessed society. Yet, at the end of the movie (spoiler alert), the character who's disabled according to our standards, the audience's standards, brutally commits suicide because he can't stand it anymore, whereas a character who actually seems more oppressed within the universe of the movie but does not come off as disabled to the audience bravely soldiers on. Left a really bad taste in my mouth, that ending. Ok, societal oppression is bad and all that, but still possible to fight, unless you're in a wheelchair like Jude Law's character - he's gotta top himself at the end. Better off dead, that one.
Okay, that was a bit of a tangent, since Gattaca is about a society obsessed with birthing "perfect" babies, not about curing adult disabled people. So back to the magical cure discussion.
In most cases, it's probably better to just stay away from magical cures altogether in your writing. But if you wanna write something with literal and versatile magic or magic-level tech, the best thing is probably to have characters play around with it and change their bodies in a variety of ways (instead of everyone going uniformly "normal"). Like in Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the end of Time trilogy (part of his Eternal Champion series, but much lighter and more whimsical in tone than the others). You've got some people changing sex back and forth, some changing into monsters or looking like non-human animals, you've got this scientist character who's got a hunchback and a club foot and walks with a cane because he thinks it's a cool science look, and so on. I think that works better than specifically having the person who's disabled by real-world standards confronted with a magical cure and then go "no! I won't take it! Because I accept myself as is!" while it's treated as a non-issue for everyone else.
3. Good and bad reasons to reject being cured
In a society with medical treatments that do not exist in the real world, but it's still not on the unlimited, can-do-anything-level we see in Moorcock's Dancers, there are several legit reasons for characters to reject being cured.
First, they might do so because they don't want to reject an aspect of their identity. This was brought up by ethnologist and crip scholar Christine Bylund when we briefly discussed the matter, and now I've been thinking some more about it ... To some extent, people are simply different with regards to how and what they identify with. People may be more or less prone to see themselves as integrated "bodyminds" vs seeing themselves as minds with bodies, for example. People differ in how much of their mental lives they see as integral parts of their personalities, and what seems a bit more external to them, perhaps simultaneously external and undesirable. I think we'd have differences in identification, and thus differences in how much and what people would be willing to change about themselves, even in an oppressive-free utopia.
However, in an ableist society like ours, disability is a political identity too. This is a big difference between the scenario in which I gladly accept increased speed and stamina, and a wheelchair user accepting an offer of walkability. Increased speed and stamina might get me fame and money that I've never dreamt of before, but I'd remain in the political category of "able-bodied" throughout, whereas a wheelchair user who acquires walkability goes from disabled to normate. For some people, that might be a welcome change, climb the social ladder to a better life, whereas others would reject as grotesque the idea of magicking your way into a politically privileged group.
In any case, I think a story about a character who lives in an ableist society and gets a chance at a magical cure should deal with how they'll move from one political group to another if they take it. Not pretend like it's a completely isolated, individual choice about either getting cured or "accepting yourself".
But do it in a better way than DC did with Barbara Gordon!
Barbara Gordon used to be Batgirl. Then the Joker shot her through the stomach, bullet hurt her spine, and she ended up in a wheelchair. She went on superheroing as the computer wiz Oracle. Occasionally, writers felt the need to address why she remained in the chair despite living in this extremely high-tech superhero world. On the one hand, the DC consensus (if I understand things correctly) was that she provided good disability rep, so better keep the chair, but on the other hand, they should provide some in-universe justification too.
I've got an old nineties comic written by Grant Morrison where the issue comes up in dialogue. Babs says that she'd be happy to have her spine cured if someone invented a way for the nerves to grow back, but she doesn't want a cyborg solution - she just don't wanna be a cyborg, is all. That's a perfectly fine motivation! She'd lived most of her life walking (running, jumping, climbing, she was quite the acrobat), so makes sense that she'd have a preference for getting all that back, but it's also fine for her to just not wanna be a cyborg.
However, most writers did a different explanation, which I think became the canonical one: Babs thought it would be unfair to all the other wheelchair users out there to accept the cyborg solution. She'd only accept it once it was available to the general public (so probably never in the USA, where she lived). So this is a sort of political motivation, but one that doesn't reject the medical perspective at all, and furthermore, it's ridiculous! Babs regularly used all kinds of amazing tech unavailable to most people - she even used to travel back and forth between Earth and the Justice League space station, in the League's teleportation machine! Apparently, this wasn't unfair to everyone else who could only dream of doing such things, but walking via cyborg gizmo would be.
They should either have stuck with the "I just don't want to be a cyborg" motivation, or given her a political motivation centred around disability activism, rather than some nebulous "fairness considerations" that apparently apply only to walking tech but no other tech. Finally, they should have given her a wider variety of chairs.
I get that she wanted to use a regular, manual wheelchair to get around most of the time. Asking why she'd use her arms to get around rather than drive something electric is like asking why Batman walks with his legs instead of driving everywhere in some vehicle. But she should have other options, like more mech warrior like options, for situations like when she's in the space satellite and it gets attacked by enemies for the umpteenth time. Sometimes, in the old comics I read, she almost came across as a lone luddite among enthusiastic tech bros. It's one thing not to give the disabled character tons of tech that erases their disability. It's quite another to give them less tech than their able-bodied but still non-powered counterparts, like Batman, because the disabled person must be "representative" in what they use.
Anyway. All of this is moot now since, after a few decades, DC cured her anyway and had her return to being Batgirl.
The easiest version of "disabled character rejects an offered cure" to execute well is probably to abstain from perfect, magical cures, and instead have treatments that come with both pros and cons. They may be fantastical by real-world standards, but nevertheless involve pain, arduous rehabs or some other type of cost. A character can weigh the pros and cons and decide it's not worth it - and maybe do so against the expectations of other people who assume that they'd obviously want to be cured, and that any price should be worth paying.
This was something Marvel's first Doctor Strange movie did pretty well, I think. The movie has been divisive since Strange starts out absolutely desperate to be cured. Still, we've seen that his entire identity revolves around his job (and the fame and money it's brought), so it's plausible that a career-ending disability would render him desperate. His girlfriend calls him out, too, and says look, you gotta get on with life and find some other job to do! She's proven right in the end, though not quite in the way she thought; she figured he could be a teacher at med school, and instead he became a sorcerer. Still, though. He did find another job, eventually, that he could do with his disability. He chose not to cure himself via magic since this would require constant concentration to uphold, and leave him with less magic for other, more important things. So, it's a thoroughly fantastical movie, but it's a fine and realistic ending in that the main character realizes that
a) contrary to what he thought right after his accident, his disability isn't the end of the world, and
b) now when he knows of a way to cure it, it's actually not worth it, there are better things to use his resources for.
It's only too bad that Marvel completely forgot about his disability in later movies, but I guess this is as good as it gets in the MCU.
Also, if you're thinking of cures in terms of pros and cons, then there will be cases where it is best to be cured, and it's not ableist to say so. I saw this bizarre discussion about the character Ghost, also from the MCU, where one person insisted that portraying her as desperate for a cure for her condition was ableist. But her fantastical condition, besides giving her superpowers, is extremely painful and actively killing her. She's only in her early twenties, but we're told she'll be dead in a couple of months unless she finds a cure. Her wanting a cure is no more ableist than when a young person dying in cancer tries every treatment the medical profession has to offer because they want to live.
Concluding lines
This is something writers should think about, and put some mental effort into. Not just throw out that old magical cure trope - nor simply reverse it and think you're being progressive because you did it the other way around!
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