Panel report: Disability in Fiction

[talkswithwind]

Twitter stream.
Caption stream.

This was a panel on the representation of disability in fiction. It's not great, but panels like these help those of us writing disability to do better about it. In my case, all three of my novel/series-length works involve some aspect of disability. This was accidental, but it seems to be a theme of mine.

• First Novel: PTSD and recovery from major mental trauma.
  • Being a first novel and one I didn't do a lot of research on, if/when I get back to it there is a lot that needs fixing. The entire first third of it will need rewriting and plotting.
• Shelved Romance: one of the two MCs is missing part of a leg
  
  • Sounds like I did a decent job. Still need a sensitivity reader.
• Ace Series: earned disability through combat injuries.
  
  • One of the MCs might be considered to have a disability in our world (she's 4'3"), but doesn't get labeled that way in hers.
    
    • Sort of. In the third book I change the cultural context and she definitely will be, for the first time in her life. It'll be challenging to write.
  • The other MC ended up with some neurological symptoms after an encounter with a mace.

For my own sake, I'm glad my two kind-of finished works hit close to the mark.

There were several tropes that the panelists rather hated

• Spending paragraphs and paragraphs on just how terribly hard it is to move around with a disability. The example used was "getting through a door with a small threshold bump." This is disability theater meant to educate the abled. Spending your point-of-view words on a disgruntled sigh and minimal words around working around it is far more in character and won't cause your disabled readers to skip whole bits.
• Magical cures. You get this more in magic or high-tech settings. That isn't disability, that's An Obstacle Overcome.
• The absence of things like ADHD, dyscalcula, and dysgraphia. People have these, and they can have major impacts to a story.
• Blindness as code for helpless.
• The lack of a disabled community. When disabled folk are seen in fiction, they're almost always singletons. It's isolating.
• The absence of assistive technology, rather than technical cures. 1980's Cyberpunk is kind of to blame for this, with its transhumanist suggestion that cyber-arms are better than organic ones and things like that.
  
  • You never see depictions of someone taking an evening to break apart and clean their ankle/knee.
  • Nor do you see people using assistive apps on their phone-equivalents.
  • A 'Google Glasses' type system that gives you guide-dog like guidance, only in words? Or an imp that does it? Would be cool.

This focus on the negative I'm doing is more of a me thing, since I find lacks to be more useful in helping me write things. There was a segment on wishes, where the concept of a hover-chair was raised. Not only is it better about going up/down stairs, it would also allow the user to be at eye-level with their conversation companions. Fewer cricks in necks!

And a session on book recommendations, which I wasn't great about transcribing. Refer to the caption stream for better notes, this section was near the end.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for this great summary. I didn't realize the caption stream was cached--how cool.

On assistive tech (AT): One thing that Elizabeth Bear got fabulously correct in her Jenny Casey books is that assistive tech breaks down. In addition to the inconvenience, it can be deeply emotional. As we use AT, it becomes part of our body image. When it breaks, it's as painful as a broken bone (or heart). I hope the futures you plot have 24/7 repairs available for AT, because they surely aren't available now.

(I'd be delighted to do sensitivity reads.)

[selki]

Thanks for the write-up! I'm a one-time attendee who looks for panel write-ups after every Wiscon. It looks like no one mentioned in the recommendations, Jo Graham and Melissa Scott's Order of the Air series (first book: *Lost Things*). 1920s WWI veterans and pilots and magic-users, includes one character who lost below the knee on one leg. Poly-, feminist-, bi-friendly (though none of the characters would use those words).