Bad Attitudes: An Uninspiring Podcast About Disability

Episode 20: Presenting Disabled Characters

October 25, 2021 Laura Stinson Season 1 Episode 21
Bad Attitudes: An Uninspiring Podcast About Disability
Episode 20: Presenting Disabled Characters
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Continuing our conversation from last week, we're talking about how disabled characters are presented in mainstream media.

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TRANSCRIPT OF “PRESENTING DISABLED CHARACTERS”

[rock guitar music]

MALE VO [00:03]

This is Bad Attitudes.

[rock guitar music]

LAURA [00:20]
Hello friends and strangers! Welcome to another episode of Bad Attitudes: An Uninspiring Podcast About Disability. I’m your host, Laura.

Last week, I talked about some TV shows that have integrated disabled characters into their storylines. Today I want to focus on the — for lack of a better word — homogeneous nature of disabled characters, and how characteristics that are associated with multiple disabilities and are generally benign are pathologized in media.

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[01:41]
As always, I want to remind you that disability is not a monolith. Although some aspects are universal, my experience as a disabled person is going to be different from the experiences of other disabled people. I am one voice for the disabled community, but I am not the only voice.

[02:01]
I was having a conversation with a writer friend who was telling me about some new work. In this work, she created a character who is disabled and who she wanted to be attractive to readers. The character has cerebral palsy — as does she — and in the process of trying to make this character palatable to the non-disabled reader, she had left out defining characteristics of a person with CP. In her words, her brain, quote, “defaulted to assume that I can’t make a character attractive while also describing physical limitations and pain.”

Consider pain. Pain is one of the great equalizers. We all experience pain — physical or emotional — at some point. We all recognize it. Yet pain as portrayed in media is limited to a few situations. On one hand, pain is limited to characters who have been victimized. Abused, beaten up, attacked, etc. On the other hand, pain is a weakness. A character is sick and pain is a symptom, or they are getting older and weaker. They are diminishing.

This is despite the fact that a multitude of people experience some level of pain on an everyday basis. And they are neither victims nor diminishing. They just happen to experience pain.

And consider one of the human body’s most basic biological needs. Going to the bathroom. No one — and I mean no one — goes to the bathroom on TV, in movies, or in books unless the situation is being mined for humor. The most basic bodily function is almost only useful in media if it is going to lead to someone’s humiliation. Yet, it is not uncommon for a disabled person to need adult diapers either in specific situations or as an everyday item. This fact is going to be distasteful to many.

But, think about how sexy adult diaper manufacturers are attempting to make their product seem. Words like “sleek” and “invisible” come to mind when thinking about these commercials. These ads also feature ONLY non-disabled adults. It’s like saying that incontinence if you are not disabled is simply a normal experience. But if you are disabled, it’s gross.

Now, the last thing I want to think about is ANYONE’S bathroom habits. But implying that it’s somehow worse to be disabled and have bladder leakage than it is to be non-disabled and have bladder leakage doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

It’s other stuff too. Shaky legs, muscles spasms, tremors. In real life, these are common experiences of a wide variety of people, disabled and not. But in the media, these affectations are reserved for the weak, the infirm, the ill or the aged.

The fact that my friend forgot to include certain elements of disability isn’t that surprising. After all, as a disabled person, we don’t always have to think about the way we do things, just as non-disabled people often don’t think about the way that they do things. Neglecting to include these details is simply the reality of muscle memory. The problem comes in that the consumer of the media — whether the viewer or reader or listener — defaults to the assumption that the way things are done is the NON-disabled way. Non-disabled is the default, even when a character is disabled.

Here’s where I make a confession. I used to write fanfic. Well, more like wish-fulfillment-fic. Fanfic implies it was meant for the eyes of others. This was fantasy on paper. Daydreams on a screen.

Basically, I would insert myself into situations or fictional worlds I wanted to be in. And I almost never wrote myself as disabled. 

A partial reason might be considered lack of creativity. I didn’t know how to put my disabled self into these worlds. I knew how my NON-disabled self fit, though. I was also a teenager. This was a way for me to explore writing and explore my creativity, while bringing my daydreams to some kind of life. I wasn’t aiming to write the great American novel. So, I took the easy way out and eliminated the complication of disability.

So if I can do that, and my friend can forget to include essential disabled details, how can we expect the primarily non-disabled creators who are shaping the media we consume to do any better?

But then I feel the need to ask, how much detail do you really need? How intimately do we have to describe the everyday disabled existence? If we say that disabled people do not owe non-disabled people their medical history, should that include fictional characters?

I would also say that some of the burden lies on the non-disabled media consumer. Another example from this same writer friend. They were working on another piece in which the main character used a flying wheelchair. It had a futuristic setting, if you couldn’t guess. Now, I heard the words “flying wheelchair” and immediately my mind conjured up an image of the wheelchair equivalent of a hoverboard, steered using a joystick, like a traditional powerchair. But one of my friend’s alpha readers apparently couldn’t conjure the same idea and needed MINUTE DETAIL as to how this chair moved and how it was steered.

I mean, how confusing is the concept of a “flying wheelchair”? I might use the term “hoverchair” instead, but even so, why could this non-disabled mind not imagine something that seems relatively simple? 

So when I say that some of the burden lies on the non-disabled media consumer, this is what I mean: Expand your mind enough so that a flying wheelchair doesn’t trip you up. Expand it enough that you recognize that when a disabled person uses the bathroom, it might not be in the way that you expect, but don’t require creators to give you all that detail. We shouldn’t have to spell it out for you to accept that disabled people do things differently and we shouldn’t have to hide those details in order to make characters more palatable. Creators SHOULD be able to include details about the lives of their characters that may be unsavory without diminishing that character.

In addition to hiding details that might make disabled characters less palatable to non-disabled viewers or readers, there is also a sameness to disabled characters to make them easier to accept. Last week, I talked about four characters in depth but mentioned six characters overall. While that’s far from a large sample size, it’s enough to illustrate that pattern. Each of those six characters is white, straight-size, and, presumably, cis-gender.

Where are the cross-sections of disability with other minority groups? Disabled people of color? Disabled fat people? Disabled queer people? Disabled fat queer people of color?! Whiteness is safe. Thinness is attractive. Being disabled is different enough. The mainstream audience apparently can’t handle more than one difference at a time.

There’s even a sameness in the type of disability represented. Three of the characters I mentioned last episode use wheelchairs. Two are amputees. No represented disability can be too disturbing. Nothing with any kind of facial disfigurement. Unless the character is a villain. In that case, scar them up. The latest example of this is Rami Malek’s character in the latest James Bond movie, which I have not seen and can offer no opinion on other than saying, “Oh, another villain with a facial disfigurement.”

I can’t say why wheelchair-users are more often depicted than other disabilities. Maybe it’s just because that’s the representation most people are familiar and comfortable with? I mean, really, we’re a menace.

But I do have a theory as to why amputee characters are popular, especially if it is the leg that was amputated. It is a disability that is relatively easy to mask. Don’t want to show the amputated site? Frame a shot from the chest up. Need a full-body shot? Long clothes and shoes that disguise a prosthetic foot.

[10:41]
Look, I don’t have all the answers. I couldn’t even figure out how to write myself as myself in situations that were pure fantasy. But I do know that somewhere, there is a middle ground between hiding all the details so that you’d never suspect a character was disabled and in sharing so many details that it overwhelms your viewer or reader. Somehow, there is a way to show all the intersections between marginalized communities

All we can do is keep demanding it. Demand better of ourselves and the creators we value. Speaking of creators we value. If you follow me on Instagram, which you should be, you might have seen where I posted about the book Symptoms of Being Human, taking issues with a line about disabled people. I am so happy to report that the author, Jeff Garvin, took notice of the post and responded, taking full accountability. I have converted him to the cause. I highly recommend checking out Symptoms of Being Human. It is a great read.

[11:47]
Thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you in the next one.

[11:49]
[rock guitar music]



Intro
Disability is not a monolith
Episode Begins
Wrap Up
Outro