thebibliosphere:

sazandorable:

naamahdarling:

thebibliosphere:

This post brought to you by Rage.

Okay, so a few people commented on the main post with this so I want to address it separately without seeming like I’m dragging individual people over hot coals for a public flogging, but no, an ideal world for me is not one without disabled people in it.

“But that’s not what I said!”

Isn’t it?

“Well why on earth would you want to stay broken?”

I don’t, not really, but also thanks for using language that reminds me you think me and people like me are worthless and deserve to be on the scrap heap of life. Also, not all disabled people consider themselves to be broken, so please don’t say that as a sweeping universal ever the fuck again. I get to make jokes about my broken immune system. But you don’t get to call me that. Okay?

“But that’s not what I’m saying! You’re twisting my words! Stop making me look like a bad person!”

No, that’s not what you’re saying directly, and maybe you don’t mean it or realize where you’re coming from, but the sentiment that the ideal world is one where I don’t exist is not a pleasant one for me. And you can argue with me all you like that I’d still exist I’d just be better, but that doesn’t really help me in this life where such a thing is likely never going to be possible.

So you know what my ideal utopia actually is? The one where I’m included in the narrative.

Inclusiveness is important on so many levels. For one thing it can help normalize the things going on now in our reality, and help change the ill conceived notions that somehow my life is worth less than yours simply because it is different or considered to be more difficult.

Finding a way to specifically write me and people like me out of the narrative because you’ve created an “ideal” world, does not include me, and is inherently ableist by default.

But Joy, in this world there is technology to fix these things, how do I make it more inclusive?

Consider, that all technology has limits. It is always advancing, but it also falls short of being god-mode because it is designed by humans, and humans aren’t God. Contrary to some peoples sense of ego. It is also not always available to everyone who needs it.

Unless your utopia is one where everyone and I do mean Everyone, has the means to access such miraculous technology, it’s not a utopia. It is in fact like our current reality where health care technology is limited by what we currently know about the human body, but also, by who is able to afford it.

There’s people out there with my issues leading an easier life because they have access to the latest treatment and the best doctors. I do not resent them this. But I do resent the system that makes it so that I cannot access these things with ease because of a little thing like money.

So if you have poverty in your fancy sci-fi, that’s an inclusive issue. In fact if you have any sort of power struggle, and of course you do, it’s a sci-fi so there’s going to be some form of societal discourse, then you have opportunities to create wider inclusion in your narrative.

But how do I portray it without sounding like a forced mouthpiece?

Idk fam, it’s your narrative, I can’t do all the thinking for you, but a brief example of how to do this could be:

“Her limbs were older ones, earlier models of the prosthetic implants that had come on the market several eons ago but were still widely in distribution due to their nigh on indestructible nature. But they were heavy, clunky things by modern standards, and even things designed to last would eventually start to wear down. He could see the evidence of where patch jobs has been performed recently, where newer tech had been spliced on to make things a little easier. It was ugly and amateurish, but it worked.”

*

“He looked up at them with his mismatched eyes, the slightly milky blue sheen around the pupils betraying them as clone grown.

“One day they’ll be able to fix that,” he said, smiling ruefully as he guessed the reason for their blatant staring, causing Ash to blush furiously at being caught. They’d thought they’d been more subtle than that. “But till then, it works just fine. Now, what can I do for you?”

My world is a magical one where magic like “cure disease” is a thing, how can I make that more inclusive?

In this instance the same principles apply. Magic will typically be the source of your societal advancements, meaning that magic must also have its limits.

Whether it’s making spells and potions that only work to a certain degree i.e. only recent injuries may be cured/mended instantaneously/fully, or, you can do something else like limit it to the skill of the spell caster.

It may also be restricted on your ability to pay for such skills.

In the case of long term disabilities or issues like auto-immune diseases, you could limit the effectiveness of such potent magical cures, to offering only temporary relief.

There are medications out there that make me, someone with auto-immune issues, feel great for a few days, before the effectiveness wears down. They can also become resistive over time as my body adapts to the use of them. There’s no reason your magical realism can’t include something similar.

So how do I write this without making it look shoehorned in for inclusiveness?

If your main concern is feeling like you’re having to shoehorn in people that actually exist in our very real reality, vs being able to write endlessly about dragons, then I’m going to suggest you need to reevaluate your way of thinking, both on a personal level as well as an authorial one. Because it sounds like you have some issues and biases you need to address when it comes to this. This alone doesn’t make you a terrible person. It makes you ignorant. And ignorance can be remedied by opening up to new ways of thinking and listening to the experiences of others. What makes me question your statement that you’re a “good person” is not your well meaning ignorance, but your continual statement that you’re “not ableist but” and then giving me some paltry reason not to be inclusive in your narrative because it essentially boils down to “your existence ruins my story and actually thinking about this as more than a passing thought is irking. Why are you making this into a thing? No one cares. You got your representation in Game of Thrones that one time, why do I have to think about this. I only want to feel like a nice person, why are you making me uncomfortable, it’s my story, I should be able to do what I want and if you don’t exist that’s my choice”.

Which you’re right. It is your choice and it’s also mine to call your work sub par and mediocre and never buy any of it ever again and give my hard earned money to a better writer who does give a shit.

But as for an example of how to show and not tell with your narrative that doesn’t involve you immediately reevaluating your life and who you are as a person:

“She raised the potion to her lips. It tasted bitter, like sour berries picked before they were ripe. It burned as the magical effects pooled through her body. Anything designed to cure diseases always did at first. There was only so much magic could do for someone like her, but least she could be certain the goblin bite wouldn’t fester into anything worse. She didn’t need rock joint on top of everything else.”

*

“The healer looked down at him from behind their blue silk veil.

“This will hurt,” they said by way of both warning and apology, voice light and soothing, though he couldn’t determine much else about them beyond that as they set their hands on his broken leg.

“And I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do for the missing foot…”

“That’s all right,” Finn said, gritting his teeth as the magic seared through him, burning white-hot until it cooled to a pleasant tingle, like dipping his non-existent toes into clear blue waters. He could almost feel them wriggling as the magic sought to replace something that wasn’t there. “I’ve got an insert for that.”

The healer nodded, looking towards his boots.

“Perhaps we can do something about making you a better one,” they said, continuing to move their hands up the length of his thigh until the glow of magic around their hands dimmed and they gave him a reassuring pat on the leg before reaching for his boot and the weighted insert inside the toe.

“These soles have seen better days. I dare say that’s the reason you slipped in the first place.”

*

“The magical limb glowed faintly in the darkness. Which would have been fine, were they not a thief.

Mal paused before moving any further through the darkened house, pulling out a thick dark glove from their doublet and pulling it on. The magical was still somewhat visible undearneath, but at least it no longer looked like a disembodied magical hand floating through the darkness.

They could, of course, have extinguished the magic. But it was never worth the trouble of finding a mage to ignite it again. And besides, two hands could carry more than one.”

So you see, it’s not impossible to include disability and disability aids into your fantastical narratives. It is also entirely possible to make it witty, funny and poignant, as well as something you only ever mention in casual passing to remind the reader hey, Character McNoLegs uses a floating wheelchair, so they’re going to stay behind in this instance and be the getaway driver, because scaling the tower that doesn’t have a ramp isn’t exactly in their wheelhouse of strengths right now. This does not however make them redundant to the narrative, nor does it make them a burden.

It just requires a little creative thought on your part, which happily should be in your wheelhouse of strengths as an author.

Supposedly.

And if this seems snarkier than my usual replies, I’d apologize, but I literally, figuratively and spiritually do not give a fuck. The giveafuck well has run dry, you’ve caused a drought of fucks in my general vicinity. Fucks are rationed until such a time people stop crawling out the woodwork to tell me they’re not ableist but, and then saying something horifically ableist.

Here’s a thought, all that time and energy you’re putting into giving me reasons before 9am as to why, in an ideal world, I wouldn’t exist, and bending arse over backwards to justify your reasoning reasoning when you could just as easily put that same energy into not being a) ableist and b) a lackluster mediocre hack spending their time reminding me you wish I didn’t exist, but hey, you do you.

I’ll be right over here. Far the fuck away from you and enjoying the use of the block button.

Now if you’ll excuse me. I’m going back to fucking bed.

I once had a fairly popular (and very skilled and thoughtful) writer tell me that the absence of people like me – people with mental illness – as well as other forms of disability was because such “problems” had been solved a long time ago.  High-tech medicine made possible what the social model of disability alone could not eliminate, so either disabilities were no longer really disabling because the people were adequately accommodated (good!) or they had simply been … bred out (not good! AT ALL!),

They didn’t seem to understand why I found a world literally without people like me in it sinister in a very visceral way.  They saw the loss of people like me as a net good, as part of what it would take to make a truly healthy society.

Do I want people to have to go through what I went through? No! But does leaving people like me out of narratives actually help that to happen? No!  It allows us to be slotted neatly into a “problem” that was “solved”.  Really, it was a narrative “problem” the author chose to “solve” by eliminating folks like me instead of envisioning ways in which the literal inevitability of the existence of mental illness could be addressed in ways that were not terrifically ableist.

I pointed out that such a world would have required a sweeping act of eugenics to achieve, and that whether it was accomplished “humanely” (by selecting only “defect-free” embryos) or not, readers like me aren’t going to be charmed by your fantasy world if it involves the fantasy of us not being there. They responded by saying their alien culture did have morally gray underpinnings, that to get where they were things weren’t nice for a while, and you know, I would have bought it if it had ever been interrogated within the material itself, but it never was.  The vividly-realized culture was almost exclusively depicted as one where people lived in harmony and with purpose, the needs of all fulfilled by all.  It was very utopian and attractive and I was on board with it right up until a clearly mentally ill character was forcibly removed for correction.  Not treatment, not really, but correction.  It was specifically framed in that way.  As if it was an act of willful noncompliance to be mentally ill.  And I swear I had a full-body nope reaction to it.  The author wasn’t interested in having the problems with this explained to them.  It was a non-issue to them, completely.

While I do think their work is incredibly imaginative and brilliant in a lot of ways, I took down my positive reviews and unsubscribed from everything.  If you can’t be brilliant enough to envision ways to help people like me instead of eliminating them, I don’t need you.  If you give me no other way to see myself in your narrative besides “suboptimal, deselected for breeding, flaw eliminated” and then decide not to address the moral ramifications of that, like, ever, I’m not going to keep paying you. I do not want to read about a world you paint as better than ours in almost every single imaginable way, a world I would actually really really enjoy living in, where people like me were deleted.

You don’t get to paint people like me as problems to be solved just because your vision of a perfect world doesn’t include us, and then tell us that it was all for the best, really, because people in your ideal world wouldn’t have to suffer like I have.

Write for the disabled audience you have, or you are writing for the people who want us gone.

Genuine question at both of you, from a non-physically-disabled writer:

in the case of a scifi utopia (intended to be played straight and be a genuine utopia, and not turn out to be secretly dystopian at the core etc. etc. à la The Giver or such)

would it be satisfactory to you if, indeed, the society is utopian enough that all disabled people are provided equal access to fully functional aids? I don’t mean Cool Cyborgs™, I mean for instance mentions of people with prosthetic limbs almost completely comparable to biological limbs, except that you still have to switch them out as you grow, but the Perfect Utopia Government™ gives you new ones any time they’re necessary, for free bc idk we’ve done away with the concept of money and it works out perfectly. Similarly, mental health issues would still exist because quality of life ≠ can’t have depression, but it would be non-stigmatized and treatment easily accessible Everywhere For Everyone (somehow, in a creative way). Autistic people would face no discrimination because perfect society perfectly adapted to them, etc.

Would you be happy with that, a world where un-healable disabled people exist, but are not significantly — well — handicapped by those issues because the unrealistically perfect society does provide and accommodate for them entirely?

Or would that feel more frustrating and disingenuous to you because it’s not addressing the issues with accessibility that you do have in our real world, which are too huge a part of the reality of disability to be done away with?

Real question because I thiiink the OP meant that not bothering to work in creative representation of accessibility issues is lazy and ableist, and completely skipped the option of Actual Perfect Utopian Society — but the commenting reblog sounds to me like they totally agree with the entire post… but also like they would love such a society. Is it just a case of different-people-want-different-things or did I miss/misunderstand something? Being a writer, I’d like to know to improve on thisf!! >^<

(Other reason I’m asking: in the case of queer representation, I know I get annoyed and frustrated at stories making light of the issues queer people face in our current world, but for fantasy it’s the opposite and I just desperately want a million of stories where LGBTphobia plain and simple doesn’t exist, and queer people might still have ‘intrinsic’ struggles like two people with the same genitals being unable to have a biological-child-by-pregnancy or trans people having body dysphoria until they can safely transition, but don’t suffer from LGBTphobia. It’s-important-to-represent-accurately-and-to-make-other-people-understand but also I-really-really-really-want-carefree-bubblegum-happy-stories-too.

And I’m unsure whether you guys feel like that too, and what manner of depicting disability would be an acceptable equivalent.)

What inspired the original post was someone telling me it was unrealistic to have disabled people and mobility aids in a true fantasy setting because it detracted from “the reality of that world”.

That’s ablesit and a Problem.

A world where my needs are understood, accommodated and affordable without stigma is a Goal. I, personally would not be upset or offended by the type of narrative you are describing because it doesn’t negate me or dismiss me. It accommodates me, just in an incredibly hopeful and futuristic light. It also doesn’t appear to do the whole “we live in a utopia where these issues have been wiped out” which so many of us find inherently troubling. Instead it seems to say “we have accommodated these issues to the best of our technology because we are a society that cares. These people have the option and means to augment themselves to a higher level of physical functioning” which in our current reality, is what our limited mobility aids and medications already do.

Wheelchairs enhance mobility. Canes enhance mobility. Prosthetic limbs and eye glasses and hearing aids and splint braces and spine braces (the list goes on) enhance mobility and function. They are good positive things. Wonderful things. And more able bodied writers need to be aware of that. My glasses are not a cage to which I am confined behind to view the world. They let me see the world.

And also not trip over the coffee table quite so much.

Not all stories featuring disabled people HAVE to focus on the struggle of fighting ableism and our limitations. We need positive and happy representation as much as anyone else and a true utopia story would be a welcome change. (Though as a tip from a professional editor: I’d consider hiring a sensitivity reader or two to make sure your tone isn’t “off” or othering. I do it for characters of color in my work. Even well meaning intentions can fall short no matter how hard we try.)

But another part of that representation that is fundamentally missing from most narratives, also means not putting us in a true utopia, as lovely as that thought is.

It means normalization and accepting of who we are as we are now and can be done with significant ease by saying something as simple as “he/she/they used a wheeled chair to move about and their life was not a tragedy because of it”.

And that is just as vitally important as the hope that one day the world will be better and no one will have to get locked away in the tower because someone deems us inferior. Or a hindrance to the human goal.

Does that make sense? I hope it makes sense. Sorry if it doesn’t. My brain is fried from all this.