#disability issues
Today we remember disabled people who were murdered by their families for being a burden. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s an act of kindness. It’s murder without justice. And in these past few years, where the refrain has been “…yeah, but only people with underlying health conditions, right?”, as disabled people have been the victims of this virus & the neglect of those unwilling to take the barest precautions to protect us, we have far heavier hearts to carry. Not to mention the abuse & neglect that far too many disabled, chronically ill & neurodiverse people suffer at the hands of their caregivers - & yes, that includes family & loved ones. I’m asking you to take the time to look through the #DisabilityDayOfMourning tag, to search it on the internet and read what people have to say. And to think about what you would do if someone you know was murdered by a loved one simply for being disabled. Today we mourn, tomorrow we fight on.
#DisabilityDayOfMourning Have you ever read a news story where a mother has killed her disabled or autistic child? Was it phrased as the mother being overwhelmed, at the end of her rope, out of options, didn’t know what else to do? Did you find yourself empathizing with her, feeling bad for her, hoping her life could find some peace? … You do know she’s a murderer, right? That the person you should feel bad for is the person she murdered? Yes, Murdered.
These news stories too often lean towards “that poor, poor mother” (or father, other family member or caregiver). They never seem to lean towards empathizing with the disabled person who was murdered. Why is that? Because disabled people are too often seen as “less than”, while the put-upon caregiver is not. Do I feel for the overwhelmed parent? Hell yes. Is the solution murder? Hell no. Does the disabled person ever get justice? Very, very rarely. Do we as a society learn from these events & start offering more services, money & help to both caregivers *and* disabled people? Very, very rarely. Should we do better? Yes. Can we do better? Yes.
In the name of all the disabled people who have been murdered by the very people who were meant to care for them…we can do better. And we should. #JusticeForTheDisabled
Watching this documentary short (taken from a longer documentary) about poor kids in Ohio during lockdown. This woman, with three kids, has been told by her doctors that she can’t work due to kidney disease. The state agrees enough to give her *some* benefits, but…she has to volunteer 80 hours a month to receive said benefits. If she’s too sick to work, then she’s too sick to volunteer 20 hours a week. I remember at the end of my “working life”, I finally realized it was time to turn in my papers when I couldn’t manage 18 hours a week. Ohio, wtf is this nonsense?! And in this documentary, it’s during the pandemic. The 13 year old subject of the film says how worried he is about his mom having to be out there volunteering because she’s so likely to catch Covid. I have to imagine a strong case of Covid could do damage to her already vulnerable kidneys. What utter bullshit our whole system is!
Here is the full documentary, an hour long, which I guess I’m gonna watch now so I can get even angrier at our system!
Being disabled is expensive and I don’t think abled people (unless they live with a disabled person) realise how expensive it is. Even the people who are fourtunate enough to get full benefits (and many people don’t even when they are entitled to it and need it) and state support are still struggling and can’t afford everything they need.
And yet, Disabled people still have to deal with people saying how lucky they are or how unfair it is that they get “all that extra money” when in reality they are struggling and can’t afford all the care or accessibility they actually need.
When I was younger and more abled, I was so fucking on board with the fantasy genre’s subversion of traditional femininity. We weren’t just fainting maidens locked up in towers; we could do anything men could do, be as strong or as physical or as violent. I got into western martial arts and learned to fight with a rapier, fell in love with the longsword.
But since I’ve gotten too disabled to fight anymore, I… find myself coming back to that maiden in a tower. It’s that funny thing, where subverting femininity is powerful for the people who have always been forced into it… but for the people who have always been excluded, the powerful thing can be embracing it.
As I’m disabled, as I say to groups of friends, “I can’t walk that far,” as I’m in too much pain to keep partying, I find myself worrying: I’m boring, too quiet, too stationary, irrelevant. The message sent to the disabled is: You’re out of the narrative, you’re secondary, you’re a burden.
The remarkable thing about the maiden in her tower is not her immobility; it’s common for disabled people to be abandoned, set adrift, waiting at bus stops or watching out the windows, forgotten in institutions or stranded in our houses. The remarkable thing is that she’s like a beacon, turning her tower into a lighthouse; people want to come to her, she’s important, she inspires through her appearance and words and craftwork. In medieval romances she gives gifts, write letters, sends messengers, and summons lovers; she plays chess, commissions ballads, composes music, commands knights. She is her household’s moral centre in a castle under siege. She is a castle unto herself, and the integrity of her body matters.
That can be so revolutionary to those of us stuck in our towers who fall prey to thinking: Nobody would want to visit; nobody would want to listen; nobody would want to stay.
#it’s so so important to remember that representation is not one-size-fits-all#what is empowering to one person might be exhausting and oppressive to someone else#some people need stories about having the strength to save themselves#some people need stories about being considered worthy of being saved#some people need inspiration for their independence while others need validation that they don’t have to be able to do everything themselves#before you lash out against something PLEASE stop to consider:#is this inadequate and/or damaging representation?#or is it just something I don’t personally relate to? [X]
It’s been half a decade and I still haven’t found an articulation of the complexity of “representation” as concisely and precisely mindblowing as @hungrylikethewolfie’s here.
One thing I definitely had on the brain writing this post is… when I get around to actually writing that The Sisters of Dorley/Glow, Worm crossover fanfic, I think probably the hardest thing about doing so will be imitating the original author’s narrative voice. For starters there’s the fact I’ll have to learn British spelling, but it’s more than that. That person writes very differently from me. I tried writing a small bit of rough draft of the fanfic I had in mind a while back, as an experiment, and it came out very jarringly not being at all like the original story stylistically. That is definitely something I’ll have to work on!
I think what I’ll probably do is try my best to write characters I read as neurotypical in their style and then write characters I read as kinda-sorta cousin-y to me kind of neurodivergent in my own natural style, to create a sense of different characters having different internal mental voices and processing the world in different ways. This will correspond probably not perfectly but pretty heavily to “characters from the original story get their internal point of view sections written in my best facsimile of the original author’s writing style, OCs get their internal point of view sections written in my style, the more they’re noted as visibly neurodivergent the more I lean into things that are ‘weird’ about the way I write while writing their internal point of view sections.”
I mean, I’m not sure if “neurotypical” is quite the right word here, cause I think transness itself is probably a neurodivergence, and itdefinitely will be in this setting, but, I mean, like, neurotypical aside from that.
Like, yeah, I’m not sure this is exactly correct, but when I try to articulate how their writing style is different from mine a phrase that pops into my mind is “they have neurotypical writing.” My impressions are:
It’s very workmanlike. I don’t mean that as an insult, it’s in a sense very elegantly functional. It doesn’t draw much attention to itself, it gets out of the way and serves as an efficient mechanism for telling the reader what’s happening and how people are interacting. It uses very ordinary “how regular people talk” vocabulary and phrasing and sentence structure. It’s kind of efficiently terse; it moves quickly and smoothly. And there’s differences in the way we treat physicality/the body that I find interesting.
It’s interesting, because I’ve seen notes in Glow, Worm and things on the author’s Twitter about her being a chronic pain sufferer; she says right in the introduction of Glow, Worm “I also may or may not be exorcising some of my demons, as a woman with chronic pain, through Viv,” but to me most her characters read as, like, really healthy-coded (I wonder if it’s the product of a deliberate effort to write normal people from someone who knows their experience is not typical).
Like, I’m thinking of this post that’s floating around that’s like “friendly reminder that the average person’s normal pain level is zero” and my reaction to that is “sounds fake but OK, guess I’m an unfortunate outlier.” And I think about my impressions of how The Sisters of DorleyandGlow, Worm treats the body, and I’m like “oh, it’s describing the internal experiences of people who have a normal pain level of zero! That’s how you relate to physicality if that’s your lived experience!” And, like, Viv feels like an exception that proves the rule here, like she and Jill feel like the only people with hurty uncooperative bodies in a cast otherwise full of people who have smoothly functioning mostly pain-free bodies (in Dorley, the only person who comes across as having that sort of body issues is Aaron - it’s briefly mentioned that he has a damaged arm). Probably most fiction reads like this and I just don’t notice it much like 99.99% of the time, but it’s really noticeable here because embodiment and the vulnerability of the body is so extremely relevanttoDorley.
And it’s not necessarily about pain per se, it’s more like, if you have a smoothly functioning body with a normal pain level of zero and there’s nothing hard to deal with going on in it, you aren’t stimulated to think so much about the fact that you’re fragile and an animal and made out of meat, you experience your body as in a way unobtrusive. And, like, it’s not that everyone there has an unproblematic relationship with their bodies, of course Gemma and like just about everyone in Dorley are going to have some kind of complicated and fraught feelings about their bodies, but they’re mostly about the social body, the ways other people react to their bodies, whether they think their bodies are beautiful or not. And the idea of damage/injury to bodies definitely shows up (Bea’s and Maria’s old scars, Dorley’s whole… thing), but it’s past damage, it’s… not really the same thing as what Viv has or what I wrote Annaliese’sandRuth’s human selves as having.
And, like, one thing I’ve been mentally pulling on a little here that I think shows this is the way Elle is originally portrayed vs. the basically an OC I’ve extrapolated out from her canon portrayal. Like, thinking about what I said about there being a lot of parallels between the way I’m writing her and Brett Devereaux’s analysis of Saruman…
One parallel I didn’t mention there is one I see specifically with movie Saruman. One thing I like about Christopher Lee’s performance is he really gives me a sense that Saruman enjoys the experience of having power; that he really enjoys the experience of telling the Uruk Hai what to do and having them act subservient to him and talking about the powerful creatures and powerful army he controls. And I’m absolutely writing Elle as having that. It’s more hidden with her, but she absolutely likes power in that way. 100% she’s the sort of self-aware where when she watches the LOTR movies her reaction to watching this scene is “Inshallah, basically me in ten or twenty or thirty years, and I think I’m going to have about as much fun with it as he’s having.”
And she’s personally a very physically strong and resilient person with superpowers, so this extends to her own body. She absolutely loves the fact that she is strong and resilient even by vampire standards. Like, there is a reason her elevator pitch for vampirization is smashing up a concrete pillar with her fists, stabbing herself in the stomach and letting the other person watch the wound heal in like five minutes while she calmly stands there, encouraging them to dig their fingers around in the wound to confirm that it’s real while being like “this doesn’t hurt much for me, my pain threshold is set at a level appropriate for my physical resilience,” and then when that show’s over telling the other person “as a vampire you will be about as strong and resilient as I am.”
And this is very much a reaction to past vulnerability, she remembers being human and being both socially and physically weak even among humans and being abused because of that and those are not good memories for her, she enjoys being strong and having power like this because it comforts her, she associates that kind of power with safety. Like, yeah, that’s definitely a subtext I intended for that bit with Grandmother, she intensely did not like that moment of physical vulnerability.
And obviously this is all my invention and extrapolation cause canon keeps her portrayal as totally compatible with her just being a weird human, but, like, it’s interesting to compare this with how her power is portrayed in the original story, where her power looks like this:
“Bea’s had a long time to perfect her womanhood, to understand it, to claim it and inhabit it, but Elle Lambert has a way of making her feel like an ingénue. Her heels announce her presence, crisply clicking on the flagstones outside, and by the time she reaches the kitchen doors, Barb — another one of Maria’s circle, who adopted the rather old-fashioned name Barbara with an enthusiasm entirely familiar to Bea; God only knows what Grandmother and the sponsors call her, but it’s unlikely to be anything like as wholesome — has already stepped smartly forward to let her in, as if she’s royalty, and the abused girls of Dorley her retinue. Elle steps elegantly through the door and smiles at the girl, inspiring in Barb a blush Bea thinks could probably cook an egg, and passes to her a shopping bag.
“Gifts for the girls,” Elle says to her, and Barb rushes back to the women standing by the wall, who all look equal parts delighted and scandalised.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Barb says, as the other girls rifle through and pull out tops, skirts, shoes. She performs an exaggerated curtsey, which earns her a glare from Frankie that no-one bar Bea seems to notice.
“Please call me Elle.”
Elle steps forward and deposits a portable hard drive on the kitchen table. She’s short — shorter than Bea and the younger Dorley graduates; shorter even than Grandmother and most of her people, too — but she commands the room effortlessly, with a manner that belies her twenty-five years and which Bea, despite being over a decade her senior, has been trying to emulate since the day they met. She’s pale and subtly made-up, and her rich, thick waves of dark hair break on the shoulders of a suit worth enough, in Bea’s judgement, to feed a family of four for a year. The only woman in the room who doesn’t look dowdy in comparison is Maria, who has today assembled with unexpected skill an elegant outfit from the meagre scraps allowed the girls; Grandmother’s coterie, already given to a particularly English variety of rural tweed anti-fashion, look positively antique.” - The Sisters of Dorley, Chapter 16.
And, like, there’s totally connective tissue! I very much see her enjoying that sort of power in a Saruman-like way too. And, like, “as if she’s royalty, and the abused girls of Dorley her retinue” - absolutely not a long stretch at all from that to relating to the graduate school girls in something like the way Saruman relates to the Uruk Hai, and yeah very on-brand if her equivalent of the “you will taste manflesh!” stuff involves this sort of small kindnesses.
But, you know…
There’s definitely a difference in the way I and the original author approach her embodiment in a way that I think goes beyond me making the vampire thing explicit.
