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Thinking about disability in a "perfect" future
No Disability at the Final Frontier: Science Fiction, Cures, and Eliminationism reminds me that I've been meaning to make a post about disability in "perfect" disability-free societies for a while, waiting until I can write the Perfect Post, but I think it's time to admit that's not going to happen and just ramble for a while, with the option to return to the topic later it later.
I'm not really addressing s.e.smith's point but riffing off a different aspect of the same broader topic of depictions of disability in scifi. I also covered some of this in Disability in Speculative Fiction: Monsters, mutants and muggles.
So. While I totally agree that representation of actual real world disabilities as they actually exist is important in general, I think the kinds of attitudes that anti-ableism draws upon can show up in a story set in a world where these disabilities don't exist, in the same way that a story that is all about men may or may not show a feminist-ish approach to gender. (And this is somewhat separate to the question of WHY the writer chose to write only about men, and the broader trends of gender depictions in fiction)
Of course the problem with this sort of thing is that everything may seem fine, and then an actual disabled person (or woman etc) shows up and it turns out the author was super prejudiced after all.
What am I talking about by "attitudes that anti-ableism draws upon"?
An acceptance that different people have different needs, that there is not one "normal", "right" way to be. That one's worth is not directly proportional to ones ability to function "productively". That all people have a right to personal autonomy. Stuff like that.
Like: there don't seem to be any ramps in the Star Wars universe, and everything is human sized, even though there are drones who default to travelling on wheels and aliens of all sizes.
"This Alien Shore" by C S Friedman make a anvil-esque metaphor about accepting difference by having all the inhabitants of space colonies be morphed by the travel into being mentally ill, or having tentacles and stuff. On their own planets this is considered normal eg on the Planet of Mentally Ill People it is just accepted and accommodated that some people need to have things explained more, or are delusional etc. The main character, from Earth, learns a Very Special Lesson About Acceptance. Unfortunately the subtext, to me, was that certain physical changes really were gross and weird, and all the central characters are at most invisibly disabled.
The Mass Effect world does have actual disability, but I really like the way that the quarians hugely debilitating immune issues are largely just accepted as part of who they are, and don't stop them being badass or happy. This is in contrast to the alien from a low gravity planet in that Star Trek DS9 episode, who learns a very special lesson about not being oversensitive about how people treat her just because she's in a wheelchair.
If the world is MOSTLY perfect, how are the few exceptions treated? s.e.smith gives the example of Tigh in Battlestar's injury being symbolic of social decay. Gattacca does a lovely exploration of prejudice towards a newly created disability: having a slight genetic chance of illness. And then has the only character who's disabled by real world standards kills themselves out of despair at being so useless. SIGH. Joker in Mass Effect (who has brittle bones that are mostly but not entirely fixed) is ok, he's a bit "oversensitive cripple", but I love that he is mostly just a badass pilot whose disability doesn't affect him, and the one time he has to "run" to save the day the game gives him just enough time to limp slowly at the speed of plot.
Actually (total tangent!) that's something that has occurred to me while pondering the possibility of a disabled Dr Who companion: the Doctor and his companions are always running away from things in the nick of time. But this is because the writers create situations that arbitrarily explode etc after the time it would take an ablebodied human to run away. It is no less arbitrary to have things explode in the time it would take a human on crutches, say. I kind of like the idea of a story where the Doctor always runs at exactly the same speed as his companions, and things always explode just in the nick of time, where his companions are limping, ablebodied, in a fast power wheelchair etc :D
Anyway.
Gattacca's flaws aside, it is a nice example of the idea that even in a world where most current impairments have been eradicated, society can still find ways to define certain people as lesser or broken. You also have the main character being ok with his "disability", and thinking society is the one with the problem.
I have Issues with the Beggars in Spain series by Nancy Kress, but she had a (again fairly anvilicious) situation where some humans become Super Advanced, and divide into those helping the ungrateful stupid mob, and elitists who think regular humans suck. And then EVEN MORE ADVANCED humans come along, and the elitists don't know how to think of themselves :) But as with Xmen, the advanced humans are always in the minority, I'd be curious to see one where they ended up being the majority (Gatacca again, I guess)
Of the top of my head, I can't think of any metaphorical equivalents of cochlear implants (which help "fix" deafness but have side effects that many Deaf think make them not worth the hassle): people with an invented disability who choose not to take the socially expected "fix". Wait! There's a non-compulsory but highly recommended "fix" for being socially awkward with dodgy side effects that the main character is trying to avoid in the very social-cohesion minded society in "Fledgeling" by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller.
I liked Scatterlings, by Isobelle Carmody, I haven't read it since highschool but as I recall the main character is "rescued" by Eloi-expys who claim she is one of them, but then discovers that she is a murlock and by that point is ok with it.
Ok, now to what was supposed to be the actual topic of this post when I first thought of it: an exploration of how there's no such thing as "making someone totally well".
In Mass Effect 2 your character basically dies in a fire then is "fixed". To my annoyance, my PC's scars (which I had decided he'd kept deliberately as a reminder of stuff) had all vanished, presumably because the doctors doing the fixing saw them as flaws and he was in no position to complain. It's also interesting that there are other sympathetic characters with badass scars who seem to have no interest in getting them fixed.
Anyway: what does "fixed" mean? Returned to your genetic blueprint? What if you don't like your genetic blueprint? What about all the factors that are environment based? Do you assume an optimal diet with optimal exercise etc? How do you define "optimal"?
I started thinking about all the other things that could be "fixed" this way by "perfect" medical devices like in Star Trek, especially by machines such as the sarcophagus in Stargate: being given back a congenital defect, losing tattoos piercings and scarification, having sex reassignment surgery reversed etc. And that's before we even get to stuff like people are quite happy being Deaf, thankyou.
I actually had an idea for a Stargate world where everyone was constantly "healed", so that injury was always healed right way but people with congenital issues were pretty screwed. But I couldn't think of any plot beyond "Stargate team arrive, some find it really helpful and amazing, others find it deadly/otherwise nasty".
So instead you get this post :)
I'm not really addressing s.e.smith's point but riffing off a different aspect of the same broader topic of depictions of disability in scifi. I also covered some of this in Disability in Speculative Fiction: Monsters, mutants and muggles.
So. While I totally agree that representation of actual real world disabilities as they actually exist is important in general, I think the kinds of attitudes that anti-ableism draws upon can show up in a story set in a world where these disabilities don't exist, in the same way that a story that is all about men may or may not show a feminist-ish approach to gender. (And this is somewhat separate to the question of WHY the writer chose to write only about men, and the broader trends of gender depictions in fiction)
Of course the problem with this sort of thing is that everything may seem fine, and then an actual disabled person (or woman etc) shows up and it turns out the author was super prejudiced after all.
What am I talking about by "attitudes that anti-ableism draws upon"?
An acceptance that different people have different needs, that there is not one "normal", "right" way to be. That one's worth is not directly proportional to ones ability to function "productively". That all people have a right to personal autonomy. Stuff like that.
Like: there don't seem to be any ramps in the Star Wars universe, and everything is human sized, even though there are drones who default to travelling on wheels and aliens of all sizes.
"This Alien Shore" by C S Friedman make a anvil-esque metaphor about accepting difference by having all the inhabitants of space colonies be morphed by the travel into being mentally ill, or having tentacles and stuff. On their own planets this is considered normal eg on the Planet of Mentally Ill People it is just accepted and accommodated that some people need to have things explained more, or are delusional etc. The main character, from Earth, learns a Very Special Lesson About Acceptance. Unfortunately the subtext, to me, was that certain physical changes really were gross and weird, and all the central characters are at most invisibly disabled.
The Mass Effect world does have actual disability, but I really like the way that the quarians hugely debilitating immune issues are largely just accepted as part of who they are, and don't stop them being badass or happy. This is in contrast to the alien from a low gravity planet in that Star Trek DS9 episode, who learns a very special lesson about not being oversensitive about how people treat her just because she's in a wheelchair.
If the world is MOSTLY perfect, how are the few exceptions treated? s.e.smith gives the example of Tigh in Battlestar's injury being symbolic of social decay. Gattacca does a lovely exploration of prejudice towards a newly created disability: having a slight genetic chance of illness. And then has the only character who's disabled by real world standards kills themselves out of despair at being so useless. SIGH. Joker in Mass Effect (who has brittle bones that are mostly but not entirely fixed) is ok, he's a bit "oversensitive cripple", but I love that he is mostly just a badass pilot whose disability doesn't affect him, and the one time he has to "run" to save the day the game gives him just enough time to limp slowly at the speed of plot.
Actually (total tangent!) that's something that has occurred to me while pondering the possibility of a disabled Dr Who companion: the Doctor and his companions are always running away from things in the nick of time. But this is because the writers create situations that arbitrarily explode etc after the time it would take an ablebodied human to run away. It is no less arbitrary to have things explode in the time it would take a human on crutches, say. I kind of like the idea of a story where the Doctor always runs at exactly the same speed as his companions, and things always explode just in the nick of time, where his companions are limping, ablebodied, in a fast power wheelchair etc :D
Anyway.
Gattacca's flaws aside, it is a nice example of the idea that even in a world where most current impairments have been eradicated, society can still find ways to define certain people as lesser or broken. You also have the main character being ok with his "disability", and thinking society is the one with the problem.
I have Issues with the Beggars in Spain series by Nancy Kress, but she had a (again fairly anvilicious) situation where some humans become Super Advanced, and divide into those helping the ungrateful stupid mob, and elitists who think regular humans suck. And then EVEN MORE ADVANCED humans come along, and the elitists don't know how to think of themselves :) But as with Xmen, the advanced humans are always in the minority, I'd be curious to see one where they ended up being the majority (Gatacca again, I guess)
Of the top of my head, I can't think of any metaphorical equivalents of cochlear implants (which help "fix" deafness but have side effects that many Deaf think make them not worth the hassle): people with an invented disability who choose not to take the socially expected "fix". Wait! There's a non-compulsory but highly recommended "fix" for being socially awkward with dodgy side effects that the main character is trying to avoid in the very social-cohesion minded society in "Fledgeling" by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller.
I liked Scatterlings, by Isobelle Carmody, I haven't read it since highschool but as I recall the main character is "rescued" by Eloi-expys who claim she is one of them, but then discovers that she is a murlock and by that point is ok with it.
Ok, now to what was supposed to be the actual topic of this post when I first thought of it: an exploration of how there's no such thing as "making someone totally well".
In Mass Effect 2 your character basically dies in a fire then is "fixed". To my annoyance, my PC's scars (which I had decided he'd kept deliberately as a reminder of stuff) had all vanished, presumably because the doctors doing the fixing saw them as flaws and he was in no position to complain. It's also interesting that there are other sympathetic characters with badass scars who seem to have no interest in getting them fixed.
Anyway: what does "fixed" mean? Returned to your genetic blueprint? What if you don't like your genetic blueprint? What about all the factors that are environment based? Do you assume an optimal diet with optimal exercise etc? How do you define "optimal"?
I started thinking about all the other things that could be "fixed" this way by "perfect" medical devices like in Star Trek, especially by machines such as the sarcophagus in Stargate: being given back a congenital defect, losing tattoos piercings and scarification, having sex reassignment surgery reversed etc. And that's before we even get to stuff like people are quite happy being Deaf, thankyou.
I actually had an idea for a Stargate world where everyone was constantly "healed", so that injury was always healed right way but people with congenital issues were pretty screwed. But I couldn't think of any plot beyond "Stargate team arrive, some find it really helpful and amazing, others find it deadly/otherwise nasty".
So instead you get this post :)
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