attackfish

I am here today, ever so slightly late, for Blog Against Disablism Day to talk about two storytelling devices (yes, this means I’m linking to TV Tropes, you have been warned) that are astonishingly popular for how blatantly offensive they are with regards to how they depict disability, or more accurately, the lack of disability. Obfuscating Disability and Throwing Off The Disability are sister tropes, and I can’t decide which one is worse.

In the modern West, there is this undercurrent of thought, rarely outright stated, that people with disabilities somehow have it easy, and that there’s a bunch of not disabled people trying to get one over on all of us by pretending to be disabled. I know it makes no sense when I say it out loud, but yes, it is there, I promise. I have written about this phenomenon before. As a person with disabilities, the moment I mention my disability, or have to use assistive technology, or in any way become visibly disabled, people, not all people, and not all of them able bodied, start, consciously or not, watching me for any kind of sign that my disability isn’t real. And since like many people with disabilities, I have good days and bad days, there is usually something for these people to hang their suspicions upon, and from then on, they treat me like a liar. I am forced to constantly justify the existence of my disability and any accommodations I need because of it. I have had people secretly contaminate my food or my belongings with things I’m severely allergic to, believing that I wouldn’t react, and they could hold that up as proof that I’m not really sick, that I am a fraud. It’s extremely unpleasant, and it’s exhausting. And it makes no sense. People with disabilities do not have it easy. Society does not give us a free pass and a cupcake for being disabled. We don’t get pats and sympathy. We get irritation, derision, and invisibility.

This is the world in which the fictional character Obfuscating Disability has become common. Like many offensive tropes, it would not be a problem if there were only one story like this. If one villain were pretending to be disabled, and revealed not to be, it would be cool, and novel, and look how he hides behind the narrative that disabled people are harmless. But there is not only one example, or even a few. Nearly every crime show has one. The Mentalist is particularly fond of this trope and has three, if you include the woman who pretended to have cancer.

The Mentalist has not only used this three times, but one of those uses is particularly interesting in the way it dismisses the existence of anyone who uses a wheelchair intermittently, and also shows frankly, if unwittingly the way people try to catch people with disabilities out as frauds. The show establishes that the main character, Jane, checks the shoes of every wheelchair user he meets for signs of scuff marks that would betray a faker. Well, Jane does say that this faker is the first wheelchair user he’s seen with scuff marks, so the rest were not faking, but guess what, many, if not most people in real life who use wheelchairs use them intermittently, along with canes and other mobility aids, and/or short periods of unaided walking. Finding signs that a wheelchair user has been walking would not be unusual, and certainly not proof of a lie. Furthermore, wheelchair users’ shoes get plenty scuffed up from daily wear and tear even if they don’t walk.

The worst use of this trope that I’ve seen has to be the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode where a woman who has recovered from paralysis continues to use her wheelchair and keep up the illusion of still being paralysed, which in real life would include catheters, and colostomy bags, and all kinds of really really gross and not a whole lot of fun purely physical stuff, because she didn’t want to give up the safety of the limitations being disabled placed on her. And she killed someone and framed her husband for it to maintain the charade. And then the detectives smugly push her into the pool, forcing her to swim to reveal herself. Law and Order SVU usually gets a pass from me, because it’s so cheesy, and so badly written, that I just can’t take it seriously, and oh, I love it in all it’s awful glory. But this episode was a colossal failure even for SVU.

There are people out there who do fake physical disability, and the ones that aren’t running charity cons probably nearly all have very real and very severe psychological problems. It is nowhere near as common in real life as it is in fiction. In fiction, perfectly sane, if utterly amoral people are willing to spend years living full time as if they had debilitating injuries that require difficult and time consuming life alterations, and endure the scorn and dismissal of countless people every day in order to pull off some nefarious plot. And people with real disabilities, in the real world are constantly watched in an effort to find a fault with their stories.

Strangely enough, in spite of the number of people faking disability in fiction, I have never found a portrayal of a character doing the kind of lying about their disability that real life people with disabilities do all the time. Some disabilities are treated as more deserving of assistance, more tragic, more real. People have heard of them, they fit the societal expectation of what a disability should look like. Because of this, many people with disabilities allow others to fit their disabilities into those boxes whether they fit it or not. A wheelchair user with chronic pain, or muscular spasms may mislead people into thinking they’re a paraplegic. I routinely let people believe that I have lung problems instead of a circulatory disorder, or that a specific allergic reaction could cause me to stop breathing instead of triggering a seizure, which they’re less likely to believe. These lies keep me safe. Over in the comments to this entry someone called it “putting a fake horn on a real unicorn.” That would be interesting to watch, wouldn’t it? But instead, we just get more and more “Look! So and so isn’t as helpless as you thought. He’s *gasp* ABLE BODIED!” instead.

This trope does bring up an interesting point in how we as a society perceive people with disabilities. It’s almost always a villain faking a disability, and they’re usually doing it to appear helpless and non-threatening. Disabled people are dismissed and rendered invisible. The villains who fake disability take advantage of this prejudice. But because the people who create these villains share this prejudice, the only way they can conceive of to make someone with a disability a credible threat is to make them secretly able bodied.

This trope’s heroic sister is when a character throws off their disability, and there is so much wrong with this trope I honestly don’t even know where to begin. Although the TV tropes article I linked to includes several subtypes, including obfuscating disability, which I already talked about, divine cures, which I have discussed briefly elsewhere, people with temporary disabilities that just happened to heal at an opportune moment, and characters who the writers just decided they didn’t want to write as disabled anymore with no in story explanation given, I want to talk about one very specific form of this trope, when a disabled character, through shear determination and willpower makes themself not have a disability. Oy.

Remember how I said that a character faking disability was only a problem because of how common it was and the cultural context? Not so with this trope. It is one of those rare tropes, like a touching love story where one lover rapes the other and that’s okay, or a story where the moral is segregation, because the poor minorities just can’t handle the White world, that just manages to be offensive even if it were the only depiction of that trope. It’s a wonderful way for an author to end up on my never-read-anything-by-them-again list.

Like Obfuscating Disability, this trope is extremely revealing about society’s attitudes towards disability, horrifically so. According to this trope, disability is all in a person’s head. If we had enough willpower, presumably like able bodied people, we would be able to walk, see, hear, breathe properly, make our immune systems fight off disease, and force our blood through our bodies. According to this trope, I am taking the easy way out by having a disability, by being disabled. Being disabled is hard. It is grueling. And the people I know with disabilities have more grit than most of the able bodied people I know could even dream of. It takes tremendous strength of will to fight day in and say out for the thinnest, pettiest trace of normalcy.

This trope says my disability is all in my head. It says that I could stop having seizures and getting sick and start getting blood to my hands and feet if I just tried, and therefor implies that my disability is not real. I have mental health issues, and an intermittently invisible disability, so anything that gives people an easier time saying that my disabilities are all not real, and I’m just lying to myself makes my life even harder. My disability is weird, and rare, and doesn’t fit most people’s ideas of the way an illness or disability is supposed to act. It’s far easier to think I’m crazy.

You might have noticed a theme in both these tropes, that society as a whole searches for ways to claim that somebody with a disability doesn’t have that disability. Disability is an unpleasant fact of life that, like death and taxes, most people would prefer to ignore. Unfortunately, that often means ignoring, and dismissing disabled people or their disabilities. A character throwing off disability by force of will allows writers to get their disability free happy endings. A writers think that disability has no place in a happy ending, and by the time a happy ending comes around, the disabled characters should be cured or dead. I’m sure you can guess what I think about that.

And just like the miraculously cured disabled characters, stories in which a character throws off their disability never deal with the implications of what being having once been disabled and being disabled no longer actually means. The writers just assume that it’s the same as being able bodied all along.

Since most characters who throw off a disability, at least since the Victorian era, and The Secret Garden, Heidi, and the like, have had a compelling and immediate reason, say, to rescue somebody they love. From a purely narrative standpoint, this is a wonderful thing. Look, the character has an insurmountable barrier between them and saving their child, oh look, they surmounted them. It's powerful. I get it. I really do. But you know what else is powerful? A character managing to rescue someone while disabled. A character rising from their wheelchair to protect the ones they love only to injure themselves worse and have to be taken to the hospital after like Wesley in Angel, a character who cannot rescue the one they love because of their disability and being forced to watch as they die.

Both the trope of a character throwing off their disability, and of a villain faking their disability say another thing about how we as a society view people with disabilities. The only way to be useful or a threat, these tropes say, is to be able bodied. Well excuse me, but fuck that. It’s society’s way of saying that disabled people don’t count unless they’re somehow really not disabled. The thing is, tropes are a reflection of society’s views, but they also shape them. Tropes get inside your head, and these are two tropes that shouldn’t be in anybody’s head.