Wheelchairs and Shotguns: Handicapped Other in Supernatural Fandom

[chasingtides]

So there have been some posts hanging about in metafandom about the Other, specifically the Other of colour and fantasy/science fiction. I have not participated because I inevitably get bogged down in the "the writer just can't win" aspect of it all. (Note: This doesn't just apply to characters of colour. I often feel the same way about most discussions of Other characters, including the Other categories into which I fall: women, queers, the handicapped.)

That being said, this meta is actually about another type of Other (I tie myself up in knots) and fandom, specifically Supernatural. Now, I've been knocking about fandom for most of my life at this point - and god, what a strange thing to think of, really - and I haven't been in a fandom that loves to beat on its characters like Supernatural fans do. (I'm sure they exist, but I haven't been in them.)

Now, as a disabled person, I face a conundrum. (Do I have to have a spiel on how this is the view of one person with a neurological condition and how I don't represent everyone everywhere who has any imaginable disability? I really hope I don't.)

On one hand, this means that disabilities are getting more face time than in anything else I've really experienced. I grew up without having any media role models - other than Professor Xavier - who had a disability that I can remember. (Oracle - from Batman - was paralysed by the Joker back in '88, but I didn't do Bat comics when I was a kid. Also, why only comic heroes?) Currently on television, I've got House and... somebody on ER (a show I don't watch)? In World War Z, there's a guy in a wheelchair who fights zombies - and I think I text messaged my whole contact list when I got to that part of the book. So, seeing a fandom that wants to grapple with disabilities should be really, really cool.

On the other hand, there are sometimes where I feel like reading The Secret Garden would make me feel better about being disabled than reading stuff coming from this fandom.

Before I get to fanfiction, there was a Supernatural episode this season that I saw as dealing with both disability and disability discrimination. I talked about it with a friend and was so happy. In Yellow Fever (4.06), the ghost was, in life, a man named Luther Garland. He was viewed by his coworkers and community as monstrous and different and ended up being road-hauled for it. As far as I could tell from context, he appeared to be mentally disabled in life. He was killed for it. It was brutal and painful and extreme, but I could relate to it, on some levels.

The discussions I saw online talked about it as a racial issue. While I can see that, Luther was persecuted and killed because he was different, because he was monstrous, because he had difficulty communicating in the same way as other people, because he looked different (and not the color of his skin which was the same as his brother's), because he acted different. I discussed the ability issue privately with a few friends, but I haven't brought it up until now. I felt - and still feel - that it is an unwelcome thing to say.

(I'm also not going touch panic as a disability and fearful hallucinations... yes. Not touching.)

Why do I feel this way?

Perhaps it is what I see in the fanfiction and discussions of the fanfiction. This is probably going to be an immensely unpopular thing to say, but it bothers me.

I am going to paraphrase (to protect both the perpetrators, but also myself from looking them up):

"I love it when Sam's a cripple so Dean has to take care of him."

Okay, I used "cripple" for a reason that I'll deal with immediately and then move on to the meat of the issue. I've seen this kind of thing a couple of times and I generally try to point out that these are Not Okay Thing to Say. I'm not playing Other Olympics here, but would you say, "I love it when Sam's a faggot" to express your love of gay!Sam? No? Then why would you use language like this? I call myself a cripple, yes, but I also call myself a half-dyke and dyke and a bitch and a cunt. This doesn't mean that I'd be okay with a stranger on the street calling me a crippled half-dyke cunt. Words mean things and they can be deeply insulting. Think before you type.

Second, let's say that this hypothetical statement was written in a review for a fic where Sam, I don't know, is in a wheelchair. What on earth makes you think that Dean would have to take care of him? People with disabilities have a wide range of caring needs and I won't make light of that, but if Sam's been paralysed and has proper therapy and time to heal and learn his body, he won't need Dean to take care of him. This applies to a lot of disabilities. (Fandom, why on earth would they need carers for most of the things you do - they're primarily injury related and if you did a little research, you would learn a lot.)

This attitude - coupled with the type of language used - is insulting. Disability is suddenly not just another way of living, but - I don't even know, something that makes people need coddling. That's infuriating.

I'm speaking as a person who once hit someone with her pocketbook when he tried to push my wheelchair (a stranger, without telling me). I've hit people with my cane when they try to grab my arm (I'd rather be in trouble for smacking them lightly than to end up falling on top of a stranger). I've been told that I can't do things because I'm too disabled - too fragile, too prone to breaking, too incapable of handling my own life. (Yes, I shop for my own groceries, drive my own car, take my own classes, work my own job.)

So, yes, my life experience is colouring how I react to people acting this way about disability. But this pervading attitude grates at me, bother me, makes me angry.

Somehow disability - whether temporary or permanent - makes our characters more cuddly. Now, I'm all for understanding that characters aren't perfect and are mere mortals, but in my opinion, the show does this (Hell, damnation, and death tend to clinch that for me). But there is this feeling that - there's a fierce joy at giving them disabilities - of doing things that the authors don't understand or research, things that affect real people. While I like disabled characters, the enthusiasm combined with a lack of understanding or any apparent desire to understand shakes me to my core. The authors and the readers don't bother to try to understand what it means to have a disability - to need to choose between exercising or going grocery shopping today, to choose between pain meds and watching the news, to wait for interminable hours in doctors' offices, but to also live lives and work jobs and have families and hobbies and interests.

I could go into detail on not understanding mental disabilities, but I'm going to shut up before my head explodes.

It's wounding. We're people, too.

(And someday, I will write a meta on sexism and the Supernatural fandom and then the part of fandom that hasn't ostracised me after this will lynch me.)

Comments

[maccaj.livejournal.com]

for what it's worth, as a gimp, a writer of hurt/comfort fic, and a reader of it - I *completely* agree with this post.

Hurt/comfort can be fun and emotional and very well done, and disability is one of the more obvious routes to take when writing a hurt/comfort fic... but writing it *well*, or hell, even *discussing* it intelligently, means undeerstanding that gimps are not helpless, less-than, or always-and-forever in need of ablebodied folks. That's the core issue that I think a lot of able-bodied h/c writer and h/c lovers miss, because culturally, we *are* (largely) represented as helpless, less-than, or at best, bitter, emotionally broken, and stubborn - (e.g. House. And I do adore House... but it also troubles me that House is pretty much the most *positive* disabled character portrayed on television.

I won't even get started on the whole ABs playing crips when plenty of very talented crip actors would kill for a job thing, or the fact that we'll see a well-adjusted, congenitally disabled regular when hell freezes over (although Joey Lucas on The West Wing was very well done while it lasted).

I think we'll know when we're actually headed toward cultural equality when well-adjusted disabled characters start showing up on our tv screens - similar to how Bill Cosby et al opened the door for black actors to be a cultural norm.

[maccaj.livejournal.com]

quoting myself, cause as usual I can't get it right the first time:

I think we'll know when we're actually headed toward cultural equality when well-adjusted disabled characters start showing up on our tv screens - similar to how Bill Cosby et al opened the door for black actors to be a cultural norm.

What I meant by this is "when disabled actors (congenitally or otherwise, but genuinely disabled) play a regular role that incorporates said disability without being the focus of the role."... in contrast to House, whom, while fairly realistic, is also utterly misanthropic and emotionally broken, and is also played by the fantastic, but very much ablebodied, Hugh Laurie.

The only *regular* role I've seen that approximates a truly realistic disabled character, played by a disabled actor, without focusing on disability, is Joey Lucas (played utterly brilliantly by Marlee Matlin). We need more of *that* for the cultural views of our society to truly change, because like it or not, television is both a mirror of and one of the largest influences on our culture.

[gwendolen.livejournal.com]

What about Jim Byrnes and the roles he played in Wiseguy and Highlander? The disablity was noticable and sometimes they showed his limits (i.e. being unable to chase after a bad guy) but he still came across as a very well-adjusted and strong character in both shows.

I would love to see more of him as I think he's a great actor.

[miriam-heddy.livejournal.com]

I'd add Robert David Hall (Dr. Al Robbins) on CSI to that list.

[chasingtides.livejournal.com]

I love reading hurt/comfort, too, but this attitude gets to me.

I agree that this is just a symptom of our culture treating disabled folk as something less than able bodied folk - both physically and emotionally, mentally and culturally. It's not just in the media - I had a guy break up with me once when he realised I was disabled, because it meant that eventually I would hurt him. (No, I cannot explain that in any way.)

House bothers me on many levels - his Vicodin popping the most obvious one that pops out at me, but also his inability to form real relationships - though I love watching him. I think that it's that he's bitter and stubborn, but he refuses to be totally broken and helpless, as so many disabled characters are.

The fact that I struggled to think of a disabled characters shows the absolute lack of cultural equality. Barring World War Z, I can't think of a book that I've recently read that had a character who was disabled and wasn't a plot point. (If you can bear horror, World War Z is worth reading. It is both incredibly well written and the disabled man is one of the most emotionally resilient characters in the book - he just takes life as it is and fights zombies from his chair and defends his friends and family. I wish every disabled character could be written like his - well adjusted, friendly, and ready to kick-ass.)

[maccaj.livejournal.com]

oh yeah... the media is, as I said, both a mirror of and an influence on what goes on in the real world, which I think is part of why seeing so few disabled characters (and even fewer well done ones) bothers me so much... essentially, it takes the existing cultural perception that disabled people's lives are all about disability, and reenforces that perception, which then continues to be the predominant and accepted thought in the real world, which is further reflected by media, etc.

I had to quit watching House for a while when the whole "House takes Vicodin and that makes him a druggie and a liar and a thief" storyline came up... it felt like it was equating the use of the pain meds with addiction and the behaviors that come with that, instead of ever touching on the idea that some of us have a physical dependence on pain meds - i.e., don't take them for fun, wouldn't steal/lie to get them, and so on. And again, it goes back to the issue that if we had more disabled characters - particularly *actual* disabled actors playing disabled characters - that plotline could more easily be read as "House is a liar and a thief and manipulative because he is *House*; disablility did not *make* him that way." Which I think is what the writers were aiming at, but they never expressed it as such in that storyline (which is strange, because in S1 "Detox," they *did* address it). But since we don't have many disabled characters, the association people walk away with is, "Even if they're professionally successful, disabled people are broken, and if they use pain meds, it's because they're addicted and chasing a high, and they will lie and steal to feed their habit."

I can't think of many disabled characters in media either. Even fewer *main* characters (in written material or movies) or recurring roles (in TV). Of those, only one is played by a disabled person. Add that to the fact that most of the time, even if disability isn't a plot point per se, it's usually an subtle indicator of someone who's either superhuman, evil, broken in some non-visible way, or some combination, and it can get really frustrating.

And wow, World War Z sounds interesting. I'll check it out... I love written horror stuff, I'm just a big wuss when it comes to TV and movies - plus my startle reflex has gotten markedly worse as I've gotten older, so sudden sounds/movements have me plastered to the ceiling. ;) Written horror is awesome, though.

[chasingtides.livejournal.com]

I had issues with that plotline. Between better meds, I have been addicted to certain meds - and it was miserable wanting more and knowing I shouldn't and couldn't and the whole hell that came with it. It was breaking because I needed them, was dependent, *and* was addicted. I couldn't watch that storyline.

I also hate the trope that disabled = evil (seriously? can we just get rid of that or at least have them fighting a disabled hero?). Although, as for the superpower one, I have a friend who points out that even if we had superpowers, wouldn't they, too, be affected by our disabilities? I am really tempted to play with that someday in a piece of original fiction.

World War Z is one of the best true horror pieces I've seen come out in recent years - it was truly frightening and he managed to take zombies and still make them real and believable. The characters are real, frightening and heartbreaking.

[maccaj.livejournal.com]

yeah, I hear you. Come to think of it, I don't think I ever did go back and watch that particular storyline... I'm pretty sure I just waited till it was over, read some summaries on TWoP to make sure I hadn't missed any germane character development and then cautiously went back to the show. That plotline definitely took the shine off the show for me, though... I can't get into it as much as I once was.

Amen to the getting rid of disabled = evil stereotype. And I love that original fic idea.

Sounds awesome!