Disability in Science Fiction

[alias_sqbr]

Draft program presentation

Note that there's notes available from the "Actions" menu.

So:
Any thoughts?
Anyone want to run the panel with me? (I'd prefer someone who identifies as disabled or at least has a moderate amount of experience with disability/chronic illness, but I'm somewhat open)

(nb I deleted the original lj version so I could use the "comments on dreamwidth" counter)

EDIT: But it didn't work! Clearly I need to play around with the crossposter. Anyway here is the lj post and here is the dw one (cross posted since lj is more swancon-ish and dw more disability-ish)

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

*cough*"uses a wheelchair" not "wheelchair bound"*cough*

Hey, that didn't occur to me, I mostly wrote this a few months ago and just got around to polishing it up a bit. I haven't seen Avatar but I can see people bringing it up, and I think "It's like a disability but not really" is not quite the same as disability superpower. I was feeling iffy about Geordie too, so this is good, thanks.

*adds new slide*

[capnoblivious.livejournal.com]

Sorry, didn't mean to be disrespectful.

Yeah, it's different from disability superpower. "Super-prosthesis"?

I hesitate to recommend the movie to you - I suspect you'd find it highly problematic - but I did find myself wondering "I wonder what Sophie would make of this?" at various points, including the first appearance of the wheelchair, and then of the "super-prosthesis". :)

[alias_sqbr]

As it happened I just watched it, and...

As I had been lead to expect, the disability stuff was a mix of good and bad, and was far outweighed for me by the super dodgy racial subtext.

I thought the wheelchair was introduced well, I liked that we get an idea of who the character is before seeing that he's disabled, and that his disability doesn't entirely drive the plot or his motivations, it's mostly just there. But really he's less a disabled character in the way that a paraplegic would be in contemporary fiction, and more someone with a temporary disabling injury. Even if he didn't become his Avatar he would have gained his mobility back through the military. I think having him being disabled added a weird subtext to his choice to become Na'vi though. It would have been interesting if he'd been paraplegic as a Na'vi too (except of course OMG you can't have a DISABLED hero *rolls eyes*).

During the movie I was thinking about how the Na'vi might react to disability (it's all well and good to say they accept Jake when the military didn't, but they met him as ablebodied), and wondering how they'd react to someone who lost their braid and thus the ability to connect to the Tree of Souls. And then I read bits of the original script to write my comic and lo! Tsu'tey (Neytiri's betrothed) loses his braid and is all "I am already dead, you should just put me out of my misery" and Jake does. Yay.