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

[shehasathree]

looks fantastic so far!

[mmaster.livejournal.com]

(Hi, you don't know me, I read the UCC Planet.)

I won't claim to be able to add anything to your slides, though they made for interesting reading.

I'm curious, now: who are the two characters you picked as examples of the "Tragic Victim"?

[alias_sqbr]

Logan from Dark Angel and Daphne from Heroes. It's in the notes! :)

[mmaster.livejournal.com]

The notes were being moderately uncooperative for me - I think I have my browser too hacked for it to handle D:

[alias_sqbr]

Ah, right. Well for the most part you're not missing much.

[capnoblivious.livejournal.com]

The protagonist in Avatar is wheelchair-bound; he's given control of a fully-functional alien body, which he comes to accept as his own. It comes under "fix the disability with Science!" if anything, but I thought it was worth mentioning, as topical. (Apologies if it's in the comments.)

[gemfyre.livejournal.com]

Looks interesting, I doubt I'd be any good on a panel though, unless I dressed early for the masquerade. :)

Was that meant to be Babs Gordon in the set of "disability = superpower"? What the heck is happening there?

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah I think I got the wrong Batgirl there or something. I was basing this off TV Tropes and google, since I don't read the comics.

[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". :)

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

I'd ditch the slide defining disability (slide 3) because I can see that in itself leading to much too much discussion about definitions and the impact of society and responsibility and general wank. If you start by trying to redefine people's internal definition of what disability is then you are getting off to a very bad start. People 'know' what disability means and they will resist you trying to redefine it for them.

I reckon most people will instinctively grasp some level of 'continuously portraying a type of people in a negative light will over time have negative impacts on real world examples of that type of person' so you can cut straight to your examples of what those portrayals often are, without actually needing to spend time convincing them why it matters.

The examples though are all brilliant.

Should the scary mad magic seer type be deserving of a slide to itself? It is very common and more or less the only portrayal of non-neurotypical behaviour that you get in most sci fi.

On geek nitpicking, Davros is from old Who canon as well as new. The cybermen are also another example of scary 'upgraded' humans with all emotions and individuality removed, and there are several others in Who.

And surely the title of 'He's more man than machine now' should be the other way round? You have a few other typos in places but I'm too lazy to list them.

[purrdence.livejournal.com]

Some other examples you could use if you want:

Bionic Woman - In the new series, Jamie Whatshername ends up becoming 'bionic' after an car accident. If not for her boyfriend's involvement in Shady Organisation that 'gives' her the bionics, she would have been disabled as she would have lost both legs, an arm and an eye. So their idea that being disabled is Not a Good Thing, but Jamie is also not given the choice of what she wants to do.

Battlestar Galatica - Again, new series. Recurring character Gaeta becomes Evil Bad Guy after losing half a leg. This was also part of his long slide into Badness, due to other events as the series went on.

Another example of the whole 'blind seer' could be Neo in Matrix Revolutions; after he's blinded by Agent Smith in a meatsuit, he becomes able to 'see' light and other Matrixy type stuff in the real world.

[alias_sqbr]

Yay, thanks!

[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.

[alias_sqbr]

Hmm....maybe. I do think I need to get across the difference between the effects of one's impairment and the effects of society, especially when for example in a lot of science fiction being "blind" is no more a disability than being shortsighted is today, while having a minor disposition to heart failure is a disability in the Gattacca universe despite causing no impairment at all. Maybe change it to be less confronting: "The two aspects of a disability are your impairment, and the way that impairment interacts with the society you live in eg.."

I am pondering a seer page.

Yes, Davros is from old Who, I didn't express that very well. What I meant is that they already had Davros and added ANOTHER character like that.

And surely the title of 'He's more man than machine now' should be the other way round?

Noo..it's...irony *coughs* *edits*

[alias_sqbr]

Thanks for those, they're good examples.

Recurring character Gaeta becomes Evil Bad Guy after losing half a leg. This was also part of his long slide into Badness, due to other events as the series went on.

Well that sounds awesome :/

[purrdence.livejournal.com]

It's not the only thing that caused him to go bad (there were, many many things going on. And this is nu-BSG. Everybody was frakked up in one way or another by the end.) but losing his leg and the circumstances in which it happened were the Final Straw, pretty much.

[pedanther]

A set of examples that might be interesting, although not topical (because the original series was written in the 1960s, and even the spike of marketing-driven sequels was 15 years ago): Anne McCaffrey's shellpeople.

[alias_sqbr]

*nods*

And often this sort of thing is just symbolic, eg the scarred bad guy in Avatar (who quite liked his scar)

[alias_sqbr]

Oooh. *ponders* I haven't read those in years, "The Ship Who Sang" was actually one of the books which got me into sf.

[pedanther]

I like 'The Ship Who Sang' a lot, but some of the 1990s spin-offs bug me - especially the one about the shellperson who invests in medical prosthetics research so that somebody will invent for her a remote control robot body so she can be Normal.

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah, that was a bit creepy, I think I stopped reading them at that point.