Hey guys!
So today's video is going to be another Disability Discourse, and in case you guys haven't seen
one of these videos before, um, because I haven't made one in quite a while, this is
just where I talk about an issue related to disability or that affects disabled people.
And I don't usually edit these videos terribly much, so you might just not wanna watch this
if you're not interested in me rambling on for quite a while about topics that I'm interested
in and that affect me on a daily basis.
Um, but if you are here for that kind of thing: Welcome!
So today's topic is going to be disability in the media, and we'e going to focus on fiction
and non-fiction, and just some things that are quite obvious when it comes to representation
of disabled characters and disabled people in the media.
So i've tried to make this a little bit more positive, 'cause I don't just want to talk
about like all the problems, so I've kind of broken it down into a problem and a solution
that I think is relatively easy, so if you're a content creator or a writer or whatever,
and you want to know how to better portray disabled people or talk about disability in
your work, I hope that I can offer some really easy solutions to really common issues that
happen with representation in the media.
So let's talk about the first issue, and that is romaticization and fetishization of disabled
characters.
Um, this happens in real life a lot, but not so much in non-fiction media, this is more
of a fictional problem (well, not a fictional problem...you know what I mean!).
So essentially this is where a disabled or sick character is romaticized and their illness
is romaticized to the point where it's kind of used as a way to make a romance in a story
more enticing or more romantic or whatever.
So cancer is often used in this way, where you'll have a cancer patient as your protagonist
who falls in love and then their partner is their knight in shining armour or lady in
shining armour and rescues them and it's all sweet and happy.
A really easy way to spot this is that writers will often only use the...kind of more attractive
or more romantic symptoms of an illness.
So for example, cancer and chemotherapy, the protagonist will be frail and pale and fragile
and like a little doll and need taking care of and all this stuff, when in reality cancer
and chemotherapy have some really unpleasant symptoms that aren't romantic at all, like
vomiting and nausea and all that kind of stuff.
So essentially the issue with this is that illness and disability aren't entirely positive
and they aren't entirely negative, so in this case you're making illness and disability
entirely positive and romanticizing it, and this is a really big issue for disabled people
in real life, because often disabilities and disabled people, especially disabled women,
are fetishized as being fragile and needing to be taken care of.
A lot of people have thing where they think it's sweet for someone to be dependent on
them, and so a disabled person is really easy to take advantage of in that sense.
So to romanticize or fetishize disability in fiction is to perpetuate that thing that
disabled people are dependent on their partner and kind of just keep that stereotype going
and it's a dangerous stereotype.
So the way to fix this is obviously to not do it, but I think a lot of this comes in
accidentally, I don't think that a lot of write this way on purpose.
I think a lot of this comes from a place of just not really understanding that it's harmful
to do this.
So a way to check that you're not doing this is, as I said before, um, a lot of writers
will only use the positive or potentially positive side effects of a illness or disability
in their writing about a romantic story.
Don't do that.
So look up the symptoms of whatever illness or disability you're using, and just make
sure that you're making a realistic portrayal of it, both the positive and potentially romantic
aspects of it, and also he negative and not romantic aspects of it.
So while your character who is going through chemotherapy might be fragile and pale and
thin, they also might throw up all the time, or not be able to get out of bed for an entire
day, or just things like that.
Just try to make sure that you aren't only portraying this perfect, fragile doll kind
of image, 'cause I feel like that gets thrown around quite a lot.
Um, the other thing about this is that often characters who are being romanticized for
their illness, often they'll be portrayed as fragile in every aspect.
So they're fragile physically, they're fragile mentally, they need to be taken care of.
And as I mentioned before, this happens quite a lot in real life to disabled people.
So a way to stop from doing that is to just make sure that your character isn't fragile
in every aspect.
It's fine for them to be fragile in some aspects, I think every character should have areas
of weakness, right?
Often for disabled people we are weaker physically than abled people, however that doesn't mean
that we're weaker or fragile in every aspect.
So have your character be strong in some situations, have them be taking care of other people in
some situations.
It doesn't always have to be that the disabled or sick person is the fragile, weak one.
Okay, so I think that just about covers that one.
I think we'll stick with talking about fiction for now, and I wanted to move on to using
disabilities as a kind of...easy way to denote evilness.
Um, sorry, I should have figured out how to word that a bit better before I came into
this video.
I didn't, so that's what you get.
Um, but essentially this is things like a limp or a wooden leg or an eyepatch and things
like that, being used as a catch-all "this person is evil" kind of thing.
This is really similar to using skin colour in the same way.
So if all of your evil characters have darker skin tones?
Probably a problem.
If all of your evil characters are disabled or have some sort of disability?
A problem.
You know what I mean?
So I mean obviously the fix to this, once again, is just don't do it, and again, I don't
think that this is a conscious decision made by a lot of content creators.
I think that this comes from a place of a lot of history and a lot of historical characters,
like evil characters, being disabled or having like missing limbs and eyepatches and things
like that, or scars, just stuff like this.
So, I mean I guess once again the way to do this is to just be aware of it.
Just make sure that you have like a list of your characters, and if you're noticing a
trend in your evil characters being disabled or being darker skinned or whatever, try to
change that, and make sure that you're kind of balancing it out.
Okay, so that is that.
The next thing - I think we'll just keep going through all the like fiction ones - so the
next thing I wanted to talk about is abled actors playing disabled characters.
Now, I think in this day and age we're all very aware of whitewashing and white actors
being chosen for canonically black or coloured person roles, um, so this is kind of a similar
issue, but slightly different.
So essentially a lot of the time in fiction abled people will be chosen to play disabled
characters.
Um, I think we all know why whitewashing is an issue - it takes away work from actors
of colour, and it also like, it just kind or removes people of colour from stories,
which is not okay.
Uh, so this is essentially the same thing, except it's...I think it's slightly worse.
Now hear me out, I think whitewashing is really awful and shouldn't be done, um, but the reason
that I think that abled people playing disabled characters is slightly worse is that it's
not quite like choosing...like erasing the disabled character entirely, because what
happens is they'll just take an abled person and put them in a wheelchair, for example.
So instead of taking a white actor and having them play a, like for example, black person's
role, it's taking a white actor, putting them in blackface, and then then having them play
a black person's role.
So I think that's slightly more offensive, just 'cause it's essentially dressing up as
a disabled person and taking a disabled person's role.
The way to fix this, obviously, start using disabled actors, there are plenty of them
out there, with all kinds of shapes and sizes, all colours, all types of disabilities, whatever
you're looking for, you can find it within the disabled community, you don't need to
look outside of that.
Um, okay, so that's that, I think the last fiction one I wanted to talk about was inaccurate
portrayals of disability and illness.
I'm sure that every disabled person watching this will have had this experience, where
you're reading about a disability or illness that you either have experience with yourself
or you know a lot about from other people, and it's just completely wrong.
So this happens all too often, and this one, I don't think I need to explain it that much
because it's quite obvious what it is, and the fix to it is: just talk to people who
have experience with this particular illness that you're trying to portray.
There are so so many disabled people who want better portrayals of their disability or their
illness in the media, and there are so many of us who'd be more than happy to talk to
writers or content creators about our disability and our experience, just to helps that accuracy.
So you can find disabled people on forums, things like that, just reach out and ask if
anyone has experience with this and if they'd be willing to talk to you.
That way you're gonna get a much more realistic portrayal of what it's like.
Okay so I think that's everything for fiction, I have some notes but I'm not really looking
at them, which...why did I even bother writing notes?
Who knows.
So onto non-fiction.
The first thing I want to talk about is inspiration porn.
Um, so this is kind of a difficult concept to grasp if you haven't experienced it from
a disabled standpoint.
So essentially inspiration porn is articles written about disabled people purely for abled
people to feel better about themselves.
Um, it's like look at this person with no arms, aren't they so inspirational, wow, it's
amazing, wow, great.
Um, and, like, it comes from a place of kindness, don't get me wrong, I understand that it comes
from a place of wanting to celebrate disabled people.
The issue is, you're defining us by our disabilities, and lord knows abled people tell me all the
time not to define myself by my disability, but we get defined by our disabilities constantly
in the media.
So when you write about a disabled person purely because they're disabled, you're setting
us apart from other, "normal" people, and you are defining us by our disability essentially.
Um, the way to make sure that you're not writing inspiration porn, because again, I don't think
that this is often done consciously or maliciously, I think it's done just...without understanding.
So a way to make sure that you're not writing inspiration porn is just to ask yourself "would
I be writing about this person if they weren't disabled?".
So if someone's done something really amazing, if a disabled person has achieved something
incredible, you'd write about them if they weren't disabled as well, right?
So that's totally fine, that's not inspiration porn.
However, if you're writing an article about someone because they're missing an arm, that's
inspiration porn, that's like...you wouldn't write about this person if they weren't missing
an arm, and so you need to stop and think "what is it about disability that makes you
feel like that is a story?".
Um, so yeah, that's inspiration porn and how to avoid it.
Uh, the other thing about inspiration porn that I notice quite a lot is that it's used
to make other disabled people and other people in general feel bad about themselves, and
this is like a pet peeve of mine, this is something I hate, so I might ramble about
this.
I'm sorry, you can skip ahead if it bothers you, I'll put a timestamp here.
Um, so what I mean by this is every time you go onto an article, particularly inspiration
porn articles, but any article about a disabled person doing something amazing really, you'll
see comments that are like "now no one has any excuse" or like "see?
Anyone can do anything they put their mind to!", and that's just not true.
Like, as someone who's been used as inspiration porn before, as someone who's had my story
and my achievements used to make other disabled people feel bad about themselves, I can tell
you we don't want that.
Like I don't achieve things to then be like "what's your excuse?
You should just like try harder".
That's not the point, like when disabled people achieve something awesome, that's great, like
that's amazing.
They did a really great job.
It's not about making other people feel bad, it's not about turning that around and being
like "well, you should do better".
Um, so the analogy that I'll use for this is Katie Ledecky, the amazing American swimmer
who just like smashed world records like they were nothing.
Um, she's incredible, she's obviously a really amazing person.
So when you see articles about her, you wouldn't see "now no one has any excuse!
Anyone can do anything, anyone could do this!", because they couldn't.
Like she's obviously incredible, not everyone could do what she does.
She obviously A) has natural talent, but then B) has cultivated it and is just so so dedicated
and is amazing.
The point of incredible achievements is that they're incredible.
Not everyone can do these things.
So you wouldn't say about Katie Ledecky that anyone can do what she does, so when you see
a disabled person doing something awesome, don't then be like "what's your excuse?
wow, anyone can do anything, just try harder" like that's not...it's not about that, it's
meant to be a positive, this person is incredible, not a "wow, this person did it so why can't
you?"
kind of thing, you know?
Anyway, I'm gonna stop talking about this 'cause I feel like I could just ramble forever.
So we're done with that.
We're done with that.
Um, so I think that's about all that I have to say about disability in the media.
There's so so much more to this topic, there's just like so many depths that I could go to,
but I wanna keep this quite simple because I don't want this video to get too long, and
I also want to talk with you guys about it.
So I hope that you'll leave all of your thoughts and feelings in the comments below.
As always, this is meant to be a dialogue, not just me rambling at you, I hope!
So if you have anything that you've noticed particularly about the portrayal of disabled
characters or disabled people in the media, let me know down below.
If you have any other fixes, let me know what you think would help to make the portrayal
of disabled people more realistic or more positive, things like that.
Just let me know, any thoughts, any feelings that you have, I would love to hear them.
So that's about it for this Disability Discourse, I really hope that you've enjoyed this, or
that it's been enlightening or just entertaining to watch me rant, and I hope that you have
a great day.
Talk to you next time.
Peace!
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