The Softer Side of Searing

The New Yorker has been kind enough to publish my letter, where I point out that Autistic kids don't have black mirrors for eyes. (Their version // my initial version.) I really appreciate them doing this because I hope it will make their readers consider the effects of dehumanizing language. I don't refer to my hurt feelings, but to the way people may behave after being exposed again and again to the idea that Autistic kids are bad tempered, bad to be around, and different to the point of being inhuman.

I also hope that the wording of my letter will remind people that autism is just one of the many disabilities that exist. I feel this is an important thing to remember, both for Autistic people's benefit and for the benefit of people with other disabilities.

When the New Yorker first edited my letter, I didn't like some of the changes they made. I worried that they would not publish my letter if I argued, but the Letters Editor was very nice and accommodated the 3 requests that I had.

However, I want to point something out. I summarized the black mirrors quote this way:

Shapin claims that Autistic children's eyes "are not windows to their souls, but black mirrors."

The New Yorker wanted to change it to:

Shapin mentions the struggle of parents whose autistic children’s eyes "are not windows to their souls, but black mirrors."

My original letter did not mention parents at all, nor did it need to. It was only about a 9-word phrase describing Autistic kids' eyes. Knowing that this phrase appeared in a sentence about parents does not explain or excuse it. It is just as bad to write, "Autism parents suffer because their kids have black mirrors for eyes," as, "Autistic kids have black mirrors for eyes"--and for the purposes of my letter, I don't see the value of one over the other.

I explained why I did not agree with the edit--"Bringing up parents' 'struggle,' when it's not relevant to my point, is something that I don't agree with because I think media discussions of autism are already biased toward the experiences of parents. (Of course their experiences are important; they are just not the only perspective, and they're often treated that way.) That line doesn't represent how I would write."

It's a bad habit the media has when discussing autism--always inserting the perspective of parents, whether or not there is a reason to do so.  I've read a lot of great deconstructions of this by Autistic people, but my favorite is Zoe's parody article from a few years ago, Person With Autism Manages to Do Something:

How does Joe Autie feel about his achievement? “We’re very proud of him,” said his mother.

Anyway, I suggested that if the editor wanted to provide context, it would be better to quote more of the review. Now the letter includes the entire sentence that the black mirrors line is from:

It’s a searing experience to have a child who doesn’t talk, who doesn’t want to be touched, who self-harms, who demands a regularity and an order that parents can’t supply, whose eyes are not windows to their souls but black mirrors.

This edit is okay with me, but does have an unfortunate result. My letter begins with this quote, but only talks about black mirrors--giving the impression that there's nothing to say about the rest of this quote. However, it's actually pretty awful from beginning to end. I just decided to write in about "black mirrors" because it was the most obviously wrong and offensive part of the sentence, and I felt I could write something very short about it.

I want to address the rest of the sentence, though, except for the part about the "searing experience." If people feel "seared" by having Autistic kids, I can't argue with that--it's how they feel. I feel "seared" by reading that it's "searing" to have a kid like me--and that's how I feel. If feelings can't be criticized, it's a tie. However, I can and will criticize the list of reasons that Autistic kids are "searing."

After "black mirrors," what stuck out to me is the self harm--specifically the construction, "It's a searing experience to have a child who self-harms." I'm afraid that this is such a common construction, when writing about autism, that it's not obvious what is wrong with this picture. Imagine the following description of a violent accident:

Kendra, a kindergarten teacher, slipped on the steps of her house; she fell and cracked her head open on the sidewalk. It was very upsetting to all the people on the street to see Kendra lying there. Kendra's husband fell into a deep depression, unable to deal with what had happened. Kendra's students were very distressed when she could not come back to work because of her brain injury.

Hopefully this example gets the point across. Everyone has good reason to be seriously affected by Kendra's accident, especially her husband. But we don't expect to have their perspectives emphasized to the point that they entirely drown out Kendra's perspective of her situation. Her physical condition is only described in terms of its effect on others, and her feelings aren't described at all.

That is just a ridiculous way to describe something bad happening to Kendra--because first and foremost, it happens to Kendra. It does not happen to the people around her, no matter how much they love her. I can't speak to every person's experience of self harm, but in my experience it feels pretty bad internally--and physically, of course, it hurts a lot. No one else's reaction to self-harm is as "searing" as being in that situation yourself. To frame a child self injuring in terms of how someone else feels about it is unbelievably unempathetic to the child; and when it happens over and over in the media to the point of being unremarkable, that is really disturbing.

However, as I read the multi-faceted "searing" quote again and again, what stands out the most is the implication that autism is volitional--that Autistic children are being Autistic on purpose, just to torture the people around them. I addressed this idea a few years ago in my post Behavior vs. Ability. I was saying that those who are more empathetic to a disabled person will usually see the person's actions/inactions in terms of what they are not able to do, the fact that they may have to do things in alternate ways, and that they are trying to cope. On the other hand, there's the colder view that the actions are all there is--the person "prefers to do this," "refuses to do that." No reason is given, and no acknowledgment is given to the idea that a reason might exist. The person is just being bad.

It's subtle. But look what Shapin says:

a child who doesn’t talk

Why not "a child who can't talk?" Does Shapin mean to say that kids who can't talk are just refusing to talk? Does he really believe they can talk?

a child who demands a regularity and an order that parents can’t supply

Why not "a child who needs a regularity and an order that parents can't supply?" I doubt the child is drawing up a contract of "demands" like a rock band demanding green M&Ms in their rider. The child is upset when things aren't regular and orderly. The child is struggling, not "demanding" things.

(Imagine if the New Yorker had wanted to edit my letter to discuss "the struggles of children with black mirrors for eyes" instead of "the struggles of parents who have children with black mirrors for eyes." It's really too bad how surprising that would be.)

And how come the child "doesn't" talk, but the parents "can't" supply order? Why not say "the parents refuse to supply the order the child needs?" Because Shapin has empathy for the parents and understands there are things they can't do--but the child is just a mirror-eyed cipher.

Well, I'm just spitballing here--I don't want to go point by point through the whole sentence and edit everything to make it sound more like the child is in fact disabled--not "demanding" the things they need to function, not refusing to talk to "sear" their parents, not self-harming just for the hell of it. At that point, the sentence would no longer be as damaging to Autistic kids, but it still wouldn't be very good. ("This is the worst writing I've ever seen in the New Yorker," was my mom's comment, although her judgment may have been affected by all that searing I did to her.)

Anyway, I just wanted to give the searing sentence a more thorough look, and now I'll shuffle off with 2 boring postscripts:

1. I want to be very clear that I was not offended by the idea that Autistic kids' eyes look black, or that they look different from other people's eyes. I was offended by the context and implications. I don't like the resemblance to the Black-Eyed Children urban legend and to the purely black eyes (including black sclera) in a lot of ghost/alien/monster characters in movies and TV. I don't like the idea that our body parts aren't flesh but metal, or the idea of us having "nothing behind our eyes" where other people have souls.

However, lots of people do have glass eyes, metal spines, and so on. There's nothing supernatural about that either. When I jump on this quote like, "How dare you say this!" it is NOT because I think there's something horrific or monstrous about anybody who really has glass eyes, has very different looking eyes (no pupils, etc.), or doesn't have any eyes at all. It is because of the context and the tropes it's drawing on. And while the insult was specifically aimed at Autistic people, I don't think it does blind people any favors either to talk in such a weirdly tragifying, spooky way about eyes that look different, or eyes that do not focus and make eye contact.

2. It's hardly worth responding to, but Shapin says some really false and insulting things about the neurodiversity or Autistic self advocacy movement. I assume these are regurgitated from the book. For a smart and clear self advocate response to In a Different Key, that explains exactly how untrue these assertions are, I recommend Ari Ne'eman's review.

mixed feelings

The family I work for went to a protest against the cuts to classes, programs, and teachers at City College of San Francisco. CCSF offers non-credit classes aimed at disabled people which cover all kinds of subjects, from arts and crafts to trying to get a job. Anna goes to CCSF drama classes three days a week and clearly likes getting to see people she knows, listen to music, and participate as much as she can in the acting and dancing. It's a big part of her life and it doesn't even cost anything, so it's horrible to think that this opportunity could be taken away from her and all the other people who benefit from it.

Anna got to be on the news representing the point of view of disabled students, and her mom was interviewed explaining how the cuts would impact her.

I thought it was cool to see people I really like on TV talking about something really important, and Anna has a great sad face. But I also felt frustrated, just like I do about most representations of disabled people in the news. I've been in class with lots of the other developmentally disabled students who were at the protest, and most of them could have answered questions with speech, sign language, or AAC, some of them very fluently. Instead, the reporter chose Anna, who couldn't answer the questions and had to have her mom speak for her.

Of course, Anna is great and I think everyone should pay more attention to the point of view of people who don't use language. But if someone really wanted to put an interview with Anna on TV, they would need to really get to know her and learn about how she communicates. Someone who was willing and able to put in enough time could make a longer video showing Anna's feelings about her classes. But Anna couldn't give an interview in the form of a couple of sentences on the evening news.

When looking for an interview in the form of a couple of sentences, the reporters decided to go past all of the protesters with developmental disabilities (many of whom were older adults and not with family members) who could have directly talked about their experience in exactly that form. They found someone who couldn't talk about her experiences in that form, and was with her parents, and had to have her parents talk about her experience. Surprise surprise.

why no one counts

Something I've noticed: a person with a disability having a conversation about the value of people with disabilities (which you can call whatever you want, but usually something more tactful than "the value of people with disabilities") can never actually be disabled.

The reason this is true is pretty obvious!

Someone who is talking about how reasonable it is for a parent to not want a kid with a disability, or how it's wasteful for kids with disabilities to get the best possible education, or how they'd never date a person with a disability, isn't thinking of fully formed and complicated disabled people.

They're not saying it's reasonable not to want a blind kid who becomes an anarchist and can't go to a family gathering without getting in fights with your more conservative relatives. If they say the word blind, they're usually referring to a kind of blindness that doesn't actually exist--a kind that is not attached to a real person.

This is why people who believe things like that can care about you even if you are disabled. You actually are other stuff besides a disability floating in space, so you don't resemble their version of a disabled person.

So, you know, someone is talking about how super hard it is to have a kid with autism or Down Syndrome or CP and how much sense it makes for people not to want that. And you're like, "But I have autism, it makes me feel bad when you say that, aren't we friends?"

"Well, you have to admit your autism is different. I wouldn't mind having a kid like YOU."

Well, duh, because I wrote you letters, and you told me my hair color is uneven, and we eat Oreos together, you eating the cookie sides while I scrape out the paste with my teeth.

But you have to admit that the way you talk about disabled people, you never let them far enough in your mind to know if they would write you letters too.

Autistics Speaking Day post 1/3-ish, do NOT link this, it is not done

1

Today at Walgreens I got my TB test, and I also got a COUPON for $3 off on any purchase above $15. Just like Walgreens wanted me to I immediately forgot what I was doing and wandered around the store trying to find $15 worth of worthy stuff.

In the toy aisle was a $15 FASHION FLUTTERSHY:



This is probably the most torturous thing that could happen. That is my authentic cell phone picture of the FF and you can see that she really wanted to go home with me. Forever.

My purse is like this:



I was also carrying/fumbling with other stuff. There was no way that I could bring Fashion Fluttershy to, on, and from the bus without dropping her and letting her be hit by a car. I was forced to use my coupon on lipgloss, batteries, and hand sanitizer, which are almost the only things I ever buy. Really hate my life. Stuff is miserable.

This is the only notable thing that happened to me today and I swear to God, I used to have a part of myself that would feel worried and guilty upon experiencing it. You guys! WHERE'S THE AUTISM?

Probs I should be reminded that I have a disability whenever I do anything, or my disability is not real.

2

I don't think it's really surprising that I feel this way, because our society treats autism like some kind of super strict religion. Even people who think that autism is tragic still seem to think it's a lifestyle. It's just not the RIGHT lifestyle. Autism is characterized as "stealing" people because little kids are growing up with the wrong personality. It's basically like they're joining a gang where you don't look people in the eye or have the right feelings.

I would argue that this explains why most anti-autism rhetoric doesn't focus on the feelings of people with autism. If autism is so bad then they would have a lot to say about their suffering, right? Wrong. We wouldn't want to listen to what they say anyway, because they're in a gang!

3

For some reason, I always find myself more annoyed by autism pop culture that pretends to be positive. Like, focus-grouped autistic memoirs and especially interviews and profiles by non-disabled journalists.

These interviews and profiles start out with pretty much the same question or concept every time.

"When did you realize you were different?"

This is the cue for the interviewee with autism to tell an exotic story about when they were a kid and used to line up all their sparkplugs/cow fetuses. It needs to be sparkplugs/cow fetuses, and not Transformers or Barbies, because non-disabled kids have those too. The interview can then develop into something that sounds like it was written by a barker at a Depression-era freakshow.

Like other people, I used to be a child. I did lots of interesting and boring things. But talking about those things isn't the most respectful way to do an interview with me as an adult. Actually, age aside, asking me about how different I am just kind of sucks.

Every single time I see an interview like this, I wish the person with autism would say, "You mean, when did I realize I was gay?"

4

I am different from the norm in a lot of ways--just like everyone else. Like many people with my disability, I did and do love stuff that non-disabled people love too. This summer the New York Times wrote the most obvious article in history about how kids with autism really like trains. Anyone who doesn't live under a rock already knows this. Still, I doubt that my beloved toothbrush

()

is being purchased only for autistic jaws.

In writing about this I deal with an obvious trap. If I try too hard to emphasize the normality of people with disabilities, I might feed into "disabled people are just like everyone else"--a 100% true statement that also happens to be the most annoying trope of all time.

Some fun facts are true about my recent trip to Walgreens. For example, if you sent a non-disabled person to choose $15 worth of stuff to buy I can guarantee they would be able to find those items in the store much more quickly than I did. Without causing me much grief on a case-by-case basis, my comparative slowness adds up. I'm really impressed that two girls in my nurse aide class go to work every day after class. After spending ten hours of my day in class and in transit, I find it hard to even eat when I get home and things like showering and laundry are tasks I can't always manage.

I forget why, but the guy who read my TB test remarked, "You must have a lot on your mind." I don't, but a little is a lot for me, which is fine--but an actual lot would be more than a lot and not really a fair expectation.

Disability adds up. That's the first thing. People don't need to be exotic cow fetus collectors for it to be true, though my lack of cow fetuses used to really wear on my soul.

to be continued

For the record I identify as disabled not as autistic.

I think if they do dialogues at TPGA again they should include people with disabilities other than autism.

It's kind of tough because I think in some ways these parent-centering issues are worse in the "autism community," not because of any real fact about people with autism or our parents, but because of the social position that autism occupies.

It's a really fashionable disability to be related to, and a really stigmatized one to have (in a complicated way--I think practically anyone can get famous for having autism while the voices of people with less distinguished disabilities are ignored, but it's almost impossible to get a normal job while being open about the fact that you have autism). To hear the average person say it, you would think that autism is the only disability someone's child could possibly have, and after watching TV for a few minutes you'd be doubly convinced.

Kids with physical, sensory, and intellectual disabilities don't have the high profile that kids with autism have, and the same goes for their parents. I'm sure this has plenty of drawbacks. I also think it gives families room to figure things out by themselves and get most of their emotional encouragement from other families rather than from the media. There's also the fact that Deaf culture is the oldest disability culture, and people with visual, physical, and intellectual disabilities have a fairly long history of advocating for themselves that anyone can read about in a book on disability rights. This isn't so much the case for people with autism.

Of course, it's also the case that any book about disability rights is pretty hard to find, and that parents of people with all disabilities are centered. I think in some communities there is more of a sense that this is something to be corrected--from my admittedly limited viewpoint, it seems that things like "Welcome to Holland" are much more of a staple in intellectual disability parent circles than they are among parents of kids with autism. But the idea is still there. The point of view of a person with a disability is always hard to remember to take.

I don't think I would be as into anti-ableism as I am if I hadn't seen how pervasive a lot of things are cross-disability, things that I had previously thought of as "autism problems." The world started to seem more broken to me but also somehow more fixable. I think parent-centering is one of the issues that people with all disabilities, and parents of people with all disabilities, need to talk about.

That said I do think it probably seems like a more severe problem to me and other people with autism than it does to people who have disabilities other than autism, because of autism's high profile and lack of history.

1. Irrelevance

(One)

Ability statements are somewhat related to the tradition of the self-narrating zoo exhibit, and I'll explain why. First of all, I think people tend to get told their disability is mild (or something else, but whatever the words are they usually imply it's not a real disability) when they haven't gone into a lot of detail about their disability and how it affects them.

The thing is though that there's no correlation between how much you talk about your disability and whether your disability is real or not. So why do people imagine there is? I think it has to do with the expectation that disabled people who talk about disability will always be talking about their own disability. A writer who self-identifies as disabled, but isn't describing her own disability, produces writing that is inconsistent with what's expected from a disabled writer. Maybe this is why the legitimacy of her disabledness gets called into question.

I think some people who have made ability statements would argue that they weren't telling the disabled person her disability wasn't "real." They were just arguing that as a talking person, the disabled person doesn't understand the experience of people who can't talk (or whatever the ability in question is). But in the context in which ability statements appear, they almost always are jarring in the extent to which they don't follow naturally from the conversation.

"I am disabled, and I think--"

"You can talk."

"I know I can talk, but anyway I'm disabled, and I think--"

"You're less disabled than someone else."

"I know I'm less disabled than someone else, but I was just saying--"

"You can attend college."

"Actually I had to drop out of college for reasons related to my disability, but anyway, I had something to say, and this is kind of offensive."

"Why are you denying that there's a difference between you and people with severe disabilities?"

As a queer person, I can make this comparison, I think: someone who's talking about something "as a queer person" doesn't usually have a lot of straight people clamoring to tell him that he's bisexual rather than gay, or that he's "straight-acting," or that he came out late in life.

Queer is a pretty broad word and so is disabled. If someone is talking about disability as a broader category than some really specific thing like not being able to talk at all, then I don't really see the motivation for needing to pin down a lot of specific facts and--it often seems--put the disabled person in her place by highlighting ways in which she is "less disabled" than someone else.

I don't think it is surprising how much it happens, because the way disabled people are treated is often all about putting them in their place for wielding the term "disability" themselves instead of letting someone else have it (and that has to do with the next thing I'm going to say). But when it happens it is really offensive because it takes a conversation that was often more abstract or general and steers it into being about the details of the disabled person's life.

Ability statements are a personal attack because they are dehumanizing. By throwing them out there when they are irrelevant, you indicate that a disabled person doesn't have the right to just express ideas and feelings like you do. She must be on display.

Ability Statements Are a Personal Attack.

I just figured someone should post a to-the-point explanation of why this is the case. I think some people, especially people without disabilities, will say something that they think is pretty innocuous, like, "You obviously can live on your own." But then they check back on the comment thread and the person they said that to looks like this:


(Realistic Haunter.)

How come?

1. Irrelevance
2. Unevenness and inexplicability
3. Real Life Facts

Fallacy Week: The Harder Fallacy & The Uncomfortable Fallacy

Hi guys it's FALLACY WEEK! Every day you get some fallacy action from a post I made a super long time ago at LOVE-NOS.

A lot of the time, when you are having a conversation about disability and/or ableism, the person you are arguing with will make a fallacious argument. Most of the fallacies I’m describing in this post are fallacies of relevance. Wikipedia describes fallacies of relevance as “presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but does not address the issue in question.”

Fallacies of relevance can be very difficult to respond to for several reasons.

1. They involve an abrupt change of subject, which can confuse and distract you, causing you to lose your train of thought. Depending on your disability, this can have the effect of making you have to quit the conversation altogether.
2. Often the change of subject isn’t obvious–it may even be unintentional on the part of the person who’s using the fallacy, if they are responding emotionally rather than logically. You may end up feeling that something isn’t right about what they said, but unable to identify exactly what it is.
3. A lot of these fallacies involve stating something irrelevant that is true. You may become confused and think you are wrong because the other person said something true.
4. A lot of these fallacies involve stating something irrelevant that is related to violence, the speaker’s personal feelings, or other emotionally powerful themes. You may become uncomfortable and think that it would be wrong to disagree, because you might be implying that you don’t care about violence, people’s feelings, etc.

I have experienced 1, 2, 3, and 4 in real-life and online conversations, and as a result I’ve become super interested in sitting around by myself and deconstructing what happened–why did I feel like I was wrong even as I sensed that the other person wasn’t being fair?

In these examples, John is a disabled self-advocate, while Mary is using various fallacies to oppose him. From example to example John and Mary are different people and have different relationships with each other. I tried to give John a few different disabilities, since most of these fallacies are fairly universal. But I felt awkward doing this, because I was mostly writing from my own experience; I hope I haven’t stuck in disabilities that don’t fit the example.

The Harder Fallacy

JOHN: I didn’t like the story we read in class. It was told from everyone’s point of view but the son with CP, and whenever it talked about the disabled son, it would just list everything he couldn’t do. We never learned about his personality or how he felt about anything. I thought it was an offensive portrayal of a disabled character.
MARY: Come on! Are you saying it’s not harder to have a kid with cerebral palsy? That’s a ridiculous thing to say.

Rebuttal:
John wasn’t talking about whether it’s harder to have a disabled kid than a non-disabled kid. He just wanted the disabled kid to have a point of view and a personality, like the other characters. If someone wanted, they could easily write a story that portrayed a family having a very hard time coping with their son’s disability, while still portraying the son as a well-rounded character and not a plot device.
Mary was responding to a totally different statement, which she made up in her head and is pretending (or actually thinks) is what John was saying. The way the harder fallacy works is that when someone makes any comment about disability being portrayed offensively or inaccurately, you respond to the following imaginary statement: “It isn’t harder to be disabled and it isn’t harder to live or work with a disabled person.”

(Fun fact: some people use a form of the harder fallacy to defend statements like, “This weather is retarded.” Their argument is that having an intellectual disability is harder than not having one, so therefore intellectual disabilities are bad, and words relating to them can be used to mean “bad.” I guess this is a legit argument, except that most people who make the argument don’t apply their “harder life=synonym for ‘bad’” rule consistently, and only apply it to stigmatized groups.)

The Uncomfortable Fallacy

MARY: Wow John, it’s so nice of you that you do that program where you go bowling with people who have special needs. I really admire you because I’m not the kind of person who can talk to special needs people.
JOHN: Well, they’re just people. I’m sure you could come bowling with us and it would be fine.
MARY: No I can’t. When I’m around special needs people, I feel really uncomfortable and don’t know what to say.

Rebuttal:
This is a less classic fallacy, and not quite an argument; but I think it’s worth exposing. Mary is confusing a feeling with a fact. She interprets her discomfort with “special needs people” to mean that they are a homogeneous group which one needs certain skills to interact with–skills which, she concludes, she must not have.
If Mary always feels uncomfortable around an entire minority group, it’s probably because she hasn’t been around people from that group very much, or has heard a lot of bad things about them. There is no way an entire group of people could be so similar that one person possesses the ability to either get along, or not get along, with all of them. The uncomfortable fallacy is when you think that being uncomfortable around another person necessarily indicates something about the person.

(Fun fact: You may be wondering why John considers this an argument, when Mary just told him he has admirable skills and is nice. Remember, John is disabled. From Mary’s attitude towards disability, we can guess that she probably doesn’t know John is disabled. But John knows that John is disabled, so he’s probably thinking, “I wonder how Mary would feel about me if she knew I was disabled. Or if she does know, why is she talking to me and why did she tell me she’s uncomfortable around other disabled people? Does she think I’m not really disabled?” And so on. Although Mary meant to compliment John, she simultaneously insulted him which makes him feel, well, uncomfortable.)

the spirit of the staircase

is the word for really good things to say that you think of when it's slightly too late. Recently I had some in my child developmental disabilities class. I obviously need a tag for this class, but anyway.

The first one wasn't really a lack of something to say, I just spaced and didn't get to make an answer that would have been very easy. Basically the professor asked a question which assumed that no one in the class had autism. This is rude, since she knows I have autism, so I would have liked to respond gently and politely to the question, from my own personal experience.

The second one I just couldn't think fast enough though. We watched a movie about autism which was mainly parents and professionals, but at one point Temple Grandin appeared and spoke in the movie. I don't really like her, but anyway. After we watched the movie, my professor said something like, "Can you see how Temple Grandin's communication [or social skills or social reciprocity or something, I forget] is lacking?"

I said, "Well, we can't really tell from the movie, because we don't see her talking to anyone else, we just see her talking to the camera."

"Really?" my professor said, in an amused way. "You couldn't tell that she was different?"

My friend said, "Well, we know that she has an autism spectrum disorder, so it's hard to tell if we would know if we just saw her."

The professor said, "Speaking as a clinician, you can...well, everyone always laughs when I say this, but there's a certain smell--not a literal smell, but you can just tell when someone's autistic. Come on, let's talk about it. What is missing from Temple Grandin?"

But what I would have liked to say, when my professor said, "What, you couldn't tell that she was different?" would not have been mean or anything, but just low-key. I think that a lot of the time, just insisting on saying what you actually experience and think in an environment that is really marginalizing can be a pretty violent form of rebellion even if you are talking slowly and not being harsh to anyone. So, I would have said:

"Well, it's true that there's sort of a constellation of physical actions, like stimming and toe-walking and maybe including voice and facial expressions...well, it's like a type of body language that I click into really well and it feels really familiar. So that's how I can sense when someone else is disabled. But that doesn't really have to do with anything being 'missing' from Temple Grandin because I don't know enough about her life to know what she can't do."

And this part is for fun and isn't what I would have actually said, because it gets kind of shrill, but I'll just type it up for posterity (this is the spirit of a really long staircase):

"Besides, I don't really think of disabled people as missing anything and I feel weird about watching videos of an adult who seems satisfied with her life and trying to say what she's 'missing.' I mean, is that what you think about me when I'm talking? That's not how I feel about myself. As far as I know I'm the only person in this class with a significant disability--and by significant I don't necessarily mean severe, I just mean it affects my life at all times and in all places, and it's lifelong. So I mean I've always lived with it, and that's just not how I feel about disability. It doesn't make me uncomfortable and I don't think it's sad. When I see other disabled people I feel like, 'Oh cool, another disabled person'--I don't feel like something is missing. I love my friends with disabilities and I love the kids with disabilities I'm working with right now. They're swell people. [I don't really say swell as much as I'd like to.] Sure I can identify a lot of disabled people on sight because there are particular ways of moving that are more common for disabled people--but it's not because they don't have something that other people have, we just look different from them."

(As is usually the case, Amanda Baggs wrote a much better post about this sort of thing.)

self-centered fiction fun

(I had some ideas about "minority experience writing" but I just got excited and started describing everything I'm writing now. Sorry. I like writing because you don't have to feel bad because people can just ignore the parts that are boring.)

I think writing that sets out to "make a point" is bad. however, I generally write with the intention of feeling less alone or, yeah, let's be honest, sometimes making a point. But when I am making a point I develop love for the characters, or else I might as well just be writing on my blog.

I generally write about queer and/or disabled characters. I actually was thinking about stuff I wrote in high school and I realized that even during periods when I buried my disabled identity (11th-12th grade and some of my first year of college) almost everything I wrote had characters who could be read as having disabilities (a limp, an eating disorder, intense anxiety, kleptomania, and of course ocular albinism). I sometimes don't like to identify characters as having autism and other fairly newly recognized disabilities, because I write stuff that is somewhat stylized and I think it breaks the style--but at this point I certainly am personally aware of my characters' disabilities.

I've been kind of distractedly working on a novel for almost two years (hoping to work much more consistently on it next term, as an independent project) that is kind of a parody of 19th- and 20th-century fiction about "inverted," traumatized ssa people. The main character is a female-assigned teenager who's attracted to girls and had a very gory, gothic childhood. She starts going to boarding school after being homeschooled and isolated for years, and has a sense of passing as female, and heterosexual, but really just passing for everything because she's so nonstandard. She has a frame for thinking about her difference which is constructed out of basically every possible ssa and gender-variant horror/gothic trope, which isn't exactly overturned in the story, but isn't really supported as being anything more than a coping mechanism.

The secondary characters are a twin brother and sister and the main character is torn between her intense friendship with the brother, the only person to whom she doesn't pass, and her crush on the sister (who for most of the story she doesn't relate to as a whole person because her idea of romance is literary to the point of being medieval). Anyway, I originally had the brother being in love with his sister because that's a trope too, but then I didn't want that anymore but I wanted a different kind of attachment that would function in the same awkward/possessive way.

So, then I made up a whole backstory for them, which is basically that the brother is disabled and was stigmatized for it in their family, and that even though he's not obviously disabled by the time he is a teenager, he has an almost crushlike distance from his sister--he loves her and wants to be close to her, but he also feels extremely inferior to her. He resents his "invert" best friend's crush on his sister, because he thinks anyone he can relate to isn't good enough for his sister to be with. I liked this backstory so much that I got off track and have spent the past year writing completely non-gothic stories about this kid at the age of ten or twelve, growing up with an "invisible" disability and a non-disabled twin.

Last week I wrote my favorite version of this story so far, which I liked because it was the first version that was funny and angry instead of emo. It was just a story about this kid with a lot of weird obsessions and a feeling that he isn't human. I turned this story in to my fiction workshop and got like...surprisingly devastated by the results. For one thing I really liked the story and no one in my class seemed to like it. For another, everyone seemed to be talking about his thought processes and his obsessions and his anger in this really pathologizing way, which was kind of stressful...I don't know.

I didn't want the story to have an "agenda" exactly but I did feel political about it. Basically, I just wanted the reader to be on the character's side and see his meltdowns as not just a symptom of his disability, but a reaction to the way he's pathologized/othered at home and at school. The story was very restrained in a way because it mostly just described the character's interests and ideas, and didn't really explain why he had meltdowns--but I guess I was surprised it wasn't obvious to most of the people in my class. I guess I shouldn't turn in disability-heavy stories to workshops, because I'm a senior creative writing major and this was the only time I've ever cried and not been able to sleep because of a fucking workshop. So weird. I feel like a loser.

I was complaining to Noah about it, almost a full week later, and I said something like, "I want to normalize the experience of oppression." What I mean by that is that I don't want to write stories that are like "LOOK AT THIS OPPRESSION SOMEONE IS DOING TO SOMEONE ELSE." No one experiences life that way. I want to write stories that are good stories, with good characters, and when the characters are queer/disabled sometimes they are affected by that. And sometimes it's funny and sometimes it's annoying and sometimes it's sad and sometimes it's all of those things, but is not explicit and obvious or the "main idea" of the story, because oppression is the main idea of no one's life (except this guy).

It kind of reminds me of True Blood. It always annoys me when people are like "Alan Ball is trying to make vampires an analogy for gay people." Fucking no! (As Clayton put it, "Apparently gay people can only eat one kind of food, and as soon as we synthesized it they all appeared.") The aspects of True Blood that are references to a particular kind of gay American experience--having to go to another state to get married, "God hates fangs"--are actually the sign of Alan Ball's refusal to a)produce some really basic second-grade narrative of gay rights, or b)produce fiction that is exactly like the fiction produced by straight people. He just kind of throws it in there because it's a part of our life and it's kind of funny to apply it to vampires. People who try to interpret the gay=vampire analogy literally are just people who think that any reference to minority experience has to be super heavy and super sincere. That's not true, and it's othering; and more importantly, it's just boring.

Translucent characters

Recently I was reading a story I'd been assigned for class. The story was about a man who had recently experienced trauma and had begun thinking and behaving differently as a result. In one scene, the man badly cuts himself while making dinner for himself and his wife, and starts kind of stimming out on the visual experience of it (I'm trying to describe this in a way that's not triggering). The wife comes home and the man tells her not to worry because dinner isn't ruined; it will just be late. The fact that he got cut won't mess up their evening. His wife is very upset, apparently by his overly calm and spaced-out reaction to his injury. The story is in close third person, so the narration is echoing the man's thoughts and feelings about his injury.

I liked this story; I liked the man, and I enjoyed the tension between his cheerful feelings and what I understood (that his wife was upset by his behavior). However, I realized that this kind of dramatic irony could almost be seen as belonging to a particular way of writing about characters with disabilities and illnesses that affect their reactions and perception.

I admit that my super intense dislike of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is a little bit unfair. My biggest problem with it is the way people react to it and think that they've become educated about autism by reading it, and I know that Mark Haddon didn't intend for that to happen and even resents it when the book is framed that way. However, it occurred to me that I have another complaint: part of what makes the book respected is this use of disability for dramatic irony. The blurb of the book says, "[H]erein lies the key to the brilliance of Mark Haddon’s choice of narrator: The most wrenching of emotional moments are chronicled by a boy who cannot fathom emotion."

I don't really think that ASD people can't fathom emotion, and despite my problems with the book I think that Christopher actually does have emotions and has some awareness of other people's emotions. So first off the person who wrote the blurb is just describing what they think autism is, not what the character of Christopher is actually like. But never mind.

The point is that this is the whole dramatic irony thing where the author and the reader are sort of treating Christopher like a wall that they can pass secret messages through. Christopher doesn't understand why his dad is so emotionally unstable, but we (the reader) are supposed to. There's also the scene where Christopher throws up because he's upset but he doesn't actually say he's upset (if I remember correctly). And so on. Lots of emotions happen, and Christopher either doesn't get what is going on, or chooses not to state what is being felt. From what I recall of his character, I think it's arguable that Christopher is aware of at least his own emotions, but chooses not to describe them because he doesn't want to. However, this isn't how the person who wrote the blurb takes it, and the same is true for many many people who write reviews of the book.

The idea is that it's clever/poignant to see emotions through the eyes of a character who doesn't seem to notice them. This is one type of Translucent Disabled Character Irony. Another type is humor; as one review says, "Though Christopher insists, 'This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them,' the novel brims with touching, ironic humor." There are passages in the book that Haddon sets up to contain information that is supposed to be unintentionally funny. For example, Christopher might write that he said something baldly offensive, and then write that his school aide or his father told him to be careful who he says that to.

The third type of Translucent Disabled Character Irony is about disability itself. An example is the story I read about the traumatized man. The man thought that he was behaving normally, but the reader could tell that he wasn't. Through the act of reading the story, the reader learns about the point-of-view character's disability, even though the character either thinks they are not disabled, or does not realize they are giving away their disability through their narration or their thoughts. This is the kind of TDCI that bothers me the most, although it's also the kind that readers seem to think is the most clever.

I guess that the first two kinds of TDCI--emotion and humor--are also about disability at the same time, since the fact that the TDC doesn't understand the emotion or humor also allows the reader to pick up on the TDC's disability.

Now, I'm obviously not trying to say that I think Translucent Disabled Character Irony is inherently wrong. Translucent Character Irony is a very striking and effective device (Translucent Child Character Irony is very common, and although it can be really troped and annoying, it can also be fun). There are probably at least a few touches of Translucent Character Irony in any work of fiction worth reading that is in first person or close third person--if there aren't, then the main character should probably be diagnosed as a Mary Sue for being so ridiculously clever and aware of everything. Everyone has a different point of view; everyone is so locked into their own experience that they sometimes don't notice how other people are feeling, how they differ from other people, the fact that a situation they're experiencing as serious is actually kind of funny. Having a reader pick up on things the point-of-view character doesn't is probably a sign of good writing.

But I do think there's a point where it is happening too much. Rather than being something that happens occasionally, Translucent Character Irony can become almost the defining feature of the work (as in The Curious Incident)--and this isn't a bad writing decision per se, but I think it's a very common way of writing about people with developmental disabilities and certain mental illnesses. If you keep writing about a minority group in the same way, it becomes offensive. Especially because it's kind of patronizing and othering.

It promotes a tendency to think "oh, how interesting" when encountering a disabled person; to observe someone instead of listening to their words; or even to see the content of what they are saying as being important only because of the insight it provides into their disability. I think there's lots of interesting fiction to be written about people with DDs and mental illnesses, and ASD in particular, but I think that it doesn't have to be fiction where the reader is so detached from the disabled/ill character and is observing their strangeness. A story about such a character can be interesting, and even be disability-centric if you want, without being ironic at the character's expense.

(This is one reason I love The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo--there are very few times when Stieg Larsson is conversing with the reader over Lisbeth's head. Sometimes Lisbeth has thoughts and reactions that most readers probably wouldn't share, but it doesn't come off as TDCI for some reason, maybe because Lisbeth picks up on so many things.)