September 16, 2023

Complicated Thoughts on the magic cure trope & precluding disabled narratives

My hot take? This trope is not inherently problematic, and the reductive labelling of it as 'problematic' leads to devaluing certain disabled stories.

*in this title, I am using ‘a’ to mean ‘one’, not that there is any single disabled narrative. Disabled people are not a monolith; our experiences, thoughts, and feelings are extremely varied. This thought piece is my opinion based on my own thoughts, feelings, and experiences, and should not be taken as anything other than that.

I am using a mix of ‘person-first’ and ‘disability-first’ language throughout this essay.

This week I’ve been thinking about a very specific trope in media: the magical cure.

My hot take? This trope is not inherently problematic. Looking at it within context—able-bodied authors have written many a magical cure trope and precluded disabled people from existing naturally and happily within their fictional worlds—I do see, understand, and agree with the criticisms of the trope. It’s been seen and done before many times; it’s frustrating given how few happy and real disabled characters have existed in media thus far.

The ‘magical cure trope’ sees a disabled character be magically healed of their disability or impairment, or be given some form of magical power that negates said disability or impairment.1

However, I do want to unpick some of the criticism and discussion around this trope because I often see it presented and spoken about in quite a black-and-white, this trope is bad kind of way, and I think that lacks a lot of nuance. While I also can agree with reviewers who speak on disabled novels and include sentiments such as “I’m so glad this didn’t have the magical cure trope” I can’t help but feel like some of the condemnation of that trope precludes disabled writers from writing about one of the very real experiences of being disabled, and that is…

Yes. Sometimes I do fantasise about a magical cure. And I don’t think that is inherently rooted in ableism.

To give you some perspective of the lens I’m viewing things through: I am a human with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder which impacts my day-to-day life with pain, headaches, frequent sprains, subluxations, and dislocations, and with slower healing and proclivity for infection. I am also neurodivergent, which impacts my day-to-day life with executive dysfunction, trouble reading social cues, fight or flight sensitivity, hyper-empathy, and more. Life is hard, yo.

And sometimes, quite reasonably I think, I wish for a magical cure. When I think about a magic cure, it’s not because I want to be ‘normal’ (normal is a social construct), and it’s not because I have a subconscious bias toward able bodies. It’s not because I think I am worth less as a disabled person (though there is no denying that my life would be easier and I wouldn't experience the same level of ableism if I were no longer disabled). This is personal.

When I say “I wish I wasn't disabled because I don’t want to be in pain and have to deal with xyz things”, and people respond with “Noooo, it’s okay to be disabled 💝” I feel like I’m being grossly misunderstood. Where did I say it wasn’t okay to be disabled? Where did I pass a value judgement on being disabled? This isn’t about an inability to accept or love myself; It’s a desire to not have to deal with so many difficulties just to be able to live.

I want a magic cure for the same reason I go to the doctor and try to advocate for painkillers and better physical care: because I don’t want to be in pain, and injured, and struggle so much with life every day.

Over the last three years, I have been studying disability theory to better understand myself, the world around me, and how the two of us exist in tandem. I have come across a lot of discussions about disability in media, and spent a lot of time interrogating my own beliefs, biases, hopes, dreams, and fantasies. Am I ‘wrong’ for wanting a cure? Am I ‘bad’ for wishing I wasn’t disabled? Have I fallen for the ableism baked into our societies and cultures in laying awake at night, in a lot of pain, and wishing I inhabited a body free of it?

Early on, I read ‘Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space’ by Amanda Leduc, and a quote stood out to me:

This is a good point. When I read it, I admit I sat in stunned silence at my local cafe, looking up at the air vent and thinking, “Why did I never consider the world could change? I want my own world to change every day, but I treat these fictional worlds and their social structures as conclusions, not open to adapting to accommodate people like me.” And it’s true — there are so many narratives that show a disabled character changing or adapting to their environment, not the other way around. It’s just easier, isn’t it, for the minority to change for the majority? For the one disabled person to change, rather than society? It’s a fact that is true in real life as well. Just look at how certain people in our communities today (2023) are isolated and unable to work (like me) because our communities have not adapted COVID measures to ensure everyone in those communities has fair opportunity and safety.

This is touching on the social model of disability. The social model views ‘disability’ as the result of the interaction between people living with impairments and an environment filled with physical, attitudinal, communication and social barriers. It therefore carries the implication that the physical, communication and social environment must change to enable people living with impairments to participate in society on an equal basis with others.3 We’re not ‘disabled’, but rather made disabled by the aforementioned external factors of social, environmental, and attitudinal barriers; In a world that accommodated me 100%, I would be ‘impaired’ or ‘have an impairment’.

Here is the thing that I’m thinking about in relation to that: even in a world that accommodated me 100%, I would still be living my ‘disabled’ or ‘impaired’ bodily experience of being injured all the time, trying to manage my pain, and struggling with decision fatigue, etc. and I would still like a cure.

My thoughts on this are complex and I hope they make sense, but I guess I keep thinking about how in order to manage my condition, I have to get painkillers which remove my pain and make me more abled. When I complain about being in pain, the first thing people say to me is “Have you taken painkillers?”, the general idea being that pain isn’t something we want to be in and is something we can theoretically ‘fix’. In fact, I even get a bit annoyed when people ask this (even though I understand and appreciate it's coming from a place of care) because, well, of course I took painkillers. They’re sort of the first step in managing my pain.

To hopefully pull these thoughts into some cohesion and to relate them back to the supposed inherent ableism of the cure trope, I guess my question is: why is it okay to want a temporary fix or solution to symptoms of my disability, but not a permanent one?

To return to the trope itself, I understand that it’s based on—or most commonly based on—a pretty ableist idea that a person can’t be ‘whole’ or happy unless their disability is negated by some sort of narrative device. I understand that how it's been used throughout the history of literature and media hasn't been great, and that it's hard to divorce the trope from that, or view it in isolation from it.

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The trope has not allowed for a more social model of disability in which the society, environment, and communal attitudes of disability shift to accommodate the person’s disability, and does not treat it like an expected and welcome and normal part of human diversity. The trope changes the character so they can fit and function in society, and does not change the society to better fit or enable the character to function.

And sometimes when we see narratives of disabled people actively wanting a cure, they’re punished for it by being turned into monsters, literal and figurative. How dare they reach beyond their means. How dare they look at themselves, their pain, their labour-intensive survival, and think “I want to not have to do all this just to function”. See Morbius (2022), who doesn’t want to die young of a disease that has no cure, who is turned into a blood-sucking monster for his trouble looking for a cure. See his friend (played by Matt Damon) who not only turns into a vampire but for some reason turns into a sociopathic monster, too. Double whammy!

We have so few disabled characters in media who are allowed to just be, who are happy, who are supported and accommodated, who aren’t the consequence of tragedy, etc. that I can see and agree with the pushback against seeing disabled people be healed in fiction. It would be amazing to see more stories about disabled people who “learn to navigate the world and teach the world, in turn, to navigate its own way around the disabled body.”4

That being said... and I’ve already said what is likely the most controversial part of this essay, but I think disabled writers should be allowed to engage with this trope and write characters who want to be cured. I think that to wholesale condemn the trope and see it as lacking any value is to say that not all disabled narratives deserve to be told.

I think it’s wrong to think that even more nuanced depictions of this trope are going to be inherently harmful or problematic because this is a reality for a lot of disabled people.

But therein lies an issue, right? That so many people with unchecked ableism believe disabled people couldn't possibly want to be disabled. So we're battling multiple fronts: battling to tell this story, battling the history of this trope, and trying to battle any weird takes that we’re confirming what ableist people assume about disabled folk not wanting to be disabled. And for the record: there are many people with disabilities who are happy and whole and don’t want a cure. We’re people! We all have different wants, needs, thoughts, and feelings.

The question I have now is, will it ever be “okay” to write a story with this trope? Because we've seen it done before a thousand times in harmful ways, is there room for a more nuanced and specific depiction of it from a disabled writer?

In many ways, I feel like I lack agency over my own body. My joints pop out when they feel like it, and I end up in a lot of pain. I get migraines and can’t function. I have chronic pain and have to limit what I do in a day because of it. I feel out of control, and it’s frustrating. I think that fantasising about a cure is an act of agency. I think that a character wanting a cure and taking a cure is also an act of agency, and a desire to have more agency.

Living in my disabled body is a complex reality that forces me to constantly think and plan for how I can move through and function in the world, even outside of external disabling factors. If I have a physio appointment, I need to do it on a Friday afternoon after work, so I then have the weekend to rest and recover from the pain. If I am having a good day, I need to constantly check in with my energy and pain levels to make sure I don't accidentally over-commit or do too much and end up in a flare-up of symptoms, or worse, with a dislocated joint. There’s a lot of what I call “disability math” that I need to do just to be alive, and frankly, I get sick of it.

I spend a lot of my time, energy, and money doing things to manage my condition and make it so that I can reasonably function most days, so why it is any less valid for a person or a character to want to spend time looking for a cure which would enable them to function every day? It’s a kind of power fantasy. Wanting to live a pain-free life is very different from believing that all disabled people are less than whole or less than human.

I think this is complex because it’s hard to completely divorce ourselves from the context of the society we’re raised in, and that society is one steeped in ableism. It’s also complex because of the way people receive and interpret narratives from disabled folk—if I learned anything from online bookish spaces for example, it’s that people will take one person’s word for something and run with it. One disabled creator says “This book is great!” and suddenly it’s got the stamp of approval and the book is above reproach because it’s got “good” disability rep. “Well this creator who has xyz disability said it’s good/bad actually” is the chorus, and shouldn’t we be listening to people within the community?

But... we’re not a monolith. One person’s empowering disability narrative is my arch-nemesis novel. We’re getting on a bit of a tangent now, but it’s interesting to me that disabled people are not a monolith until one of them says on a public platform that something is good, then suddenly that judgment becomes a fact and a defence against critique of the work in question. “We shouldn't be judging ownvoices stories for being ableist when they’re true to the author” is a take I might be able to agree with in part, were it not used to preclude any and all criticism of the disability narrative they wrote about. The fact of the matter is that disabled people can be just as ableist as able-bodied people. Doctors can be ableist. Everyone can be. Everyone and everything is open to critique when it’s released to the public. The fact of my disability does not mean I shouldn’t receive criticism if I accidentally write something that’s upholding or endorsing ableist ideas.

This is why I think it’s important to view works within their context, both in-narrative and outside of it. If the author is presenting their novel as being inspiring, then we need to ask if it’s endorsing messaging that is truly healthy and aspirational. Does the character’s internalised ableism make sense for the world they’re in? Is it being challenged in any way? How is it being challenged? Is the very challenging of those misbeliefs, in actuality, still upholding harmful ideologies?

If someone writes a disability-cure narrative, I think we need to open our minds to that and think about what it is the author is trying to do and why, and again, ask what kind of message it’s sending and what beliefs it’s endorsing. Me? I’d love to one day write a story which explores the complexities of the inherently complex bodily experience of being disabled, and all the mental and social aspects of what questions a cure would raise. Would I still be 'me' if I were cured? Who is 'me'? My disability has impacted my life for as long as I can remember, so how would my lifestyle, likes, dislikes, fears, wants, and needs change? Should I even be lumping 'me' and my identity in with my disability? The story would be reflective of my journey, my experiences, my thoughts and feelings as an individual.

I’m just afraid that on the surface, because of all the harm that is and has been previously perpetuated by this trope, the very premise of this depiction of disability will not be seen as worthy of open-minded reading and discussion.

Again, all disabled people are people, and our lives, thoughts, experiences, and feelings are incredibly diverse and complex. I hope that some time in the future, there’ll be room for narratives that feel uncomfortable but are nonetheless valuable and reflective of these varied lives. One thing minority and marginalised groups struggle with is the explicit/conscious and implicit/subconscious attitudes of those around us, as well as within ourselves. We need to be able to explore these implicit attitudes as they relate to disability specifically because of the social norms and stereotypes ascribed to disability.5 It’s easy to see "this story doesn't have the disability cure trope" and think YAY! GOOD! And it’s easy to see "this story has the disability cure trope" and immediately have an ick reaction. It’s harder to look at that and be open to learning the context in which it’s being employed, and how the writer is engaging with it.

In reducing this trope to labels such as ‘bad’ or ‘problematic’, I feel like we’re doing away with all nuance, all possibility of discussion, and we’re implying that this narrative has no (or less) value than others—and that’s a shame. We’re already so starved for disabled narratives from disabled authors. I want us to be open to more of them, even if they’re not exactly palatable on the surface. We need to see much more varied media portrayals of disabled characters,6 and this is one of them.

What do you think? Let me know!

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