April 27, 2024

On Disability, Fantasy, and Belonging

The inability to imagine disabled characters outside of a cure or tragic narrative is a failure of imagination, understanding, and empathy.

Hello, friends. I’ve had thoughts again.

Some of you may or may not have heard: I’m creating a digital and print anthology centering disabled authors and stories in the fantasy genre! The theme is Traditional Fantasy, and it will include 12 short stories from authors of intersectional disabled identities from around the world. If you or someone you know might be interested in submitting, click here to see more info. 

I have wanted to put together a print and digital anthology for a long time, but in the last twelve months I decided I wanted to try and uplift disabled creators, specifically, because as I have become a more critical reader and learned more disability and feminist theory, I have noticed the gaping hole in publishing that excludes us.

The thing that finally kicked me into gear and made me put out the submissions call was the (frankly vitriolic) discourse on twitter dot com about disabled people in fantasy, which boiled down to, explicitly, “Disabled people don’t belong in fantasy”.

You know what this almost sounds like? ✨Eugenics✨

So, I’m going to be talking about this today: disabled characters in the fantasy space, why I’m advocating for it, and what it means to me.

In some ways, I feel lucky to have missed this recurrent discourse in its precious iterations, and in other ways, I feel frustrated and saddened that it’s even discourse at all (let alone discourse that continues to occur).

“Once you have magic in a setting, it makes no sense to have disabilities.”

Able-bodied people, Orcs, aliens, somehow-returning sith lords, pregnant people, shifters, dragons—all of these belong in fantasy, but not regular ol’ disabled people? Because it “breaks immersion” or because you “don’t read to see depressing things”? Imagine if disabled people banded together and said that able-bodied people don’t belong in fantasy because it breaks immersion, or because able-bodied people are inherently too pitiable. The inability to imagine a disabled character outside of a cure or tragic narrative is not only a failure of imagination, but a failure of understanding and empathy.

Disabled people can and should exist in fantasy because we exist in real life. It’s as simple as that.

Aside from the inherent able-body supremacy in this statement, it shows a real entitlement to being accommodated to as an audience member, without acknowledging the very real oppression that had led to disabled people in real life being relegated to the unseen fringes, both in reality and in fiction.

When we consider that around 15% of the world’s population1, (around 27% of Americans2, and 18% of Australians3) is estimated to live with some type of disability, it’s bananas to exclude anyone, let alone up to one fifth of the world’s population from an entire genre. 

Author and essayist Elaine Castillo talks about something called “the expected audience” in relation to race, but I believe the concept and sentiment is translatable to this context too. “When white readers claim to be made uncomfortable—as many I heard from claimed—by the presence of something like untranslated words in fiction, what they’re really saying is: I have always been the expected reader. A reader like this is used to the practice of reading being one that may performatively challenge them, much the way a safari guides a tourist through the “wilderness”—but ultimately always prioritizes their comfort and understanding.”4 When able-bodied readers say “disabled characters shouldn’t exist in fantasy”, what it sounds like is: “I am the expected reader. Prioritize my comfort and expectations.”

It’s ableist in several ways—if you’re unable to remain immersed and are put-off by disabled characters, ask yourself why. If it is so unbelievable that disabled characters might exist in a world with magic, ask yourself what makes you think they wouldn’t. And then if you’ve come up with an answer similar to “Well there’s magic so they could just be cured”, ask yourself why you think that is something every disabled person would want. Ask yourself why your first idea is to cure and erase disability, rather than accommodate it. Ask yourself if you’re doing this in real life. If you come up with an answer like “Well they should float around like puppets instead of needing a wheelchair”, ask yourself why you take issue with seeing disabled people exist with their visibilities, mobility aids, and access needs on display. Ask yourself why their means of mobility needs to “look cool” or be disguised or justified, and not simply exist in ways that disabled readers can see themselves in.

The stories you want to read tell a story about you, too.

Disabled people are already under-represented, underemployed, and excluded from society in many ways—do you need to exclude us from fantasy worlds, too? People have dropped masking during the ongoing COVID pandemic in favour of attending public events “like normal”, which means many disabled people no longer have safe and equal access to public spaces. So what we have is a world that tells us disabled people don’t deserve consideration or safe and equal access to real-world spaces, a world that tells us disabled people to stay home and shut up, and a world that tells us they don’t want to see disabled people even in fictional spaces.

Jinkies. Where, exactly, are we safe and welcome and wanted? What space are you making for us?

My second reason for wanting to create an disability-centric anthology is that I grew up reading a lot, and almost all of those thousands of books were full of able-bodied protagonists and side characters, and hardly any disabled characters at all. The disabled characters were most often villains, the butt of jokes, and were killed or mistreated in the name of motivating the protagonist to be a hero. I didn’t realise this when I was young, of course. I had never been taught that I should be able to see myself in stories, that disabled characters could be anything but dead, dreadful, or dangerous. 

But of course, I’m forgetting those even rarer instances where the disabled character is alive and not a villain— like AVATAR (2009) where the disabled protagonist spends the whole movie fielding ableism and hating his disability, yearning for a cure, and getting it in the form of becoming a Na'vi.

Like the detective show MONK (2002-2009) who is unwittingly a victim of ableism in almost every episode, whose carer often withholds care and accommodations, whose friends call him crazy, and who is the butt of too many jokes to count.

Like MORBIUS (2022) who tries to cure himself of his disability and becomes a blood-thirsty monster in achieving able-bodiedness, whose one other disabled friend becomes a sociopathic killer. And what of the stories where the disabled character must push through and overcome their disability, and this is framed as an amazing achievement? What of the stories where disabled characters are only pretending to be disabled?

As a disabled woman who only ever saw disabled people portrayed as helpless, victims, immoral, faking, lazy, or weak for not being able to push through, I grew up thinking that I too was a victim—because I certainly didn’t want to be a villain—and that I too just needed to grit my teeth, work hard, and push through. I hid my health issues to the point of danger for fear of being seen as a burden or as a liar, but I have also been seen that way anyway, and I have to wonder how much our media landscape encourages that dehumanising scrutiny and distrust. In fact, I have been told on several occasions that someone’s misbeliefs about disability were because they’d “seen it a few time on TV”, and I’ve had to re-educate them into basic understanding that no, I cannot “just try harder to run” when my knees are subluxing, and no your presence doesn’t suddenly make me able-bodied enough to do so.

I have spent my whole life reading and forcing myself into stories, imagining myself in the fictional worlds I loved, facilitating the inclusion of ramps and elevators in magic school because the author didn’t consider different access needs when they invented magical stairs. I would see a character mention that their knee hurt, and I would imagine he’d sustained an injury years ago and now had chronic pain. A character would complain of a headache, and I would imagine she had chronic headaches just like me. I would read stories of characters on long, arduous quests, and read into their understandable fatigue while thinking “yes, me too!”, but the chronic fatigue was not canon. It was never canon. 

All that time I was subconsciously noticing a lack of inclusion, and I took it upon myself to facilitate it, to make it so in my mind because I thought I had no other choice. In fact, when I would write my own stories, I would often not even consider disabled people’s existence despite being one myself.

I would write myself out of stories because I had never been taught to see myself in them. It’s a frightening thing to realise you’ve been complicit in your own erasure and oppression.

Now? Now I want it to be canon, and I want others to be able to read these stories and see themselves in them, see their friends in them, see people and experiences they’ve never known or considered before, and love them. I even want people to hate the disabled characters we write—hate them because they’re people, because they’re villains, and because other good disabled characters exist alongside them, because we are not a monolith, because it’s not about making disabled characters moral pinnacles and stripping them of complexity. It’s about achieving a good multiplicity of representation and depiction, which allows for disabled characters to exist in all shapes and sizes without harmful implicit messages rooted in ableism.

Disabled people exist, have always existed, and should be allowed to continue to exist. The truth of disability is that it exists in so many different ways and forms, sometimes visible, sometimes invisible, sometimes visible on Tuesdays and other time on Thursdays, sometimes obvious and sometimes completely non-apparent. It is not a simple binary. There is joy, pain, family, connection, isolation, anger, anxiety, celebration, love, and yearning. There is humanity. There are so many stories.

And so I continue to say to myself the same thing I said in reply to the aforementioned ableist discourse: Disabled people can and should exist in fantasy because we exist in real life. 

This means that space must be made, and voices need to be uplifted. This is part of community care. I hope that this anthology is a success, and that it is the first project of many that allows us to take up space and share our experiences, creativity, and love. We deserve it. 

What do you think?

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If you’re interested in reading up about disability justice, advocacy, and becoming a better ally to us (and even to yourself!), here are some readings I recommend: 

“Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

“Feminist, Queer, Crip” by Alison Kafer.

“Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century” by a mix of authors.

“Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space” by Amanda Leduc.