6:57pm March 26, 2014

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Disabled characters are written into stories for one reason: the disability. Do most people actually believe real disabled people spend our days obsessing about being cured? Or rhapsodizing about killing ourselves? Here is the truth: Disabled people barely ever even think about our disabilities. When we do think about them, it’s usually because we are dealing with an oppressive, systemic problem, such as employment discrimination. Can’t there ever be a disabled character in a book or film just because? Where the topic doesn’t ever come up? All sorts of interesting stories can be written about a disabled character, without the disability ever being mentioned. You know, just like real people.

The vast majority of writers who have used disabled characters in their work are not people with disabilities themselves. Because disabled people have been peripheral for centuries, we’ve been shut out of the artistic process since the beginning. As a result, the disabled characters we’re presented with usually fit one or more of the following stereotypes: Victim, Villain, Inspiration, Monster. And the disabled character’s storyline is generally resolved in one of a few ways: Cure, Death, Institutionalization.

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Susan Nussbaum, Disabled Characters in Fiction (via kassapti)

I know of a disabled woman who, in a writing class, wrote a disabled character into her story.  The rest of the class spent all day trying to determine what her character’s disability “symbolized”, and refused to believe her when she said the character just had a disability, she wasn’t there for some grand purpose.

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