as small as a world and as large as alone, natalunasans: marxisforbros: “There’s a...

7:57pm August 18, 2014

marxisforbros:

“There’s a cure?!” asked the girl that kills everything she touches.
“Hey shut up we’re perf” replied the girl that makes clouds.

this is an allegory of disability communities, except actually the nature and severity (medical model, sorry) of people’s disabilities don’t actually reilably determine whether or not they’d want a cure.

it’s way more complex than that.

Yeah I cringe whenever people go see this one and go “It’s just like the autistic community!” No it’s not.

If it were, you’d have two Rogues and two Storms.

Rogue #1 would want a cure, Rogue #2 would reject a cure, Storm #1 would want a cure, Storm #2 would reject a cure. Rogue #1 and Storm #1 would probably band together in explaining in great agonizing detail to Rogue #2 and Storm #2 how the #2s just don’t understand the #1s pain, even though #1 and #2 of each are identical, completely, in their powers. But they’d all believe that their desire for a cure stemmed entirely from the severity of their anguish related to their variant on mutation. And they would believe anyone who didn’t want a cure must just not be as severely mutated as them or would not have as unpleasant mutations. Even when the mutations are identical.

I’ve written other critiques of the X-Men before from when this movie came out, maybe I’ll post one of my old ones.

I do understand why a teenager who couldn’t touch anyone without killing them and had a strong desire to have a sexual relationship, would want a cure, though, and at the same time feel ashamed for wanting a cure given the community she’s being brought up in. At the same time, I can see a teenager with a different personality turning her powers into a source of pride, even if they were the exact same powers and conferred the exact same limitations.

That’s one thing that’s missing in all these talks of cure: The influence of personality. Which is huge. Personality, family background, cultural and ethnic values, these things all play a huge part in how we approach disability and cure. Yet all anyone wants us to look at is what kind of disability we have and how severe it is and assume that’s the only reason we’d want or not want a cure.

I have gotten into realllllly interesting arguments with incredibly ‘high functioning’ people who desperately wanted cures and wanted to paint me as 'much higher functioning’ than them in order for their worldview to stay intact. Unfortunately that was very hard for them to do, given my actual skill levels at just about everything. So instead they settled for getting very angry with me.

I actually have a theory that sometimes, the people who most want a cure are related to so-called functioning levels, but not in the way people expect. I think sometimes the people most invested in a cure are people who can almost manage normality but not quite. So nearly the highest functioning of the highest functioning, to put it in terms I wouldn’t normally use. People who feel like if they could just get this little disability thing out of the way they’d be just like everyone else. And they’re so close to just like everyone else, they can just taste what that would be like, but they can’t quite get there.

People like that seem far more likely to want a cure than people who know we’ll never, in a million years, reach normality, and have had to learn to accept ourselves as we are.

But what do I know?

Anyway, I’ll be posting my old x-men post next.