as small as a world and as large as alone

9:40am September 7, 2014

andreashettle:

bronweathanharthad:

a list of things that are important:

• canonically disabled characters
• disabled actors playing disabled characters
• disabled characters who are treated as a person and not as a laundry list of symptoms
• characters who remain disabled throughout the entire story
• abolishing the belief that disability is a tragedy and that being miraculously cured is the only happy ending
• examining disability in all groups, not just white cishet men
• abolishing the use of ableist slurs
• condemning characters that use ableist slurs
• explicit, respectful disability representation

• disabled characters who have some kind of connection with other disabled characters, including people who share the same disability as them
• Disabled super heros whose super power does not basically just cancel out the disability (aka Dare Devil)
• Condemning characters who don’t accommodate the disabled character’s accessibility needs
• NOT using disabilities as metaphors for a broken spirit or a twisted soul, etc.
• Deaf people who are NOT champion lip readers, because although a few are that good at lip reading most are not.
• Having multiple disabled characters in the same story … because one out of seven people on Earth are disabled, so why should there be just one lone disabled person in pretty much any cast significantly larger than seven?
• People who have multiple disabilities, because not all disabled people have just one disability, many of us have multiple disabilities and we deserve representation too
• Showing the kinds of micro aggressions that disabled people face in real life, because that is a pretty huge part of our lives and you can’t really reflect what our lives are like while pretending that all disabled people live in this utopia where all their accessibility needs are always met. Like, no, the people around a deaf person do NOT always automatically learn sign language, occasionally a few people might learn a few signs but most don’t. And the people around a deaf person are NOT always going to be infinitely patient when they don’t immediately lipread everything.  And they are NOT always going to explain to the deaf person what they have missed.
• But also showing why these micro aggressions are wrong.

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