Disa(visi)bility

Note: I'm hoping everybody likes this picture enough to excuse how late this entry is.

Able-bodied people don’t want to think about disabilities. Physical and mental disabilities make able-bodied people uncomfortable. Couple this with the assumption that disabled people can’t do much, and we get a lack of disabled representation, particularly heroes, in popular culture. In her essay “Freaks and Queers”, Eli Clare writes on how the word disabled carries expectation and stereotypes with it. “Where does our inability lie? Are our bodies like stalled cars? Or does disability live in the social and physical environment?” (Clare 82). Disabled heroes challenge the notion that bodies we label as disabled are inherently less able or worthy. Disabled heroes can reach to disabled and enabled (Clare prefers this to able-bodied) people alike to change perceptions about disabled bodies and empower disabled people.

I want to focus on the direct and non-subtle erasure of characters with disabilities when adapting them. If you haven’t read the Hunger Games novels, during the first book both of the main characters, Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, obtain disabilities. Katniss is deafened in her left ear by an explosion, and must deal with it throughout the rest of the book (her hearing is repaired at the end of the first novel). She struggles in the book with balance and shooting immediately after losing her hearing, and worries about the long term consequences of her hearing loss. In the movie, Katniss has ringing in her ears for a few seconds after the explosion, but no lasting consequences. Even the book could have done this better (give Katniss a hearing aid or implant instead of just waving their hands and using fantasy medicine), but Hollywood completely erasing that part of Katniss’ journey was a slap in the face as a Hard of Hearing person.

Peeta gets his leg amputated in the first novel, and it has lasting consequences in the later books. Peeta is slower at running and cannot swim in the second novel because of his disability, directly affecting his performance in the competition. Of course, having the main character’s love interest (depending on how you interpret the text) be disabled isn’t very romantic or glamorous, and Hollywood left out plenty of other unsavory aspects of the games as well, including the effects of dehydration and starvation. Add to this that Peeta needed to be saved by Katniss in the beginning of the game in the second novel because of his inability to swim, and we can’t have women saving men from physical obstacles because what does that say about the man (the horror!), and Peeta being disabled is just damned inconvenient.

In the Hunger Games novels, the Avox are forcibly disabled by the capital and become slaves as punishment for their crimes, which could include being out of designated areas after curfew and other “revolutionary” acts. Katniss forms strong bonds with Avox in the novels, though from afar as she’s not supposed to interact with them unless giving them orders, and they cannot speak. The Hunger Games feature many different kinds of disability and the movies gloss over all of them. It’s frustrating to watch as a disabled person, because Hollywood is ignoring not only my identity, but the idea that I can actively participate in revolutionary acts or be a hero.

Another recent Hollywood franchise that glosses over and erases a hearing impaired (super)hero’s disability is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the comics, Hawkeye wears hearing aids. To be fair, much of the time he is also healed by hand-waving fantasy medicine and is no longer hearing impaired, but it’s still part of his history and there are comics that try to stay true to his disability. The MCU glosses over any Hawkeye backstory, and doesn’t attempt to give him hearing aids in the film, so his disability, and the wealth of storytelling opportunity and character development it presents, is erased.

The most recent Hawkeye comics acknowledge that he was deaf in his youth, assume he was cured at some point in his past, and then deafen him again to revive his disability. Hawkeye slips back into deafness with relative ease, already knowing sign language, along with his brother. This article explains the comic and discusses another disabled superhero who is magically cured, Oracle. Most of the issue in which Hawkeye is deafened includes empty speech bubbles and extensive ASL (American Sign Language). This is done to throw the readers off and make them uncomfortable. Not knowing sign language makes the comic less accessible to the readers in an attempt to both display the harshness of being HOH in a hearing world, and on some level entreat readers to learn sign language and be more accommodating to invisible disabilities.

American Horror Story Season 4: Freak Show features disabled people, “freaks”, played by both disabled and enabled actors. The show is a modern version of the freak show itself, exemplified by Clare’s portrayal of the freak show in her work. The line that stuck with me the most described Ryan Murphy perfectly: “But most certainly, like all the people who profited from the freak show, he used ableism and racism to his benefit. This use of oppression by white, nondisabled businessmen is common, fraught, and ultimately unacceptable” (Clare 91). Though AHS attempts to “humanize” “freakishness”, the show ultimately uses disabled and atypical people to create horrific entertainment. AHS also fails to include the full history of freak shows, excluding dark-skinned people kidnapped from other countries and atypically bodied yet enabled people. Another problem with AHS is that all of the villains are neuroatypical. Ryan Murphy, instead of working to empower disabled people (which is not within his realm or power), commodities and vilifies them. The disabled actors of AHS are the real gems of the show. They are pulling all of the empowerment, respect, and visibility they can out of this exploitative situation (don’t even get me started on the enabled people that they use prosthetics on to enact disability), exactly like the freaks who “did not overcome disability; they flaunted it” (Clare 98) in traditional freak shows. This season of AHS is a modern day freak show that has been twisted as to be acceptable to our modern sensibilities. But at least AHS makes disability visible, unlike the Hunger Games and MCU. But this representation leaves much to be desired.

Note: While searching for this image, I found mostly group photos of all of the enabled actors from the shows, excluding the disabled actors entirely. 

EDIT: I found this horrific article that assures us that disabled people are not real, so we shouldn't be afraid of the characters in AHS because they're all actors in "seriously sinister makeup". Just in case you were wondering whether I was exaggerating about how AHS is being progressive or changing anything.