Stereotypes in the Portrayal of People with Disabilities

Featuring an excerpt from Kristin Cashore's blog about her newest novel Bitterblue

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Ever since I read this post on The Rejectionist a few years ago, I've tried to be more aware of how people with disabilities are portrayed in the books I edit and the media I consume. I mused a while back on my own blog about Toph from the Avatar: The Last Airbender TV series, wondering if she fit the stereotype described by Rachel in that post, the "supercrip" stereotype. As Rachel, who is deaf, put it,

The most crucial error the Able-bodied Narrative makes is the proposition that the disability is the most important and most interesting thing in that person’s life. . . . Thinking of disabled people as being their disability ignores all the other things that make us fully realized and active human beings; our loves, desires, hobbies, thoughts, fears, hatreds, ambitions, and failures. It ignores the conflicts that have actual meaning to our lives and relationships—conflicts that contain within them the seeds of stories so much richer and deeper than the Able-bodied Narrative could ever allow for.

Instead, The Able-bodied Narrative defines people by their disabilities and results in stereotyped characters in predictable plots: the struggle to overcome our obvious suffering, the search for a cure or at least normalcy, and the inspiring greatness of the "Supercrip."

How do we approach the portrayal of people with disabilities in children's and young adult literature? Do we treat them as whole people, whose disability is just one part of who they are?*

This can be especially tough in fantasy literature, because magic can so often solve problems in ways that can't be solved in the real world. Author Kristin Cashore faced this situation in her first book, Graceling. (Warning, spoilers ahead; the book has been out for several years at this point, though.) A character is injured in a way that we learn in this world is irreversible. It's devastating. It changes his life forever. Yet somehow, magically, a solution is found for this injury.

Kristin wrote a note in the third book in the series, Bitterblue, that discusses how readers reacted to this, and how she handled it. Her process in acknowledging her mistake and in trying to right it is an example for all of us.

The following is excerpted from Kristin's blog, with her permission:

Now, SPOILER WARNING: These questions/answers don't contain any significant Bitterblue spoilers, but the first two questions definitely contain significant Graceling spoilers.

1. In your acknowledgments for Bitterblue, you included an interesting mention having to do with Po, disability politics, "magical cures," and your own failings as a writer. Would you talk a little bit more about what that was all about?

Here is the section of my Bitterblue acknowledgments to which this question refers:

Thanks to Rebecca Rabinowitz and Deborah Kaplan, who, after reading a late draft of Bitterblue, counseled me on the matter of Po, disability politics, and whether there was any way to counter the consequences of my making Po’s Grace grow so big that it compensated for his blindness at the end of Graceling. (I was not thinking about disability politics back then. It didn’t occur to me, until it was too late, that I had disabled Po, then given him a magical cure for his disability—thus implying that he couldn’t be a whole person and also be disabled. I now understand that the magical cure trope is all too common in F/SF writing and is disrespectful to people with disabilities. My failings here are all my own.) 

One thing I've learned about being a writer is that you make mistakes, and then they're out there in print and it's too late to do anything about them -- except to try to do a better job in future books, and with future characters. Here's another example that no one asked me about on tour, but which I'll mention here anyway: I wish I'd thought more carefully about race when I first created these worlds, been more explicit, thoughtful, and careful about creating characters of color. I intend to do so in future, and expect to create the opportunity for it with the next book I write in my fantasy world.

Returning to the question I was actually asked: I also wish I'd been less ignorant about disability politics when I was writing Graceling. When I realized, late in the writing of Bitterblue, that I had disabled Po, then "magically cured" him in a way that suggested, as book after book after book does, that a character can't be both disabled and whole -- that his story can't continue happily until he's cured -- when I realized what I'd done, I tried to change a few things to make his blindness more real, and his cure less magical. For example, in Bitterblue, he can't read words on paper and needs assistive devices to write, and when he's ill, his Grace warps so that he no longer has a clear sense of his surroundings. But the fact remains that I'm stuck with the powers I gave him in Graceling, so the best I can do is work really hard to make him as real as I can whenever he appears, think hard about my future representations of him, and try to be more thoughtful about this issue with new characters.

Writers make mistakes. I've made mistakes. Moving forward, I'll try (1) to rectify them if and when I can, and I'll also try (2) not to duplicate them. No doubt, I'll continue to make mistakes. One thing I'll definitely be doing is getting advice from people who are better at these things than I am.

There are two more things I want to say before I move on to the next question. First, I want to extend a heartfelt thanks to the readers in my audiences who asked me to talk about this during the tour. You probably didn't know you were doing it at the time, but what you did was force me to get over my fear of publicly talking about it, and it's good for the world when these things are talked about publicly. Second, I want to say that I'm sorry for the mistakes I've made.

End of excerpt

I like how thoughtful Kristin is about this--it's important for us as publishing people, whether on the business side or the writing side, when we learn something new, to be able to look at how we've done things in the past with new eyes, take from that a lesson on what we can change, and move forward.

* Kody Keplinger also has a great post on the subject of how we treat people with disabilities in real life, which I think is also applicable to this discussion of how we portray people in fiction.