Disabilities as fanfic challenge prompts

[briarwood]

I've seen some posts around DW and LJ about the problematic issues in hc_bingo. I faced some similar issues myself with this year's spn_summergen so I've given it some thought.

One person's kink - and I use the term in its broadest possible sense - is another's trigger. I can certainly see how giving prompts related to things like sexual abuse or disability are problematic (though not prohibitively so) and I hope no one reading this needs me to explain it. But the other thing is we can't always tell what's behind a person's enjoyment of a particular kink. Some people enjoy fiction about rape because they are rape survivors and it helps them deal with their own experieces. Other rape survivors are triggered by such fiction. There's no "rule" about how people will react and there's no way one affected person can speak for all.

In Summergen this year, there were a small number of prompts that related to permanent injuries or disabilities. Because I don't personally know most of the participants, I have no idea whether that's coming from a kind of fetishistic place or whether the prompt is a genuine wish to see a disability well represented in fan fiction. In matching those prompts, I faced another problem: a lot of writers are squicked by the permanent injury/disability thing. But very few mention it as a caveat in signups because (I suppose) they weren't expecting it to be a common request.

In hc_bingo the problem is a bit different. This is about prompts, taken from a long, long list, which the participant can interpret as they please. But it's in the context of hurt/comfort, which as a genre tends to focus on the "hurt" in an almost pornish way. So, is hc_bingo by definition fetishising these things? Particularly as the genre tends toward some improbable or magical solution to the "hurt" at the end of the fic?

Well, for many of the prompts, I don't see that it matters. Two of mine, for example, are "fallen angels" and "tentacles". But there are others. The ones that appear to be most troubling are prompts which are potential triggers for survivors and those which specify disabilities. Again, to draw examples from the table I was given, I found "Body dismorphic disorder" and "Domestic abuse (sexual)", but the list of potential prompts contains many more. (I also found prompts on my table that make little sense to me in a H/C context...not things I'd consider a "hurt" at all. Or at least not one requiring comfort. But that's not important for this discussion.) Triggers are fairly easy to deal with: just require adequate warnings. I've gone into this in great detail before so I won't draw it out, but my basic feeling about this is it's the indvidual's responsibility to avoid things they know are triggers. We - I - should provide adequate information to let them do that, but I don't feel oblighed to modify my writing. Only how I present it.

But disabilities (physical and mental) and related injuries are another thing. You can't run a hurt/comfort challenge and not allow many of these things. Saying it's problematic isn't much different from saying slash is problematic - the genre is just that big.

What makes this more of a minefield, I think, isn't the presence of those particular tropes. It's the presentation of these things as part of a challenge which by its nature encourages short fics with minimal research or attention to detail. Although there will always be issues with things real people have to deal with being used as fictional tropes, those issues exist on an individual level: writer X has done a bad thing (in the opinion of a reader) by writing...whatever. This challenge is asking writers en masse to do that...and it's not difficult to understand why some people are taking issue with that.

But this is one of those things where there's no easy answer. H/C will always exist. It's a genre of fiction that is given to exaggeration and distortion, and that's not likely to change. Fandom can't lay down rules forbidding poorly researched stories...and we shouldn't want to. Every fan writer has to begin somewhere; we've all been through a phase of writing wince-worthy stories. Some of us grow out of it; some of us don't want to. Fandom is diverse and that's our strength. At the same time, suggesting those who might have a problem with it should just stay out of the sandbox isn't a satisfactory response, either. I don't envy the mods and I don't have an easy answer to this one.

My own answer in Summergen has been to match prompts to writers as best I can, and to emphasise that just because a prompt specifies a permanent disability doesn't obligate the author to write it that way, if she really can't go there. This is far from ideal. The scenario I really hope I won't see is a recipient who wanted to see her own disability (or one close to her in real life) represented being gifted with a story that treats it as a condition that can be tossed aside or magically cured...but I see no way to avoid that as a possibility. I can only try to minimise the chances of it happening.

For the bingo, my solution would have been to exclude some things from the list. For the same reasons that the miscangenation (did I spell that right?) blowup in HP fandom a couple of years ago was a huge issue because they were fetishising an offensive term in a way that hurt people, throwing out real disabilities as prompts in this context seems like asking for trouble, because (as I said above) the context encourages quick writing with little thought or research. I'd rather vague it up: for example "inability to walk" with no qualifier would permit a broad range of interpretations rather than narrowing it down to something that inevitably impacts individuals. It wouldn't exclude the potential for stories fetishising paralysis, but it would minimise the risk. The approach of the hc_bingo mods seems to be the opposite: to be as specific as they can in prompts, allowing the participants less wiggle-room, even though they've said they encourage creative interpretations.

Caveat: in saying the above, I have to emphasise that although I'm taking part in the challenge, I'm not really a hurt/comfort person, so I don't consider myself qualified to make that judgement on the genre. There are surely aspects of this I'm not taking into account. I enjoy many elements of H/C, but when they're all thrown together it's a bit too much for me. (There's a real possibility that my own offerings for the challenge will not be judged "real" hurt/comfort. I'm prepared for that, and I'm okay with it.)

Comments

[shanaqui]

When I requested a fic with disability in it in the deancastiel exchange, I made sure to give some kind of guidance on how I wanted it dealt with, and the person writing for me did an amazing job. (They had an option of picking a different prompt to work with, too, so I'd hoped if someone did get me as a recipient, they wouldn't be forced to write about disability if they didn't want to/didn't feel capable.)

I've had a somewhat bad experience in the last few days of people, without reading my fic at all, looking at the headers and the fact that I have written a handful of fics with disabled protagonists, and accused me of fetishising disability. I write fic with characters who have disabilities in it for several reasons, but I don't think I should be required to justify the simple act of doing so, because it's personal. But because I don't want to spill my guts all the time on the internet, clearly I'm doing it in bad faith.

(My actual reasons for writing characters with disabilities: I don't identify as disabled but have a minor disability, my father isn't registered as disabled but should be if he didn't cling to his stubborn pride, my mother is going blind, and it's quite likely that me and my sister have the same faulty gene and will be blind by the time we're fifty. Consequently, I a) work out my feelings concerning these things when writing characters with disabilities, and b) want to see more characters with disabilities in fiction because the whole issue gets ignored much more often than not. I don't mind volunteering this information in a time and way of my choosing, but I do not appreciate people demanding it and refuse to do so pretty much on principle when pressed.)

[briarwood]

I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with writing disabled characters or even with giving canon characters non-canon disabilities. The problem - if it is one - comes from the way its done. If you're coming from a place where it matters to you personally, you are likely to be treating it with a certain amount of respect. If someone is thinking "wouldn't it be great if X were blind/deaf/whatever" as a route to some other end, as is so often the case in H/C fic...well then I suspect it's a lot less likely that the writer will consider the disability as something real.

I see requests in fic-search communities "any fics where X is suffering from...." and it makes me wince. But that doesn't mean it can't be done well.

Such stories, when done badly, aren't without merit, either - I mean, everyone's got to go through the badfic phase at some point or you never learn how to do it right.

I've had a somewhat bad experience in the last few days of people, without reading my fic at all, looking at the headers and the fact that I have written a handful of fics with disabled protagonists, and accused me of fetishising disability.

Well, if they're not even reading your stories first, that's just bull. "They" can't have it both ways: if you want more disabled characters in a media (or more women, or more minorities etc) then along with that goes some (or even most) of the people writing those characters are going to do it poorly and others will treat it as a fetish. Discouraging those who are at least trying to get it right is ridiculous.

[shanaqui]

Yeah, I ended up talking to someone today about it and they just couldn't fathom why magically removing disability at the end of a fic, for the sake of a perfectly happy end, might be offensive. That is one of the main things that bothers me, reading fic where there are disabled characters. There was one that I thought was amazing, even though it did have magical healing at the end... but then they wrote a sequel and ruined it. *sigh*

If people are prepared to write disability badly, get told they're doing it wrong, and learn from it, then it's a positive thing. I've seen even people I respected totally dismiss criticism, though.

Well, apparently, writing several fics with characters who have disabilities at the core without producing a good excuse means you must be a fetishist by default! According to this handful of people I was talking to, anyway. It's very discouraging... If they read the fics and said I was doing something wrong, I'd be happy to listen, but the simple fact that I've written more than one fic with a disabled character shouldn't be incriminating... I worry about this kind of attitude because it means the people who care and are sensitive to the issues probably won't write it, for fear of causing offence, and the writers left will be the ones who don't care.

[briarwood]

Well, apparently, writing several fics with characters who have disabilities at the core without producing a good excuse means you must be a fetishist by default!

Wow. That's just.... I dunno.

I admire you for doing it, truly. I've tried to create and write disabled characters myself but so far I've not been very successful.

[shanaqui]

Hard to know what to do with that, isn't it?

I've been doing it for quite a while now (first disabled character written at about the age of twelve) and I have good resources for research (a handy doctor for one, and a friend who blindfolded me and then taught me how she was taught to lead a blind person, which was informative, and other such things), plus the need to get to grips with these ideas, so it comes... not easily, really, but naturally at least, for me.