My New Year’s
Resolution is to not put effort into posts and turn this into a lazy Buzzfeed-style
blog. I think a good New Year’s Resolution for people who produce media is to
make an effort to include more characters with disabilities. But how can one
make a good character with a disability? Here are the top ten tips for make
positive representation of disability. Just follow this guide and you will be
completely inoffensive.
1. Every person with a disability is
an individual and media should show a diverse range of lifestyles and
characters. Also, the mainstream
audience is incapable of distinguishing between “character with a disability”
and “everyone with disability”, so only show a diverse range of lifestyles that
everyone in the disability community finds socially acceptable.
2. Don’t limit characters with
disabilities to straight, white, cis men. The ideal character is a pansexual,
black, non-binary trans person with a disability. This is known as intersectionality. But avoid
tokenism.
3. It is good to portray people with
disabilities being productive in society, but don’t show them having challenges
to work with because it is inspiration porn. In addition, make sure the same
people with disabilities have some challenges because otherwise it is
trivializing disability.
4. Characters with disabilities in
the upper class are problematic because they ignore the disproportionate
poverty rate among people with disabilities. The unemployment rate among people
with disabilities is high, but you shouldn’t have unemployed characters with
disabilities because it reinforces the status quo.
5. Increase the number of characters
with a diverse range of disabilities, but remember to find actors and actresses
who have each specific disability or it is “cripping up”.
6. People with disabilities make up a
significant part of the population, so remember to add people with disabilities
as side or background characters. Also, just putting in side or background
characters with disabilities is tokenism. Avoid this.
7. Invisible disabilities are widely
underrepresented in media, so there should be some more in 2017. But just
saying that someone has a disability and then ignoring the symptoms trivializes
the experiences of people with invisible disabilities. With that in mind, don’t
constantly remind us of their disability because that uses disability to define
a character.
8. One of the laziest and most
exploitative stories is to have an able-bodied character fall in love with a
character with a disability. A myth that needs to end is that people with
disabilities are asexual, but avoid having two characters with disabilities
fall in love because it perpetuates the myth that people with disabilities can
only be in relationships with each other.
9. An unhealthy trend is to have all
characters with disabilities be on the “good” side, because having a disability
doesn’t determine morality and people with disabilities are heterogeneous.
Furthermore, villains with disabilities are overused and harmful because they
equate disability with evil.
10. If you are unsure as to whether a
character with a disability is problematic, share it on social media. If at
least two hashtags trend against your character, it is time for a rewrite.
Let’s look forward to a great year
of disability-related movies!
