Entry tags:

house md, m*a*s*h, meta, spammers are evil

Disability and fanfiction: House and Mulcahy
Over at the Six Apart place, vescoiya writes:

All of the current discussion of race in fanfiction and the whole issue of pay attention to what you write has made me think about another minority. The disabled minority. ..... Now oddly enough it is not that disability doesn't come up in fanfiction. It does. It is the way that it does most frequently. Normally what happens is that it is used as a plot device. X is horribly injured so now Y can help him and he realises his true feelings. Or it is used as an excuse for rather a lot of angst. In a lot of ways temporary disability or even permanent disability is the corner stone of h/c fiction.
.....
Now fanfiction doesn't exactly do this with most of the other minorities. You do get homophobia in slash, but only in a small percentage of it. I've yet to see explicit racism portrayed if one ignores for the minute the general lack of ethnicities portrayed in fanfic. Yet, give someone a disability, and it is suddenly a plot point. Possibly because you are adding in something that was not there to begin with. You do get dsylexia casually referenced but that is about it.
.....
I guess i'm asking where are the what if X was always blind fic? How about what if W was deaf? I mean we do get mental disabilities but only due to the extreme angst involved. I guess I'm asking why it isn't more commonly just a part of characterisation as opposed to if it is there then it ellipses everything else.

I started writing Sins and Virtues before I knew Mulcahy was going to be deaf through most of it. I began it before I'd ever seen Goodbye, Farewell, Amen, and it would certainly never have occurred to me I wanted to write a novel about a deaf character spontaneously: I mean, while I was vaguely interested in sign language and deaf culture in the way I can be interested in anything to do with language, I was never passionately interested. I wouldn't have made someone deaf for the sake of writing a story about a deaf person.

I got as far as the line "This close, despite the toothpaste and soap, Mulcahy could smell that Hawkeye was still drunk" and wrote An Officer and a Gentleman and Out and Far Tonight, and watched G, F, A ....and I knew I had a choice: I could magically decide the deafness got fixed (his ruptured eardrums grew back, etc) and wish it away in a sentence, or I could deal with it: what would Francis Mulcahy do with himself as a deaf man in 1954?

There was never really a choice: I love writing to canon. Mulcahy was deaf, I thought: OK. I'll write that.

The thing that was first and worst and perpetually hardest: I was writing from Mulcahy's POV, and he couldn't hear. The sound of someone's voice, the tone in which they said something: he might get it from his imagination, but never because he heard it. (I did slip once, but it's no good looking for it: the_shoshanna gleefully spotted it for me when she beta-read, and I blushed with fury and fixed it.) I did make him a very good lip-reader, but I tried to keep it within the bounds of probability. He had to be facing someone, in a good light, and the most he could normally keep up with was two people - and then only with considerable concentration. It's totally instinctive to write things like "He heard in Hawkeye's voice" and I had to keep stopping - all the way to the end of Such As We, it never became automatic - and remind myself that Mulcahy couldn't. Conversations had to be face-to-face: Mulcahy could look away when he was talking to Hawkeye, but Hawkeye had to keep his face turned towards Mulcahy. Obviously, any form of self-discipline in writing is a source of grace, and there was plenty of joy to be found in using those limitations: but it was a struggle.

I got to the end of "For Ever" without finding out all that much about what deaf culture would have been like in the 1950s: it took quite some digging, once I knew what a gap was there, to find contemporary accounts or histories. (I had help, again thanks to the_shoshanna and the Edinburgh City public library stacks. Mrs Dunsford is, in my imagination, what the author of a particularly bright little book on teaching deaf children must have been like.) When Mulcahy signs "I burned the toast" to Hawkeye, I first had to find out via a deaf community what signs in ASL a deaf person would be likely to use to say that, and then find a video dictionary of ASL so I could see the signs and figure out how to describe them from Hawkeye's POV. As Vescoiya wrote: "I do wonder if there is also an issue here about realism of portrayal. I don't want to write it wrong and cause offense." Well, yes: I wanted to get it right, as far as I could. Part of that was just my usual wanting to get it right (I also did an alarming amount of research into Catholicism, too, for the same reason) but an element of it was, probably, not wanting to offend any deaf fen who might read it.

But mainly: Mulcahy is deaf. That's canon. I couldn't change it. I was committed to writing a story about it. And I wanted very much to get it right. (I discovered, in the course of writing it, that a friend's mother is deaf, which I'd never realised before: she gave me, in a manner of speaking, Mulcahy's notebook.) And his deafness gave me far more back for all it took away. It remained difficult to write to the end, but it was worth it.

With House, though, I have no impulse to write about his lame leg or his addiction to Vicodin. He is: I wouldn't run away from it if I was writing a story: but I don't feel any particular impulse to write a story which focusses on it. (So far, the only story I've written about House was back before he [became the bitterly angry/hurt man who believes everyone he ever cares for will damage him and leave him that he became after his leg was damaged and he became addicted to Vicodin].)

My reluctance to write House comes from something rather different (or so I thought): he's emotionally damaged, in lots of rather horrible ways, and that's why I like him as a character (and yes, The Lion in Winter is one of my favourite films, why do you ask?) and I don't want to fix him. On the other hand, what story do I write if I don't fix him? About him hurting everyone he loves because they are sure to reject him once they find out what he's really like? I don't want to write that story. I've been toying with crossover ideas, but nothing leaps at me.

When I think of getting inside House, it's more appealling: thinking about how he walks, how it would feel, how it would be to be addicted. I can deal with disability. From the inside.

Update: attackfish also writes I Hate "Teachable Moments": Disability and Fanfiction, or How Not to Fail at Disability in Comments

Update update: My usual rule is to try not to use 29 words when one will do, but attackfish identified the one word I'd chosen as offensive, and as I really don't want to be offensive, I've amended the sentence accordingly. Sorry to all whom the original word offended: it wasn't my intention.