#sami schalk

[probablymoons]

Disabled Hardcore Reading Club #13

Critical Disability Studies as Methodology by Sami Schalk [Spring 2017]

Word count: 1381     Genre: Essay Content warning: references to slavery and racism

This essay is about academic discussions of disability being most valuable as a lens for analysis, rather than focusing on individual bodies. It argues that critically viewing social structures changes how disability is taught, studied, and understood. What do you think?

[blackberryjambaby]

tagged by @gloombby to share nine books i want to read this year

i felt the end before it came: memoirs of a queer ex-jehovah's witness by daniel allen cox / owls & other fantasies: poems & essays by mary oliver / black disability politics by sami schalk / optimism over despair: on capitalism, empire & social change by noam chomsky / ireland & the empire by stephen howe / devotions: selected poems by mary oliver / soledad brother: the prison letters of george jackson by george jackson / beloved by toni morrison / kitchen confidential: adventures in the culinary underbelly by anthony bourdain

i'm tagging all my mutuals. show me show me show me

[lesbianboyfriend]

Attention to accessibility [in activist work] not only ensures the participation of disabled people, which, as [Lorrell] Kilpatrick notes, can transform the practices of an entire organization, but also ensures that people can participate in movement work in sustainable ways because the multiple needs of their bodyminds are being considered and care, for one's self and each other, is valued. As Dustin Gibson contends, "All of the influx of sustainable practices that we in disability justice work] center for survival will be key to actually being able to do the work long term."

Sami Schalk, Black Disability Politics

[blackautmedia]

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

I have seen many, MANY discussions/debates about ca:cw and I have never seen anyone mentioning that Rhodey's injury was a metaphor. How did you get that idea?

Short answer: I’ve actually read a lot on the subject.  I’m teaching a media studies class right now called “What Can Superheroes Tell Us About Psychology?” (because that’s the kind of shit you can get away with at giant universities) and hoo boy are superhero narratives More Ableist Than Average.  Anywhoo, a few of those readings:

I’m quoting hard from the chapter “Hyper-Normative Heroes, Othered Villains: Differential Treatment of Disability in Marvel” in a book on disability studies because it’s free.  A relevant passage:

“These metaphorical portrayals all fail to engage with disability as a social category and as an individual identity, thereby ignoring its context… Nick Fury’s missing eye does not change his aim with distance weapons (e.g. Captain Marvel) or piloting software. Instead, it recurs in the films largely in metaphorical lines such as Fury’s commenting on the death of a friend with ‘I just lost my one good eye’… One character in Avengers even questions the lack of accessibility in Fury’s multi-monitor computer console, and Fury’s assistant simply answers that he must turn his head more often to compensate. The franchise thereby emphasizes that Fury’s missing eye is only a metaphor for his discernment and ability to see details that others have missed, rather than a truly integrated part of his character or even an accurate portrayal of that disability.

“8. This treatment of disability as metaphor persists throughout the MCU. In Captain America: Civil War, superhero War Machine incurs a permanent spinal injury while fighting on behalf of his best friend Iron Man. Later on, rival superhero Hawkeye… ‘You gotta watch your back with this guy. There’s a chance he’s gonna break it.’ The film then equips War Machine with a fantastical prosthesis that essentially nullifies his disabled experience through giving him the same range of motion as his non-disabled [abled] teammates, entirely without side effects or need for maintenance. The MCU films thus present disability as a metaphor for inner morality and characterization. War Machine has few experiences of being a disabled man through his spinal injury, but is instead emotionally ‘disabled’ by the damage to his social standing he has incurred through his friendship with Iron Man… The MCU thereby offers no critique of ableism or inaccessibility, instead continuing to localize disability as a problem with the body and the individual.”

Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond by José Alaniz is also a fantastic resource, and you can buy it for money here or hopefully find it at a library if you have no money.  A few of the relevant points from his book:

Superhero stories often treat disability as a “problem” that must be “solved” through in essence nullifying the disabled experience of the character(s) through superpowers that run directly counter to the disabilities and/or fantasy “cures,” e.g.

Daredevil is blind BUT navigates the world in a way similar to sighted people due to his “radar sense,” meaning that he doesn’t get to have a lot of the lived experiences of blind individuals

Don Blake is mobility impaired and uses a cane BUT his cane transforms into mjolnir and imbues him with the power of Thor, meaning that he spends most of the story moving like a nondisabled person

Hawkeye is hard of hearing sometimes in some of the comics, BUT he often gets magical cochlear implants from Tony Stark that cause him to stop being hard of hearing

Characters that are disabled and remain disabled tend to be villains whose villainy is either implied or stated to come directly from their bitterness over being disabled, e.g.

Doctor Doom hates that he’s scarred by an explosion so much that he wants to take over the world to get revenge on the Fantastic Four

The Lizard only transforms himself because he ignores all scientific and ethical boundaries in his desperation to stop being disabled

Doctor Poison is described by herself and other characters as a “monster” for failing to (unlike Wonder Woman) conform to White Western conceptualizations of female beauty 

Characters like The Thing, She-Hulk, and Bizarro have the potential for some really interesting disability narratives.  However, the same publication pressures that prevent permanent injury or death to the characters also prevent the inclusion of “serious” “real-world” issues like discrimination unless it’s metaphorical (e.g. anti-mutant fearmongering as a metaphor for anti-AIDS prejudice).

The Big Damn Foundational Text on the intersection of disability studies and media studies is Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, and you can pay money for it here but it’s also available at a lot of libraries.  Anyway, a couple of relevant points from that book include: 

Disability portrayals abound in literature going back to pretty much the dawn of history, but most of those portrayals suck ass because:

Most disabilities are treated as metaphors rather than demographic characteristics, which means that the disabled character doesn’t get connected to other people with disabilities (including those in the real world) and offers no commentary on ableism — if Richard III’s spinal misalignment is just a metaphor for him being “twisted” inside, it doesn’t allow readers with spinal misalignment to identify with him

Disabled characters tend to exist to teach lessons to nondisabled characters rather than having their own journeys — Tiny Tim isn’t a person in A Christmas Carol, he’s an object lesson for Scrooge

Many disabled characters either get “fixed” so that they look outwardly “normal,” or their “ugliness” is used to make concrete the abstract “ugliness” of their personalities

Disability is treated as a “problem” that demands an explanation – Captain Ahab’s prosthetic leg and Joker’s facial scarring are treated as automatically demanding the question “why are you like this?,” even though no one would ever ask the same thing of their nondisabled co-characters

Authors’ implicit ableism tends to come out in their horror of disability, such as when they portray disabled characters preferring death to disability, going to extreme lengths to avoid or nullify disability, and/or declaring themselves “worthless” or “burdensome” in light of disability

Discomfort with disability — another form of implicit ableism – also comes out when disabled characters are overwhelmingly “killed or cured,” meaning that they don’t get to end their stories as living individuals who are still, in practice, disabled

ANYWAY, that’s a long-winded way of saying that I also haven’t seen any critics specifically talk about Rhodey’s disability as a metaphor first and a part of the character second, but that that doesn’t mean the shoe don’t fit.  When someone asks about the Accords in Infinity War, Rhodey also says he supported them but then “I’m pretty sure I paid for that,” and gestures at his own paralyzed legs.  He also also says in Endgame “I wasn’t always like this… but we work with what we’ve got” when talking to Nebula, BOTH about the fact that he’s disabled and about the fact that half the universe is dead and they’re all struggling to cope with that fact.  It keeps getting used as a metaphor and keeps NOT getting used as a part of his identity.  LET THE MAN TALK TO SOME OTHER DISABLED VETERANS FOR TWO SECONDS, FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

A couple of other (free!) readings that talk about that general problem of “we love superheroes and we hate ableism, now what?” even if they don’t mention Rhodey specifically: 

“Reevaluating the Supercrip” by Sami Schalk connects media portrayals of the paralympics to media portrayals of Captain America and the Doom Patrol.  (I swear to god it makes sense in context.)

“Seven Roads to Justice for Superheroes and Humans” by Mikhail Lyubansky gets into the glaring (for me, anyway) question of “why the fuck are sci fi psychologists all so evil and useless?” by explaining why Harley Quinn must be evil for Batman to be a vigilante.

“Superhero Comics as Moral Pornography” by David A. Pizarro and Roy Baumeister (again, I swear it makes sense if you read it) discusses the evolutionary tendency to judge people based on disabilities and why it’s so popular in superhero stories specifically.

Anyway, you probably weren’t looking for an entire annotated bibliography in response to that question, but I’ve never been one to use five words when 500 would suffice.

[andthecynicswereoutraged]

As authors and activists imagine better futures, they create representations of that future — in words, in text, in images — which influence people to not merely hope for and believe in such futures, but work for them as well. They open up for us new ways of being in the world that may not yet exist, but could.

Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction

[darkmattersproj]

(Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined

[lesbianboyfriend]

Dustin Gibson argues that "race and disability were pathologized in a way that we can't separate them now.... I think we can't literally talk about ableism without talking about racism"; therefore, he continues, "I don't think that there's such thing as anti-Black ableism ... ableism is inherently anti-Black.”

Patrick Cokley similarly explains that in some regards "ableism is very much one and the same with racism because what we're really talking about is who has agency in our culture."

The relationship between racism and ableism (and other systems of op-pression) is most expansively articulated by TL Lewis, whom I quote at length in order to make clear not merely how Lewis and other Black disabled activists and cultural workers understand the relationships between these systems conceptually but also how this intersectional understanding shapes political approaches to social change. Lewis states:

I always chuckle about this because my brain doesn't disconnect them. There is no racism without ableism. There is no ableism without racism... you quite literally can't have one without the other.... There is a fundamental lack of understanding of the connections between racism and ableism, classism, and other structural and systemic oppressions that is killing us because if we understood those things—how they are connected, how there's an unbroken chain between asylums, plantations, zoos, circuses, and prisons—then we would be able to actually fight all of those things collectively and very differently.... [If we did make those connections,] then we would be able to have a much more holistic understanding of what is going on in our society but also a much stronger framework from which to unearth the histories... these collective histories and then dismantle the system—all of these systems....So long as we continue to allow people to think that it is just one or the other, we are going to keep spinning our wheels and not being able to identify the cause of the harm, which is all of these systems operating simultaneously.

Sami Schalk, Black Disability Politics