Pet Peeve 18

I’ve got a major set of posts in the works but Christmas shopping this weekend has left me too worn out to put the proper concentration into them. Its also left me irked. In the realms of thoughtless things able bodied people do this is pretty minor. None the less it irks me that cashiers feel the need to hand me my change, receipt and purchase all at once and often get annoyed when I need a moment to sort everything out.

I walk with a cane. The more tired I get the more reliant on it I become. That pretty much ties up one of my hands. Ever tried holding a bag and using a cane in the same hand? It doesn’t work very well. Even a little bit of weight in the bag throws everything off.

This means that I have one hand to accept my change, sort coins from bills and get it all into my wallet. That same hand has to transfer the receipt somewhere useful. On top of that I then have to arrange the purchase in a way that I can actually carry it (for some reason I get weird looks for hanging a row of grocery bags off my forearm).

Needless to say I can’t do this all at once. Having everything pushed at me all at once tends to result in money and receipts being hastily shoved into pockets and bags gripped awkwardly. So far i haven’t dropped any purchases or lost more than a coin or two. i’m convinced that one of these days I’m just going to leave a trail of money behind me.

As I say, I know this is a pretty minor pet peeve. Still, its one of mine. Stay tuned for something a little more thought out, just as soon as my brain comes back on line.

Roar!

Where’s My Narrative?

After dithering about whether or not to start this blog and how the best way to do it would be I’ve finally decided to just take the leap. Rather than fill in a lot of back story about me I’ll trust you can figure it out as we go along. Without further adieu....

Where’s My Narrative?

My wife and I have been rewatching the television series Buffy and as we’re want to do spending a lot of time analysing and discussing each episode. As a feminist writer my wife has focussed a lot on the depictions of women in the series and what messages, both deliberate and unintended are being sent. We’ve also talked about the representation of people of colour and noted some of the issues, especially for a series that’s set in southern California.

All of this has lead to me banging my head against a wall. Buffy, for all its flaws is attempting to provide a narrative of strong, independent women who are powerful in their own right. It broke new ground in providing an empowering, positive narrative for women. Lord knows it was long over due and still has a great deal of ground to make up.

As a person with serious physical disabilities I’m still waiting for the narrative that speaks to me. While I’m not a huge TV or movie person I’ve been struggling to even think of narratives that include charters with disabilities. So far I’ve come up with a character on the series Oz who was in a wheelchair, I believe permanently. There are three characters from sci-fi/fantasy series who have lost an eye, G’Kar in Babylon 5 and Colonel Saul Tigh in the new Battle Star Galactica as well as Xander from Buffy, in each case there’s a distinct lack of consequences to this loss. The only other examples I’ve been able to come up with are movies like Born on the Fourth of July and one or two others that are deliberately “issue” narratives.

There are probably other examples out there but what it comes down to is a distinct lack of narratives that speak to someone with disability. There are no narratives about couples, where the husband stays at home because he’s disabled and can’t work rather than some no good slob. There aren’t romances or adventure movies where the protagonist uses a cane or crutches or is confined to a wheel chair.

Its hard to pretend that popular culture like movies and television don’t shape the perceptions of people a great deal. Whether they were written to do so or not they send a message of how things are supposed to be. Apparently people who have disabilities that can’t be ignored should be invisible or occasional focusses of pity. Apparently we have no other role in the world.

I wish I could say that people don’t actually think that way but the truth is that a lot of people do. A lot of people are happy enough to pity me once and a while. A lot of people don’t want to see me trying to juggle my wallet, purchases and my cane in thee check out line. They don’t want to see anyone who walks strangely.

As anyone with a disability or a loved one who has a disability knows, we’re not invisible, we’re not a focus of pity. We have all the traits as people that make for good protagonists, we love, we hate, we behave nobley and ridiculously. Our strength may not be that of the sword swinging action hero but we are still strong. So where are our narratives, where are our movies and television shows?