Category Archives: media and pop culture

Disability & Fiction: After the Dragon by Sarah Monette

Sarah Monette wrote a short story for Dragon Magazine called After the Dragon.

After the dragon, she lay in the white on white hospital room and wanted to die.

The counselor came and talked about stages of grief and group therapy, her speech so rehearsed Megan could hear the grooves in the vinyl; Megan turned the ruined side of her face toward her and said, “Do you have a group for this?”

She felt the moment when the counselor dropped the ball, didn’t have a pre-processed answer, when just for a second she was a real person, and then she picked it up again and gave Megan an answer she didn’t even hear.

The doctors talked about reconstructive surgery and skin grafts, and Megan agreed with them because it was easier than listening. It didn’t matter; they could not restore the hand that had seared and twisted and melted in the dragon’s heat. They could not restore the breast rent and ruined by the dragon’s claws. They couldn’t stop the fevers that racked her, one opportunistic infection after another like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Her risk of thirteen different kinds of cancer had skyrocketed, and osteoporosis had already started in the affected arm and shoulder.

They could not erase the dragon from her body, and she hated them for it.

Confession: I think I met Sarah Monette at WisCon last year.

I think this is an interesting story about disability. Unlike so many others I’ve read, it assumes the main character, Megan, is a complete human being and doesn’t need to go through something in order to become complete. It centers Megan in the story, not the reactions of her friends and family, while at the same time making it clear that not everyone can cope with a sudden dramatic change in ability status. It doesn’t present this as a story where Megan learns a Very Special Lesson, or is a Very Special Lesson for others.

I’m in a household where disability has been a component since I started it, so I’m not as familiar with the Stages Of Grief that can come from a sudden and traumatic change in ability status. To me, it all reads true.

I admit, I was dreading reading this when I realised it was going to be about disability and recovering from trauma, but I’m glad that I did. I think it’s a good short story, and I like how disability just is in it.

After the Dragon.

A Letter for your Toolbox: How to ask for transcripts and subtitles

A while back, I talked about how to make your blog more accessible, and brought up the issues of transcription.

Transcription is damned hard work to do properly, which leaves a lot of people in bind. It’s time consuming, it can be difficult, it can cause pain, and this doesn’t even get into stuff like how some people with disabilities just can’t provide transcriptions, for whatever reasons.

So, what do we do with content like that, especially now that things like vlogs and videos are becoming more and more a part of the blogosphere?

I think this is something we need to spread around a lot more.

Often, people who create vlogs will have a script they are working with. I suspect that many of them could be talked into doing stuff like providing a transcript or even including subtitles for their videos. But the difficult thing is, how do we ask? How do we suggest that they do more?

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of letters, and have written a few in my life. I know what the big challenging bit of letter-writing can be: where do you start?

So, here is something I’ve drafted up. I’ve sent it once so far, so I can’t tell you what the success rate is, but feel free to use it, adapt it to your purposes, and send it along to people who’s vlog content you would like to see have a transcription and/or subtitling.

Personalise it to your heart’s content, and ignore/add things as you see fit, and don’t fret about crediting me in any way.

It’s a tool in our toolbox to encourage wider web-accessibility. The more uses we get out of it, the better!

Dear [Person]

My name is [Anna], and I’m a big fan of your vlogs/videos [Here I listed two videos I really liked].

I would like to link them [on my blog, www.disabledfeminsts.com], but I have some difficulties.

I’m a proponent of increased web accessibility for people with a variety of disabilities. Part of this means including transcriptions of video content when I link things. This is so that people with a variety of needs, such as people who are Deaf or hard of hearing, have auditory processing disorders, or have other disabilities which make watching video content difficult, can still get the content of the video. It is also useful for people who are not native English speakers, and people who, for whatever reason, cannot have the speakers of their computers turned on. Providing transcriptions allows all sorts of people the opportunity to get the content from your videos who might otherwise not be able to.

I think your blogs/videos are great, but whenever I want to link them, I have to make a decision: Do I have the time/energy to transcribe this video so that everyone can get the content? If I don’t, do I link it anyway, and hope someone else will come along and provide a transcript for me? Or is it just easier over all to not link your videos?

Obviously, your videos are very popular, and you’re not hurting for viewers because I don’t link them on my site. But I do think you’re missing an opportunity to have even more people access your content.

I suspect that you script your videos in advance. Would it be possible for you to provide a transcript on your YouTube page, or in your blog, for new videos? As well, YouTube allows you to upload captioning on video content. They provide information on how to do that here: http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=100077

I know that creating video content is time-consuming, and I really respect the work you’ve done. Providing a transcript and subtitling would be a great way of allowing more people to access your content, which would be win-win for everyone.

Thank you for your time!

[Me!]

If you have success with a version of this letter, let me know!

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants: A Discussion That Always Happens From Outside

My addiction to YA literature has moved on to another series. I decided to check out Ann Brahsares The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Aside from the fact that I am going to really milk this series for review fodder, I really enjoyed it, for many reasons.

Seldom do I find stories written by women that tell women’s stories that I think get so much right. Here, we have the stories of four young women, Bridget, Carmen, Lena, and Tibby, who have grown up together, and for the first time are going to spend a summer apart. Young women who have grown so much a part of each other and have formed such a tight bond, a sisterhood that forged long before the eponymous pants found their way into Carmen’s closet from the thrift store, must branch out and discover how to be whole women by themselves.

And that is a story that I don’t get to read often in popular young adult fiction.

I fell in love with this book just a little bit… more than a little bit.

Which is why it pains me just a little bit to write what I am going to write.

Three of the four girls goes away from home to stretch her wings in situations that are so poignant that I felt the need to hide my face behind my book and bury my tears in the pages. Of the four of them, Tibby alone remains in Washington, D.C. for the summer, getting a summer job, dreading being home without her friends. During her shift at the department store Tibby begins an at first reluctant relationship with a twelve year old girl named Bailey, who passes out in the middle of the antiperspirant display that Tibby had built. Through a series of events that leads Tibby to Bailey’s bedside both at the hospital and at her home, it is revealed that Bailey has leukemia.

We pretty much know what happens to kids with cancer in books like this.

Bailey serves as a vehicle to help Tibby learn to see past appearances as they make a documentary together, or the “suckumentary” as Tibby likes to call it. First intended to be a slightly mocking film about people Tibby finds somewhat laughable, Bailey conducts interviews that help Tibby see these people for unique and wonderful people, each broken and needy like she herself is. Bailey is, of course, here to teach a Very Special Lesson to Tibby, who will then go on to learn so many wonderful lessons from it that she will pass on to her friends in the form of a message on the Pants.

Because naturally Bailey’s time runs out. Time, that thing that Bailey fears most, calls up on Bailey. And Tibby goes through a long and painful denial that she must call upon the Pants and her friend Carmen to help her overcome.

I must ask: Why do we always read of the story of Cancer Girl from the perspective of the healthy and able bodied outsider? I have read so many stories (My Sister’s Keeper, comes to mind, and although she doesn’t die, I know I have read others where the Kid with Cancer is meant to teach a lesson from outside the perspective), and have yet to find one that tells Bailey’s story. Bailey is brave, and good, and wonderful, and she has much to teach us, but does she not ever depart the world with any wisdom of her own? Is she only here to impart and never receive?

I hate that the Baileys of YA are only ever vehicles and never the main character. I hate that I have to read Bailey’s story from someone else’e eyes. It reminds me that the disabled and chronically ill are to be talked about, but not to. Our stories and lives are teaching tools, but not to be lived or experienced. We are to be silent.

Bailey’s story marred this otherwise exceptional book for me, and yes, I was delighted to also have Bailey be a young woman, another woman’s story, but she was just a window dressing, like Tibby’s guinea pig who also died.

Bailey lives on, though, in the Pants, and in Tibby’s first movie, and in the friendships she forged outside of her sisterhood when she needed to. I just wish that it didn’t take Bailey’s life and story to teach this Very Special Lesson.

Also worth noting, the author uses the word “lame” frequently, although I think it was only for two of the characters, as casual dialogue. It grated on me to no end. I wish it wasn’t so pervasive. This otherwise lovely novel that has strong feminist language and themes was kind of flawed by this.

Thank you, always, to Chally, for recommending this book to me. I am going to be reading the next in the series very soon. It seems that one of the girls deals very seriously with depression, and if this is a continuing theme, perhaps you will hear from me on that one too.

Open Letter to the Mainstream News Media

Dear Reporter,

Hi, how are you? I am fine.

Okay, that’s a lie. I am not fine.

There’s a certain type of “news” article that drives me up the wall. The “feel good” story about how the poor pathetic cripple, whose life was horrible and bad, has now been SAVED! by something miraculous, by which we mean “something that would be common place if we lived in a world that wasn’t full of disability fail and discrimination” and also “something done by non-disabled people so we can all talk about how Good and Kind they are to the pathetic disabled person”.

Here’s an example: Legally Blind Man Gets First Job

Debbie and Russell Ward spent a whole evening crying in silence when they were told their four-year-old son would never see again.

Fifteen years later, their tears were ones of joy when they saw the look on Bobby’s face as he was told he had landed his first job.

The shy but proud 19-year-old worked his first shift at the new Supa IGA yesterday morning, where he will work in the produce section.

The article [do read the whole thing] describes how Bobby has multiple certifications that would make him qualified for a variety of jobs, but everyone should be Very! Happy! because look! The poor blind boy has a job. Isn’t it so awesome of the “new Supa IGA which opened yesterday morning” get this free publicity – I mean, give this nice young man a job?

The whole article is structured in such a condescending way, too. I mean, all due respect to Bobby’s parents – I still get teary whenever it hits me again that Don may never get his voice back [1. Side effect of the OMG! Cancer surgery. They removed his thyroid, and hurt his vocal cords. They may come back, but every day it seems less likely.], so I totally get the grieving period and how it can be a total blow to find out your life has been drastically changed – the article focuses a lot of attention on their grief, how their life was affected, and what they thought about everything.

Notice, please, that there’s not a single quote from Bobby himself. Just the Nice Sighted People who work so hard for him.

Look, Reporters: I get it. You want to tell a story that makes everyone feel good, and really digging into why Bobby couldn’t get a job he had qualifications for because of his disability wouldn’t really make anyone feel good at all. Prejudice rarely does.

But these sorts of stories fuel people’s pity. “Oh, how sad it must be to be blind! A world of darkness, of dependency, of not being able to drive a car! WOE. I’m so glad I’m not one of THEM. And I don’t know how I’d cope if my child were one of them. Oh, Bobby’s parents are so brave! And that nice man who gave him a job! So Nice!”

You can do better than this, really. I’ve seen you do better than this.

Do better, okay?

Hugs & Kisses,

Anna

A Difference in Perspective: Experiencing Avatar Exceeds the Marketing

We recently took a family excursion to the theatre in Seoul to see Avatar (and we can discuss our decision to take The Kid to see it another time, as in, not at all). I thought I would suck it up and see it as a service to the rest of the team here at FWD so that I could write an honest review from the perspective of someone who has been sheltered from the marketing of the movie. You can thank my language barrier and the reluctance of Hulu to stream in our country. Wev. As you may know, the marketing of the movie and views put forth by some of the actors kicked out some seriously ableist themes. After reading this transcript of the interview with the lead actor I was prepared to not like the movie at all because of the Bad Cripple message that I got from that video, the caricature of the disgruntled former Marine, and a lot of the other tropes that were chucked out there in a lot of the reviews. In fairness, I tried to not read a lot of them so that I would come into this review with a clear mind.

I was completely prepared to hate this movie.

I pretty much surprised myself and enjoyed some parts of it. Or the parts that I feel were realistically portrayed.

That is not to say that most of this movie was a big pile of fail from a feminist perspective.

To be fair off the top: This movie is pretty fucking racist. But guess what?

This is not the first time this story has been told with this theme, so I consider myself kind of inoculated to it at this point. By the time I had seen Dances With Wolves, Pocahantas, The Last Samurai, Fern Gully, and several others I am sure could come up on a more comprehensive list, I was used to having the “White Guy meets Native Group of people (and is either supposed to betray them or not), becomes accepted into their culture, and then falls in love with Native Woman or Culture (or both), and ultimately becomes the savior of Native People” movie shoved at me every Award season. Understand me when I say that I am not OK with the implications of this; I am simply becoming numb to the experience and how ingrained it has become.

Here I go. Oh, and: EXTREME SPOILER WARNING!

LAST CHANCE TO TURN BACK FOR SPOILERS

SPOILERS!

Despite what I believed going in, Jake Sully was not a disgruntled Marine who believed that he had to get his legs back in order to be a normal human being. He wasn’t seeking the Avatar as a vehicle to deliver this to him; I found his desire to be in the Avatar directly linked to his desire to be with the Na’ Vi people in general, as he had fallen in love with them and the Cheif’s daughter (if this sounds cheesy, don’t blame me. I think Cameron drank some bad milk before writing some of the dialogue). There is one scene where Jake first enters his brother’s Avatar that he excitedly runs about the garden and experiences using legs again… curling his toes in the dirt. I am not a wheelchair user, nor an actor pretending to be one, so I don’t know what it would be like to live in either of these situations. I can imagine that being a veteran, and having your worth tied to your abled body must be an experience that changes the way you view disability.

Jake Sully’s desire for getting his “real legs” back is directly linked to his feelings of self worth as a Marine, and the actual caricature, the Marine Colonel Quaritch, does nothing to make him feel differently, but rather offers to cut red tape with the VA (who apparently is still a shit pile of failure years in the future) in exchange for Sully’s promise to sabotage the Na’ Vi from inside. Jake isn’t the brainy super genius that his twin brother was, who was able to help pioneer the Avatar technology. Sully was only valuable for the parts of his body that the government needed. Before it was his legs that could carry him into combat, and now that those were no longer doing that, I got the feeling that Sully was struggling with what he was supposed to do now. Then, in a brilliant plot device, his amazingly intelligent and never appearing in this film twin brother, conveniently died leaving him to be called up because he has the correct DNA to sync with the avatar. The reality of Jake Sully’s life isn’t that he is an ableist jerk… rather, he has only ever been as good as what his body has to offer to the government. This is reinforced by Doctor Augustine, when she uses a constant barrage of insults against Sully’s mental acumen. He doesn’t measure up to what his twin was capable of.

Jake Sully, is, again, told he is not good enough by the able bodied world.

I don’t view these as the same thing. This isn’t a disgruntled Marine. This is a society that hasn’t learned how to accept a person outside of the standard, and doesn’t yet know how to accept them into their perfect world. Society doesn’t know what to do with a Jake Sully because it doesn’t want to…and why should it? It will just cast him off and get more fresh, able bodies to replace him. He isn’t their problem any more, right?

So, it is easy to paint this movie as ableist. I was ready to cast it aside as such, probably because I already hold James Cameron as a misogynistic douche nozzle and a racist ass hat to boot. I want him to fail at this too. But what he has done here actually impressed me a little (even if the actor’s own words betrayed the sentiment). He managed to show the real pain of a veteran, separated from the only thing that has ever given him a connection to anything useful. He has shown a disabled person living in the actual world…and sadly it still exists in the future.

The rest of the movie, despite being fucking gorgeous, is a pile of tropes waiting to spring forth. Despite decent performances from actors and actresses that I adore (Zoe Saldana, Giovanni Ribisi, and Sigorney Weaver), it was cliche. You want bad ass military chick who loves to blow shit up? We got that! (she dies) We have a chief’s daughter who falls incredibly in love with the mysterious outsider! We have the White Guy pretty much slaying the dragon (almost in a literal sense), and the hot warrior chick rides off behind him on its back. I almost choked on my popcorn when I saw him waving a machine gun around in the jungle as he led the natives to battle. How about the tree hugging White woman who wants to preserve the culture of the Natives because they can’t protect themselves (she dies).

All the CG in the world can’t cover up a bunch of “been there, done that” bullshit.

I leave you to your own thoughts.

Discuss.

For Cereal, Cute Overload?

A periodic feature in which we highlight some of the more ableist posts and comments in the blogosphere – the things that made us throw up our hands and ask “FOR CEREAL???”

I’m late on this one, but that doesn’t make me any less upset. Cute Overload is one of the best and most regular suppliers of the cuteness I so often need to take the edge off the day, but it’s becoming increasingly problematic. They have a continuing series called Cats n Racks, featuring photos of kittens placed in cleavage, usually cutting off the woman’s head. Recently the site posted a picture of a extremely wrinkled puppy with lots of excess skin and compared it to Eleanor Roosevelt (described here at Filthy Grandeur). She also points out a recent photo of a wallaby titled “The New Slave Girl, She Intrigues Me,” captioned with what sounds an awful lot like a rape fantasy.

Not content to settle for racist and sexist, the site went for a hat trick and added ableist to their list! In their post reviewing the ten most popular posts of 2009, number five is a photo of a bunny with a long forelock brushed over one eye, called “Emo Bun.”

a small grey bunny looking to the side, with a long forelock of fur falling over one blue eye.

The text reads “On June 18, Stephanie N. took a minute from cutting herself to send us this awesome shot, an emotional bunneh.” The alt-text for the photo of the bunny reads “No Mom I was NOT cutting myself!”

FOR CEREAL, CUTE OVERLOAD? I’ve written at length about my issues with the term “emo” elsewhere, but beyond that, the multiple references to cutting are 100% non-negotiably inappropriate. Having an undeniably cute bunny whine about cutting minimizes and dismisses the very real pain of people who do self-injure. It implies that self-injury is a choice as superficial and changeable as a trendy hairstyle and that it’s done to fit into a trend. It’s not funny. And it’s certainly not cute.

Do you REALLY trust women?

For the purposes of this post, I would like to remind everyone that the range of disability includes people who are mentally ill, paralyzed, Blind, Deaf, permanently injured, autistic, physically disfigured, with compromised immune systems or disordered speech or chronic pain or cognitive impairments, and many, many others. Disabilities may be fatal or not, may be degenerative or not, may be apparent or not. Being painful, fatal, stigmatized, or poorly understood does not mean that life is not worth living, and I will not tolerate any attempts to enforce a hierarchy of disability; there is no category of Especially Bad Disability that destroys any chance of worthy life.

A blue-purple sunburst in the background, white letters reading "TRUST WOMEN: Blog for Choice Day 2010"

Blog for Choice Day 2010

Have you ever participated in the stigmatizing of pregnncy, childbirth and childrearing when the parent, child, or both have, or could have or obtain, disabilities?

Have you ever participated in the cultural narratives that say:

  • Older women should not have children because their children are more likely to have a disability
  • Women with disabilities should avoid having children because their children might also have a disability, and it would be wrong, unjust and cruel to give birth to a child that is not in perfect health
  • Women with disabilities should avoid having children because only temporarily-abled women can properly parent a child, or being a mother with a disability would somehow deprive the child of necessary experiences or put a burden on the child
  • Women with disabilities should avoid having children because they are more likely to be poor and need public assistance, and their children would also be more likely to use public assistance in the future, resulting in a drain on temporarily-abled taxpayers
  • Women with disabilities would be selfish to have children, and to do so would contribute to environmental destruction, economic decline, and even degradation of the human species, and they and their children would be less valuable members of society because of their lack of perfect health
  • It would be a tragedy to have a disabled child, disabled children are less desirable than temporarily-abled children
  • Life with a disability is inherently worse than life without one; life without a disability is the baseline by which all life should be measured, so of course to have a disability would be a negative and would make a person’s life worse
  • Disabled children are a burden on their temporarily abled parents, more so than any other child would be, and this is because of the child’s disability rather than because of the lack of support and affirmation throughout all levels of society for PWD and their loved ones
  • Of course it is more desirable for a child to be perfectly healthy than to have some sort of medical imperfection, and those medical imperfections are a big stress and hassle on the temporarily abled people around the child, and there is something wrong with the child for failing to meet an impossible standard of perfection
  • Health and ability are objective concepts and our current cultural wisdom on them are completely right and the medical industry that puts them forth is infallible; our ideas about health and ability are the only right way to look at things and can be universally applied
  • To violate those cultural ideas means that you are inherently flawed
  • The answer to all of this is to go to excessive lengths to avoid ever having, or being around someone who has, health problems, up to and including letting the least healthy die off or be terminated before they can live at all

You know what? I’ll bet you’ve all done it. Even the most radical disability activist has participated in some of these cultural tropes at some point in their lives.

But I’ll bet the vast majority of people “blogging for choice” would never think of disability as related to “choice” issues, and if they did, it would be for the right of temporarily-abled higher-class white Western women to terminate a pregnancy that has a more-than-minute chance of resulting in a less-than-perfectly-healthy child.

This is why the “choice” framework fails. It fails all of us, but it particularly fails those of us who fail to meet society’s idea of the optimal person: the pale, thin, beautiful, and financially comfortable picture of perfect health. The person who never relies on others (no!), is “self-sufficient,” and isn’t likely to end up a burden on the important people.

The rest of us can “choose” to stop existing.

Do you really trust women? Or are you perfectly willing to override their choices if you feel they threaten your comfortable position in society?

And you expect me to think you’re any better for my rights and needs than pro-lifers, why?

(Cross-posted at three rivers fog.)

Edit, Saturday 1/23: I am being very strict in moderating this thread. The primary response from people who do not identify as disabled seems to be “Well, I respect your choice, even though it is clearly cruel and bad/makes me ‘uncomfortable’/is the ‘wrong’ choice.” That is exactly the opposite of what this post is saying. If that is what you got out of this post, you have a LOT of stepping back, listening, and learning left to do.

I’m not asking you to be nice enough not to forcibly prevent us from ever having children, or anyone from ever having disabled children, even as you eagerly stigmatized disabled motherhood/childhood; I am asking you to genuinely examine the deep-rooted prejudices you have been taught and challenge your thinking on childbearing/rearing and disability. I am asking you to question why you have these ideas about disability, and whether they are appropriate to hold as a person committed to social justice. Including for women.

Because, here’s a hint: a lot of us women have disabilities, and all of us were children once, and some of us will have children of our own. And we are still women. Are you really protecting women’s freedom? Or are you merely preserving the temporarily-abled supremacist structure of society, with temporarily abled women as a convenient proxy?

I ask you to consider these prompts, to attempt to truly challenge your assumptions about disability and parenthood. If you aren’t willing to do that, please don’t drop in to explain why disabled women are “Doin It Rong.” Check your privilege. Thanks.

Seven reactions to reviews of Rachel Axler’s “Smudge”

On-stage scene from the play. A man and woman stand looking into a pram, the woman with a many-limbed plush toy. The pram has a wild series of tubes and wires snaking out of it.

I’ve been shaking my head over the press for Rachel Axler’s new hipster-ableist play, Smudge. Here’s a lightning tour, with my response

s at the end. Emphases are mine.

In ‘Smudge,’ Baby’s disabled, and mom’s not much better, from Newsday:

Most couples look at the sonogram of their impending baby to see whether it’s a boy or a girl. But when Colby and her husband, Nick, scrutinize the picture of the life in her womb for an answer to the “what is it?” question, they are appalled to realize that they mean it. Literally.

Rachel Axler’s “Smudge,” the very dark 90-minute comedy at the Women’s Project, aims to be part horror movie, part domestic relationship drama. Their baby, a girl, arrives unbearably deformed, with no limbs and one big eye. Nick (Greg Keller) bonds with the unseen character in the pram encircled with tubes, and names her Cassandra. Colby (Cassie Beck, in another of her achingly honest performances) attempts to protect herself from the agony through brutal humor, maniacally snipping the arms off baby clothes and taunting the “smudge” until “it” miraculously responds. Or does it? […]

BOTTOM LINE The unthinkable, faced with wit but not enough depth

More, from Variety:

Title comes from the first word that comes to mind when Colby (Cassie Beck) gets a glimpse of her infant daughter, grotesquely described as having no arms or legs, an undeveloped skeletal structure and only one (beautiful, luminous blue-green) eye in her misshapen head.

More, from Time Out New York:

She is nearly indescribably deformed: a purple-grey mass of flesh and hair, with a single, disconcertingly beautiful Caribbean Sea–colored eye. Her horrified mother, Colby (Beck), describes the child as looking “Sort of like a jellyfish. Sort of like something that’s been erased.”

More, from SF Examiner:

Continue reading Seven reactions to reviews of Rachel Axler’s “Smudge”

Does Outright Speculation Make This Disabled Feminist Angry?

Answer: Yes.

Let’s talk about this piece-of-crap article recently published on that oh-so-“liberal” news n’ culture site, Salon.com. I’m prefacing this post with a warning for ableist language and concepts on the part of the article’s author, Rahul K. Parikh, M.D. The article begins as follows:

There was a time when a celebrity’s sudden death almost invariably meant illegal drugs…[a]nd so it seems with Brittany Murphy, the bubbly and bright actress who died of cardiac arrest at 32.

Yes, it seems. Point is, we don’t know much yet. There are other health-related issues or conditions that can lead to cardiac arrest, but is this acknowledged? Of course not! Parikh continues:

The coroner’s notes allegedly claim a pharmacopia in Murphy’s bathroom cabinet: Topamax (for seizures or migraines), methylprednisolone (a steroid), fluoxetine (an antidepressant), Klonopin (for anxiety), carbamazepine (for seizures or bipolar disorder), Ativan (for anxiety), Vicoprofen (pain reliever), propranolol (for hypertension, migraines or anxiety), Biaxin (an antibiotic), and hydrocodone (a narcotic pain reliever). Gone are the days of shameful crack pipes and empty gin bottles.

OH MY GOD, EVERYBODY PANIC.

Murphy’s medications, like those of [Heath] Ledger and Anna Nicole Smith, are on the shelves of your local drugstore, available with a simple trip to the doctor — or doctors — whom you merely need to convince that you need the stuff. Did one doctor prescribe her those meds? Did 10? We don’t yet know. But as a doctor myself, I just kept wondering (and not for the first time): What if doctors were more like librarians? Would Brittany Murphy still be alive?

Cue scary music! THE DANGER IS ON THE SHELVES OF YOUR LOCAL DRUGSTORE. Nevermind that people with chronic pain conditions and disabilities have to jump through numerous, often ridiculous hoops just to get, say, a month’s supply of medications that help them function and/or live life to the fullest extent possible. As one of these people, I am of the opinion that Parikh is being rather disingenuous here; these drugs, at least for us “average” folk with chronic pain issues, are usually not easy to obtain.

After nattering about how the medical field should follow the example of public libraries when it comes to monitoring people and their books meds, he continues:

One of the many negative consequences of such fragmentation is how ridiculously easy it can be to get drugs. Most doctors know patients who have desperately angled to get a prescription they don’t need, usually highly addictive pain medicines like Percocet or OxyContin. This is what we call “doctor shopping,” hopping from one physician to the next until they find someone willing to write a script. When the supply dries up, they go to another doctor, and then another. One 53-year-old man in California visited 183 doctors and 47 pharmacies in one year to support his addiction to painkillers.

Hey, nice use of anecdata there! What on earth does one 53 year-old guy in California have to do with Brittany Murphy’s situation? As for “most doctors” knowing a patient who has “angled” for meds they “don’t need” (who makes that judgement, I wonder?): cry me a goddamn river. The endless Helen Lovejoy-gasping about ADDICTION!!1 in fact makes it incredibly hard for some of us who need these medications to obtain them, and no amount of 1984-esque War is Peace anecdata–from someone, no less, who is supposed to help people in pain as part of his chosen occupation–is going to change that.

In short, the experiences of people with chronic pain are going be different than those of an able-bodied doctor, but nowhere is this acknowledged in this article–nor is it mentioned in many larger conversations about  painkillers and (possible) ADDICTION!!11.

Most of us who need these medications do not have the energy to doctor-shop. I do not wish to deny that painkiller addiction is a serious problem; it is, for some. Sadly, these sorts of “conversations” on the specter of supposedly widespread PAINKILLER ADDICTION!!!1–much like those focusing on the OBESITY CRISIS!!11–tend to focus entirely too much attention on extreme cases and anecdata, leaving out those who need these medications for legitimate medical reasons, and, I might add, some of whom spend a great portion of time proving said legitimacy in order to show that they are not addicts or doctor-shoppers.

But if “preventing” ADDICTION!11 in able-bodied people via endless hand-wringing about who “really” needs these drugs versus who doesn’t is the number one priority here, that is a problem. Yet again, the needs of those who are judged by society as most “important” or productive or fitting into able-bodied society are taken seriously, and the needs of those who do not fit this mold–because they need painkillers for actual pain and are therefore bad/unproductive/just a bunch of whiners–are ignored, or worse, actively shamed and castigated for things or circumstances that they cannot control.

And, as OuyangDan pointed out so eloquently on this very blog, there are a lot of things that we don’t know about Brittany Murphy’s death. Using her death as a poorly-researched, almost totally speculative “example” of the dangers of painkiller ADDICTION!!11 is not only tasteless, but it distracts from how ridiculously the concerns about painkillers, “legitimacy” and the specter of addiction are often framed by (mostly privileged) people who do not deal with these things in their daily lives.

Less infuriating: Many of the commenters seem to agree that this article and its “speculation” went too far, which is unusual for Salon commenters, as most of them tend to exemplify the worst of privileged white “liberalism” on a regular basis (as you would expect, this includes loads of abled privilege and the anecdata to back up their uninformed opinions).

Subtitles in Assassin’s Creed II and Ubisoft’s Pledge

I am somewhat of a gamer. I am not by any means an avid gamer or someone you should call up with questions. If you want a review of how easy a game is to play or how not confusing your controls are, I am your girl*.

I am mostly a computer gamer. I like my World of Warcraft just fine, thank-you. It has a lot of room for critique, and I have some letter writing campaigns to Blizzard in progress. But I like it. I have no love for Warhammer Online, having never played it after being promised by multiple reliable sources that I would be able to play it on my Mac, and after purchasing the Special Edition in order to get into the Beta, was most unpleasantly surprised. Whatthefuckever, I turned that store credit into a Wii Fit, something I actually used. And, no, I don’t care that you can now get it for Mac, they already shat in my Cinnamon Life. I am digressing when I just wanted to say that I prefer computer over console because I tend to find console controls too confusing for me —  all the button combinations are too much to keep track of. I like to set up my buttons in a row and get my “Pew Pew Moar” on. If it is more complicated than original Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros., I don’t really enjoy it. I just don’t have the reaction times or memory to figure out all of those buttons (and I don’t need an evo psych lecture on how girls just don’t have those skills, because I have many gamer skills that translate well into the PvP aspects of WoW…I just don’t have it for console gaming).

One thing that endeared me to WoW, however, is that all the dialogue is subtitled. I am not deaf, but I do sometimes have trouble sorting dialogue out from ambient noise, both in game and out. I don’t want to have to miss something in an otherwise mostly enjoyable game because I can’t understand what the NPCs are saying. It doesn’t matter how high you turn the volume, you just can’t get everything. WoW even lets me know when someone is yelling.

Back to console games…

One console game that I did pick up was Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed. There was a lot of excitement over this game, it was anxiously awaited — one of the most anticipated games of the year of its release. There was also a huge deal surrounding one of its lead developers that I will leave you to read up on,I just am too tired to rehash it — I was thrilled that it didn’t stop Jade Raymond from being a part of ASII’s team (no transcript at the link). Just for a fun exercise, Google “Jade Raymond + Assassin’s Creed II” and see how many search results come up with anything that has to do with how good she is at being a video game developer or producer, and then tell me why more women don’t go into that industry. The team at Ubisoft put in the beginning of the game that it was developed by a team of multi-cultural and religiously sensitive people from many diverse backgrounds. I found the game fantastic. The Guy beat it in just a couple of days (he eats games for breakfast like that), even if the ending did make him want to put it in the freezer, and even though I have only recently tried it, I have really enjoyed it. To me, the controls are really simple, the game play is methodical (note: things that really piss some gamers off appeal to me, as in part of my OC nature really likes the repetitive storyline, and the different things to complete. I *love* that, because it allows me to zone out, clearing my mind.), and the game itself is Really Fucking Beautiful. I love going to all the checkpoints and using the “eagle vision”, just viewing the cities.

One aspect that was missing from this design team, it seems, was someone who had input on accessibility, because one complaint I had, even before I was invested in disability activism to the degree I am now, is that it had no subtitles. Like I said, I often miss dialogue during cut scenes, and even if that does not affect my game play, it affects my gaming experience.

When Assassin’s Creed II came out I read in The Guys Game Informer that they made a lot of changes based on what fans wrote to Ubisoft asking for. Before I was willing to get this for The Guy for X-mas this year, I needed to see two things: 1) That the playable character could not drown in a two fucking inches of water, and 2) subtitles. Well what do you know, this iteration’s assassin can fucking swim, and Assassin’s Creed II includes subtitles for all of the game play.

Rawk.

We have it, and it both translates the Italian and has decent subtitles, although it doesn’t describe non-spoken sounds.

There’s more.

Ubisoft, apparently has made a commitment that they will always include the considerations of deaf and hard-of-hearing gamers in the development phases of their gaming creation. This is exciting news for me, coming from a company that I have come to really like. By like, I mean, has made the first non-Nintendo based console game that I can actually play (this is also because I find the new black controller included w/ the X-Box Elite military appreciation smaller than the original, and fits comfortably in my hands, even on a moderate pain day).

I am looking forward to finishing Assassin’s Creed so that I can move on to ASII, if for no other reason than for the subtitles. I wish they had made this pledge long ago. It is worth noting that I read on a gamer message board somewhere (I can’t find it now) that someone had written them, and they responded, saying they took that complaint very seriously, and now, here they have. This has raised Ubisoft in my mind.

Like it was hard to do at this point.

*I do sometimes call myself girl. I don’t have a problem with this.

More articles on subtitles in video games: Subtitles: Increasing Game Accessibility, Comprehension (Gamasutra)