SFContario, Part IV

Just in time for the weekend, here’s the final instalment of my SFContario report. Today we have two panels: Disability in SF and a final one on the unfortunate persistence of the Yellow Peril trope in SF.

Disability in Science Fiction and Fantasy

Suzanne Church opened this panel by quoting the Ontario Ministry of Education’s definition of disability. MEDU recognizes three kinds of conditions that could potentially require a student to need an Individualized Education Plan. Sensory disabilities include blindness and deafness, while physical disabilities impair mobility in some way. Cognitive disabilities include things as diverse as developmental disability, autism, ADHD, and also exceptional intelligence, because it too requires an individual learning plan.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden said that fandom is one of the most open and accepting communities she has run across. She can recall conventions where a deaf man showed up with a typewriter and lots of people stopped to chat with him in print. Teresa herself has narcolepsy, and one of her symptoms is that when something makes her laugh unexpectedly, all her muscles go limp and she falls down. Fans who’ve heard about her condition have been known to simply bend down and keep talking when she does that.

She also had a fascinating story about what happened when she brought a talented speech pathologist friend to an SF convention. After the two of them had been there for awhile, Teresa asked the friend what she thought of it all. The speech pathologist admitted that she was feeling kind of weirded out. Apparently fans don’t talk like ordinary people. We speak in paragraphs. Our interrupt rate and our eye contact patterns are different. We also use the conventions of written English in our speech.

Over the years, Teresa has been collecting a list of characteristics common among fans. We’re only or eldest children (check). We taught ourselves to read at an early age (check). We have poor eyesight (check). We have poor face recognition (check). We were also late to develop physical coordination. Teresa asked how many people present *hadn’t* been picked last for sports teams as a kid. In a room of 25 to 30 people, only two hands went up.

Teresa says she finds these characteristics fascinating, because most of them were in place long before our tastes in reading developed. I’ve been turning the fandom-as-a-syndrome hypothesis over in my mind ever since.

Fiona Patton wondered, if we’re all geeks, why are there so few geeks in SF literature? We all seem to want to be the six-foot guy with the sword. There was some discussion at this point of J.K. Rowling and the roles that squibs play in her stories.

The conversation then moved on to the deaf community and the way that some of its members are opposed to cochlear implants. Teresa presented an interesting analogy: if someone said they could “fix” your fannishness so that you could make small talk at cocktail parties, would you agree?

Jane Petrovich brought up Elizabeth Moon’s novel, The Speed of Dark, in which the main character decides to undergo a procedure to lose his autism so that he will be allowed to go into space.

Suzanne observed that we all want characters to develop and become “better” which can lead to a tendency to try and turn disabled characters into mainstream ones.

Teresa said that she has noticed this tendency in the medical community as well. Doctors keep wanting to correct her falling-over problem by prescribing strong drugs, but those drugs tend to have side effects that include things like unfocused eyes or losing the ability to concentrate. She would rather just fall down.

Suzanne noted that there’s a huge difference in the way that different disabled people feel about their conditions. Some people are very angry about it, while others are very cool with it. News media tend to turn every ill or disabled person into a brave, tragic hero, but fiction writers should really try to make their characters more rounded than that.

Jane produced a list of disability tropes that generated some discussion. First off was the Monster Psycho, where disability turns you into a killer. Examples would be Shakespeare’s Richard III and Annakin Skywalker.

Another trope is the character who is disabled, but “cured” by modern medicine. People felt that fiction doesn’t really deal with the psychological effects that linger after someone is cured. Someone in the audience told of a friend who had finally gotten control of severe chronic migraines. She described the aftermath as being like the after-effects of an abusive relationship.

Teresa said that everyone who has had a disability for awhile will become shaped like their disability. She realized this the first time she attended a narcolepsy conference and someone casually moved over and gave her some wall space to lean against while they talked. If someone is cured, there should be a period of readjustment.

There’s also the trope of the disabling superpower. Using your superpowers makes you ill in some way.

Alternatively, there’s the plot twist where the cure gives you superpowers. In some cases, the character gains abilities, but in others he trades some abilities for others.
Someone mentioned the novel Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson. It’s about a bad-ass porn star who gets into a serious car accident and loses his penis.

Another trope of SF is what Jane calls “Wookies need extra leg room.” SF can be very good at showing how a society could accommodate unusual non-standard bodies.

A further trope might be called “Everyone’s disabled compared to Superman.” When the universe has fantastical people in it, being an ordinary person can be challenging. Teresa noted that there aren’t many stories where humans meet aliens who are better than them at everything.
Chandler Davis also brought up one more trope: the Waldo. That’s a character who has managed to get around his disabilities by means of his own ingenious inventions.

The Yellow Peril and Exotic Asia Reflected through SF and Fantasy

This panel featured an interesting talk and slideshow by Jeff DeLuzio on the way that SF pop culture has treated East Asian characters over the last century. If you aren’t aware of the history behind some tropes, a character like Jar-Jar Binks can seem original and unobjectionable, but when you see the line of descent he belongs to, the character becomes much more problematic.

Jeff started with some images from roughly a hundred years ago. At the time, North America was terrified by the so-called Yellow Peril. Westerners had suddenly clued in that most of the world’s population is Asian, and it caused a moral panic. In the artwork of the time, the representative of the Asian hordes who would imminently be taking over the West and the Western way of life was a scowling man in a Fu Manchu moustache.

Around 1912, the novelist Sax Rohmer created the arch-villain Fu Manchu. Interestingly enough, the literary character was never described as having a moustache. In 1932 the novels were turned into the movie The Mask of Fu Manchu. The role of the evil genius was played by Boris Carloff wearing eye makeup and a moustache that would come to be known as the Fu Manchu.
Around the same time, there was a Buck Rogers comic where Buck wakes up in the future and Asians have taken over the United States. So he fights them.

Over time, pop culture went from defining East Asians as the exotic and threatening Other to representing completely alien and threatening species as being Asian. Carloff was followed by the comic book villain Ming of Mongo, a.k.a. Ming the Merciless. While Ming was supposed to be an alien from another planet, he also had slanty eyes, yellow skin and the Fu Manchu ‘stache. His long robes and Asian palace decor influenced many later artists.

When the costumers of the early Star Trek series were designing a look for their exotic villains, they came up with pointy ears, slanted eye makeup and Fu Manchu moustaches for their Klingons.

As late as the 1960s, Wonder Woman fought a yellow-skinned, slanty-eyed villain named Egg Fu. Once you’ve seen a string of images of Asian SF villains, you can even see the aesthetic at work in the portrayal of the Trade Federation of the Star Wars prequels.

Discussion opened up to the floor. Someone wondered if SF hasn’t enabled racism at times.

Another person brought up the issue of cultural appropriation. Derwin Mak, who together with Eric Choi has just edited The Dragon and the Stars, the first anthology of SF stories in English by members of the Chinese diaspora, gave his personal opinion. He’s not worried about non-Chinese people writing about China and the Chinese, per se. What annoys him is lazy writing where the author knows just a few characteristics of a culture and exaggerates these out of all proportion.

Also annoying is the assumption that all members of a culture are all of one mind and all have one agenda. This is the same as the old Star Trek cliché where every planet has just one alien race and one culture, and all the aliens agree upon one agenda.