aweber4

Abigail’s Final Exam: Prompt 1

Abigail Weber

Dr. Foss

ENGL 384

April 29, 2020

Troubleshooting and the Undermining of Social Issues in Dystopia

The definition of “dystopia,” according to Merriam-Webster, is “an imagined world or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives.” Dystopian literature is a large category, spanning classic works of required high-school reading like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 and recent popular works of young adult fiction like The Hunger Games and Divergent. At its heart, dystopian literature forces the reader to confront a horrific possible future and contemplate what current trends in our society might lead humanity down such a brutal path. Autistic author Selene dePackh likely intended to shine a light on the disturbing trends and rhetoric surrounding autism today and how they might lead to a dystopia if unchecked in her novel Troubleshooting. However, many austistic individuals already lead “dehumanized” and “wretched” lives as a result of our current ableist and disableist society, calling into question how much dePackh really needed to change the setting to highlight anti-autistic prejudice. By setting its story of autistic oppression in a dystopian future with a dramatically different political system, Troubleshooting lost an opportunity to examine the dystopian society that many autistic and otherwise neurodivergent or disabled people experience today.

In Troubleshooting, the main character, Scope Archer, is branded with a tattoo that marks her as autistic and removes her rights without her consent. She states that “tattooed, [she] was no longer entitled to due process” or the “presumption of innocence” before being subjected to forced medication, institutionalization, experimental procedures, or electroshock therapy (dePackh 5). However, autistic children, and some adults, face the same specters of involuntary abusive “treatment” and institutionalization without due process under the system of guardianship (Autistic Self Advocacy Network 1). “Almost every country” has a system of guardianship under which disabled individuals assigned a guardian “cannot choose where to live, where to work, who to be friends with, and who to marry without their guardian’s consent,” while the guardian is free to ignore the wishes of the person in their custody (Autistic Self Advocacy Network 1). They lose the “usual rights and responsibilities” of citizens without being legally recognized as “no longer a citizen” (dePackh 4). The law does not announce it is taking away the rights of disabled and autistic people by declaring them no longer citizens or branding them with tattoos. DePackh does not draw a comparison between the tattoo system and the guardianship system; she does not discuss how one led to the other, the ableist ideas underlying both, or the similarities between the two. A reader with background knowledge of guardianship can draw the parallel, but one of the biggest problems with guardianship is how little the general public knows about it. Without this knowledge, the tattoo and its accompanying restrictions simply become more set-dressing that establish how terrible the book’s society is, without prompting introspection or reflection on its contemporary precursors.

Troubleshooting does later engage with neurotypical guardianship of autistic people, but again renders its criticism irrelevant through its future setting. Scope has trouble living independently, particularly keeping track of monthly expenses, as a result of her autism. To deal with this, she takes in and ultimately marries an allistic man who handles the tasks she has trouble with. He quickly becomes abusive and controlling, and Scope has difficulty escaping him. This is an unfortunately common situation: some estimates place disabled people at almost twice the risk for intimate partner violence compared to their non-disabled peers, and even conservative estimates place them at a significantly higher risk that others (Breiding and Armour 455). Disabled people are at risk for intimate partner violence in part because their “increased dependency on others for long-term care” makes it difficult for them to leave abusive partners (Nosek et al. 178). The University of Michigan notes that disabled or elderly survivors requiring additional resources can add yet another barrier to escaping abusive relationships alongside those, like financial dependence and the fear of retaliatory violence, that their neurotypical and able bodied peers also face (“Barriers to Leaving”). However, dePackh undercuts this important point by explaining Scope cannot escape because “new domestic violence laws [don’t] favor” her (emphasis added), making it a recent development only relevant to the society and legal setup of the book (dePackh 168). This implies that before the dystopian future detailed in the book began, Scope would have handily escaped from her abusive relationship. Scope’s relationship could have played out along similar beats in today’s society, considering the numerous barriers to leaving an abusive relationship and the disadvantages disabled people have when navigating the law and dependence. Instead, Troubleshooting ignores the complex forces that push autistic people into abusive relationships and limit their ability to escape, replacing them with a clear-cut law passed by an openly misogynistic and disableist government.

By placing her narrative against a backdrop of a dramatically different future, dePackh makes her points on the treatment of autism feel irrelevant to the present sociopolitical system. She fails to connect the issues in the novel to their predecessors in contemporary America. Although readers with background knowledge of autistic issues or disabled advocacy may be able to make these connections, the text itself fails to illuminate them. This is particularly odd because the future described in Troubleshooting is not a distant one where current ideas of autism are forgotten. The narrator and protagonist is 15 in 2031, and the book was published in 2018, meaning that the United States completely transformed over Scope’s short lifetime from our current society to the one depicted in Troubleshooting. Despite this tremendous change all occurring while she was alive, Scope treats society as if it has always been this way, which might have been a powerful commentary on how the dystopia described in the book is not so different from modern America to an autistic child in the hands of an ableist caregiver—if the novel had ever mentioned this implication of Scope’s age. The short timeline could have helped to emphasize how close to dystopia the American political system is for autistic people already, but instead it serves to detach the world of the book from the real world through distracting, improbably radical shifts in the way the United States is structured. Readers are not left realizing how close we are to the world of Troubleshooting or questioning what part they play in preventing such a future. Instead, they are simply glad the world is not like that.

Word Count: 1057

I hereby declare upon my word of honor that I have neither given nor received unauthorized help on this assignment. -Abigail Weber

Works Cited:

“Barriers to Leaving.” Abuse Hurts, Regents of the University of Michigan, 2009, www.stopabuse.umich.edu/about/barriers.html. Accessed Apr. 28, 2020.

Breiding, Matthew J. and Brian S. Armour. “The association between disability and intimate partner violence in the United States.” Annals of Epidemiology, vol. 25, no. 6, June 2015, pp. 455-457. ScienceDirect, doi.org/10.1016/j.annepidem.2015.03.017.

“Dystopia.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster Incorporated, 2020, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dystopia. Accessed Apr. 28, 2020.

Invitational Summit on Supported Decision-Making and the Transition to the Community: Conclusions and Recommendations, October 18-19, 2016, Autistic Self Advocacy Network, June 7, 2018. autisticadvocacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/SDM-Summit-Conclusions-and-Recommendations.pdf.

Nosek, Margaret A., et al. “Vulnerabilities for Abuse Among Women with Disabilities.” Sexuality and Disability, vol. 19, no. 3, Sept. 2001, pp. 177-189. ProQuest, DOI:10.1023/A:1013152530758.

Abigail’s MPP: The Princess and the Fearless Youth

Abigail Weber

Dr. Foss

ENGL 384

April 22, 2020

Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there lived a powerful king and queen. Although they had every luxury and ruled a vast kingdom, they were childless for many years. At last, the queen gave birth to a daughter to great fanfare and celebration in the kingdom.

But the couple’s joy was soon replaced by horror as they beheld their child. Her tiny legs were uneven and twisted. Her little face had wide apart eyes and a crooked mouth. Purple and red blotches swirled around her body.

As she grew, each milestone seemed to only deepen their revulsion. When the little princess learned to walk, her parents could only lament the limping of her uneven legs. When her smile first revealed a tiny tooth, her parents recoiled. When she first spoke, her parents forgot that all children’s first words are clumsy and cursed the twisting of her lips. But as she was their only heir, they did their best to cure her.

For years, an endless procession of clergymen, physicians, and conmen made their way to the grand palace, each attempting to curry favor by fixing the unsightly babe. Prayers and charms, relics and salves, potions and spells–all failed.

Finally, when the princess was seven years old, the king and queen gave birth to a son. His limbs were even and straight. His eyes were close, but not too close. The royal couple cooed over the baby, marvelling at his perfectly sculpted tiny limbs and features. They rejoiced at his birth, and told their most trusted servant to get rid of their loathed firstborn. This man could not bring himself to kill her, so he sent her to live with his mother, a weaver in a small river village far away from the castle.

The elderly woman adored the child as a granddaughter, and taught her all she knew of navigating the world. Years passed, and the princess acquired a reputation as a wise and clever woman. The people of the village came to her to solve their disputes, and eventually people began to come from all along the river.

When the princess realized this, she begged Grandmother to spin her a veil to hide herself.

“Whatever for?”

“Oh Grandmother, Grandmother, they will hate me when they see me.”

“Everyone here has already seen you,” Grandmother argued, but when she saw how distraught her granddaughter was, she finally agreed.

And so the princess continued to pose riddles and answer questions, never revealing her body. Her legend only became more fabulous for the mystery, and many a questioner came simply to ask to see her. She laughed at each and sent them on their way, telling them “oh my dear, oh my dear, you will fear me when you see me.” Some of the cleverer ones brought gifts of food to tempt her to lift her veil, but she would thank them for helping her to feed her good Grandmother and give it to her elder to eat instead.

One day, a scarred young man about the princess’ age came down the road to her little cottage, muttering to himself. The villagers stayed well away from him, and as he drew closer, the princess could hear his hoarse words.

“If only I could shudder, if only I could shudder!”

The princess asked what he wished to know.

“Oh, my lady, I will give you fifty thalers, which is all I have in the world, if you will teach me how to shudder!”

“How to shudder? However do you not know how to shudder?” The princess asked in disbelief.

“My father said I could never learn anything, but the only thing I ever wanted to learn was to shudder. At campfires, when people told stories about spirits and the devil, they would say ‘oh, that makes me shudder!’ But I have never shuddered, and I only wish I could.”

At this the princess laughed, but he looked so forlorn that she soon stopped. After much thought, she said,

“Listen. At the edge of town is a gallows where a murderer was hanged last night. Go there and spend the night, and you will learn how to shudder.”

The boy obeyed, and returned the next day.

“Have you learned how to shudder?” The princess asked.

“How could I?” The boy rasped. “The murderer made poor company. When I set him by the fire to warm himself, he let himself burn up, and I didn’t want to burn with him so I hung him back up!”

The princess marvelled at this, but quickly came up with another plan. “There is a place on the riverbank where a young boy drowned, and his ghost is still there. A girl I dared to stay there for five minutes as a child fled in terror. Surely he can teach you how to shudder.”

The boy obeyed, and returned the next day.

“Have you learned how to shudder?” The princess asked.

“How could I?” The boy rasped. “A little boy fell into the water, and so I jumped in and saved him. As soon as I had done so, he fell in again! I had no time to learn to shudder!”

“That was the ghost of the little boy!” The princess said.

“Well, if he died by falling in the river, he should know better than to do it again!” The boy said hotly.

The princess laughed, and so did the boy, but inevitably he returned to saying “if only I could shudder!”

“Come back tomorrow, and I will teach you how to shudder,” the princess promised. The boy agreed, and left.

“Oh Grandmother, Grandmother, he will fear me if he sees me!” The princess cried to her guardian. “And I so want him to shudder, for he is kind and funny and determined, and I cannot bear to see him so sad! If I am truly so horrifying, he will finally shudder when he sees me, and so I will be happy. If he does not shudder, I will be glad that at least one person does not see me as a monster, but I will be sad for him.”

So resolved, she met him the next morning and invited him into her cottage. She drew the curtains and lit candles. At last, she removed her veil.

He did not shudder or look on in fear, but even more, he was not confused or revolted by the sight of her, and his eyes didn’t linger on her as something to be picked apart, examined, fixed. She could no sooner imagine him among the procession of physicians than she could imagine him shuddering.

“How are you going to teach me to shudder?” The boy asked, oblivious to the princess’ self-consciousness.

“Lay down on that mat and go to sleep,” the princess ordered. “When you wake up, you will have shuddered.”

Once he was asleep, the princess opened his shirt and poured the flopping tadpoles all over him. He awoke shuddering.

“Oh my lady, my lady, look how I shuddered! You’ve taught me how!” He embraced her with joy and spun her around, setting her back down carefully so she could balance on her wobbly legs.

The boy never shuddered again, but it mattered not, for he was satisfied. In time, he and the princess were wed, and when the royal family died and left the kingdom without a ruler, the faithful servant retrieved the princess and invited her back to the throne. She was a kind and wise queen, and she was never cured as long as she lived.

Word count: 1262

Writeup:

In my project, I decided to combine my love of fairy tales, particularly The Youth Who Went Forth To Learn What Fear Was, with disability studies. The result is a retelling that aims for the style similar to traditional fairy tales while avoiding the ableist tendency of such stories to cure disability. In this piece, I wanted to particularly engage with the ideas introduced during this course of freakery, societal expectations of ability, the cure narrative, and the way disability and neurodivergency affect relationships.

The story primarily engages with freakery through the character of the princess. The theory piece for this consideration was Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Introduction: From Wonder to Error–A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity from Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. As a child, her highly visible disability horrifies those around her and is highly emphasized by her parents’ desire to fix her. Her difference is exploited and speculated about both by physicians and clergymen, capturing both scientific interest and religious wonder as described by Garland-Thomson. The throng of people attempting to cure her makes the palace itself into a freak show with one exhibit, objectifying and exoticizing the princess even as the gawkers attempt to remove her disability. As an adult, the princess interacts with freakery again as her fear of prejudice drives her to cover her disability. Here, again, people flock to the strange and unknown, her fame growing in part because of the mystery surrounding her body. Even though she is engaging in the opposite of the traditional freak show by covering instead of revealing and leaving things to mystery instead of describing a fictionalized backstory in elaborate terms, her deviation from an expected norm is still greeted with curiosity, and her petitioners’ desire to see her face is an effort to categorize and understand–an entitlement to knowledge of her body that also defines the attitude of a freak show audience.

The story engages with the cure narrative and societal expectations of ability through both main characters. The princess’ experience of a cure is inherently negative, and she views escaping those who seek to cure her as a triumph, to the point that it is a part of her happy ending. Her parents had a clearly defined expectation for their child that did not allow disability, and so the princess labored under the pressure of an unattainable expectation. Like many cure-focused parents of disabled children, the king and queen view disability as stealing their child: a cure will return to them the child they should have had and that they actually want. On the other hand, the boy’s main goal throughout the story is to find a cure for one of the symptoms of his neuroatypicality. He is highly aware of his difference from other people, and sees his inability to shudder mainly through a social lens; he talks about how he cannot fully enjoy the social experience of campfire stories because he does not shudder at them with others. In the end, his happy ending is found in the satisfaction of experience. He has shuddered without truly changing his inability to feel fear, achieving satisfaction without a real cure to his disability.

Finally, my last goal with this story is to offer a nuanced relationship between a neuroatypical boy and a physically disabled girl. The main struggle was the constraints of the genre. Fairy tales are not long enough for nuanced and deep love stories, and often rely on instantaneous love and telling instead of showing. Despite these constraints, I set out with two goals: to portray how the two main characters’ disabilities bring them together, and to show they have reasons to love each other beyond those similarities. In particular, as the focus is on the princess, I wanted to make sure I did not simply portray her as falling for the first man who was not afraid of her. She falls in love with the boy for his compassion toward the drowning ghost, his sense of humor, and his determination. Although he cannot be afraid of her, he does not negatively react to her appearance in any of the many ways he still could. As with any fairy tale romance, it happens quickly from the audience’s view, but I believe I successfully included nuance and insight into their relationship.

Word count: 721

I pledge that I have neither given nor received unauthorized help on this assignment. -Abigail Weber

Abigail’s Response to Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar”

In “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar,” Jhumpa Lahiri explores the different and complex relationships that disabled people, particularly disabled women, may have towards traditional gender roles. Through both Bibi’s own ideal of marriage and the responses of those around her to this dream, Lahiri questions the underlying assumptions that people make both about the power of marriage, its importance, and its unattainable status for disabled people.

At the start of the short story, the unnamed narrator, a friend of Bibi’s, notices that Bibi longs for a husband. She primarily expresses her desire in terms of gendered expectations: she wants to have the full experience of a wedding and married life, complete with the protection of a husband and the duties of a housewife. Bibi’s desires stand out because disabled people are often desexualized and infantilized, seen as perpetual children with no sexual, romantic, or social agency. She herself recognizes and laments that no one will ever take her out on a date or marry her. As a disabled woman, she is locked out of the same gendered expectations that stifle her able-bodied peers. The stress and pain of being cut off from such a common institution, of being seen as undesirable for marriage, leads to a worsening of her condition.

After one particularly harsh seizure, a doctor concludes that marriage will indeed cure Bibi. With the prospect of a man loving and marrying Bibi, the narrator suddenly begins to notice her beauty. She describes these new observations as “apprais[ing] the pleasures she could offer a man,” demonstrating that she views Bibi’s desirability through the lens of male gratification (Lahiri 162). The narrator’s attitude toward Bibi subtly shifts in another way alongside this newfound appreciation for her beauty; she and her friends begin teaching her in romance and marriage. Even though the narrator mostly refers to it as a way “to distract her” and doubts if anyone would actually marry her, this shift in treatment likely helped Bibi (Lahiri 165). With their coaching, Bibi is now more a part of her peer group, no longer lamenting her lack of prospects but actively seeking out a suitor and making herself desirable. The idea that Bibi may be a marriage prospect changes her self-perception and that of those around her, revealing how important it is for a woman to be seen as romantically and sexually appealing to receive respect and interest in a patriarchal society.

“The Treatment of Bibi Haldar” reveals an important member of intersectional feminism: the disabled woman who is prohibited from partaking in the same marriage and family life that her abled peers are pressured into. The experience of womanhood is not universal, and Bibi’s struggle for romantic fulfilment is both a product of a patriarchal society that devalues single women and the product of an ableist society that fails to see disabled people as romantic and sexual beings in their own right. It is impossible to speculate on how much of Bibi’s desire for a man is based on her society’s definition of a woman as a mother and homemaker, and how much of it is a genuine desire for romantic love.

Word Count: 524

I pledge

Crooks, Isolation, and the Intersection between Race and Disability

In John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the primary disabled figure is Lennie, a physically strong character with an intellectual disability. However, the secondary character of Crooks offers the perspective of a character marginalized not only by physical disability, but racial prejudice. Crooks’ response to isolation is to reclaim the site of his isolation as his own space, free from invasion by those who cast him out.

Crooks has a small shed off of the barn where he keeps his things and spends much of his time, avoiding the rest of the workers. He stays here alone, and the narrator describes him as a “proud, aloof man” who “kept his distance and demanded that others keep theirs” (Steinbeck 66). However, the narrative implies that his pride in his loner status is a response to the ableist and racist exile forced on him by the other workers. When Lennie, Slim, and Candy all end up visiting him, Crooks tries “to conceal his pleasure with anger,” implying that his pride, anger, and protectiveness of his own space are a defense mechanism (Steinbeck 73). Crooks explains on multiple occasions that the other workers won’t let him in the bunk house because he’s black. Even though both Candy and Crooks have lived on the farm for years due to their disabilities, racial prejudice keeps them apart, as Crooks cannot come into the bunk house and “guys don’t come into a colored man’s room very much” (Steinbeck 73). Isolated from the white community of the bunk house, Crooks tries to occupy himself with the solitary pursuits of horseshoes and reading, but even he admits to Lennie that the lack of companionship is bad for his mental health.

Crooks’ isolation from any support network is damaging to his mental health, a fact he acknowledges himself. When talking to Lennie, he says that “a guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody…don’t make no difference who the guy is, long’s he’s with you,” drawing a direct comparison to George’s assertion that he and Lennie are going to be okay because they have each other (Steinbeck 71). Crooks even goes so far as to describe himself as “sick,” describing how he sees things and isn’t sure if they were real or not without another person to verify it for him (Steinbeck 71). Despite his reluctance to invite people in or talk to the people who exclude him, Crooks pours his heart out to Lennie once he realizes that the combination of Lennie’s poor memory and his own marginalized status as a disabled black man means what he says will likely never get out (Steinbeck 69). Crooks claims that the specific companion doesn’t matter, since all he needs is someone to make sure he isn’t hallucinating, but his resistance when Lennie innocently invades his space and his delight when he realizes that Lennie isn’t a reliable witness (thus meaning he couldn’t check whether Crooks is hallucinating, the reason Crooks claims to want a companion) belies that sentiment.

Crooks’ relationship to others is complicated, shaped by years of prejudice and isolation. As a disabled man denied a support system due to racism, even the companionship of a fellow disabled man who lives and works on the same farm, Crooks turns to pride and self-reliance for survival. When speaking to Lennie and believing he can be vulnerable without Lennie repeating it back to anyone, he reveals that he knows the psychological toll his isolation causes, but his pride won’t allow him to tell anyone else. After all, his loneliness is not self-imposed, and abandoning these coping mechanisms won’t bring him a friend or companion. Crooks is bitter, proud, and aloof, but these aspects of his character are informed if not created by his status as a man at the intersection of two marginalized identities.