What you won’t be able to see when you first meet me is this: I’m a published author. I read all the time. I write all the time, too. I dictate, using an old-fashioned cassette recorder, and my mother types up my finished drafts.
July has officially come to an end, and with it, the blog’s daily post schedule.
What concerns me is that disabled characters are often integrated in the form of tokenism, meaning one token character that could be considered “different” is included in the plot. And even then, such characters are frequently depicted in stereotypical ways, despite being created by authors who may have the best of intentions.
With one word, one look, it hit me that my experience really was abnormal.
Being autistic and also belonging to another minority might be one marginalization too many to sell children’s fiction informed by one’s own experience to a mainstream press, and that is a very sad thought.
The notion of people faking disabilities is not at all new or novel–and, like many, many disability tropes, it’s a harmful one.
The pain of being the butt of someone else’s joke comes back to me whenever I read fiction that depicts characters on the autism spectrum who repeatedly take idioms and other expressions literally, or fail to understand the double meaning of words in embarrassing ways.