Masturbation (and sexuality in general), particularly for girls, is widely stigmatized. But on top of that stigma, I had this body that was utterly different from the bodies around me. It was different and therefore wrong.
I’ve never written fiction about living with Crohn’s, and to be honest, I’ve never wanted to. Perhaps because I still feel what I felt for years growing up: that nobody wants to hear about my annoying, humiliating misery. Yet I know, intellectually, that this is a shame, because there should be more characters in YA literature who live with chronic illnesses like IBD.
In my experience, the disabled sibling in fiction exists purely to make the main character’s life more “difficult,” more “sympathetic.” Oh, that poor dear, the writers want you to think,
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.
If our contributors could tell an author writing a character with their disability one thing–besides “do your research”–what would it be?
What was originally intended to be a one-month event has now reached its third birthday, and we could not be more ecstatic!
The entire Disability in Kidlit team wishes you a spectacular 2015!
July has officially come to an end, and with it, the blog’s daily post schedule.
When privileged outsiders define us, they often do so out of ignorance, self-interest, or malice, and their versions of ourselves, rather than our own realities, become the norm.