Comments | crip_crit: Le Guin and empathy

elettaria in crip_crit

Le Guin and empathy

May 05, 2010 19:59

*looks around shiftily* I really shouldn't collude in breaking copyright, but the story is up on someone else's website anyway, so I thought I'd put it up here for general discussion. But do be good creatures and buy the book if you like it! This is a follow-up to the discussion on telepathy as disability in the Sookie Stackhouse novels/True ( Read more... )

short story, le guin, madness, fear, autism, empathy, mental illness, science fiction

Comments 3

elettaria May 6 2010, 22:42:38 UTC

One of the first things to strike me on rereading this story is that it takes an invisibile disability (an imaginary one, but related to a real one) and makes it startlingly visible. Metaphorically, Osden doesn't have a skin, nothing to protect him from the outside world of other people's emotions. Physically, "he looked flayed", with bones and muscles disturbingly visible. And of course there's nothing actually wrong with muscles and bones, we need them, but we get freaked out if body parts are displayed in ways other than what we're used to, just as emotions need to be kept largely private for social interaction to work. He looks ugly and he knows too much about other people. I think this touches the core of what fear of people with disabilities is all about: it's often not rational, and humanely can't be justified, but it's how many people respond at an instinctive level, even if the ones with any sense of morality do their best to work past it ( ... )

kazaera May 11 2010, 21:55:31 UTC

Hmmm. There are definitely good things about this and I'll probably have to think a while to figure out exactly how I feel about this. However, my first reaction:

For once, I want autism to be used as a metaphor for being autistic, period, end of story. The super-empathy is interesting and does in fact have some connections with some experiences I have and some experience I have heard other autistic people talk about, but it is not autism. And having autism be "withdrawn into own world because of super-empathy" is also problematic since the idea that there is a ~normal~ child somewhere "behind" the autism is, you know, a serious problem nowadays. (Not that Osden is normal but the trope is still there behind it all.)

I'm not sure how fair this is, and she does get kudos for managing to present a cured autistic without me vomiting, but it's definitely the main thing I thought of.

elettaria May 15 2010, 08:18:55 UTC

Well, it's science fiction. It's not meant to be about autism, it's meant to be about empathy, and the autism is being used to illustrate some points. The question of course is how far it's acceptable for writers to use a disability or illness as a metaphor for exploring something else, and I think my own answer to that is that it depends on how they do it. This isn't like Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids or Saramago's Blindness, where blindness is used extremely disrespectfully for an end-of-civilisation-as-we-know-it type scenario, or come to that, King Lear, where it's just a way of exploring people's egos. But just because it's not like the dreadful "better dead than disabled" ideas out there, does that make it acceptable? Is it OK for writers to borrow illnesses and disabilities to use to explore something else? My gut feeling is yes, we shouldn't be censoring writers in that way and anyway that's what they do, use one thing to explore another thing. The crucial point is how well and respectfully they do it. And in this ( ... )