Note: Kelly Fox, my watch-Glee-and-squeal-over-IM buddy, and I were both touched by last night's episode, which dealt in great detail with disability. Kelly is hard of hearing, so when she told me she'd written some thoughts down about the show's handling of a range of physical and intellectual disabilities, I asked her if I could share this with y'all, and she kindly said yes.
I thought tonight's episode of "Glee," with its thematic focus on mental and physical disability, was fabulous. There was all kinds of fantastic character development - Artie's struggle in coping with the limitations of being a wheelchair user, Kurt and his father's interactions and ongoing give-and-take in adjusting to Kurt's openly gay status, Puck's drive to prove himself as not just boyfriend/lover material, but as a man and a family-oriented man at that, Tina's hiding of insecurities behind a mask of pretended impairment, Sue and the exploration of her dedication to equal treatment of everyone without "talking down to" the mentally-challenged.
There was a lot I could related to in this episode:
There was a lot I could related to in this episode:
· Artie - his portrayal as a kid who is frustrated and hampered by his disability yet is doing his best to live with it is such a much more realistic portrayal of what its like to live with a disability than other portrayals where the disabled person is a rude, bitter, sarcastic bastard who uses his disability as an excuse to avoid the real world (I'm looking at you, House), or a plucky, peppy go-getter who barely seems aware of her disability because gosh-darn it, its just a little ole minor inconvenience that doesn't really impact her life. When you have a disability, you are always, always acutely aware of it, and you live in a perpetual state of frustration over it - or so has been my experience. You can't let it stop you, and you just have to work with it as best as you can, but it's something that colors everything you do and every interaction you have with any other person and it is a source of constant frustration.
· Tina - Artie might have been repulsed by her confession of faking her stammer, but I totally empathized - I have often affected to be less intelligent or more impaired than I actually am, especially when I was younger and even well into college. I don't know about Tina, but in my case it's a defense mechanism against the humiliation of struggling to follow a conversation or class discussion and still failing (worst thing in the world: to be trying hard to understand what someone is saying, only for them to get annoyed/frustrated and end things with a curt "never mind"), or the embarrassment of speaking with a difficult voice and finding people can't understand what you're saying, or think that you are ill (and, by implication, disease-ridden/unclean/not normal). Pretending to be less intelligent or more impaired is a way to bring balance to the fact that I am fully capable of highly intelligent and complex activities, but am significantly less able of effectively communicating with others about those activities - by engaging in this pretense, I manage (and lower) people's expectations and so relieve some of the pressure/anxiety/frustration on me.
One thing that felt very true to life in this episode was how openly discussed and publicly displayed disabilities are nowadays compared to a few decades ago. Compare the two characters with Down's Syndrome in this episode - the older woman, Sue's sister, lives in a permanent care facility - isolated from the world, essentially. Beth, the high school girl, is clearly mainstreamed into school life - her best friend is a pretty and popular cheerleader, she wins a spot on the cheerleading squad, and she's clearly not just being kept in an out-of-the-way room with the other special ed kids, forever isolated from the rest of the school.
It reminds me of a visit I made to my audiologist a few weeks ago - at one point she was out of the room fiddling with the programming software for my hearing aid, and I was examining the display of behind-the-ear (BTE) hearing aids. When I was a kid, my BTEs were large, ugly, beige-colored chunks of plastic that perched awkwardly on my ear and would fall off at the slightest bouncy movement (jumping rope = not fun). I remember spending a lot of time as a kid trying to keep my aid covered with my hair, and feeling self-conscious whenever my hair was pulled back.
But kids these days! Their hearing aids are in bright pinks, purples, greens, oranges. They have flowers, polka dots, stripes painted on. They're in interesting shapes - triangles, crescents. They're not made of cheap-feeling plastic - instead it feels like the kind of material that they make MacBook Airs out of, that kind of soft metal that feels like velvet. They could almost pass for an unusual style of iPod earbuds. Basically, these BTEs look like they've been designed by Apple. They're not just useful communication devices, they're stylish and fashion forward accessories.
The whole mentality has shifted in the past 20 years from trying to conceal hearing loss and teaching kids how to "pass" as hearing (I remember getting regularly pulled out of class in elementary school so that a man with a full beard and mustache could attempt to teach me to lip-read. In retrospect, totally not cool and doomed to failure) to not only embracing it and being nonchalantly public about it, but doing so with style. This new mentality, the same kind that Artie shows when he freely and openly states he doesn't appreciate being left off of the bus and that it hurts his feelings, is dramatically different from when I was younger and the whole focus was on "passing" and concealing/downplaying/making light of one’s disability (and never, ever publicly discussing it - hell, it's only in this past year that, after a lifetime of determinedly ignoring it, I've started to explore what my hearing loss has meant and still means to me, and started talking about it to others, and started exploring alternative ways of thinking about and living with this loss, such as by beginning to study ASL).
It's an interesting and positive change, and I think that a lot of credit can be given to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 in promoting this shift in perception. Given the 20 year anniversary of the Act next year, it's really amazing and reassuring to see how far treatment of disability has improved and progressed since then.