Being Seen by Elsa Sjunneson

Author:Elsa Sjunneson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tiller Press
Published: 2021-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

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However, there is another side to the horror disability trope. When we aren’t the perfect targets, easy to pick off, we are the monsters that lurk in the dark.

In Scream, the 2015–2019 television series based loosely on the film series of the same name, the main villain is murdering people because he couldn’t get a prom date. Because he is disabled. While I’ll admit that it was hard for me to get a prom date, and my experience of school dances was chiefly standing alone and slightly miserable in a pretty dress, no part of me wanted to violently murder my classmates.

Disabled bodies are often used to code for evil. Little people are conspirators, blind women are seers, even blind weapon masters inspire a certain amount of fear alongside respect. Fear imbues the disabled body, both in terms of nondisabled people wanting to avoid ever being like us, but also because we’ve been coded as scary. In Don’t Breathe, a blind man is the victim of a home invasion, but unlike Hush, the Big Bad is not the invaders. It’s the blind man himself. He never even has a name, because he is an archetype of evil.

In another classic disability trope, his super hearing allows him to sneak up and kill people in his home—and when the home invaders discover that he is not only a super-hearing blind man but also a rapist, the depiction really goes sour.

The Blind Man doesn’t even rape women himself. The Blind Man rapes women with a turkey baster full of his own semen. This really underscores the issues plaguing disabled people when it comes to sexuality. There is something about the idea that a blind rapist cannot actually use his own penis that speaks to the larger issues of representation.

Don’t Breathe was breathtakingly harmful because it used all the tropes—literally all of them—about blind people and used them to terrorize the nondisabled.

And when we are afraid of something, we are less likely to feel empathy for it. This is how racism works, this is how anti-Semitism works, and yes, this is how ableism works.

Fear breeds hatred, or at best indifference.

How do we, actual blind people, live in the world safely when we are caught between being victims (who are actually sighted and just pretending) and blind men who will kill you quick as a snake?

No one listens to us. Because in addition to being disabled, to having targets on our backs since day one, we’ve also been handed the curse of skepticism. Remember, all these people playing blind people are actually sighted. Remember, too, that blindness is defined in stark contrast to sight, so the sighted are the ones arbitrating whether we can be trusted.

As a disabled woman, I am not to believed. I can’t see well enough, so the police don’t feel I am a reliable witness. Someone else (my assailant?) would be needed to prove what happened to me. I can’t hear well enough, so perhaps, the convention coordinator suggests, I didn’t hear him properly.

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