More on Pretending: Less Rant, More Consideration

Goldfish leaves a very apposite comment to my original post. Thanks, Goldfish. I feel a little chastened by your sensitive and respectful tone ... so I want to discuss and rant less. So, if that's okay with you, I want to take the time to respond.

I am quoting you here:

"But from the little I read, some of these folks take this very seriously; it is sometimes a mental health condition far beyond a sexual fetish."

Yes. This is what I meant by BIID. Gotcha and am with you on that one. There are sites dedicated to buying multi thousand dollar custom made wheelchairs. People are willing to spend money on the equipment that allows them to appear disabled (irony: a pretender who can buy an ultralight wheelchair as if it were a bicycle while many disabled people cannot get their health insurance to pay for one). That's a serious investment of money and time.

We cannot perceive who is/has what. BUT the borderlines between mental health condition and fetish are where things get murky for me.

Going to pretender fiction. I see fiction as establishing, responding to, defining, creating, affirming the a part of the ethos and culture of the pretending world. I have problems not with the existence of the pretender world per se, but with its vision and understanding of disability. This is a vision of disability that I think strips us of hard-won independence, pride, and culture; it strips the disabled person in the fiction of his/her independent personhood by deriving eroticism from a passivity which in itself is born from aspects of disability.

I am not arguing that sexual passivity and/or submissiveness are in themselves bad --I am just blocked on the connection between disability, sexual passivity, and the disabled. I know it is possible to positively depict these aspects of disabled life, and I can imagine positive eroticism from such positive depiction. It's the image. Yet again. Of the disabled person as somehow so broken that gets me. The image. The non-personhood of erotic pretender fiction I cannot reconcile myself to (owch).

But fiction is fiction and the real world is the real world. So, what happens when the pretender hits the world. Wants to engage with our experience. These days, we enjoy African Americans passing for white and vice versa for television shows, for the purpose of projects... We don't usually (any more) grant social capital to individual people who do it for their own pleasure or entertainment (for any number of reasons). But the scholarship on passing is mightily critical of those who pass. Disability passing is interesting. Usually -- but not always --passing is about passing as AB.
This article talks about a PWD who exaggerates his disability and why (and where) he does it. Connections between passing and pretending?


So the question is one of impairment. Is it an impairment to pretend? Yes. I can see how pretending could be described as such. But what proportion of pretenders identifies their pretending as their disability as opposed to their desired disability? Or is impairment only the judgment of the non-pretender about pretending?

It matters to me because I see disability as a category vulnerable to exploitation (the disability free pass) and singularly subject to social and political scrutiny......

While access (and I am not talking just ramps here) remains an issue, while people struggle to survive, while people struggle with prejudice, I think I will see pretending -- though I am open to persuasion and will go look at Transabled -- as a breach of the social contract we share as a society: I will help you when you need it; I will pay for your medical care because it is for the good of all of us including me; I will support you because I see you as a worthy human. There is a good deal of emotion, trust, and, let's not forget, money behind those statements. These values are under threat from the world at large; the fact of pretending further endangers them in individual encounters.

Hmm. Serious stuff. Thanks for getting me thinking again, Goldfish.