Cookie baking bitch

June 6, 2011

Since I started dating a paralyzed guy (who’s rather fond of wheelchair-using Oracle since he’s also a computer geek, causing me to nickname him Boy Oracle), I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a number of other wheelchair users who all admire Oracle for being a perfectly strong, capable woman who happens to be paralyzed. Her presentation as a strong and beautiful woman is empowering for wheelchair users. Go to disabilities forums and see how many women sport her as their avatar. Go to cosplay websites and see how many women in wheelchairs happily represent Oracle at cons and even do photoshoots in character, proudly displaying the FACT that someone can be disabled and still be attractive and strong. Look at blogs like the one Benicio has linked and see how greatly that representation for wheelchair users and other disabled people is needed. Look at the debates about her character on such forums — she has come to represent an entire audience that has hitherto received NO representation at all. Look at the reactions in the disabled community to news reports on treatments that give false hope to “healing” paralysis — they tend to be pretty damn negative.

If DC strips Barbara of all that she has become as a character and all that she has come to represent for marginalized communities who have NO ONE they can relate to in the stories they love to read, then yes, it IS a big “fuck you” to those audiences. It’s saying that their support of the character and adoption of her as a fictional representative doesn’t matter. It’s saying that, while other communities are (finally) starting to get more representation, the disabled community doesn’t deserve the same. It’s saying that everything that Barbara has become as a paralyzed woman — a hero in her own right FAR more powerful than Batgirl and, in many ways, more powerful than Batman or Superman — means nothing. It’s negating a history that has come to mean so much to people who get no representation anywhere else, painting over it like it never happened. It’s saying that there’s something wrong with existing as a capable person who happens to have mobility issues, so that existence needs to be wiped away.

I hope it isn’t Babs. I hope it’s a fakeout.

— Kate Fatale, always amazing, her comment says it so much better than I ever could.

12:14pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZWvbJy5qcxVD

(Notes: 164)