Resisting Ableist Language in Romance
After my last two blog posts on disability and as someone who suffers from both visible and invisible disabilities, it was only apropos that I follow it up with this post.
Crazy, mad, deewana/i (Urdu), pagal (Hindi), veDa/i (Marathi), ghelo/i (Gujarati) are all words used in the context of attraction, romance, desire, and love. These are used to depict how lost one feels when consumed by another’s thoughts, how divorced from oneself and one’s reality. Yet each of these words is also what’s used to describe persons with mental disabilities. So, when I began writing romance, I knew I would keep my distance from these words.
I was fortunate to study Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at a time when we had already incorporated intersectional studies into the field. Disability was one of them. The contributions of Disability Studies scholars stand strong on their own merit, and I have to thank my friends in the field whose social media posts have taught me just as much as I’ve learned from scholarly materials. A few years ago, one such friend shared a Facebook post on how to resist ableist language. I was so struck by it, that I adopted it instantly, tweaking my daily conversations to eliminate ableist words and language. So it wasn’t much of a leap that I continue to avoid these terms in my romance writing as well. For instance, I replaced “that’s crazy” and “that’s mad” with outrageous or ridiculous. Where I mean “crazy” as in divorced from reality vis-a-vis feelings, often used during intimate scenes, I use “out of my mind,” or “make me forget myself.”
But in writing realistic characters with real emotions including anger and derision, I’ve had to educate myself and tweak other aspects of ableist language too. For instance, coming from India, where the lineage of the English language comes from Britain, not the U.S. (until very recently), the word “idiot” was a common term of derision. I used it frequently while growing up, much to my mother’s ire, who considered it a pejorative. I resisted her reprimands every time. She wasn’t English educated, I was. I explained to her every time she scolded me for using it, that it just means stupid, it’s not a bad word. But boy, was I wrong! As casually as it is used in the U.K., there is a very specific connotation of the word in the U.S. In North America, the word has been used to depict persons with severe mental disabilities, quite equivalent in tone and intent to the “R” word that has long been identified as a pejorative.
I must confess that the first draft of my first novel included “idiot” which I later changed to fool and knucklehead depending on the context. As writers, we present our sensibilities on the page and often those are influenced by our experiences and ideals. For me, resisting ableist language is an important aspect of my sensibility as a scholar of WGSS and postcolonial studies.
Having said that, of course I don’t claim to be infallible. We always have blind spots because we aren’t omniscient. But I will unhesitating and unconditionally accept my limitations and blind spots when they are pointed out to me. So please don’t hesitate to reach out if you find other kinds of prejudices and blind spots in my writing and I will rectify those immediately.