s. leigh ann cowan / fiction

[Re]De(a)fining Barbie

Mom died with the firm belief that we would never see each other again. She was going to heaven, and I wouldn’t be welcome there, being an unrepentant lesbian. I had never tried hard enough to hear God’s calls for living biblically, so Mom had to cut her losses and leave me like a worn piece of furniture on the curb. She never did answer me, if God was so adamant that I somehow will my blood to stop burning when I see a beautiful woman, then why didn’t He just send me an archangel bearing a message in ASL. A text, at least. 

I figure God made a mistake with the Tower of Babel. Mixed up all the languages and then realized He couldn’t speak any of those other languages either. God probably never studied English or American Sign Language, neither of which are ever mentioned in the Bible anyway. Mom better brush up on Hebrew while she’s in line for the pearly gates, I guess. Otherwise she won’t get a visa, let alone pass the citizenship test. 

We were never close, Mom and me. Not just due to my sexuality—formed according to her by a liberal college education (my major was linguistics, making me a cunning linguist, I suppose)—but more so due to my deafness. She never forgave me for being born without hearing her gospel. It was she who spearheaded the efforts to turn me into a hearing person. If not by miracle, then by medicine. If not by medicine, then by molding. 

That goddamn doll. She’d kept it all these years, packed away with a hodgepodge of collectable porcelain dolls from “around the (stereotyped) world,” cabbage patch kids, ragdolls, and other little button- and glass-eyed nightmares. This was the worst of all. It had once been a mint Barbie, thin and tall and tan with synthetic blond hair, a polyester dress, and pink plastic heels to match. 

I recoil at the sheen of light dancing across the oversized hot pink hearing aid protruding from a tiny shell of an ear. Mom had fashioned them from polystyrene and carelessly super glued them onto Barbie. Her hair was stuck in clumps, unkempt and unbrushable. She could not even hide the alien devices under her hair as I had once done, before I chopped it all off in teenage rage. 

Barbie was hideous. Grotesque. A ruined woman. Her downfall had come about only hours after being chosen from among her identical sisters, only differentiated by career and pastime—flight attendant Barbie, teacher Barbie, surfer Barbie, hibachi chef Barbie, Manhattan Project Barbie (with a snazzy catchphrase typed in a pink star right on the box: “I am become deaf!”). Mom skipped right over all these and chose hiker Barbie, an unsuspecting victim who never had the chance to choose the (teddy) bear. Barbie trafficking, an exchange of money for the human right to desecrate and mutilate the innocent. As Mom had shoved the doll into my limp hands, she identified her as a Barbie-who-is-hearing-impaired-but-can-do-anything-she- sets-her-mind-to-just-like-you. 

But Barbie had already been deaf. Plastic ears weren’t made to hear. Mom had hurt Barbie with these humongous pieces just as the audiologist had hurt me with silicone molds and eardrum-piercing frequencies. I knew they weighed down Barbie’s ears; mine felt like flesh peeling from skull. I knew Barbie’s empty head resounded with each unfamiliar, warped sound, just as my brain was buffeted by a relentless barrage of nonsense. 

“But see how Barbie smiles,” Mom said. (See how Barbie never complains, is what she meant.) Then she said with a plastic smile of her own, “Barbie loves hearing the world!” 

That night I asked God if that was true, and He didn’t answer. Probably because He didn’t know any English. Barbie didn’t speak up. Probably because she couldn’t understand speech, with or without her aids. I didn’t know whether I loved hearing the world. Haven’t heard anything worth hearing yet. 

I take a break from going through Mom’s things and pick with a ragged fingernail at the hardened, scar-like glue on Barbie’s cheek. 

𓈒⠀𓂃⠀⠀˖⠀𓇢𓆸⠀˖⠀⠀𓂃⠀𓈒

What the hell am I supposed to call these dolls? Cyborg is a combination of Cybernetic and Organism, which is (too) often applied to disabled people, but dolls ain’t people. No matter how we mentalize the spaces behind their uncanny faces. 

Cybernetic Dolls? Cybernetic Figurines? Cybernetic Puppets? 

Maybe I shouldn’t be the one to coin the portmanteau. But also, why the fuck shouldn’t I? Donna Haraway, a feminist philosopher, got to pick “cyborg,” and her discussion on disabled people was basically trash. [1] Nondisabled people get to write inspoporn and stereotypes and farm Reddit karma and community awards for taking some random disabled kid to prom. Yet they hate to see a disabled person doing or saying anything for themselves that they didn’t at least get to pre-approve. We’re not allowed to complain or discuss our complex and nuanced lived realities. Instead, we must serve as examples of “good” disabled people—someone who does their best to become and behave like abled people (or, barring that, performing at an abled person’s whim and thanking them for allowing us to perform for them). Let me graffiti “cybarbs for cyborgs” on the wall and be praised up and down for it.

Maybe not cybarbs. It looks too close to an anagram for crybaby, somehow. And yet, another part of me likes it. Barb. Thorn. 

Actually, no. Hold on—

LALA: How do we feel about the mixing of languages? Might be exclusionary for the monolinguals.

XAVI: I think the squiggly line makes it pretty clear, but true, for someone who doesn’t know and doesn’t take the time to look it up, which would be most people just reading it, hmmm. 

LALA: But I do think it plays into the experimental writing style, a sort of cyborgism in itself, this combination of languages; it would also defy the stereotype of deaf people being unable to learn (additional) languages. 

You know what? Screw the monolinguals. (God included.) I’m talking about something important here: the power of visual language. Not just signed languages like ASL. But the messages we send with objects like toys. Appearances. 

There’s a video of a little girl, who has a port wine stain birthmark on her face, falling in love with a Todoroki doll.4 It went so viral that people literally made fanart of her interacting with the character and other characters like Zuko.5 People made analysis videos talking about the importance of representation. Saying how anyone who had anything negative to say about it, or who disagreed, was speaking from a place of privilege, who never had any trouble finding dolls that looked like themselves. That’s a fair point, I shiver, and look in the mirror. 

I’m white. A pasty, creamy white. Doll white. Glassy blue eyes. I can make them go fishy if I zone out. I can make my eyelids flutter independently like those creepy “I can blink too, mommy, while I watch you sleep” dolls. I could walk into any supermarket and see myself in the doll aisle, as far as the basics go. BUT ALSO ISN’T THAT MY POINT? 

I don’t inherently hate disabled dolls and I recognize that children need to see themselves. In fact, I celebrate dolls with visible differences and think we need more: skin tones, body shape and type, limb differences! We need dolls with dwarfisms, and dolls with psoriasis, and dolls with overbites, and dolls with burn scars, and dolls with port wine stain birthmarks, and so much more. I’m even all for creating mini medical devices and equipment as accessories—wheelchairs and crutches, braces, nasogastric tubes, etc.—which could be acquired separately for dolls in the same way you can purchase extra wardrobes or dollhouses or pets. 

What I’m specifically against is that children with invisible disabilities aren’t allowed (or able to) see themselves in “normal” (unaltered) dolls. Literally any Barbie can have a seizure disorder without the need to somehow give her the outward appearance of having epilepsy, like an EEG cap. Don’t you fucking dare jam a fistful of wires and a motor into the hollowed plastic corpse of your daughter’s favorite doll and rig it up to a battery so it folds and flails at the press of a button, only for it to be coopted and marketed to the masses as “yoga Barbie.” Deaf people look like hearing people; any doll can be deaf if you give it to a child and say, “This doll is deaf like you.” Instead children are given dolls that strive for hearingness and are told “This doll has painful/uncomfortable devices stuck on her ears, just like you—see how she never cries or complains about it. Now quit crying before I give you something to cry about.” 

𓈒⠀𓂃⠀⠀˖⠀𓇢𓆸⠀˖⠀⠀𓂃⠀𓈒

I more calmly reflect on the rising visibility and virability of dolls with disabilities and assistive devices. It’s one thing to buy a doll that looks like you—eye, hair, skin color(s), limb differences, or even hygiene- and/or life-sustaining medical devices like ostomy bags or trachs. But to represent an invisible disability with a device that is popularly perceived to “cure” it? 

Consider that, like deafness, blindness is a spectrum. The vast majority of blind people have some vision, whether an ability to detect light and shadow or tunnel vision or some other variation. How might a blind doll be represented? Most people’s first thought might be a pair of sunglasses, with or without a white cane or a seeing-eye dog. But, like a real blind person wearing sunglasses, whose comfort is it for? Sure, there are those with photosensitivity who need shades, but we all know that sighted people are not associating sunglasses with blind people for that reason. It’s because in popular imagination, blind people have eyes that roll aimlessly in their sockets or are missing or scarred or behave/exist in other so-called grotesque manners unsuitable for the sighted gaze. Blind Barbie with the irremovable sunglasses would not only reinforce such stereotypes, but also push the message that those who live within these stereotypes should strive to hide the socially undesired pieces of themselves. 

Now consider the deafness spectrum. To represent deaf people, why do so with devices specifically designed with the goal to enable the wearers to minimize or “overcome” their disability? Barbie is powerless to remove the devices herself; just as deaf people are expected to glue them to their ears and scalps to remain as hearing as possible at all times, to smile through the pain of migraine and misunderstanding, performing hearingness by parroting words through clay lips molded by speech and language pathologists’ fingers, our own fingers stiff and frozen and still at our sides except when the audiologist says “Raise your hand when you hear the beep.” 

We muddle the realities of disability behind technoableist replicas. These muñenetics both obfuscate and illuminate the disability, make a child(‘s condition) feel seen and be able to see their own (conditional) selves. And yet it would seem that disabled children aren’t worth seeing—by others or by themselves—unless they’re trying to “fix” or hide their differences. When you slap hearing aids on a Barbie, you only see the hearing aids, reducing deaf identity to the attempt to be hearing, a body to be “normalized” (touted and treated as abled) rather than celebrated as they naturally are. 

What kid doesn’t want to be normal? To be normal is to be accepted, to belong with your peers, to look and think and feel like everyone else. To be loved. 

“Children,” as Susan Wendell, a feminist disability theorist, points out, “are very aware of the requirements of normality.” She goes on: 

The disciplines of normality are preconditions of participation in every aspect of social life, yet they are unnoticed by most adults who can conform to them without conscious effort…[A]mong children, conformity to standards of normality in body size, carriage, movement, gesture, speech, emotion expression, appearance, scent, ways of eating, and especially control of bodily functions such as salivation, passing gas, urination, and defecation, are enforced by teasing, taunting, and the threat of social ostracization, beginning at an early age….Those of us who can learn to be or seem ‘normal’ do so, and those of us who cannot meet the standards of normality usually achieve the closest approximation we can manage…The disciplines of normality, like those of femininity, are not only enforced by others but internalized. [2]

In other words, children are quick to notice differences. Anyone who has spent time with a young child has been bombarded with “whys”—including questions that might be difficult or embarrassing, such as “Why is that man brown?” or “Why is that lady’s eye stuck looking to the right?” or “Why does that boy have a tube in his nose?” and so on. When they are shushed or shamed for asking questions, or they only see certain types of representation in media, or their parents only ever seem to socialize with a specific demographic, and they observe how others interact with people who might be different in some ways, then children begin to internalize that certain appearances merit different tolerance levels and even different types of treatments. And then there are those kids with terrible emotional intelligence, who lack support and role models, who are abused/neglected at home, etc., who take it out on those they perceive as more vulnerable. 

This in turn reinforces to disabled children that their body lacks something that it ought to have in order to participate in and contribute to society, in order to be loved and accepted and to belong. In such cases, anyone might be more eager to hide the difference, seek a nonexistent cure, or “overcome” the difference. They might decide to hide or abandon their prosthetic to avoid being marked out as different or feel forced to use a prosthetic or assistive device for the comfort of others. In the 1950s, hearing aid manufacturers published advice on how wearers could hide their devices through certain hairstyles or by carrying the aid in a vest pocket. [3] These days, you can get “invisible,” skin-tone hearing aids that fit inside the ear canal. Who’s to say that any Barbie on the shelf doesn’t have one of these already? 

But back to what messages these muñenetics send. Understand that just as we can conjure faces from inanimate objects, we can and do read meanings into objects like technologies. Symbols are one means by which we reinforce social values and morality. In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway (who, despite participating in ableist rhetoric, has interesting things to say) writes: 

Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth….Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other. [4] 

But the symbol of a hearing aid is ineffective unless given meaning, and a hearing aid is purposeless unless it is fulfilling its title: “aiding” the sense of hearing by being put to use, whether actually or aesthetically. Someone must consent to wearing the hearing aid to give life, so to speak, to the symbol. Philosopher Michel Foucault discusses the body “as object and target of power…that is manipulated, shaped, trained; which obeys, responds, becomes skillful, and increases its forces.” [5] The bodies of those who don’t conform to ideals are especially valuable, then, as canvases: “A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved.” [6] What body is more docile than that of a child who desperately wants to fit in with her peers?

𓈒⠀𓂃⠀⠀˖⠀𓇢𓆸⠀˖⠀⠀𓂃⠀𓈒

The floorboards shift underneath me as someone approaches: Vibhuti, my partner.6 I crane my head back and see her, hands braced against her knees, peering over my shoulder at the collection. Her dark eyes shine. 

“Your mom had so many dolls,” she signs, in case I had failed to notice. She playfully mimes an avalanche and buckles under the weight of porcelain and cotton expectations, dropping into a sitting position beside me. She nudges me. “You keeping any of these?” 

I purse my lips—“Nah—” and toss Barbie back into the box with her mismatched sisters. 

Vibhuti gasps and rescues her, then examines the hot pink plastic mess of Barbie’s ears. The green light of her CI processor winks at me. “A deaf Barbie?!” she signs. “Did you make this?”

Heat flushes my face. “No!” I grab the muñenetic back, her head caught in my fist, the polystyrene and glue digging into my palm. “My mom made it.” 

“That’s lovely.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“No?”

“You think this is nice?” I demand, shoving Barbie in her face. My fingernail bed whitens as I press the unbudging aid. 

Vibhuti takes the doll from me and tries, unsuccessfully, to smooth the hair back as she admires it. “I wish I had something like this growing up.”

I reach over and twist Barbie’s head to the side—a living woman would have died instantly of a severed spinal cord—and emphasize the aid again. “You wish you had something like this?”

“Yes?” Vibhuti frowns at me. 

We are now both holding the Barbie—Vibhuti cradling her long thin supermodel body in her palm, and me pinching her skull in my fingers, like God does when He sends me migraines. Our arms lower but neither of us are willing to relinquish custody. 

My partner breaks the silence, signing with her free hand: “What’s wrong with her?”

I stare at her. Vibhuti stares at me. Barbie stares up at God. 

My head is full of thoughts, full to bursting. Philosophies and theories and opinions and anecdotes and feelings and memories all bound up in a tangled mess of babbling debris. Dammit, God! How could I possibly explain any of this in a language that makes sense to anyone else? 

𓈒⠀𓂃⠀⠀˖⠀𓇢𓆸⠀˖⠀⠀𓂃⠀𓈒

Sure, part of normalizing disability is authentic representation of their aids and devices. But when those aids and devices are used to enforce performance of ability rather than actually provide any useful input, the representation becomes just another method of control. 

One of Foucault’s more relevant theories is disciplinary power, which is a means of training bodies to produce and regulate desirable behaviors within a certain space, time, and structure. In systems of disciplinary power, the aim of punishment is neither stopping a particular behavior nor exactly repression. Instead, discipline serves five progressive functions: 

1) It compares each person’s actions to a broader standard. 

2) It highlights differences between individuals based on how well they meet those standards. 

3) It ranks people by measuring their abilities, behavior, and characteristics. 

4) It creates pressure for everyone to conform to the expected norms or values. 

5) It defines what is considered “normal” by marking off what counts as different or “abnormal.” 

Overall, punishment in these systems is a constant force. It oversees everyone, sorts and organizes people, and pushes everyone to fit the norm. It compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, and excludes. I.e., it works both to define normal and to normalize.

Part and parcel of producing uniform citizens through a disciplinary institution is constant surveillance. Foucault takes an architectural thought experiment, the Panopticon (in which prisoners are kept in a building where constant surveillance is a possibility, supposedly influencing their behaviors), and metaphorizes it. Now, instead of a building, the Panopticon stands for disciplinary society, a 1984-ish world in which the walls have ears and there are smartphones held aloft, poised to record at all times, and Santa Claus sees when you are sleeping and knows when you’re awake. With constant surveillance comes increased pressure to perform normalcy, to pose as an ideal citizen who contributes to society and economy in a structurally acceptable way. To be(come) a standard productive body which is easily replaceable, like a cloned toy lined up on the shelf, awaiting your turn to be disfigured and desecrated in the line of duty. 

Remember: Big Barbie is watching you. She doesn’t punish us for not looking and behaving like her. We grow up to punish each other and ourselves for not being supermodels. We punish Barbie for mocking us, for making us look at ourselves: We hack off her hair, cannibalize her hands and feet, draw and quarter her, tattoo her with permanent markers, orphan and marry her off to our brothers’ alpha werewolf GI Joes in loveless ceremonies, force her to bear his army of green plastic child soldiers. Remake her in our formless, slippery images of the world. 

𓈒⠀𓂃⠀⠀˖⠀𓇢𓆸⠀˖⠀⠀𓂃⠀𓈒

“Can we keep her?” Vibhuti asks, eyebrows raised and lips turned up as she cradles Barbie against her chest. She strokes Barbie’s crusty hair. 

“I don’t want it,” I scowl.

“Then can I have her?” 

“Whatever. Keep it.” I shift my gaze back to the multitudes of other dolls, signalling an end to the conversation. 

Vibhuti leaves me with my thoughts. My hands grasp aimlessly and catch nothing.

𓈒⠀𓂃⠀⠀˖⠀𓇢𓆸⠀˖⠀⠀𓂃⠀𓈒

Isn’t it fucked up to use an Indian character to represent the “other side,” the one who more needs and wants the representation, the one who would be grateful to have even shitty attempts? Yeah. I’m acutely aware of how first-world-problem the philosophy of a doll with hearing aids is. 

But I have a deeper reason: Children in overexploited countries are provided inferior, obsolete, or even potentially defective products. [7]

Representations of first-world people and products aren’t going to foster their self-confidence. Slapping hearing aids on a tall, thin, white and blond Barbie and hoping when the white girl she was originally bought for throws her away that she makes it onto the garbage truck destined for a landfill in some distant Indian provincial slum and into the hands of a deaf Indian girl who received subpar cochlear implants is still exclusionary to those with additional marginalized identities. Trickle down Barbienomics doesn’t work. 

Maybe I’m just so holier-than-thou, perpetually aware, whatever you want to call it, that I intentionally created this character for the sole purpose of writing this passage. Except I didn’t. I saw the name Vibhuti while at work—one of the benefits of my career is coming into contact with people from a variety of backgrounds and geographies—and then that was the name that first came to mind when it came time to name the narrator’s partner. 

And yet I chose to keep the name and all its connotations. Why didn’t I just give her a “white” name? She would have such an easier time getting job interviews. I’m setting her up for failure, just like the shady cochlear implant manufacturers that provided obsolete devices for her surgery but equal expectations for speech-and-listening success. (Do any of the 330 million Hindu deities speak English? Did any learn ASL with all those extra limbs? Do any answer Vibhuti’s prayers?)

I pack all these considerations away and place them on the shelf next to my platinum Unitron Stride hearing aids with the purple ear molds. I don’t know what to do with them. Whether to keep them or abandon them. 

Someday my daughter might unpack these and be forced to confront my mistakes. 

𓈒⠀𓂃⠀⠀˖⠀𓇢𓆸⠀˖⠀⠀𓂃⠀𓈒

Technoableism, according to technology ethicist Ashley Shew, is both the belief that the elimination of disability through technology is inherently a good thing, and the use of technologies to reassert such biases against disabled people, in favor of nondisabled ways of life, often under the guise of empowerment. [8] Technologies like prostheses reinforce ideas about the kind of people we want to be and the kind of society we want to live in. 

Nondisabled people, especially those who ascribe to technoableist fantasies like cures, are uninterested in how a disabled person thinks and feels about their body; rather, they are preoccupied with an idealized, productive, “normal” body type that a disabled person should be striving to achieve. The (futile) attempt to overcome a disability is perceived not only as a worthy endeavor, but as a moral and social obligation. 

Worse, technoableists will see one person thriving with their prostheses and then look suspiciously at individuals who physically CANNOT benefit from prosthetics and demand why they aren’t conforming. Essentially a technoableist believes that ALL disabilities can and should be cured, that ALL disabled people should strive for abledness at all costs, even though disability aids are obviously not one size fits all. The nondisabled work to ensure the disabled child works to overcome whether it’s a possibility or not, through whatever means necessary: including molding ridiculous hot pink plastic hearing aids and clumsily supergluing them onto a Barbie doll. 

When it comes to disability, technology all too often takes on a magical air. It doesn’t help that in media, disabilities are resolved through magic all the time, sending the message that disabled children should not only strive for abledness to become socially acceptable, but that they also must strive in socially acceptable (nondisabled-approved) ways. 

★ Barbie: Fairytopia (2005) ends with the line, “What makes you different makes you special.” Elina, the wingless fairy who saves the day, is rewarded with wings in the end, making her distinctly not-special. The ending’s Rudolph-the-Red-nosed-Reindeer note defies the film’s actual message: Do all the hard work to help everyone who relentlessly bullied you for your difference, then they’ll like you, and magically you’ll become just like them. 

★ Barbie in A Mermaid Tale (2010) ends with the line, “What makes you different just might be your greatest strength.” Merliah is a champion surfer girl who turns out to be half-mermaid, like Michael Phelps, and goes on a quest to become fully human. Her legs hinder her in the deep sea, but her tail hinders her on land, perhaps akin to a disability that might make someone an ambulatory wheelchair user; the solution was to magically allow Merliah to choose when to have legs or a tail, erasing any and all possibility that any sort of disability might be a strength. Her greatest strength was not her difference, but the magical necklace her mother gifted her in the end. 

★ Barbie and The Secret Door (2014) ends with the line, “You never know what you can do unless you try.” Shy Princess Alexa gets isekai’d into magic land, where she meets wingless fairy Nori and legs-instead-of-tail mermaid Romy. They have been disabled through the theft of their magic by the princess Malucia, the only one ever born without magic (i.e., a congenital disability). Alexa eventually defeats Malucia, and returns the magic to all the land, including Nori and Romy, who are cured. And Malucia is returned to her original disabled, lonely state. You’re telling me that no one is willing to share any of their magic with her? She is to be alone in her disability forever? All because there was no social welfare infrastructure in place for Malucia, and she had no one to understand or to mentor her. 

Sticking aids onto a doll is not going to solve deafness or loneliness for deaf children. If deaf children cannot see themselves in dolls without aids or implants, that is a failure of society. We tell them that “you” are not “you” unless you are able to hear, trying to be(come) hearing, that they aren’t worth seeing unless they’re trying to “fix” their differences. Like muñequitas cibernéticas, we demand that niñitas sordas hear too. Instead of getting deaf friends and mentors who understand their experience and can have conversations and teach them languages of self-advocacy, they get pieces of plastic made in their images: bodies onto which social norms and expectations are inscribed and reinforced through overhyped, oft-misunderstood technologies. 

𓈒⠀𓂃⠀⠀˖⠀𓇢𓆸⠀˖⠀⠀𓂃⠀𓈒

STRANGER: You don’t look deaf.

LALA: Neither does a doll. 

STRANGER: I thought deaf people wore hearing aids or those whatchamacallems… cochlear implants. How come you don’t?

LALA: How come you don’t suck my c★k-leer. 

𓈒⠀𓂃⠀⠀˖⠀𓇢𓆸⠀˖⠀⠀𓂃⠀𓈒

For some reason that even God Himself wouldn’t know, Vibhuti straps the deaf Barbie to one of the ceiling fan blades. Her arms are stretched out to each side, plane posing. As I recline on the couch, getting comfortable for movie night, flesh pressed up against Vibhuti’s under the blanket, I can’t help but stare as the doll whirls round and round. Blond hair flutters like a flag. In the flickering shadows her hearing aids are obscured. She is as endlessly tormented in her vertigo as I am in my philosophizing. 

I understand the purpose of the muñenetics: They’re so little girls who are deaf and hard of hearing and hearing-impaired and non-hearing and hearing disabled and hearing deficient and oh-so-special can see themselves. To visibilize an invisible disability. 

It’s great. Truly. Sincerely. 

But I hate them. I hate deaf Barbie. I’m glad she is suffering. Yet I pity her. I worry for Vibhuti’s sanity. I worry for my own. 

It’s complicated. 

I wonder if my mom still has her smartwatch in Heaven, and if the stairway counted toward her daily steps. Or if she got wings even though she never drank Red Bull. Not that I’d ever find out. After all, we’ll never meet again. 

Perhaps I do see myself in a doll wearing hearing aids, tied to a spinning ceiling fan. At least, she seems as trapped as I used to be. Besides…Rejecting Barbie means rejecting myself. And I can’t condemn her to the infinite darkness of the doll box.

Notes

1 Too yet-another-speculative-retelling-of-a-classic-fairy-tale-y…

2 While striking close to the inspoporny infantilization of real disabled adults and children, this just ain’t it.

3 Does this seem like a sex thing?

*Muñeca is the Spanish word for doll. Also the word for wrist, which evokes a more mechanized prosthetic image that falls in line again with the cyborg image, à la Haraway’s conception, perhaps.

4 Todoroki: A character from the anime My Hero Academia. The red mark covering half his face is a burn scar, not a birthmark, but c'est comme ça.

5 Zuko: A character from the cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender. Another character with a burn scar, not a birthmark, because no one (myself included) can think of any actual port wine stain representation in media.

6 NOAH: Did you just give your self-insert a girlfriend lol?

LALA: Dante gave his self-insert a (platonic) girlfriend and a boyfriend, so…I plead tradition?

References

[1] Kafer, Alison. “The Cyborg and the Crip: Critical Encounters.” Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press, 2013.

[2] Wendell, Susan. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. Routledge, 1996, p. 88.

[3] Virdi, Jaipreet. Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History. University of Chicago Press, 2020, pp. 222-23.

[4] Haraway, Donna J. Manifestly Haraway. University of Minnesota Press, 2016, p. 33. 

[5] Rabinow, Paul. The Foucault Reader. Pantheon Books, 1984, p. 180. 

[6] Ibid.

[7] Friedner, Michele. “Deaf Children in Developing Countries Are Getting Inferior Cochlear Implants.” Scientific American. August 3, 2021. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deaf-children-in-developing-countries-are-getting-inferior-cochlear-implants/ 

[8] Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. Norton, 2023, p. 8

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S. Leigh Ann Cowan is a white, deaf, queer ciswoman who was born on a Tuesday morning. She holds master’s degrees in Deaf Studies (Gallaudet University ’22) and in English Literature and Language (St. Mary’s University TX ’20). You can find more about Leigh Ann and her work, especially her passion for deaf representation in fiction, on her website, slacowan[dot]com.