What are you dressing up as for Halloween?
This is a post related to Halloween. Not everyone embraces the holiday and it's tradition of dressing in costume, kids asking for and consuming candy or even congregating this year as COVID vaccines are just being rolled out to a younger population.
This is also a post about disability. As I write this, I remind myself that not all disabilities are visible, identified, or acknowledged.
The question of the season in my circles: What are your kids dressing up as for Halloween? My children at 9 and 6 dress up as their heroes daily; one as a soldier and another as Venom. Their white male busy able bodied super egos thrive in their alternate identities playing their ideals of these characters. I do the laundry frequently to keep up.
Halloween gives people a chance to temporarily try on a new persona. This makes me think of other questions: What are the identities we are drawn to when we have the chance to dress up? Do we make the choice to be ourselves or some version of what we think of as more brave, beautiful, or gifted than we really are? Or do we find entertainment, mystery or illusion in posing as a person with a disability?
Amanda Leduc, writer and disability rights activist living with Cerebral Palsy, shares in her book Disfigured - On Fairy Tales, Disability and Making Space:
"I knew growing up, that my life as a disabled child was just as valuable as that of any other girl. But I did not know - and sometimes still don't - how to fit physically into that 'valuable' space.”
It's really not until the last decade that we are able to have a conversation about the norms we center in the mainstream Halloween costume industry. Children with physical disabilities can now find adaptive and wheelchair costumes from Disney to Target or other online retailers. But what values do we want to reflect when our culture does not have adequate or even accurate representation of their differences?
In the article Disability Isn’t a Halloween Costume, Alaina Leary quoted Danni Green, a professional accessibility specialist, an activist with disabilities, and an Expressive Arts Therapy student in Boston, MA:
“Halloween costumes generally fall into one of three categories:
Something you wish you could be,
Something scary, or
Something funny.
When people use accessibility tools as part of their costume, nobody thinks they’re dressing up as something they wish they could be—they’re portraying disability as something scary or something funny, and either way, it’s harmful to real people whose disabilities should be treated as neither scary nor funny."
Walk into any Halloween store and you’re bound to see ableist costumes and props. These costumes are ableist because they assume that non-disabled people will be wearing them for a night or a few and then taking them off. They make light of the reality that disabled people live with—whether it’s fighting for wheelchair access, discrimination against mental illness, or difficulty getting adequate healthcare.”
As a white cisgender able bodied native English speaking middle class girl living in Southern California in the 80's, I identified with and dressed up as Rainbow Bright. This cartoon followed in the footsteps of iconic American images of white dominant culture. I was drawn to dramas of good vs. evil. These stories are characterized by white cisgender able bodied native English speaking characters who battle forces of evil with their endless optimism and compassion.
But life is not this linear. Life is messy shades of sepia. Life asks us if we want to be seen beyond the illusion of tidy moral tales. Life gives us all chances to do quiet heroic acts. In life we can choose to create brave spaces. Brave spaces in which we honor others' realities and create opportunities for them to be celebrated without being exploited.
When I try to translate these complex ideas to my kids; we pause when we interact with, listen to stories, or watch shows about identity. We reflect on how it makes us feel when our differences are generalized as good vs. bad. We talk about how others move, talk, eat, dress, look, act, play, feel, dance, sing, think, read, write, or identify their gender(s) in their unique way is an expression of the beautiful diversity of life. It is a practice to learn how not to center our own experience in our interpretation of life and all of its variation. Having these ongoing conversations makes it easier on Halloween to understand how and where ableism comes up so we can appreciate vs. exploit others’ lived experiences.
