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The Audio Long Read

The disabled villain: why sensitivity reading can’t kill off this ugly trope

The Audio Long Read

The Guardian

Society & Culture

4.32.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For centuries, fictional narratives have used outer difference to telegraph inner monstrosity. As someone who uses a wheelchair, I’ve learned you can’t just edit out a few slurs or bad words to fix this – it’s often baked deep into the story. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is The Guardian.

0:30.0

I'm off this ugly trope. Written and read by Jan Gerrard.

0:43.0

Some years ago I decided to read all of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. It may have been

0:49.1

a fit of nostalgia for the Roger Moore films I grew up watching. Or perhaps I was bored

0:55.0

with writing short stories for a miniscule readership. And wanted to know what mass market success

1:02.0

actually read like.

1:07.3

It was quite an experience. And when I found myself recalling recently when I read that

1:12.5

Fleming's books were being revised, chiefly in order to remove some, though not all of

1:17.8

the casual racism. Also some of the misogyny though likely not all of that either.

1:25.3

My first question on reading the news was what kind of read-ra-exactly was the publisher

1:31.3

Ian Fleming publication's limited envisioning.

1:35.1

Presumably someone who would worry not for the most explicit slurs really enjoyed ethnic

1:41.1

stereotypes. Or someone who would worry not for the full-on rapes really enjoyed the

1:47.4

pervasive sexism. Come to think of it, there are probably quite a few of these readers.

1:53.5

However, the other question that struck me was this. What on earth are they going to do

1:59.5

about disability?

2:02.2

As a wheelchair user, I could not help noticing that the original Bond books had, shall we

2:07.6

say, an interesting relationship to embodied difference. It was a feature of Fleming's

2:14.1

writing that would be all but impossible to alter through the interventions of a sensitivity

2:18.8

reader, hired by the publisher to make the books more palatable to contemporary readers.

2:26.2

Fleming's attitude to disability was encoded not only in words and phrases, but in characterization

2:32.2

and plot, that is, in the stories most fundamental qualities. It is not a novel observation that

...

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