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ember_keeltyI have thoughts about Puppetgate. Here is a good rundown of what that is if you haven't heard of it, including some initial arguments for why the play is terrible that I won't be rehashing here and an example of the defense of it that I will be responding to: that it represents the plight of parents whose children have autism, which is "the other side of the autism story" and deserves to be told as much as the stories of people with autism. In my view, there are three problems with that.
1. The stories of non-autistic parents of autistic children are currently over-represented, actually.
The most prominent autism-related nonprofit is Autism Speaks, which is run by non-autistic people. Its focus is raising "awareness" of autism in an incredibly stigmatizing way that centers the hardships of non-autistic caregivers for autistic children. The other place that autism comes up frequently in well-publicized social discourse is the antivax movement, which treats it as a sort of bogeyman and generally acts as though parents should be more afraid of their children "contracting" autism than of them dying from preventable infectious diseases. Parents of people with disabilities are viewed as so put-upon by the general public that they garner sympathy from mainstream media even when they murder us. Meanwhile, autistic adults like myself have difficulty finding supportive resources, because we aren't children burdening non-autistic adults with no legal and socially acceptable means of getting rid of us and therefore not the focus of autism-related nonprofits such as Autism Speaks.
2. The parents in All in a Row are terrible representation for caregivers anyway.
The husband plays outlandish, outright abusive "pranks" on his wife and then blames it on their child. The wife is secretly the one trying to get their child taken away by a social worker who explicitly views him as an "animal" to be institutionalized. These are villain protagonists, whether or not they were intended as such. The point of villain protagonists ought to be not "aren't they just so universally relatable to people in their situation?" but rather "this is how people with understandable or even sympathetic motives can end up doing monstrous things."
3. You can and should tell "the other side of the story" without dehumanizing the obverse side.
I think this is true even when you're inverting a dominant narrative where the characters usually centered actually are villainous and you want to call that out - after all, bigots don't generally see themselves as inhuman, so portraying bigotry as something only inhuman monsters engage in can only serve to comfort them and reinforce their conviction that they aren't actually bigots - but it's even more important when you're telling the story of someone "on the other side" from the sort of people the dominant narrative already tends to dehumanize, because punching down is both the cruelest and the laziest thing that an artist can do. Depicting the plight of caregivers for disabled children is certainly not the most urgent artistic mission in the current social climate, and the caregivers in All in a Row would certainly not be a good depiction if it were, but it's true that caregiver fatigue is a real thing that exists and that it deserves to be depicted in art as much as any other part of the human experience. Still, that depiction doesn't have to come at the expense of narrative compassion for the characters receiving care. All in a Row had the autistic character portrayed by a puppet specifically so that he could engage in "shocking" behaviors like biting his mother and the audience could see firsthand the misery his parents were going through without being confronted by the reality that the source of this misery is a human child with his own subjectivity and his own pain. That isn't daring or brutally honest storytelling, but rather the exact opposite.
1. The stories of non-autistic parents of autistic children are currently over-represented, actually.
The most prominent autism-related nonprofit is Autism Speaks, which is run by non-autistic people. Its focus is raising "awareness" of autism in an incredibly stigmatizing way that centers the hardships of non-autistic caregivers for autistic children. The other place that autism comes up frequently in well-publicized social discourse is the antivax movement, which treats it as a sort of bogeyman and generally acts as though parents should be more afraid of their children "contracting" autism than of them dying from preventable infectious diseases. Parents of people with disabilities are viewed as so put-upon by the general public that they garner sympathy from mainstream media even when they murder us. Meanwhile, autistic adults like myself have difficulty finding supportive resources, because we aren't children burdening non-autistic adults with no legal and socially acceptable means of getting rid of us and therefore not the focus of autism-related nonprofits such as Autism Speaks.
2. The parents in All in a Row are terrible representation for caregivers anyway.
The husband plays outlandish, outright abusive "pranks" on his wife and then blames it on their child. The wife is secretly the one trying to get their child taken away by a social worker who explicitly views him as an "animal" to be institutionalized. These are villain protagonists, whether or not they were intended as such. The point of villain protagonists ought to be not "aren't they just so universally relatable to people in their situation?" but rather "this is how people with understandable or even sympathetic motives can end up doing monstrous things."
3. You can and should tell "the other side of the story" without dehumanizing the obverse side.
I think this is true even when you're inverting a dominant narrative where the characters usually centered actually are villainous and you want to call that out - after all, bigots don't generally see themselves as inhuman, so portraying bigotry as something only inhuman monsters engage in can only serve to comfort them and reinforce their conviction that they aren't actually bigots - but it's even more important when you're telling the story of someone "on the other side" from the sort of people the dominant narrative already tends to dehumanize, because punching down is both the cruelest and the laziest thing that an artist can do. Depicting the plight of caregivers for disabled children is certainly not the most urgent artistic mission in the current social climate, and the caregivers in All in a Row would certainly not be a good depiction if it were, but it's true that caregiver fatigue is a real thing that exists and that it deserves to be depicted in art as much as any other part of the human experience. Still, that depiction doesn't have to come at the expense of narrative compassion for the characters receiving care. All in a Row had the autistic character portrayed by a puppet specifically so that he could engage in "shocking" behaviors like biting his mother and the audience could see firsthand the misery his parents were going through without being confronted by the reality that the source of this misery is a human child with his own subjectivity and his own pain. That isn't daring or brutally honest storytelling, but rather the exact opposite.
