The Disposable Body

Acquired Disability and Curative Self-Loathing in Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide

The sequels to Ender's Game,  Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind, form a self-contained trilogy that follows Ender and a number of other characters in their fight to prevent the extermination of three alien species by an interplanetary human government. The trilogy features a handful of disabled characters including Olhado, whom I discussed in my last post “The Boy with the Metal Eyes”, and his brother Miro. Miro, the subject of today's essay, acquires a brain injury partway through the series that leaves him with limited fine motor skills, slurred speech, and difficulty walking. Miro experiences his disability as a major loss and loathes his disabled body. His family and community regard him with pity and identify his disabled body as an insurmountable barrier to meaningful work, romantic relationships and any desirable future. Miro’s struggle is ultimately resolved by a cure that entails the complete destruction of his disabled body, something which is only made possible by his unrelenting self-loathing. 

Miro's disablement comes at a time of extreme loss; in a matter of hours he learns that the woman he loves is his half sister and that he is set to be arrested and removed from his planet—and thereby his work, family, and friends. It is in this moment of despair that he attempts to climb an electric fence that separates the human colony from the rest of the planet, resulting in permanent neurological damage.¹ His disability is thus framed as the ultimate loss; the loss of an able-body. 

In response to his newly disabled body, Miro experiences immense self-loathing. He describes himself as a “helpless cripple”² and “a useless carcass”.³ His internal monologue is filled with cruel, repetitive ableism, and the text constantly describes him in ableist terms: 

“For the first time, humans and two alien races, living together as ramen [human of a different species] out on the same world, and Miro wasn’t a part of any of it. He was less human than the piggies were. He couldn’t speak or use his hands half so well. He had stopped being a tool-using, language-speaking animal. He was varelse [monster/animal alien] now. They only kept him as a pet.”⁴

While it’s clear that the reader is meant to question Miro’s harsh, ableist perspective, the text does little to challenge the underlying assumption that Miro’s disabled body is an insurmountable barrier to meaningful work or a desirable future. The text repeatedly describes him as a “cripple” and Miro and those around him imagine him to have no work to do and no hope for a meaningful future: “His life’s work was taken from him, his body, his hope for the future, and nothing I can say or do will give him a vital work to do”.⁵ This hopeless perception of Miro’s future is particularly jarring given the assistive technology that is available to him and his demonstrated ability to continue contemplating and working on the scientific and social issues of his time. Shortly after becoming disabled he discovers an AI program (or, more accurately, an alien being named Jane who resides in the computer networks) that can anticipate his desired computer inputs, understand his garbled speech, and thus allow him to communicate clearly and quickly with minimal effort. Because his cognitive skills appear to be largely unaffected by his injury, this assistive technology removes the majority of the barriers he faces to intellectual work, and while he has difficulty walking, he has access to a variety of motorised vehicles and there appears to be no reason he couldn’t resume at least some of his work as a xenographer with appropriate accommodations. But accommodations for Miro are never meaningfully considered or pursued. Instead, Miro and his family view his body as the problem to be solved, and take few steps to accommodate him or adjust their ableist approach. 

Because they imagine him to have no hope for meaningful work, his family encourages him to leave the planet in a spaceship, on a trip that for him will be a few months but will actually bring him thirty years into the future, functionally allowing him to time-travel.⁶ This plan is not particularly well justified in the text, and primarily serves as a plot device, but I still think it has significant implications. The fact that the only thing his family can think of to do for him is to send him away on a trip that they all recognize to be akin to him dying, is pretty telling. There is a long history of disabled people being removed from their communities because their families didn’t know how to care for them or simply couldn’t stand to witness their disabled bodies. The fact that Miro agrees to the trip and does ultimately feel himself to benefit from it doesn’t change the fact that this is a story in which a family was so unwilling or unable to accommodate a disabled person that they completely excluded them from the community.  Miro sums up his family’s feelings about him going away saying: “Those who will miss me, miss me already...because they already think of me as dead”.⁷

Unsurprisingly, when he returns, Miro finds that his family’s attitude about his disability have not changed: “he could not help but see their pity, their grief, their frustration at what had become of him. When they looked at him all they could see was the difference between what he was before and what he was now. All they could see was loss”.⁸ While it is common for individuals and their families to feel immense grief and loss following the acquisition of a disability, our narratives around acquired disabilities often focus on this grief to the exclusion of the rest of the disability experience. This focus on the grief and loss of disability can be extremely harmful as it reduces disabled people to tragic figures and imagines that a disabled life is always somehow less than a nondisabled one. Alison Kafer describes this phenomenon as “compulsory nostalgia for the lost able mind/body, the nostalgic past mind/body that perhaps never was”.⁹ In fact, there is such a strong cultural conception of disability as loss, that disabled people are often expected to mourn a non-disabled self that never existed. I have been disabled my entire life and yet the recognition of my disability elicited immense grief both in myself and my parents. This grief and mourning for an imagined nondisabled future I would never have is understandable, but it is also a reflection of compulsory able-bodiedness, and watching non-disabled people in my life experience that grief (at times, long past that point when I had come to accept and love my disabled life), was hurtful and even served to pressure me into hiding or attempting to change my disability.

To its credit, Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide do manage to capture some of the pain that results from this conception of disability. As we can see in the above passage, Miro’s family is so consumed with grief over his disability that they are no longer able to see him as he is or genuinely connect with him. Unfortunately, this issue is not very well handled by the text, and is only resolved when Miro’s disability is cured, further reinforcing the idea that the underlying issue is Miro’s body rather than his family's ableism. 

As Allison Kafer explains, for people with acquired disabilities, compulsory nostalgia is often at play in the relationship between the disabled self and the lost nondisabled self: 

“People with ‘acquired’ impairments...are described (and often described themselves) as if they were multiple, as if there were two of them existing in different but parallel planes, the ‘before disability’ self and the ‘after disability’ self... Compulsory nostalgia is at work here, with a cultural expectation that the relation between these two selves is always one of loss, and of loss that moves in only one direction. The ‘after’ self longs for the time ‘before,’ but not the other way around; we cannot imagine someone regaining the ability to walk, for example, only to miss the sensation of pushing a wheelchair or moving with crutches.” ¹⁰

This sense of dual selves is central to Miro’s disability arc, as he is ultimately able to recreate and return to his nondisabled body without experiencing any remorse or grief over the destruction of his disabled body.

At the end of Xenocide, the characters invent a means of exiting their current plane of reality and entering a void “nowhere” space in which it is possible to create new matter simply by firmly imagining it. Miro uses this space to recreate his nondisabled body, and move his “auia” (soul or self) into the new body, thus abandoning his disabled body, which then crumbles into nothingness:

“The old Miro slumped within his seat like a dead man. Ender knelt in front of him, touched him... when Ender took his fingers away from the old Miro’s throat, the skin came away in a small puff of dust...The head dropped forward off the shoulders and landed in the corpse’s lap. Then it dissolved into a whitish liquid.”¹¹

This gruesome moment is pure wish-fulfillment for Miro. It is everything he longed for: his non-disabled body back, and his loathed disabled body destroyed. 

This cure scene is remarkable for its ability to literalize and starkly present the ableist violence of cure narratives while somehow still endorsing them. In this scene, Miro’s bifurcated self is literalized. He is literally two selves: one disabled and despised, the other able-bodied and longed for. His desire to abandon and destroy his disabled body is fulfilled, highlighting the violence of cure narratives and the underlying desire to eradicate disabled bodies. While the destruction of Miro’s disabled body is taken to a literal extreme, it reflects long standing ableist ideas about the necessity of cure, even when it risks the health, wellbeing, and lives of disabled people.¹² 

The text makes it very clear that it is Miro’s self-hatred that makes his cure possible; without it, he never would have been able to abandon his disabled body and move to a new vessel. This narrative suggests that it is right and good for disabled people to loathe their disabled bodies and to long for a nondisabled future. While this instance may seem extreme, I would argue that there is very real societal pressure towards and belief in curative self-loathing. Disabled people are regularly shamed for their non-normative bodies and behaviours and our society tends to believe that shame and self-hatred are valid and useful forces in motivating “self-improvement”: obvious examples being messaging around weight loss and substance use. But I would argue that curative self-loathing extends into our view of many other disabilities. As a neurodivergent and mentally ill person I have been strongly encouraged to allow embarrassment and shame to foster changes in my behaviour. I have been conditioned to believe that the way my brain and nervous system work, the way I am, is unacceptable. I have been encouraged, both implicitly and explicitly, not to accept my (disabled) self with the expectation that this lack of acceptance will drive me to pursue treatments that will bring my bodymind closer to a nondisabled norm.

Miro’s rejection of his disabled self is so complete that he appears largely untroubled by the death of his disabled body. He acknowledges that he chose to destroy his body, at one point even likening it to a suicide¹³ , but expresses no remorse or regret. There is nothing about his disabled life that he misses or longs for, as though Orson Scott Card can’t imagine a single aspect of disability that might be desirable. As Kafer points out, the nostalgia in our stories of disability goes only one way; we are not permitted to find any aspect of inhabiting a disabled body desirable, pleasurable or fulfilling.¹⁴ Perhaps most troubling of all, this is a story in which even the most extreme and violent of cures is unambiguously good; there are no side effects, no downsides and nothing lost in the destruction of a disabled body. 

I'd like to imagine a different story, a different ending for Miro. What if, instead of mourning, pitying and shunning him, Miro’s family had accommodated and accepted him? What if they learned to appreciate his slow deliberate speech and movements, or used the advanced technology at their disposal to accommodate him and help him pursue his work? Could they have built him a portable assistive communication device, or a fully accessible home where he could live independently? What if instead of conjuring a new body, Miro had conjured a hovering power chair? What if the characters had come to understand disability as part of human life and had incorporated that knowledge into their study of alien species? Could we have learned how alien societies deal with disability? That’s the book I want to read. 

1. Speaker for the Dead 280, 294, 328

2. Xenocide 318

3. Xenocide 359

4. Speaker for the Dead 361

5. Speaker for the Dead 368-369

6. Speaker for the Dead 372

7. Speaker for the Dead 376

8. Xenocide 25

9. Feminist, Queer, Crip 42

10. Feminist, Queer, Crip 42-43

11. Xenocide 530

12. Feminist, Queer, Crip 112

13. Xenocide 559

14. Feminist, Queer, Crip