I’ve been still ruminating over the relationship between ethics and writing in regards to an unpleasantness I experienced at a local comic festival last weekend. On Friday night when an artist read their work out loud to an audience of probably a hundred, one part had their characters say a specific clinical word.
Not only was it a word that is an illness that has been a massive source of trauma in my life, but I've suffered horrible stigmas around it on a near daily basis. However, this clinical term was used in a derogatory fashion, completely removed from the true meaning which has impossibly heavy, nuanced and complex meaning for me.
To use specific medical terms in derogatory fashion is either intentionally sinister, or at the very least, just painfully ignorant, but there is a very dangerous harm from such negligence.
According to Booth, ‘we all underestimate the extent to which we absorb the values of what we read.’(1988) This means people unfamiliar with the term will believe what a poor writer presents to them at face value, they won't challenge the negative associations.
It is unethical to use words like a slur, so far removed from their true factual meaning, and skew it towards harming people who have to endure the weight and burden and stigma of such a word, on a daily basis.
Writers like me, with actual lived experience, have to fight back and educate readers with my own work, otherwise harmful stereotypes are continually worsened.
Writers who haven't experienced such things have an ethical obligation to watch what words they use.
Unless they want to incur a wrathful storm of comics from people like me, that is.
References
Booth, WC 1988, The company we keep : an ethics of fiction, University of California Press, Berkeley.
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