So one of the things I like about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which I think is somewhat underappreciated in the audience because it clashes hard with the utopic vision of the future, is that the Federation is in many ways still systemically and culturally ableist.
I think this is explored best in S02E06's "Melora," obviously.
This episode starts off with Dax being shocked that the replicator contained a schematic for a wheelchair, because no one has needed one in three hundred years. Bashir answers that no no no lol, Federation replicators in fact cannot make wheelchairs based on their built-in libraries, and that the wheelchair is a schematic that their incoming wheelchair user coworker sent over to have replicated for her on arrival.
The rest of the episode explores how this utopic vision of the future that the difficult-to-accommodate disabled are not a part of has absolutely de-normalized the cultural concepts and accommodations surrounding some disabilities, thus creating complex and seemingly anachronistic institutionalist-era realities in the space future.
This is, to me, deeply interesting because it highlights a very real conversation around pursuing cures against pursuing accommodation.
It's basically acknowledging the threat of the Gattica style shit currently engaged in by dudes like Elon Musk and these freaks
(for those who don't recognize them, these are weird pro-natalist yuppies who claim they've done shit like genetically engineer their kids for high IQs, a scentifically impossible thing. they are, unsurprisingly, very racist but in a SoCal-Berkeley way.)
becoming so normalized in society that we effectively engineer out the majority of "defects." Everybody starts off with a happy healthy life as defined not through accommodation and infinite diversity in infinite combinations, but through the elimination of variation that would necessitate different cultural practices, different architecture, different understandings of life worthy of life, blah blah blah.
It's not "in the brilliant shining future nobody has to be disabled," it's "in the brilliant shining future the disabled aren't allowed to exist, and we don't have to think about them" lol.
But! Geordi LaForge!
Well, Geordi is born blind in a context where blindness can be perfectly accommodated, debatably even cured, via his wundervisor and / or surgically implanted eyes. In fact, in the movies, which do not exist sorry, Geordi gets them eyes stuck in and in so doing even loses the cultural signifier of his blindness, as well as situational considerations of blindness.
Further, Geordi is in this unfortunate weird space a lot of disabled characters in science fiction are, where his prosthesis is considered cool enough that it passes some kind of ableist vibe check wherein the character is no longer necessarily received as "disabled" by the audience. It's a cool cyberpunk thing, and thus loses its audience association with disability in many ways, ala Adam Jensen's sword arms or the unexplored nature of voluntarily cutting off one's limbs to replace them with robot parts in Cyberpunk 2077.
Geordi "can do things," he just "has to do things a little differently." The "a little differently" here is defined as "wearing a thing on his face" and not a different process or method. We never see how Geordi lays out his quarters or prepares his uniform, tools, whatever in a way that makes it all more accessible for him; he readily assume the first thing he does in the morning is plug his visor in. Glasses.
It's a fun cosplay idea in a way a wheelchair isn't.
The thing is, when Geordi is without his visor, he's fucked.
I don't just mean the episode where he's trapped in a island with a Cardassian or whatever, I mean on the fucking Enterprise. Say they're in a crisis, he falls over, wangs his noggin on a console and breaks his visor. Look at the open layouts with no handrails leading anywhere, no braille or layout signage posted, nothin'.
How the fuck is he going to find his way to the turbolift?
These are not accessible environments for a blind bloke. These are accessible environments for a sighted bloke wearing glasses.
The thing to consider as well is, we know Geordi's blindness is absolute. Blindness in real life is pretty diverse, actually, and many blind people do have some vision. Not Geordi. So, all the lights that communicate where to go in a crisis mean fuck all to him.
And, considering how often the Enterprise is in crisis, crew members are cut off from each other or the ship, the practical realities Geordi has to deal with on away missions that are simply never accommodated - it becomes apparent that Geordi is considered effectively the same as any sighted crew member.
His disability accommodation is individual and his responsibility. Nothing is provided by Starfleet except, perhaps, new visors and free visits to Beverly.
The same criticism exists for my man Hemmer,
who is played by blind actor Bruce Horak, yes, but who exists in a similar state to Geordi. I doubt they considered Mr. Horak a consultant on blindness and how a blind crew member would work in their series, because again, his blindness is accommodated for by magical future thing that doesn't fucking exist. In this case, psychic senses or something (idk I've never watched nuTrek sober).
If you look at the environments he's in, or the situations he deals with on away missions, sans those Daredevilian supersenses he'd be shit out of luck.
They're so adverse to giving blind characters so much as a cane.
I'm not saying the inclusion of blind characters is bad or that we should not engage in these fantasies of disabled characters being able to live and work equally to able-bodied characters without the need for accommodation, necessarily. I'm certainly not saying every blind character should have a sighted support following them around or a dog or whatever. My criticism is not of the blind characters' individual accommodations not being up to my arbitrary standard as a sighted viewer lol.
What I am instead attempting to hightlight here is that the shows seem adverse to engaging in disabled / accommodative environmental design or in the more complex, social realities of disability, and that's something that the episode "Melora," the wheelchair user episode this post is about lol, addresses in depth.
Julian is a future space doctor who doesn't know how to comfortably talk to someone in a chair. That only happens in a universe where doctors don't encounter wheelchairs in their professional lives. That's a reality brought about specifically by the comfortable eugenicist realities of the future, where although due to a war the Federation draws the line at "enhanced" individuals, it obviously voluntarily engages in liberal eugenics to the effect of eliminating disabled life in many meaningful forms. Its society, where doctors seem to need an aide like this to do their jobs properly:
And idk! I think that's neat. I think that's a powerful flaw in the utopic vision of the future that Roddenberry and the others probably didn't intend originally, and that DS9, commendably, attempts to explore.
Especially because Julian was a lil autistic boy who was forcibly cured through similar treatment, and correctly identifies that this means the him who existed before was drastically altered for his parents' fear of actually accommodating him.
anyway this post was brought out of me by some dickhead saying Melora "breaks the setting" for them lol. bro they fought a eugenics war, they definitely didn't come out of that culturally unchanged. you're just scared of wheelchairs. fuck u
Regarding blindness specifically, there is a whole episode in TOS with a blind character who pretends not be blind thanks to a very cool dress who allows her to know where things are around her and the fact that she trained with Vulcans because she is a bit of a telepath. Because her eyes look ok, she can pretend to be looking at things and she does so because, as she says when confronted with her lie (they think it's another lie and find this one), she doesn't want anyone's pity. Apparently, with Vulcans, she could develop other skills without people feeling sorry for her.
Now that is interesting about the Federation, isn't it?
I don't remember all the details, but it stood out to me that we do see how she manages without her dress (poorly). If I am not mistaken, the dress is not Human technology, as Kirk and Mccoy weren't aware it even existed.
[I have to say that TOS, while not being perfect, does have a couple of episodes where there is at least some background idea of "what if we put a disabled character here to make a point". And while making the point, they are overall very respectful and they raise some very background questions about how the Federation lives with disability (ignoring it massively)]
In theory, Andorians have several blind people/communities and we still don't see a lot of adaptations for them.
Klingons and Vulcans, given their history, should have a lot of amputees or otherwise disabled by life people.
Now, thinking about other aliens that are not Federation related, we had Vidiians as very interesting villains that were left there because Voyager kept voyaging. But we have a whole planet with an incurable disease that causes pain and mobility problems to the point that the only solution they found was to kidnap and force surgery on healthy aliens?? Is that what some writers think disabled people want? And regardless of that, they were probably the most original villains of the whole of Star Trek and they weren't there long enough for us to have an episode of "average daily life of one of these" like we do have with some other villains.
