Access is Magic: Labor & Disability on My Little Pony

"I wouldn't be standing here
if it weren't for the friendship 
I made with all of you." 

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
the Magic Mystery Cure

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'The Magic Mystery Cure' aired on 16 Feb 2013 as the finale 

to the 13 episode Season Three of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

While I concentrate on the song "What My Cutie Mark is Telling Me,"

as a synopsis of the episode's key premise and conflict,

a broader examination of the finale is included in a note at the end.

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It's No Fun Being Me:
Environmental Disability

The second track of the season three finale, "What My Cutie Mark is Telling Me," introduces the problem which the narrative will attempt to resolve: what happens when your prescribed "destiny" contradicts your desires and talents? In Equestria, when a pony reaches maturity (around puberty) a cutie mark appears symbolically representing their special vocation. The arrival of the cutie mark usually culminates a long period of self-discovery. As such, for three seasons the show has more-or-less followed the premise that the assigned mark happily correlated with the orientations and abilities of the recipient. Following the introduction of a misunderstood spell by the show's protagonist, Twilight Sparkle, the cutie marks of her good friends get switched and suddenly each of them find out what happens when their naturally/magically determined vocation works against their ingrained characteristics. Each pony suffers undue hardship, ridicule, and a sense that they are failures, becoming effectively "disabled" by their social environment. 

Previously, I have connected the cutie marks arrival at puberty with the normative arrival of sexual and gender identity. Continuing this line of thought, being forced to perform a socially prescribed role contrary to one's desires and orientations fits fairly well with the show's general attention to tensions experienced by queer and transgender youth. Being pressured into a heterosexual relationship or to perform a cisgender identity scans fairly well with conflicts against "What My Cutie Mark is Telling Me." In this way, "destiny" or "cutie mark" could stand in for God, Nature, parents, the government or society in general. One could read further into several of the lines for a gender-sexuality conflict, such as when Pinky Pie (an otherwise hyper pansexual super-femme) sings, "I don't care for picking fruit and plowing fields ain't such a hoot. No matter how I try I can't fix this busted water shoot," while taking the role of the butch cowgirl lesbian Applejack. The penetrative metaphors of plowing, the aggressive sensuality of picking fruits, and the phallic imagery of a water shoot are signs of Applejack's female masculinity but in Pinkypie's hands they signal failed sexuality.

What happens, however, when we take the occupational aspect of the plot as more than mere metaphor, an exploration of environmental disability begins to arise. The distinction between the descriptors able-bodied and disabled has many times raised the question: able (or not) to do what? Once this question is asked, we are on our way to a critical social model of disability. Immediately, the able to ___ becomes evidently circumstantial. A deaf person may be less able to hear (according to normative definitions and expectations) but may be able to see. In this way, there is no universally able-bodied or disabled persons. Disability is contingent on the demanded task. Disability is in the environment. This fact has been pushed further to observe that most of disability is invoked as an occupational matter. Rights, compensation, limits, access, and disability language in general become financially, legally, and socially stressed in and around concerns of the workplace. Able to ___ quickly becomes "Able to work" or disabled. In this way, when five of "the Mane Six" get their cutie marks mixed up so that each of them finds themselves set up as failures by the vocational environments and demands of a mark contrasting with their abilities and interests, the disability register becomes more evident.

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It has to be my Destiny:
Fixing Limitations

In turning the ponies into examples of disability, the episode overemphasizes their essential inability to perform a task beyond their traditional occupation. There is not a well established reason that Rainbow Dash cannot become skilled at taking care of animals when she receives Fluttershy's cutie mark, although her desires and talents point elsewhere. Indeed, it is different asking Rarity to fly like Rainbow Dash (she has no wings), than asking her to do Rainbow Dash's job of ordering the weather (which she finds a way to accomplish in her own way, using her unicorn magic). Because the show excludes a variety of physical disability narratives (e.g. blindness, deafness, needing assistive technology like a wheel-chair), this brief excursion into crip environment somewhat ignores differences in embodiment. Broadly speaking, most of the ponies are physically identical, excepting color and the significant presence or absence of horns and wings. 

The differences between  a unicorn (with a horn), a pegasus (with wings), and a land-pony (without horn or wings), frames the whole world with each of the three types working distinct kinds of jobs (Only a pegasus can control the weather, for instance). Although there is no evident hierarchy between these three types, few try to move beyond their prescribed order. In fact, Rarity's ability to order the weather without the wings and cloud-hopping ability of a pegasus suggests that she is on her way of developing alternatives to an assumed natural order. In this way, forcing the ponies to return to their traditional occupation may ease their comfort but denies the narrative that challenges the way that environments and professions are structured to deny access across the social orders. 

While choosing to resolve the problem with a fairly conservative "Born this Way" argument, again showing a background in non-radical LGBT politics, the song "What My Cutie Mark is Telling Me" gestures to alternatives beyond the one the show inevitably follows. "Maybe they will learn to like their new lives," suggests Spike, Twilight's dragon assistant after the song. "No!" replies Twilight, "They are not who they are meant to be anymore" (Translation by JoshScorcher: "How dare they do something they don't normally do!"). In short, while the song evidently critiques the notion that one can be handed a profession from on high as a "destiny" without problems, the counter-argument the show offers is that it is merely not the right destiny. The concept of growth and change is elided for a return to the status quo. In the end, liberty (even progress) is denied in favor of conserving traditional limits and power structures.

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What My Cutie Mark is Telling Me:
Liberating Access

While the show explores the negative affects of being forced into a disabling professional environment, it misses an opportunity by solving the problem merely by moving the "right" person to the "right" job, ignoring the opportunity to change the way the job is structured to better facilitate their needs and abilities. Opportunities for increasingly accessibility to move across professions are suggested within the song itself when Applejack turns her disabling circumstance into a call for collective support. "Could y'all give me a hand here and help me fix this mess?" asks Applejack, "My destiny is not pretty but it's what my Cutie Mark is Telling Me." If the audience takes the shift in profession as authentic, for a moment, the bias of the shows solution to restore ponies to their proper "destiny" demonstrates not merely a preference for the traditional way things have been done an aesthetic rejection of the ugly, difficult, and socially revolutionary. Rather than support those asking for help, by improving their circumstances, Twilight locates the problem in the individual.

Ironically, while the show's first two-thirds deals with fixing characters back into their traditional roles in society, the final third (which seems to come out of no where - see note) contradicts this message. By returning society to its idealized past and doing something no other pony can, Twilight Sparkle proves herself enough of a conservative and superior breed of creature that she is deemed fit for becoming a ruler of Equestria. In a sudden burst of magic, Twilight Sparkle is transported to a star-lit exterior where Princess Celestia tells her that her training has made her into the model princess, earning her the right to be transformed from a unicorn (with a horn) into an alicorn (with a horn and wings). By yoking her coronation with her transformation, the show upholds the idea that one's physical appearance determines one's social status while nonetheless admitting that in the case of "superiors" exceptions can be made. This is a fairly rote argument for royal monarchies: individuals stand above the law in order to administer the law to the common people.

What if the special favor done for Twilight Sparkle was widened to include other ponies? Based on the revelation that Princess Celestia has been helping to prepare Twilight for her transformation since the very first episode, there is evident reason to believe that occupational and material change is possible if a person is given the right training, environment, and support. Looking back, we see Celestia picking out Twilight for (1) ongoing individual attention consisting of regular lessons and missions, (2) moving Twilight from the city of Canterlot to Ponyville where she will have more room to grow, and (3) helping facilitate a community to form around Twilight to support her in her development. Here we find a good formula for social change, liberating persons from occupational and environmental disability. By limiting the access to these structural supports to an arbitrary few goes further to substantialize ableism, however, given that disability is not located in individuals but in systems. The able-bodied are socially designated as "able" because they have access to the mechanisms by power which gives them liberties which are denied to those to considered "disabled." Environments are not a phenomenon of "destiny," but social phenomenon where decisions are made to profit some at the expense of others. Twilight's ascension into the privileged class is an opportunity for her and the story to explore more of the social causes and repercussions of a hierarchal system where "destiny" and "cutie marks" are used as tools of control.

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More My Little Pony

Queerness is Magic: Erotics

Passing is Magic: Transgender

Crip Magic: Madness

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It's Time Now for a New Change:
A Note on the Season Finale

The plot arcs of Season Three of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was cut in half, consisting of a 13 episode order instead of the 26 that make up prior and later years. Surprisingly, the change was made because the show had become too successful for its own good. Reports suggest that the first two seasons had increased the sales of MLP merchandise to a peak that a full 26 episode order would not increase and a half-order would not likely diminish. Commentators have applauded this move by Hasbro as a "good business decision" while admitting that it comes at the expense of fans of the show who may complain that their loyalty is now being taken for granted. In any case, the shortened order seems to affect the story development in a few places in season three, most notably in the finale. 

In a move that one reviewer described both as earned and a clear move to sell a new line of toys, half of the season finale focuses on the sudden transformation of Twilight from a unicorn into an "alicorn" (a unicorn with wings - a distinction in the MLP world reserved only for the rulers) at which point she is declared a princess. How is the change both "earned" and "sudden?" As JoshScorcher notes, this development was clearly a point that the series had been working towards from the beginning when Twilight Sparkle is given a special training mission by Princess Celestia aimed at developing her leadership skills. Within the arc of the season and episode, however, the shift feels forced. 

The magical change and her sudden coronation are given little to no explanation either before or after. In fact, the show runners have admitted following the two-part premier of Season Four entitled "Princess Twilight Sparkle" that the tag at the end of Season Three was effectively part 1 of a 3 part arc. Putting the transformation in season 3 instead of season four was likely aimed as a pay-off for the loyal fans (who were being short-changed by 13 episodes) and to leave off on a cliff-hanger. Whatever the reason, the effect of the sudden shift at the end of the episode is that it rings disharmony with the message of the overall story.

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Follow on Twitter:

Blog: @ThingsTransform
Personal: @Transliterature

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The Lives and Afterlives of Leelah (Josh) Alcorn: Remaking Meaning from Transgender Suicide

"#LeelahAlcorn was buried in a suit with the wrong name. Please remember her as a beautiful young woman."

@Lets_Stop_Here

Bullying Stops Here

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"No Winning, No Way Out"

In Canto XIII of Dante's Divine Comedy, the poet imagines the Wood of Suicides, where the damned find themselves denied the dignity of their lived form after death. When suicides arrive in Dante's Hell, they are cast to the second ring of the seventh circle by Minos, where they plunge into the ground like seeds and grow into the form of trees. If this is not enough, they are continually torn to pieces by Harpies. Even after the time of the resurrection, when all souls return to their bodies, the suicides will be denied this honor:  "Come l'altre verrem per nostre spoglie, / ma non però ch'alcuna sen rivesta, / ché non è giusto aver ciò ch'om si toglie" ("We will come to claim our cast-off bodies / like the others. But it would not be just if we again / put on the flesh we robbed from our own souls." Dante, Inferno.XIII.103-105). Punishment by the refusal of embodiment is a consistent theme throughout the Divine Comedy, repeated again in the shifting forms of the cheats and liars. Changing the form determined for one's substance by Dante's God is tantamount to a rebellion against Natural and Divine Law, a privilege of shape which is then revoked. 

While the Inferno imagines the enforcement of such prescribed genres of embodiment in an epic fantasy, we witness the same logic of punishment active today against those who break from the confinement of unlivable shapes of gender. I've written previously, asking the question "What Name Will You Put on My Gravestone?" calling out the responsibility we have to fight the battles of the Trans lives after their death. Every trans person experiences vulnerability and the need for community support, but when that fight claims the life of another, the dead become even more dependent on others to re-make the meaning that has oppressively structured their lives. Between 50-60% of trans persons attempt suicide by the age of 20 and all too often the same forces that pressured the trans person into annihilation, continues to erase their existence by refusing them the dignity in death of keeping the form of gender they fought (and died) to preserve in life. Burying trans women in suits and ties and marking the graves of trans men in their birth names perpetrates the same violence of the imagination and memory that Dante's Inferno enforces on his damned souls in the Wood of Suicides.

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"Transgender Queen of Hell"

In the last days of 2014, we have been reminded again of the battle for the lives and after-lives of Leelah (Josh) Alcorn, age 17. On a late December day, Leelah posted a note on her tumblr page entitled  "Suicide Note" and proceeded to end her life by walking in front of a trailer tractor truck on Interstate 71. In the note, she admits to feeling that despite repeated attempts to make a livable life for herself through gender transition, she faced seemingly impenetrable barriers put forth by her parents and her community. Thus, while it was her legs that cast her into the way of death, she was clearly pushed by a society that wished to deny Leelah a dignified existence. "There’s no winning. There’s no way out. I’m sad enough already," writes Alcorn. "I don’t need my life to get any worse. People say “it gets better” but that isn’t true in my case. It gets worse. Each day I get worse" (LazerPrincess). While contemporary secular doctors might describe Alcorn as mentally ill, as we see in the case of medieval stories of sin and transgender suicide, the illness is more accurately a social disease rather than a personal one. In fact, the resonance between Alcorn's online confession and John Gower's description of the death of a trans feminine Narcissus in the Confessio Amantis's description of the deadly sin of Pride is striking: a life is isolated from community, where the expectations to be a "perfect little straight Christian boy" causes an unsustainable division within the self, that because of a lack of support, resolves itself in death.

Yet death is never the end, as the battle over the life of trans persons turns into a war over their afterlives. Conscious that her story existed as part of a genre of transgender lives (often ending the same way), Alcorn reached out to an online community and called on them to guard her memory. "My death needs to mean something," writes Alcorn. "My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say “that’s fucked up” and fix it. Fix society. Please." (LazerPrincess). An articulate young woman, Alcorn's note does what Gower's Tale of Narcissus and Dante's Wood of Suicides does: take a story of isolation and connect it with an imagined community of lives and texts. This imprisonment in an unlivable form of embodiment and sense of isolation bred out of being cut off from contact with a community of support constitutes what CS Lewis has defined as Hell itself. In the Great Divorce, Lewis describes Heaven as a single expansive multiplicity but also that there are as many hells as there are those who would reject or be rejected by everything else: "For a damned soul is nearly nothing: it is shrunk, shut up in itself." In this way, Alcorn was damned by her family and society to become how she describes herself in the tagline to her blog: a "transgender queen of hell" (LazerPrincess). 

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"Death Needs to Mean Something"

Trans activism and scholarship has been characterized not merely as either encompassed by the constructions nor the destructions of body and narrative, but by a continual re-construction. In 1991, Sandy Stone wrote her seminal trans theory essay, a "Post-Transsexual Manifesto" in which she called for a transformation of how we approach our personal and collective histories: “To begin to write oneself into the discourses by which one has been written.” This act of asserting change does not deny the work nor the violence of social forces, but seeks to assert agency over the technologies by which their lives and afterlives are made and unmade. “Transsexuals must take responsibility for all of their history,” writes Stone, “to begin to articulate their lives not as a series of erasures… but as a political action begun by reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the reconfigured and reinscribed body.” This battle over the reins of discourse seeks to wrestle matter and meaning away from the eternal fixity of supposed Natural and Divine Law as well as from the eternal nihilism of a denied existence. This occurs not by denying scripts and erasures, but by giving new meanings to life and death.

This is the vein that frames Alcorns plea, "My death needs to mean something" (LazerPrincess). In her final days, Alcorn was overwhelmed by the solitude and nihilism of a personal hell, and looked for "something" rather than nothing. The force of her words and death has sparked a viral response with numerous artists, activists and scholars adding the force to re-inscribe the history that others have set for Alcorn: burying her in a suit and under her birth name. Rather than letting this grave have the final word, photos taken by Alcorn herself have been circulated and paintings of her have been made. On Facebook, Robert McRuer writes, "RIP Leelah Alcorn. That pressure to be a "perfect little straight Christian boy" is real and I hope we honor your memory by refusing and negating that pressure in whatever way possible." On Twitter we hear voices reacting to the societies that made and unmade Leelah. Tara Jayn (@TaraJayn)writes "Guess the parents overlooked the fact that maybe God gave them  #LeelahAlcorn  as their chance to learn unconditional love. #TransLivesMatter," while Sophia Banks (@SophiaPhotos) writes, "I am not religious but nor will I blame religion for the suicide of #LeelahAlcorn lots of transphobia from atheists too." Whether or not one believes in Dante's hell of torment, Lewis's hell of isolation, or Alcorn's parents' hell of cisgender expectations, Leelah's death need not be the final everlasting word for her afterlife in the wider community.

We failed to save Leelah's life, but how can we honor it and give her a better afterlife on this world? Re-inscribing her image and story are great starts. As Alcorn writes in her sign off, "Goodbye,(Leelah) Josh Alcorn" the specter of past lives remain with us and we have the power to transform them. Yet we need to also liberate Leelah in ways that she could not do alone. We need to free "(Leelah)" from the confines of being stated parenthetically, separated off as an isolated life or failed potential. Alcorn points us in the direction of how to do this: "My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say “that’s fucked up” and fix it. Fix society. Please." In life she was made to be too alone, in death she has the potential to join a community. We need to connect her story to those that have come before (like Dante, Gower, Lewis) and give her afterlife a place among us. This is not merely a plea to "Save Leelah" but an affirmation that we never will totally lose her and she may yet save us.

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