GeekGirlCon Blog

Panel Recap: The Disability Politics of Daredevil

With Daredevil returning for season two this week, let’s revisit our GeekGirlCon panel on the show! I attended a panel with Elsa S. Henry, a feminist scholar and disability rights activist. She also happens to be legally blind and, given that Daredevil is a show with a blind protagonist, she had several misconceptions about vision impairment to clear up.

“You can still like Daredevil, but here is a perspective you might not have had before,” Henry explained to a full room at the start of the session. She began by disproving several presumptions about what it was like to be blind. “Not all blind people use braille. So a lot of what you see isn’t accurate towards a blind person’s life,” she said, with reference to Matt Murdock’s constant use of a braille output device. “Most people use text-speak; you can hear it and don’t need to mess around with machines. When I watch the show, it’s very difficult not to notice things that don’t make any sense.”

JC Lau
“Rock On!”

Dead Scare: Interview with Game Writer Elsa S. Henry

Written by GeekGirlCon Manager of Editorial Services Winter Downs.

Dead Scare, which at the time of writing has hit 86% of its Kickstarter goal, is “a tabletop RPG where you play the women and children fending for themselves against zombies and the McCarthy regime in 1950s America.”

It’s written by women and non-binary game designers, about women, children, and other marginalized people fending off zombies in McCarthy-era America. Russian spies unleash a bio-weapon in an attempt to assassinate President Truman, turning everyone who was out in the streets and other public places into flesh-eating zombies. As a result, the only human survivors are people who were excluded from the public sphere–women, children, and people with disabilities.

The game is based on Apocalypse World by Vincent Baker, a versatile system that’s been adapted for many genres and settings.

GeekGirlCon had the opportunity to talk to Elsa S. Henry, the writer of Dead Scare, and ask her a few questions.

Winter Downs
“Rock On!”