#disability lit

[whilereadingandwalking]

Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc was a good nonfiction about how stories are never just stories. Through a mix of memoir and literary analysis, Leduc unpacks how fairytales—both the old versions and the new Disney-fied versions—both reflect and ingrain in us a certain perspective on what disability and disfigurement are, how they should be treated, and what kind of endings they incite.

Leduc parses excellent analysis to argue that disabled people deserve tales outside of the two that fairytales allow: despair and death or the return of able-bodiedness or beauty. I don't always agree with the analysis—some interpretations miss intriguing opportunities, such as with Hans Christian Andersen—but it's still a great breakdown of how these tales influence our idea of what's normal, what a happy life is, and how disability is leveraged too often only as a symbol, which then becomes useless as soon as it's fulfilled its purpose. A great analysis and reflection of disability in fairytale and fantasy.

[acyborgkitty]

The problem, unstated till now, is how to live in a damaged body in a world where pain is meant to be gagged uncured ungrieved over The problem is to connect, without hysteria, the pain of any one’s body with the pain of the body’s world For it is the body’s world they are trying to destroy for ever The best world is the body’s world Filled with creatures filled with dread misshapen so yet the best we have our raft among the abstract worlds and how I longed to live on this earth walking her boundaries never counting the cost

-Adrienne Rich, Contradictions: Tracking Poems

[mendingbone]

i keep seeing people in their late teens/early twenties having a "[X] content intended for younger audiences does not feel satisfying to me anymore but i don't know where to start to branch out into adult fiction" moment and i thought i would give some recommendations for adult fiction for my fellow creepy crawly queer people. all or at least a LOT of it will be on the darker and more fucked up side bc i primarily engage with horror and thriller media personally but feel free to add on with more or recommendations from other genres :)

edit: i am continuing to add to this list so there might be new recs (highlighted in pink) in here every once in a while! also want to add that there's a variety of POC, queer, and disabled authors in here as well, i am also all of the above (asian, bi/aro, poly, disabled) and tried to incorporate as many of their wickedly talented, compelling narratives as possible. that's all, happy reading!

A Certain Hunger, Chelsea G. Summers

A Darker Shade of Magic, V. E Schwab*

A Dowry of Blood, S.G Gibson

Animal, Lisa Taddeo*

A Ripple of Power and Promise, Jordan A. Day*

Bunny, Mona Awad*

Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi*

Cursed Bread, Sophie Mackintosh*

Dark Places, Gillian Flynn

Dead Girls Don't Say Sorry, Alex Ritany*

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk*

Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh*

Fruiting Bodies, Kathryn Harlan*

Goddess of Filth, V. Castro*

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

House of Leaves, Mark Danielewski

If I Had Your Face, Frances Cha*

Iron Widow, Xiran Jay Zhao

Jackal, Erin E. Adams*

Juniper and Thorn, Ava Reid*

Kindred, Octavia Butler*

Manhunt, Gretchen Felker-Martin*

Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee*

Rabbits, Terry Miles*

Scorched Grace, Margot Douaihy*

Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn

She is a Haunting, Trang Thahn Tran

Slewfoot, Brom*

Sorrowland, Rivers Soloman

Summer Sons, Lee Mandelo

Supper Club, Lara Williams*

The Centre, Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi*

The Change, Kirsten Miller

The Death of Jane Lawrence, Caitlin Starling*

The Dreamer Trilogy, Maggie Stiefvater

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson

The Hollow Places, T. Kingfisher*

The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter, Soraya Palmer*

The Jasmine Throne, Tasha Suri

The Locked Tomb, Tamsyn Muir

The Luminous Dead, Caitlin Starling*

The Red Tree, Caitlin Kiernan*

The Unfamiliar Garden, Benjamin Percy*

Vicious, V. E Shwab

Wake, Siren, Nina MacLaughlin*

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson

What Moves the Dead, T. Kingfisher*

[frankingsteinery]

all victor hateposts boil down to are "i hate victor because [he displays XYZ mental/physical illness symptom]" or "i hate victor because [he does things or reacts in a certain way because of reasons outside of his control due to his illness]"

[xiaq]

Like Real People Do Giveaway!

Do you want a free signed (by both me and Deacon!) copy of LRPD shipped straight to your door? Of course you do.

Rules for entry: 1. Must be following me 2. Like this post 3. Share this post

Closes October 1 midnight. Winner to be announced October 3rd! I'm doing a separate giveaway on Instagram if you want to double your chances. :)

The Blurb:

Nineteen-year-old hockey phenom Alexander Price is the youngest-ever captain in the NHL. With a polarizing social media presence and a predilection for dirty play, he typifies the stereotype of young, out-of-control athlete. But away from the cameras, Alex is a kid with an anxiety disorder and the expectations of an expansion franchise on his shoulders. And maybe he tries too hard to fit the part of asshole playboy, but it’s better than the alternative; in his line of work, gay is the punchline of an insult, not something he can be.

Eighteen-year-old vlogger Elijah Rodriguez is a freshman in college recovering from an injury that derailed his Olympic figure-skating dreams. Mixed-race, disabled, and out of the closet since he was fourteen, Eli is unapologetically himself. He has no qualms about voicing his disapproval of celebrity jocks who make homophobic jokes on Twitter and park their flashy cars in the handicapped spaces outside of ice rinks.

After an antagonistic introduction, Alex and Eli’s inexplicable friendship both baffles and charms the internet. But navigating relationships is hard enough for normal teenagers. It’s a lot harder when the world—much of it disapproving—is watching you fall in love with your best friend.

Also if you don't want to let fate decide your ability to own a copy, you can find them on Amazon any of these ebook retailers or in print at your favorite bookstore nationwide!

[mossy-rainfrog]

[ID: A traditionally drawn and watercolor painted portrait of Captain Ahab from Moby Dick based on Le Génie du Mal by Guillaume Geefs. Ahab is an older chubby and muscular Persian man with short curly greying dark hair, a pointed beard, a lightning scar across his face and body, and several other scars. His left leg is amputated below the knee. Ahab wears nothing, but has a deep red cloth draped across his lap. He holds a harpoon iron in one hand across his lap, and his other hand rests on top of his head. He looks down pensively, with a troubled expression. The background is colored in light blues and browns. End ID.]

ungodly, godlike Ahab

I miss drawing traditionally, this was so refreshing ;-; the statue this is based on is the really hot Lucifer one with the crown btw: le génie du mal, definitely look it up :) anyways I love drawing Ahab in religious imagery and going completely batshit insane about it

design from the stellar @pocketsizedquasar as always :3

[doyouknowthisdisabledcharacter]

Do You Know This Disabled Character?

This isn't specific to any media. If you know only one version, vote ‘I know them.’

Matt Murdock / Daredevil is blind and has depression.

[haveyoureadthistransbook]

The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment by Cameron Awkward-Rich

goodreads

In The Terrible We Cameron Awkward-Rich thinks with the bad feelings and mad habits of thought that persist in both transphobic discourse and trans cultural production alike. Observing that trans studies was founded on a split from and disavowal of madness, illness, and disability, Awkward-Rich argues for and models a trans criticism that works against this disavowal. By tracing the coproduction of the categories disabled and transgender in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and analyzing transmasculine literature and theory by Eli Clare, Elliot Deline, Dylan Scholinski, and others, Awkward-Rich suggests that thinking with maladjustment might provide new perspectives on the impasses arising from the conflicted relationship between trans, feminist, and queer. In so doing, he demonstrates that rather than only impeding or confining trans life, thought, and creativity, forms of maladjustment have also been and will continue to be central to their development.

Mod opinion: I haven't started reading this book yet, but it is waiting for me on my bookshelf & looks so, so, so interesting!

[thepersonalquotes]

All sort of boundaries, be their gender, age, socio-economic status, physical or mental disabilities have to be eliminated.

Sukavich Rangsitpol

[astraltrickster]

....so like, I'm gonna say, I don't typically keep up to date with comic releases. I'm not super cut out for trying to stay on top of all the different continuities, that's just not the kind of thing I'm autistic about, so I just read them when I read them.

So.

Was anyone gonna tell me.

That in the 6 months between realizing I was hypermobile and getting my EDS diagnosis.

A Spider-Person debuted with the EXACT SAME DIAGNOSIS or was I just supposed to find that out in a conversation about ATSV myself???

Not only that, but with weirdly similar fashion sense to my own and a first name that is so close to my deadname that mine got mis-written as hers on a weekly basis as a kid??

Have I just been assigned a canon spidersona? Government-assigned kin?

[leebrontide]

It's been a minute, so please allow me to remind you all that I wrote a semi-YA book featuring brain-altering nanites, multigenerational found family, a few explosions, 4 queer MCs, angst (mostly not about queerness), my rage at the criminal justice system, some superheroes, and some hamsters.

The ebook is free, at least till book 2 comes out this July.

The paper book is available with all the usual suspects.

Content warnings at the listing (most of them sound worse than they are, but I tried to be fairly comprehensive)

[acyborgkitty]

"...with the knowledge that I simply cannot attend live performances. I suspect that this is not an uncommon experience; many other members of the disabled community are probably used to rationing their wants and lowering their expectations. Within that context, “radical disabled dreaming” is a form of resistance; Piepzna-Samarasinha’s new book, as with so much of their other work, provides us with an invitation to dream boldly."

from https://wordgathering.com/vol16/issue4/book-reviews/laksmi-piepzna-samarasinha/

[talefoundryshow]

NOW ON NEBULA!

Kafka's Metamorphosis: The Monster You Will Become

Would you still love us if we were a gigantic insect? We certainly hope you would!

[movietonight]

The earliest memory I have of my father was a court ordered play date when I was ~5 and we were supervised by a social worker. Anyway, I was really into this children's audiobook series called Elea Eluanda at the time which has a much "darker" backstory than most popular children's audiobooks. So I wanted to play Elea Eluanda with the dolls they had there and explained to my father that this doll is a child whose parents died in a car crash and now she's in a wheelchair. And my father had never heard of this series. So he just looked at me and was like this is not normal. And I had no idea what I did wrong because I just wanted to play out the plot of my favourite audiobook.

I have no idea where I'm going with this but I remembered this recently.

[mossy-rainfrog]

[ID: Four traditional pen drawings involving characters from Moby Dick. The first shows Fedallah staring darkly out into space with a thought bubble, showing a photograph of Bingus the cat. The second drawing shows Ishmael drawing Queequeg in a sketchbook as Queequeg reclines in front of him, chin in his hands, and smiles as Ishmael laughs. Text on the art reads: "lazy day - drawing his husband". The next drawing is of an autism creature, with Fedallah's harpoon and Zoroastrian skull cap. The fourth drawing shows Ahab and Fedallah walking together. Fedallah has a brace on his knee in view, side by side with Ahab's peg leg. Text on the art reads: "disabled besties".

Character designs: Fedallah is a thin, Persian man with a dark beard and mustache, wearing a long shirt and white Zoroastrian skull cap. Ishmael is a thin, white man with short hair and sideburns. Queequeg is a muscular Māori person with tattoos on his face, and a curly topknot on his hair. Ahab is a chubby, Persian man with short, curly hair, a beard, and a scar across his face. He has a pegleg, and wears a long coat. End ID.]

part 1 of all the mobydick themed doodles ive been doin at my new job for the past month in between trainings and call work :3 god i love fedallah. btw.

designs as always are from the delightful @pocketsizedquasar and their magnificent comic btw!!! go check them out always mwah mwah mwah

[wrenviel]

The warrior cats fandom 🤝 the unwanteds fandom 🤝 owen richardson fucking up the characters