Great Responsibility : Rethinking Disability Portrayal in Popular Fiction & Calling for a Multi-cultural Change

• Main Author: Minaki, Christina Georgia
• Other Authors: Titchkosky, Tanya
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: disability; fiction; multicultural; disability studies; disability portrayal; disability culture; normalcy; anti-ableism; anti-oppression; publishing; disability industry; 0340
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/30113

This thesis is an occasion to examine how normalcy – as a phenomenon constructed in society and so not natural but human-made – is reproduced as a hegemonic ideal through oppressive portrayals of disability in literature. Many of the fictional texts I analyze reproduce the privileging of normalcy. I therefore work to disturb normalcyʼs hold through critical analysis of a wide variety of currently popular fiction for youth and adults. Combining interpretive inquiry and personal narrative, I bring forward new understandings of normalcy, disability and culture. Along with showing how normalcyʼs supremacy is upheld within the book industry, and critiquing texts that do disability as usual (through both survey and close analysis approaches), I discuss at length several literary works that write disability in anti-oppressive, anti-ableist ways. To close this thesis, I discuss my own transformation as an author and scholar through disability studies.