Disability in Genre Fiction

Abstract

A visually impaired hero is unable to recognize the woman he meets as his lost love. Through her intervention, his sight is restored, and the couple live happily ever after. A young girl with autism is threatened by a supernatural monster, but is protected by a nondisabled boy. A man with a disfiguring genetic condition commits a series of murders, eventually attacking the detective working on the case. A disabled girl is transformed into a cyborg, and teaches those around her – and the reader – about what it means to be human. Genre fiction has always told stories about disability. Literary genres, like their counterparts in film, television, and other media, present and re-present characteristic disability tropes and narratives, such as the disabled horror monster, the romance hero who is cured by the love of a good woman, and the cognitively exceptional detective. These images reflect disability discourses and stereotypes circulating in wider culture, but they are also refracted by the demands of the genres in which they are located. As Ato Quayson observes, “generic conventions serve to situate the disabled characters differently from genre to genre.” Genre affects how disabled people are depicted, and how those depictions are interpreted; it influences how frequently people with impairments are portrayed, which impairments those characters possess, and whether they appear in primary, secondary, or marginal character roles. Despite the manifest importance of genre to disability representation, it is only very recently that cultural disability scholars have begun seriously to consider genre fiction, and genre scholars to embrace disability-informed perspectives. Clare Barker notes the “limited literary range” of scholarly work on disability representation, and the ways in which such works have tended to overlook factors such as “genre, period and context of production, or political orientation,” while Rebecca Mallett and Katherine Runswick-Cole write that there is still “much work to be done on the importance of impairment and disability to genres such as sci-fi, romance and crime fiction.” Scholars have examined disability in works of genre fiction, and their historical precursors, but such works have rarely been read as genre fictions, meaning that the interplay between disability and genre, and the way that it shifts over time, remains largely unexplored.