How We Feel About How We Feel

Abstract

478 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) whole. Particularly as these genres maintain a significant position in popular culture, institutions of learning, and as modes through which contemporary life is critically examined, this work is invaluable and points to a growing need for more conversations regarding the critical potential of speculative fictions and pedagogies.—Brittany Tomin, York University How We Feel About How We Feel. Ria Cheyne. Disability, Literature, and Genre: Representation and Affect in Contemporary Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, REPRESENTATIONS:HEALTH,DISABILITY,CULTURE AND SOCIETY, 2019. 256 pp. $120.00 hc. We have all experienced it: reaching the end of a much-anticipated book only to find ourselves disappointed by an ending that does not fulfill our expectations. As readers, we bring certain expectations to any book as we consider what we want to read; it is safe to say, however, that many readers, unless they identify as such or advocate for, rarely consider how impairment and disability are represented in various genres. These expectations are exactly what Ria Cheyne addresses in Disability, Literature, and Genre, under the aegis of two main concepts: affect and reflexive representations. The book consists of an introduction, five chapters analyzing horror, crime fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and romance (from the 1960s onward), a conclusion, a works cited section, and an annotated bibliography replete with books that feature disability in some manner. Drawing on disability studies, literary studies, and affect studies, Cheyne declares in her introduction, “Affective Encounters and Reflexive Representations,” that the purpose of her book is to “examin[e] the affective—and effective—power of disability representations in contemporary fiction” (1). This section is packed with definitions, concepts, and key points in both affect studies and disability studies. As Cheyne rightly points out, “Disability makes us feel” (1) and her book “examines how the most significant popular literary genres produce particular affective responses and the role of disability within these affective systems” (4). Notably, Cheyne insists that “affects,” much like sf, are “inherently unwieldy, intractable, and impure, resisting precise definition” (8). She determines that Margaret Price’s concept of the “bodymind” in trauma studies is “implicit within the notion of affect, and vice versa” (9), and she emphasizes that transformation is inherent in the idea of affect: “Affective and emotional factors are often much more powerful at changing minds and attitudes, and challenging prejudice, than arguments based on reason and logic” (9). Engaging with the work of noted disability studies scholars such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Lennard Davis, Robert McRuer, Alison Kafer, and Tobin Siebers, Cheyne summarizes that disability is a “complex attribute arising from the intersection of bodyminds with the natural or built environment, social expectations, systemic barriers, and cultural norms”; current perceptions of disability position it as an “individual biological deficit [that] understands disabled people as worthy of pity, and assumes that cures or therapies should be utilised if available” (10). The field of disability studies, then, pushes back 479 BOOKS IN REVIEW against these assumptions. Addressing its role in her research, Cheyne says of genre fiction that it is a rich source of representations of disability that “function[s] as part of a codified affective system”; it is a “reflexive fiction in that it always writes back, directly or indirectly, to the conventions of the genre as shaped by its history” (16-17). Using Garland-Thomson’s notion of misfits, Cheyne claims that “Misfits, with all their productive potentials, are much more likely to come into being where there is the expectation of fit” (20). She also utilizes the idea of “reflexive representations of disability,” defined as “representations which encourage the reader to reflect upon what they understand about disability and potentially to rethink it” (20; emphasis in original). Ultimately, Cheyne argues for the value of genre fiction because it “enables reflexive representations of disability precisely because it is conventional, because readers have a set of expectations about what genre texts should be like and what those texts should make them feel” (20). In her first chapter, “Horror: Fearful Bodyminds,” Cheyne analyzes Stephen King’s Duma Key (2008) and Thomas Harris’s HANNIBAL LECTER series (19812006 ), and positions horror as a genre that targets the body to react in...