Teaching Models of Disability with Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love

Abstract

Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love , a novel about children with engineered disabilities living and performing in a traveling freak show, has proved a useful vehicle in teaching of disability studies in the college classroom in that it utilizes and complicates the negative depictions of disability often available to students, and even works to advance an opposing and more positive view of disability. From the vast field of disability studies, the article focuses on five paradigms or models of disability to ground and focus students’ learning: the morality model, the charity model, the medical model, the supercrip model, and the social group model. All highlight the problematic ways in which society often views disability, as well as how readers might begin to shift these perceptions in more positive ways.