Stephanie Austin, Collin Callahan, Keri Miller, Laura Smith
What does it mean to imagine disability differently? Differently from the stereotypical stories of pity, helplessness, and victimhood, of evil, bitterness, and abjection, or nonsexuality and isolation, of overcoming and supercrips?
-Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined
Historically and culturally, conceptions of disability overlap with tales of monstrosity and medical discourses. The works in this section seek to deal with the harm of these layered discourses regarding a variety of conceptions of disability—encompassing disease, neurodiversity, mental illness, and more. You will find writings in this section that grapple with the myriad ways we conceive of disability or might understand it in a way that does not perpetuate “othering” characterizations. Drawing on texts from theorists including Eli Clare, Avery Gordon, and Samantha Schalk, along with speculative works by Colson Whitehead and Octavia E. Butler, the following articles and stories pursue critical reconceptualizations of monstrosity and (dis)ability.
This section takes as a given the harmful history surrounding disability and others who are debilitated by monstrous labels. However, we do not settle with a critique of common conceptions of disability. Instead, this serves as a foundation inspiring change and projections of possible futures that respond to and reject these harmful norms. These works span creative pieces that speculate on the abilities that accompany but are often overlooked in conjunction with having a disability and explore the potential for finding and gaining subversive capacities to maintain agency despite the sometimes debilitating effects of medical treatments. Included in this section are critical works, as well, which analyze the historical understanding of monstrosity through Marjorie Liu and Sana Takada’s graphic novel series Monstress and another which critiques AMC’s series The Walking Dead for its tendency to portray mental illness as monstrous and criminal. By closely analyzing and using inspiration from speculative fiction and science fiction genres which appear on TV, in comics, graphic novels, and short stories, we consider how we can learn from past and current conceptions of (dis)ability and monstrosity, to project possible futures that demonstrate thoughtful awareness of the complexity of (dis)ability.
Collin Callahan’s short story “Ascension Risks” takes place in a nameless, dystopic, vertical cityscape that has been divided into two distinct echelons in accordance with a law that requires each child to be tested for (dis)abilities at a young age—and if labeled (dis)abled, they are allocated to the lower echelon. This story’s setting is inspired by Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, and similarly will evoke surreal imagery and metaphor as a means of world building. The protagonists of the story, four individuals who live together with varying (dis)abilities—whether cognitive, physical, or mental illness—will challenge the classification of (dis)ability as defined by the governing structure of the city in their attempt to disrupt the upcoming election. There is corruption in the department that diagnoses children with (dis)abilities—the upper class being more able to bribe officials to doctor the results, and also to afford certain medications that allow for a “passing” medical classification, a classification that will not result in the allocation of their child to the lower echelon. The description and interactions of the main characters will illustrate the diversity and malleability of (dis)ability, and in addition will push back against the negative stereotypes historically associated with (dis)ability in fiction. This story will investigate Schalk’s definition of (dis)ability, as well as the “inextricability of mind and body” when it comes to (dis)ability, and will incorporate Afrofuturist elements in order to critique the political structure in power in order to imagine a better future for the citizens of the lower echelon.
In Keri Miller’s short story “Blue Lobsters and the Armadillo Domain” two young women meet and befriend one another due to both having a Desmoid tumor in their shoulders. The women meet while Fran, a twenty-one-year old from the United Kingdom is undergoing proton radiation therapy in the United States. Dana, the other protagonist, is twenty-six and a few years removed from her own radiation treatment and is now living down the street from the proton center in Florida. Through the narrative, the women explore their evolving identities—especially confidence after physical changes such as their radiation burns and scars from surgery—medication, treatments, dating while chronically ill, as well as the differences in access to healthcare.
Through the first-person narrative, told in alternating sections from both Dana and Fran’s perspectives, the two women learn from one another how to live as young, disabled, and chronically-ill people in a world very close to our own. The technologies of treatments are explored and used in the narrative to give the women abilities. Not so much of a “superpower” but an intuitive ability to read people and their intentions. Through this heightened sense, they are able to intervene in real-world tragedies such as human sex trafficking.
The story explores how illness can change lives for the better, while still acknowledging the harm it causes. Though it is a work of fiction, the story draws from the lived experiences of the author Keri Miller and research, especially feminist views, in the fields of disability, cyborg and invalid “othering,” and cancer narratives.
Stephanie Austin’s article “Leaving the Curative Arc: Mental Illness and the Monstrous Criminal in AMC’s The Walking Dead” contends with the monstrous portrayals of mental illnesses in the science fiction TV series. Taking an early shift away from the original graphic novels, AMC’s show The Walking Dead (TWD) explains that the cause of the living dead pandemic is the reanimation of the brain after the individual’s death. The brain is the site of illness and the most surefire way to kill off the undead “walkers.” This is the first of many ways that the shown aligns monstrosity and mental illness. The show’s plot is not driven by the monstrosity of the walkers but that of humans, who typically suffer from a form of mental illness especially after the trauma of a zombie apocalypse. The protagonists can take dangerous or even villainous turns when they are confronted with their own mental illness—often in the form of PTSD.
Applying critiques of cure and rehabilitation ideology from disability studies theorists such as Fiona Kumari Campbell and Eli Clare, this paper reflects on the medicalization and criminalization of mental health in TWD. Despite the show’s obsession with curative arcs, the storyline of Morgan Jones offers a potential way out of the negative depictions of mental health that is neither tragic nor monstrous, offering a possible escape from the otherwise toxic representations within this show that is a work of science fiction, but not speculative fiction. Morgan’s character must be written out of the main show so that his character can appear in the spin-off series, Fear the Walking Dead. Because of extenuating circumstances surrounding the show’s creation, that is, despite the show’s drive for cure, the fact that Morgan leaves the main group illuminates a potential escape from the cyclical pursuit of cure that would only portray mental illness in a tragic, monstrous, or criminal light.
Laura Smith’s article, “Partners in Time: Exploring Survival and History in Monstress” explores the comic series Monstress written by Marjorie Liu and illustrated by Sana Takeda. The currently ongoing story opens on a young girl, Maika, who is inhabited by a monster (called a monstrum) and struggling to survive in a political situation where self-interest, misinformation, and rumored mythology reign. Appearing as tentacles out of her left arm, which is missing at the elbow, the monstrum hungers to consume the life of anyone close enough to reach, a hunger only matched by Maika’s drive to discover her late mother’s secrets and remove the monstrum from her body.
The monster’s often-unseen existence inside her body engages with conversations of not only monstrosity, but also of haunting and disease. Without answers to her search, she may be consumed by a monster that has woken inside her after centuries of being passed down quietly through past generations of genetic carriers (not to mention that the monster has needs, desires, and a past of its/their own, often in conflict with Maika’s well-being). Monstress combines elements of haunting and monstrosity in order to consider how the misunderstood or neglected past materializes as uncontrolled monstrosity in the present, and how we must understand the past in order to proceed towards the future. Liu and Takeda, the artist, create a graphic novel that refuses to follow a linear timeline: illustrations reference past and future events, a cat provides historical narration to his students, flashbacks illuminate Maika’s shrouded back-story, and a dream/memory space seems to step outside of time all together, a space where all history is now. These elements of non-linear time drive the plot and provide the key to Maika’s survival. As both she and the monstrum discover the origins of their entwined ancestral past (which foregrounds the current political situation), their ability to navigate their problematic relationship increases. Both her future/destiny and her mysterious past/ancestry are embodied within her and she must reckon with them not only as an aspect of her life, but as a literal aspect of her being.
Collectively, our work on monstrosity and (dis)ability aims to create and explore characters that must think outside of the dominant framework of “normalcy” in order to survive. They must rewrite the present, revisit the past, and uncover alternative pathways to the future. In rethinking (dis)ability and monstrosity, we strongly agree with Schalk’s challenge to the dis/abled binary and instead seek visionary work that “refuses the simplistic binary of good representations and bad representations, acknowledging that adherence to norms of one system of privilege and oppression may defy norms of another” (24). Our creative works reconfigure myths of disability-enhanced “superpowers,” finding instead the very real ability to destabilize a corrupt regime built on arbitrary social stratification or the ability detect and understand the needs of the voice-less. Our critical works investigate popular texts where main characters must forge their own path in order to survive, a path that goes towards both the future and the past. All of these refuse to either condemn or romanticize (dis)ability or monstrosity. All of these are committed to finding possibility outside of narratives we have been told before, narratives where difference is either assimilated or rejected. Together, we aim to imagine better futures by examining the historical understanding and representation of disability and monstrosity in fiction from the past and present.
Visionary Fiction: Fugitive World-Making and Ethnofuturisms 