About
Hello and welcome to Disabling Sci-fi, a blog where I analyse depictions of disability in science fiction novels. I am a disabled, queer, 30ish, white woman living in Canada with my two partners and our two cats.
I plan on reviewing a wide variety of sci-fi books, ranging from critically acclaimed “New Wave” sci-fi to dystopian YA novels to works that arguably veer closer to fantasy.
In terms of analysis, I'm coming from a disability studies and crip theory perspective, but I don't have any formal training in disability studies and my writing won't necessarily be all that academic. I'm primarily interested in examining the quality of disability representation in sci-fi novels and what the worldbuilding and imagined realities have to say about disability more generally.
A note on language
I'm working from a broad definition of disability that includes impairment, mental illness, chronic illness, deafness, and other stigmatised bodymind differences. When it comes to reading disability in the context of sci-fi, where differing rules of reality can complicate definitions of disability, I’ll be relying on Sami Schalk’s criteria for identifying disabled characters:
“I read a character as disabled if the character experiences their bodymind as different from others and that difference cannot be better interpreted as gendered, racial, or another type of difference; if that character's bodymind is interpreted from a medical or psychological perspective in the text as nonnormative and in need of treatment or cure; and if a character's bodymind variation is considered nonnormative or deviant by the text's fictional society at large” (Bodyminds Reimagined 28).
A note on accessibility
I'll be doing my best to make my work as accessible as possible, but I will certainly make some mistakes. If you have any access issues with this site, or any suggestions for how to make my text more screen-reader friendly, please don't hesitate to reach out.
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