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 came to this blog first because I love reading science fiction, second because I am passionate about disability politics, and third because as a disabled person with few employment prospects, I needed a worthwhile project—and I do feel that analysing and cataloguing disability representation in sci-fi is a worthwhile project. The imagined worlds we create and absorb greatly influence our understanding both of our current reality, and of our future possibilities. In the words of Alison Kafer, “The futures we imagine reveal the biases of the present; it seems entirely possible that imagining different futures and temporalities might help us see, and do, the present differently”1.
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. The main thing they’ll have in common is that they'll be books that I am interested in (re)reading—it is my blog after all. 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 world building and imagined realities have to say about disability more generally.
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”2
When analysing texts, I'll be thinking about a few theoretical frameworks for assessing disability representation. First, there are the questions posed by the Fries test, a simple pass/fail test of disability representation (inspired by the Bechdel test) proposed by Kenny Fries:
“Does a work have more than one disabled character? Do the disabled characters have their own narrative purpose other than the education and profit of a nondisabled character? Is the character’s disability not eradicated either by curing or killing?”3
Then there's Kathryn Allan's “common categories'' of disability representation in sci-fi literature and film:
“Disability as a condition in need of cure.
Disability as a condition to transcend.
Disability as out of sync (with normative time).
Disability as creator of cyborg or posthuman.
Disability as creator of the superhuman (the “super crip”).
Disability as distinction of the nonhuman.”4
I'll also occasionally be drawing on academic articles and critiques specific to the texts I review which I will reference as I go. If you're interested in reading more about disability in sci-fi, please subscribe to my newsletter and check out the (Re)Sources section of this blog, where I will keep an updated master list of all my sources.
Thanks for checking out my blog! I hope you enjoy it, that it gives you something interesting to think about, or maybe a jumping off point for a project of your own.
A note on accessibility: I'll be doing my best to ensure my work is as accessible as possible, but I will certainly make some mistakes. If you have any access issues, or any suggestions for how to make my text more screen-reader friendly, please don't hesitate to reach out.
Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. (Indiana UP, 2013), 28
SchaIk, Sami. Bodyminds Reimagined; disability, race, and gender in black women's speculative fiction. (Duke UP, 2018), 28
Fries, Kenny. “The Fries Test; on Disability Representation in our Culture.” Medium, 2017. https://medium.com/@kennyfries/the-fries-test-on-disability-representation-in-our-culture-9d1bad72cc00
Allan, Kathryn. “Disability in Science Fiction.” SF 101: A Guide to Teaching and Studying Science Fiction. Ed. Ritch Calvin, Doug Davis, Karen Hellekson, and Craig Jacobsen. (Science Fiction Research Association, 2014), 4.4