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Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure by Kathryn Allan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Read the day before and the day after a con, so I am reconstructing my thoughts around a gaping pit of distraction and exhaustion. They were super brilliant thoughts at the time, I swear! Anyway, the full ToC is available here and worth looking at, as is this book. Overall, I'm glad I read it, though the only pieces that jump strongly out from my memory now are the ones I feel negatively about. Though Woiak and Karamanos on Samuel R. Delany were eye-opening, and Christy Tidwell on autism in The Speed of Dark and "Movement" was a pleasure. There were some odd editing choices here – Allan prefers "dis/abled" to "disabled," and yet repeatedly used "confined to a wheelchair" or "wheelchair bound," which was confusing and distracting as these language cues tell you a lot about a person's politics, and Allan's language was telling me really inconsistent things. Anyway. Some notes:

"The Metamorphic Body in Science Fiction: From Prosthetic Correction to Utopian Enhancement" -- António Fernando Cascais: One of the worst examples of academese I've seen in years. This provoked me to half an hour of seething rage over dinner about the thin line between critical theory and utter bullshit and, more to the point, the way academic writing, at its worst, is intensely exclusionary, full of meaning only to the tiny be-doctored in-group (and, I would argue, not even to many of them, who won't ever admit they don't know what the fuck he's talking about, either). It's just such a waste – I think he had some interesting things to say about the way science fiction pushes at notions of the singular self as an identity, but he went to extraordinary efforts to make sure I didn't follow exactly why the fuck I'm supposed to care.

"Great Clumsy Dinosaurs -- The Disabled Body in the Posthuman World -- Brent Walter Cline: Interesting. Postulates, among other ideas, that the category of disability will expand to include all embodiment in post human scifi futures because the physical body will limit access to the uploads or the cloud or whatever other ascendant technology we are theoretically climbing toward. I appreciated this as a mental exercise, but I also . . . hm. I balk a little at these "ooh, let's speculate about theoretical expansions of the concept of disability in nearly unimaginable futures!" I mean, Clein should have fun with his bad self, but I have a hard time really taking these exercises seriously. Not when there is so much complexity and unexplored territory in, you know, our actual category of disability. There's something . . . diluting? Misdirecting? Unhelpful? … Something about working to expand the lexical category of disability to include people so far from us, they definitionally aren't human anymore when the construction of that category is so persistently human and contextual. Something. I'm not getting this out right.

"Animal and Alien Bodies as Prostheses: Reframing Disability in Avatar and How to Train Your Dragon" -- Leigha McReynolds: This one bugged me. It's an interesting enough idea, which you can get from the title, but seriously, any essay on Avatar which does not seem to notice all the rampant race and colonialism issues is just not doing its job. And it doesn't do any good to say that's not what she was writing about; it was inherently, because she was using disability theory to talk specifically about the co-optation of an alien culture and an alien body as a kind of prosthetic. I mean, this is how intersectionality works – you really can't separate these things! And yet . . . *crickets*.




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