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A review by steveatwaywords
Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
So many reasons to appreciate this excellent book by Amanda Leduc. While it serves as a fitting and straightforward discussion of its subject--the role of fairy tales and their impact on individual and cultural behavior around disability--it is also part memoir, allowing us into her own medical history and social interactions meeting that impact. The result is a near-perfect hybrid of personal scholarship, carrying us richly into each sphere and forging the truth of its thesis.
It's little wonder, when we see them systemically across history, from Perrault and Grimm to Disney and Pixar, that the folk and fairy tale make ample and denigrating use of disability. Characters born differently-abled, those by misadventure, or even punished by some moral justice, are too often aligned with the unnatural, the pitied, or the villainous. Happy endings are found extensively around further punishment or, in the case of protagonist, cures. The end result is that in virtually no instance do our childhood tales make space for normalizing otherness in society.
Leduc surveys dozens of these tales, examining at length their lessons and effects on us. We misunderstand potential solutions to creating healthy social spaces (for instance, "curing" people so that they can better fit what already exists rather than recognizing how limiting our spaces are); and the disabled struggle to understand themselves as worthy of those spaces (having been inundated by heroes and princesses of hyper-real beauty). We see the language of these misunderstandings even in the medical records of Leduc's own doctors (which she shares at some length with commentary).
Yes, we see more and more policies create accommodations for some who with different physical and mental capacities. But none of these address some of the roots of our initial ignorance: that our traditional stories have already trained us from childhood to our own ignorance, our own failures to understand.
The only area that Leduc's book falls short is in its own brevity. This is an important opening, an introduction, to the discussion, but it has hardly been explored fully yet. Hopefully we'll see more from her and others on this topic.
It's little wonder, when we see them systemically across history, from Perrault and Grimm to Disney and Pixar, that the folk and fairy tale make ample and denigrating use of disability. Characters born differently-abled, those by misadventure, or even punished by some moral justice, are too often aligned with the unnatural, the pitied, or the villainous. Happy endings are found extensively around further punishment or, in the case of protagonist, cures. The end result is that in virtually no instance do our childhood tales make space for normalizing otherness in society.
Leduc surveys dozens of these tales, examining at length their lessons and effects on us. We misunderstand potential solutions to creating healthy social spaces (for instance, "curing" people so that they can better fit what already exists rather than recognizing how limiting our spaces are); and the disabled struggle to understand themselves as worthy of those spaces (having been inundated by heroes and princesses of hyper-real beauty). We see the language of these misunderstandings even in the medical records of Leduc's own doctors (which she shares at some length with commentary).
Yes, we see more and more policies create accommodations for some who with different physical and mental capacities. But none of these address some of the roots of our initial ignorance: that our traditional stories have already trained us from childhood to our own ignorance, our own failures to understand.
The only area that Leduc's book falls short is in its own brevity. This is an important opening, an introduction, to the discussion, but it has hardly been explored fully yet. Hopefully we'll see more from her and others on this topic.