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Musings: Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc

 

cover of Disfigured by Amanda Leduc

Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc ( Bookshop.orgAmazon.com  )

Coach House Books, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-1552453957

Available: Paperback, audiobook, Kindle edition

 

Although Disfigured  focuses on the relationship between fairy tales and disability, there is a lot here that should provide food for thought in the horror genre, where disfigurement, disability, and illness are often used to indicate otherness, villainy, or monstrosity. Leduc examines well-known, mostly Western fairytale archetypes from literature and pop culture, how and why they were created, and the damage those narratives can do to perceptions and treatment of disabled individuals, using a disability rights framework. She explains that this is not a work of  fairy tale scholarship or of an expert on disability rights, but that she approaches it as an individual who has loved fairy tales for most of her life and is physically disabled, with major depressive disorder. As a white disabled woman, she notes that her ability to comment on the impact of Western fairy tale narratives is limited, and that there needs to be space for and attention paid to the perspectives and experiences of disabled people with multiple marginalizations about the impact these narratives have had on them as well.

Interspersed with her research and analysis are medical notes taken by the doctor Leduc’s parents consulted regarding her diagnosis and neurosurgery at the age of four, and autobiographical writings describing her childhood and young adulthood and how storytelling and fairy tales impacted her. This is an interesting structure, which personalizes the book, but it does lead to an idiosyncratic organzation of the material, with a fair amount of repetition. Leduc writes that “disabled identity is… inextricably bound up with how someone navigates the world,” literally, in her case, as she has cerebal palsy. Who tells her story and how cannot help shaping her view of who she is and will be, and the stories around her, and many other disabled people, also give them messages about their places in the world. As a child, many of those stories are fairy tales. Leduc writes that “we have used this storytelling form to illustrate that which is different; whether that difference is disfigurement or social exclusion, fairy tales often centre in some way on protagonists who are set apart from the rest of the world.”

In some stories, like “Hans My Hedgehog”, the protagonist, who is half-hedgehog, is treated cruelly and excluded as a child, even after he leaves home, excels, and shows himself to be generous. It is only after he is accepted by a princess in his half-hedgehog form that he reveals that he is actually a handsome young man. His transformation into an attractively formed man is his happy ending. Characters who are disfigured, disabled, or part-human(either born that way or as a punishment) often have this “happy ending”, (if they get one) that implies that there can be no happy ending without individual transformation to a fully functional, attractive human, even if a price must be paid. Leduc suggests that while that is a destructive message in general, it is particularly damaging to disabled people who grow up with fairy tales. In these stories, society doesn’t become more accessible; it’s the individual who must change, and sometimes that change isn’t possible (or preferable) on an individual level.  Leduc does a nice job of explaining different models and theories of disability, such as the medical model, charity model, psychological theories, social model, and complex embodiment (although not all in the same place. I suggest lots of bookmarks for this book).

Leduc says stories can be told in a way that calls for community and social structures to change so that anyone can succeed, or they can be told in a way that privileges individual triumph. She contends that under the surface, we have been taught through our stories that to be disabled is to be lesser, filled with darkness, and in pain, and therefore unhappy. Even when fairy tales have been written subversively, to encourage the disenfranchised, disabled people have still been represented as either pitiable, inspirational, or villainous. Leduc concludes that in real life, a disabled person isn’t necessarily transformed for a happy ending or permanently villainous. There is a complex, lived experience in the disabled body that isn’t represented by flattened archetypes and ableist language and symbolism, and she calls for envisioning these traditional stories in ways that make space for a new kind of fairy tale that does not privilege able-bodied, conventionally attractive characters or assume that happy endings are all identical.

Horror and dark fiction face some of the same issues. Protagonists are often set apart from the community by some kind of flaw, monsters and villains are often masked, disfigured, or disabled in some way, and the stories can have flattened characters or depend on “shortcut” tropes to quickly communicate a story’s schema to a reader or watcher.  Leduc examines this through the lens of Disney villains and heroines, and superheroes, but in the horror genre we see it in many of the great villains and protagonists of horror and Gothic literature and cinema such as the Phantom of the Opera, the Invisible Man, Frankenstein’s creature, Quasimodo, and more. Just as horror and dark fiction are making space for more versatile representations and stories with BIPOC characters and authors, we need to ensure that there is also space for new kinds of representations and reimagined stories with disabled characters and authors (and also where those intersect). There is food for thought here for those creating and consuming in the horror community.

Be cautioned that this is a long book, however. Leduc’s personal story is interwoven in many places so that it’s hard to skip around to just find the analysis and commentary on fairy tales and how they fit with the disability rights framework. This is deliberate, and while it’s interesting as a memoir, if you plan to use this book as a reference, it can get frustrating. As a disabled person who has been a children’s librarian and elementary school media specialist, has a Disney-obsessed daughter, and has been thinking about how disabled people are represented in horror fiction for quite some time, I found this to be a worthwhile and fairly unique read (Amazon shows me just one other book on this topic, a more narrowly focused academic study, and only a few on disability and horror), and it’s an intriguing topic, so I hope it is finding its audience. Recommended.

 

 

 

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Interview: Ezra Claytan Daniels, Creator of Upgrade Soul, Talks to Lizzy Walker

Ezra Claytan Daniels

We were lucky enough to have the opportunity for one of our reviewers, Lizzy Walker, to interview Ezra Claytan Daniels, the creator of the interactive graphic novel Upgrade Soul, which she just reviewed for Monster Librarian. Thanks so much, Ezra, for taking time for us! We are looking forward to seeing what comes next from you! Check out Lizzy’s review of Upgrade Soul here!

 

Lizzy: Tell Monster Librarian readers about yourself.

Ezra: I’m a writer and illustrator originally from Sioux City, Iowa, and currently based in Los Angeles. I worked for many years as a trial graphics consultant, creating medical and technical illustrations, and charts and graphs for high-stakes trials. I worked with the Department of Justice to help present the case against former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. That job was a huge influence on my approach to comics and storytelling.

Lizzy: What inspired you to create Upgrade Soul?

Ezra: The seed for Upgrade Soul came to me in my first year of art school. I moved to Portland, OR from a small town in Iowa, where I was kind of THE art kid. Then I started college, where I was suddenly not the best at anything. All the skills and ideas that had defined my identity my whole life, where suddenly not unique to me. So that existential terror of being made obsolete by someone who is better at being me that I was, is what eventually became Upgrade Soul.

Lizzy: What do you want readers to take away from your story?

Ezra: I wanted to challenge people’s ideas not only of what is normal, but what is good or bad, or better or worse. The central conflict in the book involves a person being faced with a clone that is smarter, stronger, and healthier than they are, but is severely disfigured. So the drama is, which version is better? The one that looks like the person we recognize, or that one that’s better in every measurable way, but because of the way they look, won’t be able to move through the world with the same ease? It’s this horror that our lives are governed and restricted by these arbitrary preferences for certain types of bodies, abilities, genders, or skin colors.

Lizzy: One of my favourite sections in the book is when Molly’s bandages are being taken off. The perspective shift is so well done, and the emotional reaction Molly has to her new body is so strong. What is your writing process like to be able to evoke so much emotion in your story?

Ezra: That specific sequence is an homage to a classic sci-fi trope. I think it first entered the lexicon with the “Eye of the Beholder” Twilight Zone episode, but you also see it in Robocop, and Tim Burton’s Batman, and I even just spotted it in that Tarsem Singh movie, Self/Less. But to answer your question, I love working within strict limitations. One of the main challenges I set for myself with this book was that I wanted to try to write a soap opera. I’m not a fan of soap operas, so the challenge was to write a soap opera that I would really love. So from day one, the main spine of Upgrade Soul was really big dramatic moments and heightened emotions.

Lizzy: What was the hardest part about writing Upgrade Soul?

Ezra: Writing Lina was by far the hardest part. She’s a character who was born with a severe disfigurement, which is not my experience. It took a lot of research, interviews, and introspection to write her in a way I felt comfortable with, but it’s still by far the part I’m most self-conscious about.

Lizzy: I have had the chance to explore the first chapter in the new app. It’s fantastic! Can you talk about the creation of the associated app? 

Ezra: The comic was actually originally designed for the app—that’s partly why the panel structure is so rigid and cinematic. But the whole idea with the app is to try to create a more immersive comics reading experience. The developer, Erick Loyer and I spent many, many hours working out how far we could use technology to push a comic before it stopped feeling like a comic. The main rule we established (you can see our whole philosophy at https://screendiver.com/digital-comics-manifesto/) was to never take control of time from the reader. The main immersive feature of our app is the original score, composed by Alexis Gideon. The score is reactive, so it keeps perfect pace with your progress through the story—you’re really controlling the pace of the music in the same way that you control the pace of the story. Every panel transition triggers a change in the music, so every emotional beat in the story is perfectly accompanied by the score, no matter how fast or slow you read.

Lizzy: Why should libraries be interested in this title?

Ezra: It’s an extremely dense book, loaded with references, homages, and entry points to other works. I worked on it off and on for 15 years, and every time I went back to it, I would add more layers from my life experience and current interests. I namedrop authors like Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany; I reference the history of pulp science fiction; I touch on concepts of experimental neurology and genetics; there’re primers for debates about transhumanism and eugenics. I see this book as a gateway to all sorts of other books and fields.

Lizzy: What else would you like librarians to know about your work?

I think about my high school self a lot. I’m constantly judging my progress and accomplishments through the lens of, “would 17 year old Ezra be proud?” I see my 17 year old self as my primary audience. I was a precocious kid who dressed weird, loved weird movies, and didn’t have a lot of friends. If any librarians know a kid who fits this description, I would love nothing more than to get my books into their hands.

Lizzy: What are you working on currently?

Ezra: I’m working on some non-comics stuff in the Upgrade Soul world. I have a new non-fiction zone that will be available at www.radiatorcomics.com in the first week of November, called “Are You at Risk for Empathy Myopia?”

 

Interview by Lizzy Walker

Book Review: Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

Pet by Akwake Emezi

Make Me A World, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-0525647072

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audio CD, audiobook

 

There was a time before the angels came when monsters caged children, polluted the environment, refused to send aid to hurricane victims and refugees, bombed civilians in other countries, shot up schools, and hurt and killed the people around them. The angels led a revolution, changed the laws, and replaced the monuments. Jam’s teachers tell her these angels took their names from angels who weren’t human: but they were imperfect humans doing their best to create a more compassionate, safer, and more just world, and by the time Jam, our protagonist, was born, there are no more monsters.

Or are there?

Jam, curious about the original angels, heads to the library and asks about them, but the pictures she finds are terrifying, not beautiful. She wonders, if angels are terrifying, what do monsters look like? And how would you know? Jam’s mother, Bitter, tells her, “Monsters don’t look like anything… That’s the whole point.” Bitter, an artist, has been consumed with creating a painting of a bloody, goat-legged, horned creature with metallic feathers, and after it is finished, Jam sneaks in to Bitter’s studio and accidentally cuts herself on a razor blade Bitter has embedded in the canvas. Bleeding over it opens a portal, and the creature pushes through, telling Jam to call it Pet.  Pet is a hunter of monsters, called through by her because there is a monster in her friend Redemption’s house that needs hunting, but the adults in Jam’s life are not willing to recognize that a monster could still be in their midst.

I feel like this is Emezi’s response to N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones That Stay and Fight”, which takes place in a utopian alien society where all people are respected for who they are, but knowledge of the outside world is illegal. That story ends with “social workers” executing a man found to be communicating with the less enlightened people of Earth in front of his daughter and taking her into custody to also become a social worker. In that story, questioning is not allowed and people are willing to live in ignorance of the evils of the past in order to live in their ideal society, and a child who gains that knowledge must become part of enforcing the need for that ignorance.

Pet, while it takes place in our near future, reflects some of this abstract speculative thinking, but as a book written for children, it needs to be set out in a concrete way. Emezi has created a society that is a little different from Jemisin’s: many of the people who live in the community remember the time of the monsters, before the revolution eliminated them, but they choose to believe the monsters are gone. The children born after the revolution learn about that time, but aren’t curious about it. Even knowing that they should remember the past, the people are focused on the the blessings of the present. In visiting her friend Redemption’s house, which has always seemed a loving place, Pet encourages Jam to look past the surface to see the unseen. It is uncomfortable for Jam to question what she has always seen and felt there, even knowing there is a monster in the house, and to tell Redemption about it. It is scary to learn about the monsters that existed in families in the past and realize they are still around. It is terrifying to confront trusted adults and have them refuse to believe. No one actually stops Jam and Redemption, but the adults don’t believe the monster exists, even knowing a child is suffering. Pet is there to end the hunt, and the monster, but Jam has to decide exactly what that means. Pet has a more positive vision for the future than Jemisin saw, but it is clear about the perils of believing that there can be an ideal world where monsters no longer exist.

Pet also n9rmalizes and celebrates differences without going into detail about them. Jam is a 16 year old black trans girl who is a selective mute; Redemption has three parents, one of whom is nonbinary; the librarian whizzes around in a wheelchair.  Emezi does not stick with standard English. Language is very individual and informal, and dialogue is sometimes almost musical. Without going into graphic detail. Emezi is able to communicate who the monster in Redemption’s house is, and what he has done.

While Jam is supposed to be 16, she neither acts or is treated like a 16 year old. Her thoughts and actions are more like what I would expect from a 10-12 year old, and I think she may have been “aged up” to make it possible for her to have used puberty blockers and had transition surgery (neither of these details are necessary to establish her as a transgender character, so if that was Emezi’s reasoning, the story would have benefited from aging Jam’s character down). While the story does get very dark, I think kids as young as fifth grade might be able to manage this book. At this point, fifth graders have certainly been exposed to the news, and this book gives them a way to process what they’re seeing in the media from a different perspective.  Certainly, my children both read The Giver, which has similar themes, at that age. This is a very relevant book, and while not typical horror, it does have unsettling and disturbing moments. Highly recommended.

Contains: Violence, references to rape and child sexual abuse