“With Edna, illness is a hobby.” Murder She Wrote, “Harbinger of Death” This is a trope that is likely familiar to most readers and TV viewers. It is one where anyone’s symptoms of illness or disability are rejected as hypochondriasis or a general attitude of “chronic complaining.” This trope constructs the disabled person as someone … Continue reading
Editor’s note: There’s still time to submit short stories to the Nothing Without Us anthology! Submissions close December 31, 2018. Read more about the submission guidelines here! And Derek’s Disability Tropes 101 series is great reference material to provide tips about what tropes to avoid! One of the tropes of disability I have wanted to … Continue reading
The “Upgrade My Body” trope is one that is frequent in science fiction and other speculative media. This trope generally involves the notion of leaving the disabled or ageing body behind in order to transfer consciousness into another, more “durable” form. This form can involve a robot, android, clone, or another person’s body. I … Continue reading
The trope that I call the “Tiny Tim” is the creation by an author of a disabled character whose exclusive role is to be an object of pity and in need of charity. I have used the name of the best known of these figures from Dickens—”Tiny Tim.” Tiny Tim doesn’t have a life outside … Continue reading
I recently watched the musical Wicked, and one scene particularly stood out to me as problematic. It tied into a few other problematic representations of disability that I have encountered in literature, film, and television. In Wicked: The Musical , the main character’s sister, Nessarose, is a wheelchair user. During the performance, she, at various … Continue reading
One of the most problematic tropes that is projected onto disabled people and our narratives is the trope of Overcoming. In these narratives, disabled people are able to “overcome” their disability (that is, become able-bodied) by working hard and pushing boundaries. Disability activist Eli Clare observes: “Overcoming bombards disabled people. It’s everywhere. I think of … Continue reading
Scholar Isabel Brittain brings attention to the trope of “The Outsider” in her article on “An Examination into the Portrayal of Deaf Characters and Deaf Issues in Picture Books for Children” (Disability Studies Quarterly 2004, Vol 24, No 1). In this trope, “the character with an impairment is portrayed as a figure of alienation and … Continue reading
I recently finished watching Season 2 of Dirk Gently and have been reflecting on the huge number of problematic disability tropes in the show, particularly around the invented disability “Pararibulitis,” but for this post, I want to focus on one particular trope that frequently appears in representations of disability, what I call the Karmically Disabled Trope. In … Continue reading
The Genius Cripple trope is pronounced in representations of disability in popular media and is generally grounded in the idea of a mind-body dichotomy. The notion of the mind-body dichotomy assumes that the mind and body are distinct from one another. This dichotomy is traced back to the philosopher Descartes, who suggested a distinction between … Continue reading
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