Disabling characters: representations of disability in young adult literature

Disabling Characters: Representations of Disability in Young Adult Literature by Patricia Dunn is an interesting book. It is not exactly what I expected, but for anyone who has an interest in disability representation in literature it is a good resource nevertheless. This book offers a discourse around disability in young adult literature and provided me with material for an undergraduate lecture on that very topic but it was at times difficult to read. At first I really struggled, largely because the author uses Modern Language Association citations, which to me as a social scientist was a little distracting. A number of the texts she referred to were not in the list of ‘works cited’ and the text is peppered with a numerical key which did not appear to link to anything! All that said, this book does have something to offer.

Although she does not say as much, Dunn engages in a ‘critical discourse analysis’ (Wodak 2001) of mostly American texts written for young adults. The premise from which she does her analysis is relevant to artefacts way beyond young adult literature. It is this aspect of her work I will continue to refer back to in my own work as a lecturer in Disability Studies more than the specific texts she chose to analyse.

In many ways the book is what I expected, especially in the way Dunn critiques the material teachers offer young people to help them critically examine literature. However, I did feel that to get the best out of this book I needed to read the books and resources Dunn was analysing – needless to say, I now have a pile of books written for older children and young adults on my bedside table waiting to be read! I would be interested in reading Dunn’s perspective of the literature I use with my own students, such as Steinbeck’s (2006) Of Mice and Men, Haddon’s (2004) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and, my very favourite book of all time, John Boyne’s (2012) The Terrible Thing That Happened to Barnaby Brocket.

Dunn moves between detailed description of the texts and the protagonists she is analysing to an analysis of what makes characters either disabling or disabled. I felt there was perhaps a little too much time spent describing the literature rather than the disabling issues raised by her analysis.

Missing from this work is a clear methodological framework for analysing literature written for young people. The book is organised around issues that do not always connect, although individually they are worth reading about. Chapter One draws upon two novels, Accidents Happen by Harriet McBryde Johnson and The Acorn House by Ron Jones. Both are about summer camps and are used to debate multiple perspectives of disability, access and inclusion. The chapter also contains an analyses of the resources teachers use to critique The Acorn House. Chapter Two draws upon three novels to discuss the ways non-disabled people interact with disabled people: The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin by Josh Berk, The Five Flavours of Dumb by Antony John and The Cardturner by Louis Sachar. In Chapter Three, Dunn examines two popular American texts – The Cay by Theodore Taylor and The Scarlet Ibis by James Hurst – and she also challenges tools used by teachers to help young people to discuss literature. Chapter Four debates ableist discourses through three novels: Pealing the Onion by Wendy Orr, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie and Stoner and Spaz by Ron Koertge. Chapter Five explores what Dunn describes as a fine line between stories of disabled characters who make ordinary achievements and the notion of the ‘super-crip’. She looks at The London Eye by Siobhan Dowd, Marcello in the Real World by Francisco Stork, From Charlie’s Point of View by Richard Scrimger and again The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin by Josh Berk.

For me the most useful chapter in this book is the introduction – that is not to belittle the rest of the book, but it is here where Dunn sets out her own position, which in her own words is the:

… premise that the status quo is not acceptable. All sorts of barriers prevent people from living their lives to the fullest. Fiction can affect the way people are treated. It can open readers’ minds to entrenched discriminatory attitudes, or it can be complicit with those attitudes. (1)

Dunn is an advocate for a ‘critical disability studies’ (Vehmas and Watson 2014) approach to literature and sees books as artefacts of social and cultural discourse. She focuses upon disability themed literature and advocates strongly for material which provides young readers with positive characters that challenge disabling barriers and assumptions, pushing forward change toward attitudes about impairment and disabled people. At the beginning Dunn explores the term ‘disabling characters’ which she suggests can be both positive (a force for good) and negative (a force for bad). Positive in that characters can challenge and disable negative stereotypes and negative in that they can perpetuate negative stereotypes contributing to disabling assumptions and prejudices. Dunn acknowledges the messiness of language around disability and differing international perspectives. She moves between different models and language as though they were synonymous. This is a little confusing given that she is herself critically analysing the discourse, language and representations of disability in other texts – this epitomises the linguistic and cultural diversity of Disability Studies in an international arena and could serve to confuse my first-year undergraduate students who are themselves analysing literature and film to recognise disabling representations of disability.

Dawn Benson
Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK
[email protected]
© 2016 Dawn Benson
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2016.1167361