Tag: Disability
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Dhalgren’s Bellona: The Ruins of Morning
“Here I am and am no I. This circle in all, this change changing in winterless, a dawn circle with an image of, an autumn change with a change of mist. Mistake two pictures, one and another. No. Only in seasons of shortlight, only on dead afternoons. I will not be sick again” (55).
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Dhalgren’s Bellona: Prism, Mirror, Lens
Dhalgren is a 1975 science-fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany, a gay, dyslexic, dysmetric author best known for works including Babel-17 (1966), The Einstein Intersection (1967), Nova (1968), and Dhalgren, although he has written many more books and essays. Dhalgren is thought of by many as being an exploration of his neurodivergency in a way…
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His Dark Materials: Disability in “The Subtle Knife”
I’ve written about the second season of the TV adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, so I think it’s only fair that I write about the second book. The show is a close adaptation in many ways, but it’s been a while since I read the trilogy, and I’m curious about how it compares.…
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Disability in “Iron Widow”
Iron Widow is a 2021 young adult fantasy novel by Xiran Jay Zhao (they/them). It’s an imaginative futuristic retelling of the story of China’s only female emperor, Wu Zetian. It’s particularly notable for Chinese and queer representation, but I’d like to highlight the disabled representation presented by Zetian.
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Disability in “Dragons: Race to the Edge” (Season One)
Dragons: Race to the Edge was an animated TV show based on DreamWorks’s How To Train Your Dragon films. It’s a Netflix original and ran from 2015 to 2018, with six seasons.
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Wonderstruck (2017)
Brian Selznick adapted his 2011 novel “Wonderstruck” into a screenplay, which then became a film directed by Todd Haynes. Rose, a deaf girl, was played by a Deaf actress, Millicent Simmonds; Ben, a boy who starts out deaf in one ear and later becomes fully deaf, was played by a hearing actor, Oakes Fegley.
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james bond’s best friend is an amputee and other things the government hid from you
In 2017, Dynamite Entertainment published the comic miniseries James Bond: Felix Leiter. This was the first time Leiter ever had a solo story. The cover of the collected edition shows Leiter holding a gun with two hands, with the more visible one being a (rather unrealistic-looking) prosthetic. One Amazon reviewer praises it for avoiding the…
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Deafness in Brian Selznick’s “Wonderstruck”
Wonderstruck is a 2011 “novel in words and pictures” about two deaf children, Ben and Rose, with their stories taking place fifty years apart. Rose’s story is told in pictures and Ben’s in words.
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Bran Davies vs. Disability Tropes
Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising Sequence is a fantasy novel series published between 1965 and 1977. Surprisingly, her books feature an albinistic protagonist, who makes his first appearance in the fourth book, The Grey King, originally published in 1975. Part of what made The Dark is Rising stand out to me when I read…
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hbomax’s pure & the nature of intrusive thoughts
I’m writing this as I watch the first episode of Pure, a 2019 HBOMax original show about a woman with primarily-obsessive OCD (“Pure-O”) with taboo intrusive thoughts. It was cancelled after one season, presumably due to low ratings, the uncomfortable subject, or simply a lack of viewers. One of the first scenes of the first…