A review by thistle_and_verse
Bodyminds Reimagined: (dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction by Sami Schalk

5.0

A fascinating book and a quick read. Schalk follows the 'tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them' format pretty explicitly. Having the points reiterated multiple times was helpful for me. I'm casually familiar with disability studies, but I don't think that was necessary to understand this book. Schalk does a good job of explaining the concepts relevant to her analysis. This isn't a book where Schalk evaluates how good the disability representation is. Her questions are more around what constitutes a disability in these novels, how is it represented, and how does it conform to or destabilize more realism-based narratives of disability.