A review by ceallaighsbooks
Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc

challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

“Why, in all of these stories about someone who wants to be something or someone else, was it always the individual who needed to change, and never the world?”

TITLE—Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space
AUTHOR—Amanda Leduc
PUBLISHED—2020

GENRE—nonfiction, memoir
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—fairy tales, disability, ableism, conformity & social expectations, social model vs medical model of disability, charity as upholding existing social structures & systemic inequalities, identity-first vs person-first language

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
PRESENTATION OF INFORMATION—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
BONUS ELEMENT/S—You mean like other than the fact that someone else wrote my manifesto so I didn’t have to? 😁
PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“What does it say when some of the most subversive narratives we know continue to entrench and perpetuate static ideas about the disabled body?”

Almost reads like a Ted Talk. It’s so conversational and engrossing. I flew through it. Had originally picked it up from the library but ended up ordering my own copy and writing allll over it. 😁

Read this if you love fairy tales, if you’re interested in the tradition of story telling, if you often think about why we tell the particular stories we tell, if you’re disabled / neurodivergent / queer / or otherwise “other” those around you (or if you love someone who is) and want to feel seen. Read this if you’re a member of a community, if you’re concerned about whose stories get told, if you’re interested in actively trying to change the systems that divide and oppress.

Basically this is a must-read for everyone! 🥰

“Once again, we support and perpetuate a culture where the emphasis is on the cure rather than societal change—where the aim of the narrative is to eradicate the disabled life rather than change the world so that the disabled life can thrive. The stories we tell need to be different. It is no more and no less than that.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

TW // ableism, bullying, suicidal ideation (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—
  • Gregory Maguire
  • Helen Oyeyemi
  • Sabrina Orah Mark
  • Marina Warner
  • The Nesting, by C. J. Cooke
  • White Magic, by Elissa Washuta
  • Women Who Run with the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
  • Clever Maids, by Valerie Paradiž

Favorite Quotes:

“Why, in all of these stories about someone who wants to be something or someone else, was it always the individual who needed to change, and never the world?”

“…identity-first language… holds that the disabled identity is an important part of what makes someone a person in the first place, inextricably bound up with how someone navigates the world.”

“I knew, growing up, that my life as a disabled child was just as valuable as that of any other girl. But I did not know—and sometimes still don’t—how to fit physically into that ‘valuable’ space.”

“How to recognize that it isn’t life’s divergence from this arc that is the problem, but the establishment of this arc that is the problem, but the establishment of this arc in the first place—these able-bodied ideals, these able-bodied expectations?”

“…which is why the explosion of social media offers such a powerful opportunity. In demanding the space to tell our own stories, in advocating for the social model of disability and for its different ways of viewing the world, disabled people are taking back control of the narrative, and urging the world to rethink the idea of the individual triumph, doing the work of dismantling the narratives that have been told about disabled people for thousands of years.”

“…charity also functions as a way of reinforcing existing social structures. As long as individual people are charitable, as long as individual charities and charitable actions exist to make gestures toward those who are less fortunate, there is less need for the sweeping societal change that would do away with the hierarchies and gross economic and structural inequalities that disadvantage people in the first place. Essentially, the existence of charity, by making concern for one’s fellow humans less a responsibility and more an active choice, works to undermine the eradication of poverty and injustice.”

“…the key is that we need to stop thinking of those less fortunate as being so because of some specific circumstance and more because of structural inequalities that the ‘more fortunate’ continue to uphold no matter how much money they give away.”

“What does it say when some of the most subversive narratives we know continue to entrench and perpetuate static ideas about the disabled body?”

“The transformation is individual, never systemic.”

“The schoolyard is a cruel place in the same way that the world is a cruel place—not because of individuals, although that is also true, but because collectively we seek to belong, to blend in, to be accepted, and it is easier to shun those who do not fit rather than risk one’s own spot in the strata.”

“But what happens when we ask a different question? What happens when the princess or the childless parent or the half-human boy says instead, Why should I be like everyone else? What kinds of stories might we get to tell then?”

“Some of us don’t dream, in other words, of personal transformation as the happy ending. Instead, we find out points of light in others who might look like us, or share our experiences of tripping up a flight of steps and spilling a full pot of tea. And together we dream about the transformation of the world.”

“Ableism is something we internalize from childhood. It seeps into everything we know. It took me years to acknowledge this, and just as long to understand how it had wound its way into my own life.”

“In the summer of 2015, the deepest part of my depression, time felt eternal and also instantaneous—each moment crystalline and electric while also somehow dulled, exactly the same as the moment that had come before it and the moment that would come after. There are technical terms for this brain fog, but it still feels right to me to call it magic—never before have I felt so imprisoned by something that wasn’t a prison, something that was merely my own life.”

“‘If you look up the criteria of any personality disorder,’ [Kelly Aiello] says, ‘they pretty much pathologize any behaviour which is not considered socially acceptable.’”

“To pretend that you belonged even if the world didn’t make you feel that way. There was power in assimilating. It was a power that had little to do with strength and everything to do with survival…”

“Another problem with Bell[ Let’s Talk]’s campaign is that it absolves the public and the government of the responsibility for looking at the systemic issues that make the charities that the campaign supports necessary in the first place. …framing the disabled as grateful recipients of a charity’s benevolence perpetuates the idea that the disabled are worthy only insofar as they make good objects of pity.”

“But how do you escape sadness when it permeates every corner of your day? Where do you go when even your dreams are filled with worry and grief, when your mind is exactly the thing you can’t escape? How do you come back from a way of seeing where even the gifts of your own life don’t seem like gifts anymore?”

“Once again, we support and perpetuate a culture where the emphasis is on the cure rather than societal change—where the aim of the narrative is to eradicate the disabled life rather than change the world so that the disabled life can thrive. The stories we tell need to be different. It is no more and no less than that.”

“It seemed easier to imagine a world where I had magical powers than a world where different bodies just existed together side by side.”

“A life that was meant to be one way but ended up growing into something else, carrying everything within itself necessary to weather the change.”

“I do not want to walk like everybody else. I do not want to be like everybody else. But sometimes it feels like that’s all the world wants you to be.”
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