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Annalee Flower Horne leeflower, an SF writer and coder, just published an outstanding essay on disability representation. It’s a great entry point for educating folks with no disability experience. It also offers a useful new-to-me concept “TV paraplegia.”

Disability, Representation, and the X-Men

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Professor Xavier has “TV Paraplegia,” which is a form of nerve damage that completely paralyzes the legs of people on television without causing chronic pain, muscle spasms, or incontinence. Depending on the version of the X-Men universe he’s in, Xavier either has a spinal cord injury or his legs were crushed. Neither injury is portrayed realistically

​ […snip…]

Realism aside, the big problem with Xavier’s TV paraplegia is that while it’s the leading cause of wheelchair use in popular media, the overwhelming majority of people who drive wheelchairs in the real world are not paralysed at all. Those who do have some form of paralysis exist along a broad spectrum of motor function.
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https://thebias.com/2017/10/31/disability-representation-and-the-x-men/)

Just caught up with some of my Blogging Against Disablism Day/May 1 blog posts. (I own my slowness). One particularly apt post talked about educating kids about what "disability" means using the Incredible Hulk and modeling clay.

From Never That Easy, 1 May 2014

begin quote  "And I guess it isn't exactly super-normal that you change into a big green monster when you're angry either" suggested her brother, ALMOST apologetically. "Well, I'm not sure disabled and normal are exact opposites there, bud" I corrected him gently (because you try and correct a 14 year-old any other way), "but yeah, I think maybe Hulking out could stretch into the disability category if we really tried, because it's something in his body that he's not always got control over and a lot of disabilities -" I gestured to myself "are kind of like that. Cousin Sara once called her seizures Hulking out." (Our cousin has epilepsy.)
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Disability Studies has always paid lip service to including contributions from community members (aka "independent scholars.") Here's a chance for folks who've thought about comics to share their ideas with a wider audience. I've seen that one really great article from an outsider can have a deep impact on how academia perceives the world, theorizes about it, and thus teaches us to shape it.

I wish I were that writing person, but maybe you are?

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We invite proposals for chapters in a volume on disability and graphic literature for the new Literary Disability series from Palgrave Macmillan edited by David Bolt, Elizabeth Donaldson, and Julia Miele Rodas. Feats of Clay: Disability and Graphic Narrative will scrutinize the ways that disability has been employed in comic books, graphic nonfiction, graphic novels, underground comix, and/or webcomics. Our aim is to interrogate standard assumptions about disability and sequential art in order to open up new approaches and potential collaborations between both of these vital areas of study.

Some possible but not exclusive topics include analyses of the range of representations of disabled figures in both superhero comics and graphic narratives; considerations of the role of the visual in offering multimodal engagement with the textual experience of disability (beyond character, plot, and theme); critical investigations of how the systems of meaning associated with disability studies (see Donna Haraway, Tobin Siebers, and others) overlap with or challenge the language of sequential art (as theorized by Thierry Groensteen, Scott McCloud, and others); extended examinations of specific comic book characters (such as Batgirl/Oracle, Daredevil/Matt Murdock, Professor Xavier, or Cyborg/Victor Stone); delineations of disability as an organizing logic in ongoing graphic series (like Fantastic Four and Doom Patrol); and theorizations of the role of disability in the texts of individual graphic narrative writers (such as David B., Alison Bechdel, Marisa Acocella Marchetto, Harvey Pekar, and Chris Ware).

Send 500-word abstracts to Chris Foss (cfoss@umw.edu), Jonathan Gray (jgray@jjay.cuny.edu), and Zach Whalen (zwhalen@umw.edu) by Dec 15th.
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