Amanda Leduc grew up on Disney just like many kids of my generation. But she grew up experiencing it quite uniquely. Leduc has cerebral palsy, so a world where beauty is judged by perfect dainty feet and graceful dancing is a world that doesn’t celebrate her.
Disfigured is part memoir, part fairy tale study, and a beautiful thesis for disability justice. Leduc shares her extremely personal experience of being diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a young girl, of navigating bullying and crises of confidence through her childhood and adult life, and blossoming as a writer in a world of stories that haven’t made room for her and the disabled community. Alongside this, she presents an impressively thorough but highly readable retrospective on fairy tale history, including deep dives into popular Grimm and Andersen fairy tales, fascinating chapters on the development of Disney and their commodification of ableism, as well as dips into superhero culture. She interviews disability advocates with a wide variety of experience to share their own perceptions and reactions to fairy tale culture, as well as fairy tale scholars to beef up the academic bits.
Recently, I’ve realized that I’m not very well versed on disability justice. Additionally, fairy tales are the focus of my content creation online, and now I am questioning my life choices a bit, ha! Fairy and folktales are rife with ableism. Separate that as well as the antisemitism of many tales, and what do we have left? Not much in the Euro-centric canon, that is for sure. So Leduc’s narrative was very eye-opening for me. She covers topics that were not as surprising: the use of disability as punishment for the “bad seeds” and the erasure of disability for the “pure of heart”; the common use of disfigurement and disability to characterize villains. But further, she sheds light on tales I’d never even considered as feeding into ableist narratives. Her notes on superhero culture are particularly poignant too, as she unpacks how even seemingly positive disability rep in superhero characters is often marred by forcing the exceptionalism narrative on disabled people who don’t get to boast “super hearing” to balance out their blindness, or telepathy opening metaphysical travel despite a wheelchair hampering a professor’s physical movement.
I cannot recommend this book enough!