Reifying the Normate: Disability Representation and Ableist Hegemony in Australian Senior Secondary English and Literature Text Lists

Abstract

Representation within English literature is vital for secondary students at a critical juncture in their adolescent identity exploration. While the literary canon has historically been contested and dominated by white, western, able-bodied men, recent years have seen significant diversification to include post-colonial, gender-diverse, and sub-altern voices. However, the representation of disabled voices and characters within senior secondary texts remains a notable gap in educational research. This article explores the representation of disabled people in senior secondary English set-text lists across Australian Year 11 and 12 curricula. We argue that the texts prescribed for students in their final years of schooling inherently construct a canonical baseline of literary merit. Through a critical disability studies lens, we analysed 357 novels prescribed in ATAR and General English and Literature text lists. Our findings indicate that while characters with disabilities are present in the canon, they are predominantly framed through a deficit model of disability. Consequently, these selections largely conform to ableist constructions of what it means to be human, raising significant questions about the representational resources made available to senior secondary students.

1. Introduction

In Australia, senior secondary English (or its literacy equivalent) operates as a compulsory institutional gatekeeper. Across Year 11 and 12 state-based curricula, the Australian Curriculum (Secondary) framework divides English study into distinct pathways: English, Literature, English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EALD), and Essential English. Within this ecosystem, English and Literature function as high-stakes vehicles for university entrance, dictating a student’s Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR). Crucially, these specific courses rely on heavily policed, prescriptive set-text lists or official recommendations. This study investigates the 357 novels mandated across these national registries. Because these texts are explicitly selected on the premise that they ‘are recognised as having enduring or artistic value’ (Australian Curriculum, 2025, p. 1), they do not merely represent educational choices; rather, they empower institutional authority to curate a definitive Australian literary canon. For adolescent students navigating a critical liminal space in their becoming, these seminal works serve as primary pedagogical sites where normative cultural values, hierarchies of human worth, and constructions of the normate, or “ideal” citizen, are naturalised and internalised.

Beyond cultivating creative and critical capacities, literature functions as a primary ideological apparatus that actively shapes ontological values, attitudes, and subjectivities. Within educational contexts, prescribed literary texts scaffold student comprehensions of societal norms, institutionalised behaviours, and intersectional identities. Existing scholarship suggests that textual representation may contribute to the resources through which adolescents understand identity, belonging and social value. However, the present study examines curriculum lists and textual representation rather than classroom enactment or student reception. It therefore does not establish how individual students interpret, resist or reconfigure the texts studied (K. Lambert et al., 2019) By curating specific representations of gender, race, class, and bodily dis/ability, literature serves as a site where authors can reinforce, contest, or subvert hegemonic societal structures, thereby participating in the construction of boundaries around legitimate and valued forms of human existence. Within disability studies, this textuality is recognized as a powerful system of cultural representation akin to gender and race (Garland-Thomson, 2002), wherein the structural curation of stories can either crip the curriculum or entrench disabling barriers.

However, the literary canons institutionalized within Western educational systems have faced sustained critique for their historic marginalization and erasure of non-dominant racial and gendered realities (Adukia et al., 2023; S. Lambert, 2019; T. Lindsay, 2024). This paper extends this critique by arguing that corporeal and cognitive diversity remains a critically under-theorized and neglected dimension within these contested curricular frameworks. When educational systems fail to interrogate these selections, the school curriculum operates primarily as a ‘normalizing text’ that reifies the medical/deficit model and enforces compulsory normalcy (Allan, 1996; Oliver, 1990; Pinar et al., 1995). Consequently, rather than expanding student worldviews and ways of becoming, the unexamined secondary canon subtly excludes alternative lives and values, reducing the radical potential of inclusive education to one that is misappropriated and subverted (Mitchell & Snyder, 2015; Slee, 2018; Ware, 2011).

The ATAR and General English and Literature courses within the Australian Curriculum structure textual engagement across specific genres, including novels, short stories, films, documentaries, articles, images, and multimodal texts. This study purposefully truncates its investigative focus to the entire collection of novels prescribed within these senior secondary pathways across all states and territories because novels capture significant breadth and depth in their portrayals of characters and representations of ways of being.

While a robust body of intersectionality scholarship has interrogated the representation, and systemic erasure, of gender, race, and sexual identity within youth and children’s literature (Adam & Barratt-Pugh, 2020; Adukia et al., 2023; Carmel et al., 2024; J. Lindsay, 2024; McGraw & Van Leent, 2024), disability remains heavily marginalized within broader educational discourses. Existing disability-centric literary research has primarily concentrated on primary school media, such as children’s picture books, films, and youth television (Adam & Barratt-Pugh, 2020; Adam & Byrne, 2024; Foss et al., 2016; Hayden & Prince, 2023; Matthews, 2009; Odabaşı, 2025; Pennell et al., 2018; C. L. Price et al., 2016). Consequently, a profound epistemic gap persists regarding how disability is discursively constructed within the high-stakes novels prescribed for senior secondary students. This omission is highly problematic given that these curricular choices directly intervene at a critical developmental and ontological nexus for adolescent learners. As Goodley (2021) critically observes regarding broader academic and social justice domains.

Just as there’s been some really important and crucial work, for example, around race or around sexuality or around gender, which is all work that we need to kind of come behind, I want to ask why is disability always left out… of those conversations.

It is therefore unsurprising that educational institutions and their foundational curricula continue to be ‘designed with a non-disabled learner in mind’ (Goodley, 2018, p. 11). This structural orientation fundamentally clashes with the democratic and pedagogical mandates placed upon contemporary educators. As Kulkarni et al. (2024, p. 111) argue, ‘teachers have a responsibility towards cultivating environments in classrooms that enact democratic principles of learning with an emphasis on humanity, dignity, and respect for all students’. By critically analysing these text lists, this study exposes how senior secondary English curricula continue to institutionalize and perpetuate ableist ideologies, deficit assumptions, and compulsory normalcy, despite the realities of an increasingly diverse student and teacher cohort.

1.1. A Note on Terms and Positionality

This study takes the historically materialist social model of disability as an important point of departure. The social model distinguishes impairment from disability by locating disability not solely within individual bodies or minds, but in the social, material and institutional barriers that exclude people with impairments (Finkelstein, 2007; Oliver, 1990, 2013; Barnes, 2020). This foundational intervention enables us to examine how curricular selection and literary representation participate in the social production of disability. However, we do not treat the social model as a complete or uncontested account. Subsequent scholars have challenged the social model’s tendency to maintain a sharp distinction between impairment and disability and its comparatively limited attention to embodiment and impairment effects. Shakespeare (2006), for example, argues for an interactional understanding that does not abandon social barriers but recognises the material and embodied dimensions of impairment. We draw on subsequent critical disability studies scholarship to attend to embodiment, discourse, affect, relationality and the instability of the human norms against which disability is produced (Mollo et al., 2026). Thus, this study is grounded in critical disability studies, informed by the social model’s account of disability as socially and institutionally produced, and extended through selected posthumanist concepts concerned with relationality, becoming and the instability of the autonomous, normatively able human subject. Moreover, we explicitly acknowledge the heterogeneous nature of the disability community and respect alternative preferences for person-first language, as well as specific linguistic conventions chosen by neurodivergent communities.

Our terminological framework is deeply intertwined with our research positionality. The first author identifies as having lived experience as a disabled person, navigating the academy from a disabled subjectivity. The second author operates from a position of ‘access intimacy’, conceptualized as an instinctual, generative connection regarding access and interdependent support needs (M. Price, 2024), informed by their lived reality as a parent of a disabled person. We recognize that our distinct positionalities and epistemic standpoints both limit and enrich our analytical gaze, functioning not as biases to be erased, but as critical interpretive lenses that sharpen our deconstruction of ableist text lists.

1.2. Disability in Australia

The contemporary Australian school student population is highly heterogeneous, mirroring broader national demographic trends (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2024). According to the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (Australian Curriculum Assessment Reporting, 2024), 1,125,502 school students were recorded as receiving formal educational adjustments due to disability. While this institutional figure accounts for 27.2% of total national enrolments, it represents a conservative baseline. The actual prevalence of disabled students within the schooling system is likely much higher due to administrative barriers, systemic under-identification, and the exclusion of students who navigate schooling without formal institutional accommodations. Focusing specifically on the senior secondary landscape, 542,817 students were enrolled across Years 11 and 12 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2025). Given that more than one in four students is disabled, and that senior English operates as a compulsory institutional gatekeeper, a significant proportion of the student body is directly impacted by the presence, or profound absence, of affirmative representations within their prescribed literary corpora.

To situate this critique within the Australian legislative landscape, this study engages with the definition of disability established under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA), which explicitly encompasses both formally diagnosed and medically imputed disabilities. While we recognize from a critical disability studies perspective that state-sanctioned, legalistic definitions often rely on medicalized and bureaucratic categorizations of impairment, they remain highly consequential. Within Australian educational policy, the DDA and its accompanying Disability Standards for Education directly govern institutional resource allocation, pedagogical adjustments, and compliance mechanisms. Consequently, these statutory definitions wield immense power over the material realities of schooling, shaping how disability is institutionalised, perceived, and resisted within the classroom.

1.3. English as a Subject in Australia

The foundational curricula for all states and territories in Australia is the national Australian Curriculum. Individual states and territories subsequently adapt and devolve this overarching framework to construct localised, jurisdiction-specific syllabi. To understand the institutional values embedded within these texts, it is necessary to examine the core parameters set by the state; the official rationale and aims of the senior secondary ATAR Literature curriculum explicitly state the following:

Literature explores how literary texts shape perceptions of the world and enable us to enter other worlds of the imagination.... Students enjoy and respond creatively and critically to literary texts drawn from the past and present and from Australian and other cultures. They reflect on what these texts offer them as individuals, as members of Australian society, and as world citizens.

(Australian Curriculum, 2025)

The aforementioned rationale and aims explicitly position culture and identity as foundational, non-negotiable dimensions of senior secondary Literature study. This institutional mandate to explore diverse human subjectivities is further mirrored in the sister pathway of the curriculum; similarly, the official rationale and aims of the Australian Curriculum for senior secondary English state the following:

It [English] encourages students to engage with texts from their contemporary world, with texts from the past and with texts from Australian and other cultures. Such engagement helps students develop a sense of themselves, their world and their place in it.

(Australian Curriculum, 2025)

Across both curricular pathways, students are required to interrogate how literary texts construct representations of individuals, groups and societies, and to explore how historical and contemporary representations configure individual subjectivities. The explicitly stated pedagogical objective of this exploration is to foster an adolescent ‘sense of the world and their place in it’. This discursive process carries immense socialization weight. As Angenot and Barsky (2004, p. 223) theorise, ‘Literature is that discourse which, present in the world, comes and speaks with the “words of the tribe” after all other discourses have said what they’d had to say, especially those discourses about certitude and identity’.

When implemented within the Australian context, the state-sanctioned literary canon functions as these definitive ‘words of the tribe’. It establishes the core narratives through which youth are encouraged to negotiate their own identities and relative social positions. However, from a critical disability perspective, if these foundational ‘words’ are structurally rooted in ableist tropes, the curriculum ceases to be an inclusive space of self-discovery. Instead, it becomes a disciplinary apparatus (Foucault & Nazzaro, 1972) that dictates a highly narrow, normative baseline of human value, effectively alienating disabled students from recognising a legitimate ‘place’ for themselves within the cultural fabric.

Literature systematically constructs the parameters through which students internalise cultural ideologies, subjectivities, and social stratification (Adukia et al., 2023; Wishart, 2025). This textual socialisation operates along dual axes of external exposure and internal validation; as Westby (2024, p. 14) theorizes, ‘books should serve not only as windows to see the world outside ourselves, but also as mirrors to see ourselves’. While a mature body of critical scholarship has exposed the systemic erasure and marginalization of women and racialized communities within youth literature, these inequities remain stubbornly sedimented. For instance, J. Lindsay (2024) demonstrated that contemporary picture books maintain an asymmetrical female-to-male ratio of 1:1.35 while actively perpetuating bifurcated gender roles that relegate female characters to domesticity and associate male characters with public, aggressive breadwinning roles. Concurrently, Adukia et al. (2023, p. 2226) uncovered deep-seated underrepresentation of Black and Latinx individuals in influential youth texts, critically interrogating the ideological underpinnings of this containment: ‘There’s… this notion of equating youth or childhood with innocence, but if innocence is equated with lightness or whiteness, what’s that implicit bias that gets baked into people’s minds?’

Within the Australian context, where racial and gendered hierarchies persist, the secondary literary canon risks reifying and sedimenting these structural inequalities if left unexamined. Although certain sub-sections of state and territory syllabi have integrated counter-narratives that actively contest hegemonic norms, this diversification remains fractured. To achieve true systemic transformation that moves beyond a neoliberal performative inclusion (Wang & Wang, 2026), these intersectional critiques must fully incorporate corporeal and cognitive diversity (Ferm Almqvist & Hentschel, 2026). Extending the work of Kulkarni et al. (2024, p. 116), we argue that the realization of Disability Centred Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (DCCSPs), which purposefully ‘embrace multiply marginalized disabled identities’, is fundamentally contingent upon the baseline presence of nuanced, non-deficit representations of disability within senior secondary English curricula.

1.4. Late Adolescence and the Politics of Representation in Identity Exploration

Late adolescence represents a critical developmental nexus where student identity, self-esteem, cultural alignment, and sexuality are negotiated and solidified (Saxby, 1997). During this time of exploration, a student’s trajectory of ‘becoming’ is fundamentally mediated by the textual representations curated within senior secondary curricula. We use the term ‘becoming’ here following Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual framework which defines becoming as a fluid process of change, movement, multiplicity, and potentiality (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987)—rather than fixed notions of maturation, development or identity. High school English classrooms function as high-stakes sites of socialization. When students encounter nuanced mirrors of their own lived realities within prescribed texts, it fosters ontological security and affirmative self-formation. Conversely, the systematic absence or distortion of these reflections can structurally constrain an adolescent’s sense of possibility and social value.

Consequently, curricular literature acts as an ideological template that instructs youth on which social roles are legible, valued, or deviant. Textual representation is never neutral; it operates as a powerful mechanism to either reify ableist hegemony or offer a disruptive medium to subvert and challenge oppressive social structures. Across all discursive landscapes, the intentional inclusion of historically marginalized subjectivities remains an essential catalyst for genuine inclusion, directly contesting the systemic erasure that keeps disabled lives on the margins of cultural worth.

1.5. Stereotyping and Marginalising

Relying on an isolated literary text to construct an authentic rendering of a marginalized community poses a severe risk of essentializing and tokenizing disabled subjects. When a curriculum offers a prescriptive ‘single story’ (Tschida et al., 2014), it codifies an incomplete, often distorted narrative that reifies systemic biases. This exclusionary mechanism is well documented in early childhood education studies. For instance, Adam et al. (2025) demonstrated that early childhood classroom texts frequently offer highly constrained ethnic and corporeal perspectives. Their findings exposed prevalent tropes that exoticized the other, alongside books which offered dominant cultural ideologies and viewpoints. From a crip theory perspective, they erased disability and did not even offer the lived experiences of disabled people. Furthermore, in another study by Adam and Byrne (2024) even when multiply marginalised characters or individuals of colour were present, they were routinely relegated to secondary status, lacking any profound narrative depth or subjectivity.

These patterns of cultural containment are not unique to classroom print media; they mirror a broader, systemic trend across contemporary entertainment landscapes that reinforces ableist structures. Similarly, a comprehensive study by the Geena Davis Institute and the Ruderman Family Foundation revealed that a mere 3.9% of characters across American scripted television are disabled, indicating a stagnant plateau in media representation over an eight-year period (Conroy et al., 2024). Crucially, only 21% of these rare disabled characters were authentically cast with characters possessing relevant lived experience (Conroy et al., 2024). This pattern of underrepresentation is similarly sedimented within the Australian broadcast context. In an analysis of the iconic made-for-children preschool program Play School, Carmel et al. (2024) observed that out of 265 surveyed episodes, only 38 featured children with visible disabilities. Furthermore, these representations relied primarily on highly medicalized and hyper-visible tropes (such as wheelchair users or assistive hearing devices). By defaulting to traditional, standardized formulas of impairment, these media selections fail to reflect the rich, intersectional breadth of the actual disabled community, subtly encouraging young audiences to view disability through a lens of deviation rather than normal human variation.

1.6. Disability Representation in Novels for School-Aged Children

A substantial body of research has established the parameters of disability representation within children’s literature (Hayden & Prince, 2023, 2024; Matthews, 2009; Pennell et al., 2018; C. L. Price et al., 2016; Tejero Hughes & Abarca, 2025). This scholarship remains heavily concentrated within the early childhood and primary schooling sectors (Tondreau & Rabinowitz, 2021). Where disability inquiry penetrates the secondary education space, it is largely confined to the rigid formats of institutional textbooks rather than literary narratives (Jensen et al., 2023; Vidal-Albelda & Martínez-Bello, 2017). This uneven distribution creates a critical knowledge gap concerning the literary materials through which older adolescents engage with disability discourses.

The systematic erasure or distortion of disabled children within foundational texts reinforces ableist ideologies, positioning corporeal, cognitive, or psychological variation as existing outside the boundaries of acceptable humanity. Meta-analyses of early childhood literature consistently identify recurring reductive patterns. These include highly restricted narrative depth (C. L. Price et al., 2016), stereotypical othering (Adukia et al., 2023), and the deployment of harmful tropes such as the hyper-exceptional ‘super crip’, reductionist inspiration pornography, or the villainized ‘evil monster’ character (Goodley et al., 2016; Odabaşı, 2025). Furthermore, when disabled characters are included, they are routinely restricted to secondary, non-agentic roles that merely serve the narrative arc of able-bodied protagonists (Tejero Hughes & Abarca, 2025).

To counter these restrictive paradigms, Hayden and Prince (2023) advocate for strengths-based configurations of disability in literature to actively disrupt sedimented ableist assumptions. Applying a strengths-based critical lens to text selection within senior secondary English is essential to challenging both explicit and implicit ableism woven into institutional canons. The difficulty of enacting such pedagogical shifts is compounded by the systemic barriers to available materials. For example, a baseline tracking of the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Reading Time registry in 2025 identified a mere 23 books out of 6088 catalogued titles that explicitly featured disability as a central theme (Children’s Book Council of Australia, 2025). Critically, only 26% (n = 6) of these identified texts were classified as age-appropriate for older readers. While not an exhaustive database search, these proportions illustrate the material barriers educators face when attempting to source complex, age-appropriate narratives featuring disabled youth.

1.7. Theoretical Framework

This study draws on three related but distinct traditions within disability scholarship: the social model of disability, critical disability studies (CDS), and selected posthumanist perspectives. Rather than treating these traditions as interchangeable, we use them in a layered way. The social model provides the study’s foundational political and conceptual starting point by directing attention to the social, institutional, and material production of disability. Emerging from the work of scholars such as Michael Oliver and colleagues, the social model distinguishes impairment from disability and argues that disability is produced through environmental, cultural, attitudinal, and structural barriers rather than residing solely within individual bodies or minds. This perspective is particularly relevant to curriculum research because it shifts analytical attention away from disabled individuals themselves and towards the educational systems, selection processes, and institutional practices that determine whose stories, identities, and experiences are recognised and valued. Within the context of senior secondary English curricula, the social model therefore provides a framework for interrogating how canonical text selections may contribute to the inclusion or exclusion of disabled subjectivities.

Building upon this foundation, critical disability studies provides the principal analytical framework for the study. Critical disability studies extends beyond questions of access and exclusion to examine the cultural, discursive, and political production of disability, revealing how normative assumptions about bodies, minds, productivity, independence, and value become naturalised within social institutions. Drawing particularly on the work of Goodley (2014, 2016), we employ concepts such as ableism, compulsory able-bodiedness, compulsory able-mindedness, medicalisation, and neoliberal-ableism to examine how prescribed literary texts construct disability and human worth. As Goodley (2014) argues, ableism is the idealization of able bodies and able minds. Consequently, when curriculum authorities repeatedly privilege narratives that marginalise, pathologise, or silence disabled lives, they contribute to broader social processes that position certain bodies and minds as naturally more valuable than others. Relatedly, Dolmage’s (2017, p. 7) observation that ableism renders able-bodiedness and able-mindedness compulsory provides an important lens for understanding how literary canons can function as gatekeeping mechanisms, reproducing narrow assumptions regarding who counts as fully human, worthy, capable, or normatively successful. CDS therefore supplies the study’s primary vocabulary for analysing representations of disability, including deficit discourse, medicalisation, narrative prosthesis, supercrip tropes, and the production of the normate.

While CDS provides the primary analytical framework, selected posthumanist concepts are used more selectively to deepen our interpretation of representation, identity, and belonging. Drawing on Braidotti (2019) and Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 1987), posthumanism challenges fixed understandings of the autonomous, rational, independent human subject that have historically underpinned ableist assumptions. Rather than conceptualising identity as stable and bounded, posthumanist perspectives emphasise relationality, multiplicity, interdependence, and processes of becoming. This perspective is particularly useful for examining the normative assumptions embedded within literary representations of disability. It prompts questions about whether literary texts continue to privilege autonomy, self-sufficiency, rationality, and bodily integrity as prerequisites for full humanity, or whether they allow more expansive understandings of human variation, dependence, and relational existence. Posthumanism does not function as a separate coding framework in this study. Rather, it serves as a sensitising interpretive lens that complements critical disability studies by questioning the supposedly universal human subject against which disabled people are frequently measured.

These traditions are therefore complementary but not equivalent. The social model directs attention to the structural production of disability, critical disability studies provides the primary framework for analysing representation and ableism within the curriculum, and posthumanism offers a supplementary lens through which to interrogate normative assumptions about humanity, identity, and belonging. Together, they enable a critical examination not only of whether disability is represented within senior secondary English curricula, but also how particular representations reinforce or disrupt dominant understandings of what it means to be fully human.

We recognise a productive tension between posthumanist resistance to fixed identity categories and the pragmatic use of categories within a national textual audit. Categories such as disabled/non-disabled, affirmative/deficit and explicit/implicit representation are treated here as provisional analytical constructions rather than stable ontological divisions. They enable patterns of exclusion to be identified but cannot capture the fluidity, intersectionality or contested character of disability identity. Accordingly, our analysis attends to continuums, ambiguities and mixed representational effects rather than assuming that every text can be assigned an uncomplicated binary classification.

Central to our analysis is the concept of the normate (Garland-Thomson, 2011; Reynolds, 2023). The normate is not simply a non-disabled person. Rather, it describes the culturally privileged and largely invisible subject position against which all forms of bodily, cognitive, sensory, and psychological difference are measured. As Garland-Thomson (2011, p. 591) argues, the normate functions as “the veiled subject position of the cultural self”, established through contrast with a range of marked and excluded others. The normate therefore operates as a social and cultural ideal rather than an empirical reality, embodying assumptions regarding autonomy, rationality, productivity, independence, bodily integrity, and social competence. Within educational contexts, literary texts play an important role in producing, reproducing, or contesting these assumptions by establishing which lives are represented as ordinary, valued, desirable, or fully human.

1.8. Methodology and Analytical Approach to ‘Set Texts’ and ‘Recommended Texts’ in English

To systematically map the landscape of disability representation within senior secondary education, we conducted a comprehensive national text-list audit. All official registries of prescribed and recommended texts for Year 11 and 12 English pathways, encompassing both tertiary-entrance (ATAR) and vocational or non-tertiary tracks, were retrieved from the respective state and territory curriculum authorities, alongside the national baseline registry maintained by the Australian Curriculum.

Appendix B provides the complete corpus-construction audit trail, including the curriculum authority, official document or list, applicable year, pathway, retrieval date, number of listings retrieved, and number of novels retained for each jurisdiction. Lists were treated as comparable where they formally prescribed or recommended texts for Year 11 or Year 12 English, Literature, or equivalent senior secondary pathways. Where pathways differed across jurisdictions, the applicable local pathway designation was retained in the database rather than normalised retrospectively.

Following data collection, all textual entries were consolidated into a centralised database, yielding an initial dataset of (n = 904) text listings. This dataset represented a heterogeneous mix of genres, including feature films, documentaries, poetry collections, digital websites, and novels. To ensure the analytical sample provided sufficient narrative length for sustained character development and thematic depth, the research team established strict inclusion and exclusion criteria. Short-form text types, such as speeches, essays, and workplace functional texts, were excluded. Short stories and poetry anthologies were also omitted due to structural inconsistencies in how jurisdictions prescribed them. For example, some jurisdictions specified broad categories such as “any poem by T.S. Eliot” rather than clearly bounded texts suitable for a national comparative analysis. After applying these exclusions and removing duplicate novel titles (n = 83) appearing across multiple jurisdictions, a refined corpus of (n = 357) unique novels was retained for analysis.

The final dataset was catalogued across multiple data columns, including book title, author, text category, and the Australian jurisdictions in which each novel appeared. Additional coding columns were developed to document disability representation, authorial positionality, narrative prominence, and representational patterns. Where publicly available information indicated that an author had self-identified as disabled, this information was recorded as contextual data. Authorial positionality was not treated as a proxy for the ideological quality, authenticity, or representational accuracy of a text. Rather, it formed one contextual dimension of the broader analysis of disability representation. While disabled authorship may bring forms of situated knowledge to literary production, representational effects were ultimately assessed through textual and rhetorical analysis rather than assumptions regarding author identity. A representative sample of the analysed novels is provided in Appendix A.

The study employed three related units of analysis. A curricular occurrence, defined as one appearance of a title on one official jurisdictional list, was used to examine curricular reach. A unique novel title was used to construct the 357-title corpus and calculate the proportion of novels in which disability representation was identified. A character-representation episode, comprising the passages, plot structures and rhetorical practices through which disability was constructed, was used for representational coding and rhetorical interpretation. Where a novel included more than one disabled character or more than one representational pattern, each relevant character or episode was coded, while the novel was counted only once in the 357-title prevalence calculation.

The qualitative screening process occurred in two distinct phases. First, a comprehensive synopsis and précis review was conducted across all 357 novels to identify potential representations of corporeal, sensory, cognitive, or psychological difference. Second, all novels identified during this initial screening were read in their entirety by the research team to facilitate a more detailed examination of disability representation. Through this process, 71 novels were identified as containing explicit or implicit disability representation and subsequently underwent intensive qualitative analysis. We recognise that synopsis-based screening carries the possibility of overlooking subtle, implicit, or secondary disability representations that are not captured in publicly available summaries. Consequently, the 71 novels identified through this process should be understood as representing the disability representations located through the specified screening procedure rather than an exhaustive count of every potential representation within the corpus.

After applying these exclusions, duplicate titles appearing across jurisdictions were consolidated to produce a corpus of 357 unique novels. Consolidation prevented the same literary work from being counted repeatedly as a different novel. However, the number and identity of jurisdictions in which each title appeared were retained as curricular-frequency variables. The study therefore distinguishes the breadth of the unique-title corpus from the curricular reach of texts recurring across multiple jurisdictions.

Data analysis proceeded in two related stages. First, qualitative content analysis was used to classify the corpus according to the coding framework (see Appendix C), including disability presence, narrative prominence, and representational categories. Second, rhetorical analysis was used to examine how disability functioned within texts through narrative structure, focalisation, metaphor, evaluative language, character agency, and recurring representational tropes. Drawing on Krippendorff’s (2019, p. 22) understanding of rhetorical analysis as the investigation of “how messages are delivered and with what (intended or actual) effects”, this second stage enabled a more detailed examination of how the prescribed secondary canon produces, sustains, challenges, or complicates dominant understandings of disability and human worth.

For the purposes of corpus screening, a text was included where the primary text explicitly identified a character as disabled or as having a named impairment or diagnosis, or where sustained textual evidence represented a corporeal, sensory, cognitive, or psychological variation that materially shaped the character’s narrative treatment or social positioning. In this study, impairment refers to the corporeal, sensory, cognitive, or psychological variation represented in the text. Diagnosis was reserved for conditions explicitly named within the primary text. Disability refers to the interaction between impairment and disabling social, material, institutional, or attitudinal conditions. Where a possible condition was inferred rather than explicitly identified, it was recorded as an interpretive attribution rather than a confirmed diagnosis. We recognise that retrospective classification carries the risk of reproducing the medicalising practices that critical disability scholarship frequently critiques. Accordingly, our analysis prioritised representations of disability, impairment, difference, and social positioning rather than the retrospective assignment of contemporary diagnostic labels to literary characters.

Several representational categories were used during coding to examine how disability was constructed within the selected texts. We reserved the term supercrip for representations in which a disabled character was exceptionalised through extraordinary overcoming, achievement, resilience, or inspirational value directed towards a presumed non-disabled audience (Schalk, 2016). Acquired impairment, including impairment resulting from war, accident, illness, or trauma, was not sufficient for classification as a supercrip representation. Where narratives did not rely upon inspirational exceptionalism or overcoming, alternative representational categories such as tragic framing, spectacularisation, medicalisation, narrative prosthesis, deficit representation, or social exclusion were used where appropriate. These categories were applied through consideration of narrative structure, character agency, focalisation, evaluative language, and broader thematic context. Consequently, representations were not evaluated on the basis of impairment type, diagnosis, or origin alone. Instead, the analysis focused on the narrative and rhetorical functions attached to disability and how these functions shaped broader understandings of normality, belonging, agency, and human value.

An explicit representation involved direct identification of disability, impairment, or diagnosis within the primary text. An implicit representation required repeated and sustained textual evidence of corporeal, sensory, cognitive, or psychological difference together with identifiable narrative, social, or institutional consequences for the character concerned. Isolated references to distress, eccentricity, difference, trauma, illness, or metaphorical expressions of being “broken” were not considered sufficient for classification. Where a character was classified through implicit representation, coding decisions were reviewed by both researchers and supported by textual evidence drawn from multiple points within the novel.

The concept of the normate was operationalised through analysis of narrative, thematic, and linguistic features that positioned able-bodiedness, able-mindedness, autonomy, independence, productivity, or bodily integrity as implicit standards of normality. Processes of normate reification were identified where disability was consistently represented as deviation from a presumed norm, where disabled characters primarily functioned to reinforce the normality of other characters, or where social value and human worth were attached to conformity with normative physical, cognitive, or behavioural expectations. Conversely, texts that challenged these assumptions by presenting disability as ordinary human variation or by disrupting normative understandings of personhood were interpreted as resisting normate constructions.

1.9. Coding Reliability

To strengthen analytical consistency, the researchers held calibration meetings to discuss the coding framework and its application to potentially ambiguous cases. Following calibration, both researchers independently and blindly double-coded a random subsample of 25 novels. The reported 100% agreement applied to the final classification of whether a novel contained an explicit or implicit disability representation. It should not be interpreted as 100% agreement across all rhetorical and interpretive categories. Interpretations concerning narrative function, ableist framing, the normate, medicalisation, narrative prosthesis, and supercrip representation were developed through close textual analysis and subsequent researcher discussion.

2. Findings and Discussion

2.1. Quantitative Containment and Structural Erasure of Disabled Subjectivities

Disability representation was identified in 71 of the 357 unique novels screened (19.8%). This proportion is a descriptive result and does not, by itself, establish underrepresentation because no directly equivalent benchmark exists for the proportion of prescribed novels that would be expected to include disabled characters. Its significance must instead be considered in relation to the narrative prominence, range and representational treatment of the characters identified. The following analysis therefore examines not only whether disability was present, but how disabled characters were positioned, what narrative functions disability performed, and whether texts reproduced or challenged deficit-oriented assumptions.

2.2. Narrative Prosthesis, ‘Super-Crip’ Tropes, and the Spectacles of Acquired Impairment

Where disabled characters do secure a focalizing role within the prescribed text lists, they are heavily subjected to reductive, historical tropes that mirror the ideological traps identified by Adukia et al. (2023). Many of these depictions are deeply anchored in structural ableism. Although a notable portion of the mandated texts are over half a century old, originating in historical eras with highly medicalized, exclusionary worldviews, it remains deeply concerning that these narrow discourses continue to operate as the dominant, institutionalized frameworks for contemporary adolescent learners.

A persistent and recurring rhetorical strategy observed across these selections is the positioning of impairment as the consequence of catastrophic misadventure, personal accident, or wartime trauma. For example, in Hemingway’s (1929) A Farewell to Arms, the protagonist Frederic Henry sustains severe physical injuries during a World War I mortar attack, and the narrative subsequently devotes considerable attention to his recovery, rehabilitation, and changing relationships. Similarly, in Vonnegut’s (1969) Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim’s experiences of war-related psychological distress and trauma following the bombing of Dresden become central to the novel’s narrative structure. These examples are not problematic because they depict acquired impairment or trauma. Rather, they illustrate a recurring representational pattern in which disability becomes narratively significant primarily through exceptional events, dramatic bodily rupture, or catastrophic loss.

Acquired impairment was not coded as ableist in itself. Rather, we examined the narrative work performed by its representation. This included whether impairment was constructed as tragedy, punishment, spectacle, a mechanism for another character’s development, a condition to be overcome, or a basis for exclusion from social life. Texts were coded as reproducing deficit or ableist framings only where such interpretations were supported by narrative structure, focalisation, evaluative language, character agency, and broader thematic context. Likewise, representations were classified as supercrip only where disability was linked to extraordinary overcoming, inspirational achievement, exceptional resilience, or other forms of exceptionalisation directed towards a presumed non-disabled audience.

Taken collectively, however, the corpus demonstrates a disproportionate reliance on dramatic narratives of acquired impairment, particularly those associated with warfare, accident, catastrophe, or profound personal loss. While these narratives are entirely legitimate literary subjects, their predominance risks narrowing the range of disability experiences made visible within the senior secondary canon. Within contemporary Australia, impairment is frequently associated with chronic health conditions, ageing, congenital variation, neurodivergence, and gradual onset rather than spectacular events or catastrophic bodily transformation. The consequence is not that the selected texts are inherently ableist, but that they privilege particular disability narratives over others. As a result, everyday experiences of disability are less visible within the literary landscape presented to students, limiting opportunities for more diverse and nuanced representations of disabled lives.

2.3. Linguistic Violence, Internalised Ableism, and the Tyranny of the Normate

Across the corpus, the normate was reified through a range of recurring narrative and linguistic practices. These included presenting disability as absence, loss, deficiency, or deviation from an assumed standard of human functioning; associating autonomy, productivity, and bodily integrity with human value; and positioning disabled characters as contrastive figures through which normative identities were stabilised. Rather than functioning as a visible ideology, the normate typically appeared as an unmarked assumption regarding who counts as ordinary, capable, and fully human.

Beyond structural exclusion, the senior secondary English canon frequently acts as a conduit for systemic linguistic ableism, and the reification of the normate. As Reynolds (2023) notes,

The normate is distinct from both lived/existential and also represented/genealogical normality. The normate is a product of and functions through mythic norms. What’s more, the normate educes an ought.

(p. 203)

The normate functions to mythologise “how things are and should be” (Reynolds, 2023, p. 203). As Garland-Thomson notes, the normate is “the veiled subject position of the cultural self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries” (Garland-Thomson, 2011, p. 591). Throughout the audited text lists, language that pathologizes and demeans disabled subjectivities is routinely reified without critical interrogation. For example, Ondaatje’s (1992) The English Patient explicitly casts the central character, Almásy, as “severely burned and disfigured.” Within this narrative framework, Almásy’s body is stripped of self-determination, reduced to a passive, tragic object of care rather than an agentic individual possessing human dignity. In The English Patient, Almásy’s burned body is repeatedly mediated through clinical observation and the care provided by others. Our analysis does not treat the presence of burns or descriptive reference to bodily difference as inherently ableist. Rather, we examine whether focalisation, restricted agency and the organisation of care position Almásy principally as an object of medical attention, tragedy or narrative symbolism. “Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet. Above the shins the burns are worst. Beyond purple. Bone… hipbones of Christ.” This interpretation therefore rests on the cumulative narrative treatment of the character rather than the isolated phrase “severely burned and disfigured.” Similarly, pejorative language such as “crazy” and “loony” is reified throughout Kesey’s (1962/2008) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to discursively police characters navigating psychosocial disabilities.

This linguistic degradation is intricately tied to the phenomenon of internalised ableism, wherein individuals internalise the dominant society’s negative values and assumptions regarding impairment. This oppressive mechanism is vividly illustrated in Rooney’s (2018) Normal People. The protagonist, Marianne, deeply internalises the ableist demands of her environment, articulating a profound sense of intrinsic brokenness by stating “there is something fundamentally wrong with her.” Marianne’s belief that “there is something fundamentally wrong with her” can be read as an internalisation of normative judgments concerning psychological and social difference. However, this statement alone is not sufficient to classify Marianne as disabled under the study’s operational criteria. We therefore use the example to illustrate the broader cultural operation of normalcy and self-pathologisation rather than as definitive evidence of a disabled character experiencing internalised ableism. Moreover, the title itself, Normal People, operates as a broader socio-cultural commentary on the violent process of ‘othering’ anyone who fails to conform to an idealised, compulsory baseline of normalcy. We argue that disabled people are marginalised by the ‘limitations determined by a non-inclusive society, which undermine the full expression of the individual’s personality’ (Mollo et al., 2026 p. 2), rather than any pathological individual condition.

To resist this the reification of the normate, Conroy et al. (2024) advocate for the systematic removal of ableist language and framing from pedagogical materials. Disrupting these deficit-based frameworks requires a radical re-evaluation of text selection policies (Hayden & Prince, 2023). They recommend that teachers and educators move beyond passive consumption, actively choosing to either avoid the uncritical deployment of ableist literature or introduce sustained critical disability pedagogies that deconstruct these toxic linguistic structures and tropes directly within the classroom.

2.4. Authorial Positionality and the Representation of Disability

Authorial positionality constitutes one relevant context for considering whose perspectives are visible within the senior secondary canon. However, it cannot determine the ideological or representational quality of an individual text. Of the 71 novels identified as containing disability representation, eight were written by authors for whom a public self-identification as disabled was located. For the remaining authors, disability status was recorded as “not publicly established” rather than “non-disabled.” These data should therefore be interpreted as an account of publicly disclosed positionality, not as a definitive classification of author identity.

The relatively low proportion of authors who publicly identify as disabled raises important questions about whose experiences and perspectives are most visible within the senior secondary literary canon. However, authorial positionality should not be conflated with representational quality. Disabled authorship does not automatically produce nuanced or affirmative representations, just as non-disabled authorship does not necessarily result in ableist portrayals. Rather than serving as a measure of authenticity, authorial positionality provides important contextual information that may shape how disability is represented. We therefore consider both the author’s positionality and the textual construction of disability itself, while recognising that representational effects ultimately emerge through the interaction between text, context, and interpretation.

2.5. Limitations

When evaluating an extensive national corpus, methodological boundaries must be explicitly delineated. First, utilizing a novel’s synopsis or précis as an initial screening tool presents an analytical limitation; it risks a flattened, one-dimensional categorization that may inadvertently overlook nuanced or deeply buried subtextual subversions of disability. Consequently, some relevant texts may have been unintentionally omitted from the secondary close-reading phase.

Secondly, the historical fluidities of language present distinct challenges when identifying disability across different literary eras. Authors operating before the advent of contemporary critical disability discourses often used archaic vocabulary to depict impairment, making intentionality difficult to appraise. For example, Dickens (1855/2003) employs the term ‘cripple’ in Little Dorrit, positioning Mrs Clennam’s wheelchair as a mechanism of confinement and self-imposed punishment. This construction reifies the ableist trope of assistive technology as a form of imprisonment; in stark contrast to the material realities of the social model, where a wheelchair operates as an emancipatory vehicle of mobility and autonomy, the canon reconstructs it as a tragic cage. Similarly, in Kesey’s (1962/2008) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, McMurphy’s performative staging of a psychiatric condition to enter a ‘mental hospital’ relies on a landscape where individuals are violently institutionalized and pathologized as ‘crazy’ and ‘loonies’. This analysis does not seek to uncritically condemn historical authors or their works for reflecting the medicalized paradigms of their respective eras. Rather, it exposes the problematic nature of relying on these historically sedimented, deficit-based tropes as the primary or exclusive means through which contemporary senior secondary students are permitted to engage with disabled lives.

Finally, the study examines curriculum lists and textual representation rather than classroom implementation, teacher mediation or student reception. Claims concerning identity, belonging and students’ sense of possibility should therefore be understood as literature-informed implications rather than effects demonstrated by the present data.

2.6. Future Directions: Disrupting the Canon and Enacting Emancipatory Selection

As these empirical findings capture a critical baseline of disability representation in senior secondary Australian English text lists, they provide an analytical blueprint for systemic reform. To build upon this research, further studies must expand this critical lens to interrogate disability discourses within broader secondary school resources, including multi-modal media, text-books, and hidden curricular policies.

Furthermore, government education departments, curriculum authorities, and front-line educators urgently require a formalized, non-deficit framework for identifying and evaluating texts. We recommend further research to develop a critical, strengths-based selection matrix that will actively assist stakeholders in choosing books that move beyond tragedy and inspiration pornography.

To achieve systemic transformation, it behoves educational systems to actively implement radical pedagogical adjustments that redefine textual selection and classroom interrogation. First, education departments and teachers could expand the inclusion of literature by disabled writers and illustrators, thereby increasing the range of situated perspectives available within the curriculum. Authorial positionality should not be treated as a guarantee of representational authenticity or ideological quality, but greater inclusion of publicly self-identified disabled authors may help challenge the restricted range of perspectives currently available. Textual quality and representational effects should continue to be evaluated through critical analysis of the work itself.

3. Conclusions

The empirical findings of this study demonstrate that despite a concerted, progressive shift within the Australian senior secondary English curriculum to incorporate post-colonial, gender-diverse, and sub-altern voices, disabled subjectivities remain systematically contained, marginalised, and under-theorised. Within the high-stakes national canon, representation continues to function through a pathologizing, deficit-oriented ableist model of disability. This persistent reification of ableist assumptions operates in direct ideological conflict with the material realities of an increasingly diverse student and educator cohort. It underscores an urgent institutional necessity to deploy deliberate, strengths-based text selection criteria that authentically validate disabled lives. Because late adolescence functions as a critical formative juncture for identity formation, subjective exploration, and socio-emotional positioning, the curation of diverse literary voices is not merely an aesthetic choice; it is an issue of educational equity. Leaving ableist assumptions within the secondary canon unexamined risks narrowing the representational resources through which students encounter disabled lives. Further classroom-based research is required to examine how teachers and students interpret, contest or reconfigure these representations in practice.