Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

THEORETICAL ISSUES

1. The literature used to introduce the social model is not sufficiently appropriate.
   If the authors are invoking the social model as a foundational theoretical position, it would be more appropriate to cite scholars who were central to its development, such as Michael Oliver, Vic Finkelstein, Colin Barnes, and related materialist accounts. A recent source such as Mollo et al. (2026) may be relevant, but it should not substitute for engagement with the foundational literature.

 

2. The term “posthumanist social model of disability” requires clarification.
   The manuscript currently uses this formulation without explaining what it means theoretically. The authors should clarify how a posthumanist social model differs from, revises, or extends the historically materialist social model of disability. In particular, the relationship between posthumanist ideas and the social model’s traditional emphasis on disabling social relations and structures should be made explicit.

 

3. The use of Shakespeare (2006) is theoretically misleading.
   Shakespeare should not be cited as a straightforward representative of the “tenets of the social model.” His work is well known for critically challenging important aspects of the British social model, including the sharp impairment/disability distinction and what he regarded as insufficient attention to embodiment and impairment effects. His work would be better positioned as part of the critical debate around the social model.

 

4. The manuscript needs greater consistency in its theoretical self-positioning.
   Later, the paper describes its framework as “posthumanist critical disability theory” drawing on Goodley, Braidotti, and Deleuze and Guattari. The relationship between this framework and the earlier “posthumanist social model of disability” is not yet clear. The authors should specify whether these are being treated as equivalent, complementary, or distinct theoretical traditions.

 

5. The paper shifts between theoretical frameworks without explaining their relationship. The manuscript appears to shift between several theoretical positions—social model of disability, critical disability theory/studies, and posthumanism—without sufficiently explaining how these frameworks relate to one another. The authors should clarify whether they are proposing a synthesis of these traditions, and, if so, what each contributes analytically. At present, the theoretical framework risks appearing eclectic rather than integrated.

 

6. Although the manuscript explicitly identifies posthumanism as central to its theoretical framework, it is not clear how posthumanist theory informs the analytical procedure or the interpretation of the findings. Most of the analysis is conducted through established disability-studies concepts such as ableism, medicalisation, the normate, supercrip representation, and deficit discourse. The authors should either demonstrate more explicitly what analytical work posthumanist concepts perform in the study or reconsider the extent to which the paper should be described as posthumanist.

 

 

7. There is some tension between the posthumanist commitment to destabilising fixed categories and the paper's repeated use of quite fixed normative binaries. This is particularly noticeable in formulations such as authentic/inauthentic representation, disabled/non-disabled author, affirmative/deficit representation, and “own voices” versus external representation. The posthumanist section emphasises fluidity, multiplicity and becoming—for example, their account of Deleuze and Guattari explicitly rejects fixed notions of identity. Yet the analysis later relies on relatively stable identity categories. That does not automatically make the analysis wrong, but the tension needs acknowledgement.

 

8. The treatment of “own voices” and authenticity is theoretically overdetermined. The manuscript appears to equate disabled authorship with “authentic” representation and non-disabled authorship with the risk of paternalistic or ableist representation. This assumption requires much greater theoretical justification. Authorial positionality is undoubtedly relevant, but lived experience does not in itself guarantee a particular ideological or representational outcome, just as non-disabled authorship does not necessarily determine an ableist representation. The current formulation risks essentialising both disabled identity and textual authenticity. The authors should distinguish more carefully between authorial positionality, textual representation, and the critical evaluation of the text itself.

 

9. There is an unresolved slippage between impairment, disability, diagnosis and representation. The manuscript also needs a clearer operational definition of disability. At different points, disability appears to encompass impairment, diagnosis, psychological difference, corporeal variation, cognitive difference, and disabling social relations. These categories should not be treated as theoretically interchangeable, particularly in a paper that invokes the social model. The authors should state explicitly how a character was classified as disabled and how impairment, diagnosis and disability were distinguished analytically.

 

10. The analysis sometimes treats the presence of impairment itself as evidence of ableist representation. In some sections, the manuscript risks moving too quickly from the presence or origin of impairment to conclusions about ableist representation. For example, acquired impairment through war or accident is not in itself evidence of a supercrip narrative or deficit representation. The analysis needs to demonstrate how impairment functions narratively—e.g., whether it is used as tragedy, moral device, narrative prosthesis, overcoming narrative, or mechanism of exclusion—rather than treating particular forms of impairment or their causes as inherently ableist.

 

11. Supercrip appears to be used too broadly. The manuscript moves from “dramatic acquired impairments” directly to the supercrip trope. But a supercrip representation normally requires some form of extraordinary overcoming, achievement, inspiration, or exceptionalisation. An acquired impairment alone does not establish that trope.

 

12. There is tension between the manuscript's critique of medicalisation and its own retrospective diagnostic categorisation of literary characters.

The authors should also reflect on the possibility that their analytical procedure reproduces some of the medicalising logic that the paper seeks to critique. In several places, literary characters appear to be retrospectively classified through contemporary diagnostic categories. The distinction between an explicitly named diagnosis in the text and the researchers’ interpretive attribution of impairment/disability should therefore be made clear. A particularly obvious example is the statement that Billy Pilgrim “acquires post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)” in Slaughterhouse-Five. Depending on the text, this may be an interpretive diagnostic attribution rather than an explicit textual diagnosis. More broadly, the paper criticises diagnostic and medicalised framings while potentially imposing contemporary diagnostic categories on literary characters.

 

13. The normate. Given that “the normate” is the central concept in the article's title, it deserves a more substantial place in the theoretical framework. The manuscript should explain more clearly how the concept is operationalised and what textual features were interpreted as processes through which the normate is produced or reified.

 

METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES

1. The corpus-construction procedure requires greater transparency. The manuscript reports an initial dataset of 904 entries and a final sample of 357 novels, but it does not provide a sufficiently detailed audit trail of how the corpus was constructed across jurisdictions. The authors should specify which official lists were included, the relevant years, the jurisdictions and pathways covered, and the criteria used to determine comparability across systems. The treatment of texts appearing in more than one jurisdiction should also be explained clearly. At present, it is difficult to assess the comprehensiveness and reproducibility of the national audit.

 

2. There is an internal inconsistency concerning which texts entered the close-reading phase. The methodology initially states that the presence of disabled characters or disability-related themes was coded across protagonists, antagonists, and secondary or marginal characters. However, the Data Analysis section later states that intensive reading was conducted for novels containing disabled protagonists or antagonists. The findings then report 71 books inclusive of both primary and secondary characters. The authors should clarify the actual selection rule for close reading and ensure that the description of the analytical sample is consistent throughout the manuscript.

 

3. The two-stage screening procedure constitutes a major methodological problem.All 357 novels were initially screened through synopses and précis, and only those flagged at this stage were subsequently read in full. This procedure creates a substantial risk of systematic false negatives, particularly for disability representations that are secondary, implicit, historically coded, narratively ambiguous, or simply absent from available summaries. The authors themselves acknowledge that synopsis-based screening may overlook relevant representations, but this issue has consequences for the central quantitative finding that 71 of 357 novels contain disabled characters. It therefore cannot be treated merely as a minor limitation. The authors need to explain how the validity of the initial screening stage was established and how they can be confident that relevant texts were not systematically excluded before close analysis.

 

4. The coding framework is substantially under-specified and requires major revision. The manuscript refers to coding for the presence of disability, narrative prominence, discursive construction, structural elements, tropes, and rhetorical effects, but it does not provide the actual coding categories, operational definitions, decision rules, or examples used in the analysis. This is especially problematic because central claims depend on interpretive categories such as deficit framing, ableism, supercrip representation, narrative prosthesis, and the normate. Without a transparent codebook or equivalent analytic framework, the reader cannot assess how consistently these concepts were applied or reproduce the analysis. The authors should provide a detailed coding scheme, ideally as a table or supplementary appendix, showing the categories, definitions, inclusion/exclusion criteria, and illustrative examples.

 

5. The methodological relationship between qualitative content analysis and rhetorical analysis is unclear. The manuscript states that the analysis was “grounded in qualitative content analysis” while “specifically utilizing a rhetorical analysis framework.” These are presented almost as interchangeable approaches, yet they involve different analytical logics and procedures. The authors should clarify whether rhetorical analysis is being used as a specific technique within a broader qualitative content analysis, or whether it constitutes the primary analytic method. The unit of analysis, coding process, and relationship between rhetorical devices and broader thematic categories should be explained more explicitly.

 

6. The procedure used to classify authors as disabled requires substantially greater methodological and ethical justification. The manuscript states that authorial positionality was established by cross-referencing whether authors possessed lived experience of disability and later includes both formally disclosed and “textually imputed” impairments in this classification. It is unclear what “textually imputed” means, how such classifications were made, which sources were consulted, or what evidentiary threshold was required. Inferring disability status from public materials is methodologically uncertain and may also raise ethical concerns, particularly where an author has not self-identified as disabled. The authors should provide a transparent and defensible procedure for this classification and reconsider whether imputed disability status should be used as an analytic variable at all.

 

7. The unit of analysis needs to be specified explicitly. It is currently unclear whether the primary unit of analysis is the novel, the disabled character, the representation or trope, the relevant passage, or the curricular occurrence of a title within a particular jurisdiction. This ambiguity affects both the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of the study. The authors should clearly distinguish between the unit used to calculate prevalence, the unit used for coding representational features, and the unit used for rhetorical interpretation.

 

8. The decision to remove duplicate texts across jurisdictions may distort the curricular significance of particular works. The manuscript states that duplicate titles across jurisdictions were removed before analysis. This means that a novel prescribed or recommended in several states or territories appears to carry the same analytical weight as a text appearing on only one list. If the study aims to make claims about the national curricular prominence or institutional dominance of particular representations, this procedure may obscure important differences in curricular reach. The authors should justify this decision and, ideally, report both the number of unique titles and the frequency with which each title appears across jurisdictions. A weighted or frequency-based analysis may be necessary to support claims about the national canon

 

DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS

1. The central quantitative claim is not adequately substantiated. The authors report that 71 of 357 novels (19.8%) contain disabled characters and immediately interpret this as a “profound lack” of representation. But there is no clear benchmark against which 19.8% is judged inadequate. The paper needs to explain what proportion would count as underrepresentation and why. Without such a benchmark, the move from the descriptive statistic to the evaluative claim is too quick. This problem is compounded by the methodological issues already identified regarding synopsis screening and deduplication.

 

2. Major qualitative claims are asserted without sufficient systematic evidence.
   The findings repeatedly use formulations such as “overwhelming majority,” “frequently,” “persistent,” “pervasive,” and “dominant,” but the manuscript does not provide a numerical breakdown showing how many of the 71 novels were coded as deficit-based, medicalised, supercrip, tokenistic, strengths-based, etc. For example, the authors state that descriptions were “severely constrained, tokenistic, or superficial” and that characters were “frequently assigned an explicit medical label,” but readers are not shown the distribution of these categories across the sample.

 

3. The examples sometimes do not support the interpretations attributed to them.

There are several instances where the authors move too rapidly from a textual feature to an ableist interpretation. Acquired impairment through war or accident is treated as feeding directly into the supercrip trope, even though supercrip normally requires overcoming, exceptional achievement, or inspirational framing. Likewise, describing Almásy as “severely burned and disfigured” is treated as evidence of linguistic ableism without enough analysis of narrative context, focalisation, or whether the wording itself is being endorsed by the text. The same concern applies to the interpretation of Marianne in Normal People as exemplifying internalised ableism: this depends first on establishing why she is being classified as disabled.

 

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attached point by point response to each of your valuable recommendations.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Overall, I found this to be a strong and timely manuscript with a potentially significant contribution to scholarship on disability, curriculum, and literary representation. The national corpus is an important contribution, and the critical disability studies framing provides a compelling lens through which to interpret the findings. My recommendations are primarily intended to strengthen the methodological transparency of the audit and to sharpen the distinctions between empirical findings, theoretical interpretation, and normative implications. I believe addressing these points would substantially strengthen an already compelling manuscript.

1. Clarify the definition of disability.
Methodology, pp. 7–8; particularly the description of “explicit or implicit presence of disabled” characters.

The paper says that researchers screened for “corporeal, cognitive, or psychological diversity” and subsequently categorized texts based on the explicit or implicit presence of disabled characters. The methodological approach would benefit from a more explicit definition of disability. The authors indicate that both explicit and implicit representations were included, and that the initial screening considered corporeal, cognitive, and psychological diversity. However, it remains unclear what specific criteria were used to determine whether a character constituted a disabled character, particularly where disability was implicit rather than explicitly identified within the text. Providing greater detail regarding the coding criteria and decision rules would enhance reproducibility and help readers understand the boundaries of the corpus.

 

2. Inter-rater reliability: The reported 100% inter-rater agreement is encouraging, but I would appreciate some additional detail regarding what aspects of the coding were included in this assessment. Given that the study moves from relatively observable classifications (e.g., presence/absence of disability) to highly interpretive judgments concerning narrative function, ableist framing, and rhetorical construction, it would be useful to clarify whether the reported agreement applied to all coding categories or specifically to the final classification of texts. If the authors have agreement information for individual coding dimensions, reporting this would provide an even stronger account of analytic rigor.

 

4. Textual representation versus educational effects (pp. 2, 4–5, conclusion): At several points, the manuscript moves from findings concerning textual representation to claims about the effects of those representations on students' identity formation, belonging, sense of possibility, and social value. These theoretical connections are compelling; however, the present study does not examine students' experiences, classroom implementation, or responses to the texts. I suggest that the authors more consistently distinguish between effects demonstrated by the present study and effects that are theorized or anticipated based on the existing literature. This distinction would, in my view, make the argument more persuasive.

 

5. Strengthening the presentation of findings (pp. 8-10): The national scope of the dataset is a major strength of the study. I wonder whether the findings section could make greater use of this strength by providing additional descriptive information about the coding results. For example, where feasible, reporting the number or proportion of texts exhibiting the major representational patterns identified would help readers assess the prevalence of particular tropes rather than relying primarily on illustrative examples. Even a summary table of the principal representational categories and their distribution across the 71 texts could substantially strengthen the empirical contribution.

Author Response

Thank you for your very valuable critique of our paper. I have attached a point by point response to each of your comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors have responded carefully and constructively to my previous comments. The revised manuscript is substantially improved, particularly regarding its theoretical framework, conceptual clarity, and methodological transparency. I consider most of my original concerns satisfactorily addressed. I appreciate the authors' substantial efforts to strengthen their work. Before the manuscript can be accepted for publication, I would recommend a few final revisions.

1. Clarify the limitations of the screening procedure.

The authors should ensure that the limitations of the synopsis-based screening procedure are consistently acknowledged throughout the manuscript, particularly in the findings and conclusion. Since the procedure may have excluded novels containing less explicit disability representations, the 71 identified novels should not be presented as an exhaustive account of disability representation across the complete corpus of 357 novels.

2. Ensure that the conclusions are proportionate to the evidence.

Some statements concerning the dominance and institutional reproduction of ableist representations remain stronger than the evidence presented. The authors should distinguish more consistently between findings concerning the identified novels and broader interpretations about the Australian senior secondary literary canon.

3. Reconsider the interpretation of Normal People.

The discussion of Marianne continues to invoke internalised ableism despite acknowledging that her experiences do not establish disability. The authors should either provide a clearer justification for interpreting this example through the concept of ableism or revise the passage to avoid conflating broader normative pressures with disability-specific oppression.

4. Clarify the presentation of the coding results.

Appendix D reports frequencies for deficit framing, medicalisation, and tragic framing, but not for other categories central to the argument, particularly normate reification and resistance. The authors should briefly explain this selective presentation or provide the corresponding results where available.