Critical Disability Studies and the Fantastic

Dear Colleagues,

Critical disability studies (CDS) is always up for further (inter)disciplinary challenges, having much to say about creative forms of resistance, about imagining the otherwise, and about difference as constitutive, embodied, and vibrant (vibrant extending to the painful and messy). This call for papers is about bringing forward CDS dialogues into literary and comics criticism, with a focus on contemporary speculative fiction (including both fantasy and science fiction) and genre-problem areas such as Gothic horror. We seek critical engagements that draw on the rich resources available in critical disability studies and critical neurodiversity studies for critical thinking around the otherwise. In Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, Sami Schalk “traces how black women’s speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds—the intertwinement of the mental and the physical—in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability.” Schalk argues that speculative fiction—texts that ask and imagine potential answers to the question of “what if?”—“allows us to imagine otherwise, to envision an alternative world or future in which what exists now has changed or disappeared and what does not exist now […] is suddenly real” (Schalk 2). Opening with a reflection on Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Schalk writes: “Reading Parable of the Sower, I began to understand how politically astute speculative fiction can be, how it can comment on our world and make us imagine alternative possibilities: the good, the bad, the ambivalent, and the downright terrifying” (1). Keeping in mind Rosemary Jackson’s observation that fantasy can be a literature of subversion, this CFP argues that critical disability studies itself is also a literature of subversion, of productive criticism, of possibilities for changes to the critical thinking toolset. Disability aesthetics, complex embodiment, bodyminds, the otherwise, narrative prosthesis, normate, autistic ephemera, monotropism—these are all critical tools that make strong critical actions in and beyond speculative fiction possible, and even urgent. Given this context, we welcome critical papers on speculative fiction inspired by CDS as a toolset. A reminder that image permissions are the responsibility of the author. Abstracts of up to 250 words are welcome to be sent directly to Dr. Jane Tolmie (tolmiej@queensu.ca) or Lilac, Managing Editor (lilac.liu@mdpi.com).

Dr. Jane Tolmie
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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