Everyone Should be Talking about This: Disability and Care

This article counters the canonized, entrenched othering of disabled bodyminds and the dismissive medicalized treatment of disabled children through my exploration of disability and the family in Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born (2023) and Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking about This (2021). If inter-abled relationships are mostly depicted as being unilateral, lacking reciprocity and affective exchange, with disabled people painted solely as objects of dependence, then these texts dismantle this distorted view and highlight the interdependence of the disabled child and non-disabled parent, affirming the interiority of the former and inviting new modes of experiencing the world for the latter. In response to the precarity of being a mother of a disabled child in an uncaring, ableist world, the women in these novels create networks of care which allow them to share the labour of parenting, troubling our traditional expectations and demarcations of parenting and privatized responsibility.