DISCIPLINING THE DIFFERENT DISABLED BODY: A FOUCAULDIAN READING OF OUT OF MY MIND

Children’s literature, which has a deep impact on children, plays an important role in structuring perceptions about disability by reflecting the dominant cultural norms. Contemporary literature questions social structures by representing bodies that are not accepted as normal by social perceptions through narratives in which disabled heroes are at the centre. The novel Out of My Mind by Sharon M. Draper, in which the disabled individual is not used as a narrative prosthesis and makes her own existence visible, offers a critical examination of disability. This novel focuses on the power of social perceptions to manage disabled people by addressing them within the framework of complex intersectional dynamics such as identity, power, and knowledge. The protagonist of the novel is Melody, a wheelchair-bound little girl who cannot speak due to cerebral palsy. Due to the deficiency in her body, her intelligence is not recognized by the stereotypical perceptions of medical and educational discourses. Draper’s narrative creates an empathetic connection with the reader by dramatizing Melody’s life experiences that foreground her deficiency in medical and educational institutions. In a society where ableist attitudes determine and shape normality, Melody is not accepted as normal and stands out as an object of constant surveillance and control. Melody’s situation recalls Foucault’s idea of how power keeps individuals under surveillance and makes them docile. Based on Foucault’s views, this study seeks to reveal how power disciplines disabled bodies, thereby addressing the lack of research on disability in children’s literature and contributing to this field. This article aims to analyse Draper’s novel Out of My Mind within the framework of Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics, surveillance, gaze and normality; in this context, it discusses how disabled bodies are defined through medical and educational discourses and how they are transformed into docile bodies through various regulatory mechanisms.