Crippling dystopia : a survey of dystopian themes in disability literature

Another name for dystopian literature is “speculative fiction,” a term that can be deceiving due to separation in the connotation of the words “fiction” and “reality.” Combine this with the description of “speculative,” dystopian literature is thus positioned only ever as a possibility. That is why it is important to recognize the ways in pieces of nonfiction conform to the dystopian genre, as well as where memoirs written by authors with disabilities weigh in on societal and political issues.. My research thus seeks to interrogate the amenability of the dystopian genre to readings of selected pieces of disability literature across modern literary movements. Each chapter is centered around one significant novel from across a period of almost seventy-five years: Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human (1948), Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride (1999), and Alice Wong’s Year of the Tiger (2022). By constructing this history, I uncover evidence to argue that linkage of disability and dystopia literatures reveals not only the manifestations of dystopia in our current reality—and has been for decades—but also that these authors identify a blueprint to fight against those harms. In Dazai’s work, we see his attempt to delegitimize the normate—Rosemarie Garland-Thompson’s term for the imagined abled individual who serves as a marker of bodily deviance. In doing so, Dazai articulates his perception of the ways in which ableism is institutionalized and upheld through the dehumanization of disabled bodyminds. Clare elaborates further on this idea, marking the beginnings of imaginings of better futures by protesting against the delegitimization of disability and disabled struggles, as well as an acknowledgement of the ways that that struggle is intersectional. Finally, Wong expands the meaning of disability justice to include ideas of environmental and colonial justice as well—with this ecocritical approach being crucial to this reading.