AustLit

'In Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's "Disability and Representation," the feminist disability studies scholar comments that disabled or "unusually embodied" characters "have fired the imagination and underwritten the metaphors of classic Western literature" (523). Garland-Thomson suggests that nonnormative embodiment is not only fundamental to the telos of literary narrative and character development but seldom treated as a mundane (and inevitable) fact of human existence. Instead, impairments often serve as expedient markers of a character's moral failings, as Ato Quayson puts it, an "ethical background to the actions of other characters" (36). Or, as Maren Tova Linett asserts, they serve as a broader statement on the ways that normalcy, personhood, bodiliness, and difference have been understood in various cultures across time (4–5). Clare Barker and Stuart Murray observe that "it is rare to encounter an account of [disability] … that does not extend to a comment on what that body does or, crucially, means" (2). And it is predominantly the literary-aesthetic domain, for Quayson, that not only reflects but refracts "multivalent attitudes toward disability"; the dissemination of such attitudes in society can have important consequences for the lived experience of people with disabilities depending on whether they are "enlightened and progressive" or, what is more often the case, reductive and stigmatizing (36).' (Introduction)

'With a combination of fantastical and anachronistic technologies and neo-Victorian settings, steampunk emerged from a niche genre to a widespread phenomenon. But this, in turn, raised urgent questions about the "punk"-ness of steampunk and the extent to which it can critique, avoid, and repurpose the Victorian trappings that it adopts. This article examines one such query: whether steampunk can interrogate its ableist underpinnings and, particularly, whether Australian steampunk writers do so in a way that is distinctly Australian. Beginning with a brief overview of Australian steampunk and the genre's conflicted approach to disability aesthetics and roleplaying, the author examines three case studies: the invisibility of disability in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century proto-steampunk stories, prosthetics as a vehicle for imperial trauma, and the recurrent motif of the clockwork heart. As Australian steampunk exists outside the genre's mainstream, so too is it able to speak to the marginal elements, such as underlying ableism, that the mainstream too often ignores.' (Publication abstract)

'While scholarly discussion of disability in Australian narrative has focused on disability as a representational device, used to reinforce a hypermasculine and able-national identity, this article draws on Ato Quayson's aesthetic nervousness to establish patterns of cultural critique throughout Mad Max: Fury Road, layered on and through capitalism and gender representation. Strong female protagonists have been a recurring character in action genres since the 1980s yet have often been absent in Australian national cinema. There is barely a scene in Fury Road that does not include a disabled body and/or a woman. Furiosa's counterpart is not Max but Immortan Joe. Both bodies are impaired and use prosthesis. However, the role of Joe's prosthesis is to hide his decaying body, while the role of Furiosa's seems only to exist in Joe's world. Throughout this article, the authors invoke critical disability studies to argue that disability and gender are central to the aesthetic of Fury Road and to conveying its sociopolitical messages. In an ensemble filled with women, Furiosa's distinguishing feature is no longer her gender but her disability.' (Publication abstract)  

'This article locates a number of 1970s Australian horror films in relation to British and American biomedical horror films featuring characters with disability who are gifted with telekinesis (making them "supercrips") and characters who are in a coma and labeled "vegetables." It employs scholarship by Paul Longmore, Matthew Norden, Angela Smith, Paul Darke, Robert Cettl, Sami Schalk, and others to interrogate how Australian genre film represents disability on-screen. An argument is made that while Ozploitation films like The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) and the first Mad Max film (1979) center on the car and mobility in Australian culture, Richard Franklin's Patrick (1978) draws attention to masculinity, immobility, and disability. Tapping into tropes about "monstrous" disabled others, Franklin creates a memorable disabled protagonist who evokes fear and dread via his telekinetic powers while also drawing attention to the plight of patients who are the victims of medical malpractice. A hyperbolic 2013 remake directed by Mark Hartley also explores the theme of masculinity and mobility and further exploits the Oedipal theme and the cure-or-kill trope. Both the original and the adaptation, this article argues, mine horror stereotypes about disability while also creating a character who is powerful rather than a passive object of pity.' (Publication abstract)

'Ubiquitous, highly visible, nonspecific to geography, history, race, or sex, dwarfism's connection with Australia's mythic and literary histories is remarkable enough to suggest here that it occupy its own subgenre in literature, the zwergroman (m). Australia's branding as the "Antipodes" geographically recalls its colonial past; mythographically the imaginative configuration was as an underworld of opposites ruled by the diminutive King of the Antipodes. Thus, the zwergroman is frequently fashioned from Celtic myths of the colonizing power along with the shaping power of colonial processes. In addition to introducing the conventions of the zwergroman and demonstrating the significance of dwarf characters to Australia's pre- and postcolonial narratives, this article gradually introduces concepts from disability studies (through the scholarly work of Erin Pritchard, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, and others) by examining representations and cultural meanings imposed on dwarf characters prior to the counter histories of twenty-first-century short-statured scholars whose demand for personhood required an engagement with subjective and experiential realities. The novels discussed (1970–94) represent a cluster of dwarf-centric novels by notable writers, all able-bodied at the time of writing (excepting Patrick White). They include C. J. Koch, The Year of Living Dangerously (1978; filmed 1982); James McQueen, Hook's Mountain (1982); Ruth Park, Swords and Crowns and Rings (1977); Peter Carey, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994); and Patrick White, The Vivisector (1970).' (Publication abstract)

'James Bradley's futuristic novel Clade (2015) is not chiefly a story about human disability. It is a novel about climate crisis set across the course of the twenty-first century. But midway through the novel, we are introduced to a seven-year-old boy, Noah, who becomes a key character in the second half of the narrative. Noah is on the spectrum. Autistics decry their portrayal in fiction as aliens, as outsiders, as harbingers of disease and disorder, as beings without agency. As we get to know Noah as a boy, through his teenage years, and later on as an astronomer, his autism is neither denied nor made the defining characteristic of his personhood. Noah is given voice, perspective, and centrality as a rounded character, emerging as someone well suited to a future world reshaped by environmental crises and new social relations. He is not pathologized but socialized across the course of the novel into a world of family, friends, and work. Like his biblical namesake, Noah becomes a survivor in the new environmental and social spaces of the latter part of the twenty-first century.' (Publication abstract)

'Alexis Wright's critically acclaimed third novel, The Swan Book (2013), has been analyzed profusely by scholars around the world. No matter how manifold these interpretative nets may be, they always refer to the character Oblivion Ethyl(ene), aka Oblivia. What is particularly telling in that regard is that Oblivia as the novel's protagonist and focalizer is a speechless child. As the article shows, Wright's so-called total novel constructs Oblivia and the virus in her brain as the novel's narrator(s), enabling her to fill her speechless world with words and meaning. Hence, as a mute narrator, Oblivia becomes one of the most unreliable but equally one of the most honest, life-affirming storytellers in contemporary fiction. The universe of her unspoken words reveals Oblivia's ability to communicate with the nonhuman and other-than-human, offering readers who are receptive a story about what it means to be posthuman in a world that defies posthumanism.' (Publication abstract)