Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons^™

Representation Matters: Disability And Its Narratives, Sophia M. Shelley

The Partisan

The representation of disabilities is complex and its dissemination through media is prevalent in social construction. In this paper, I will be using identity-first language which places the disability before the person as the descriptor. Through analyzing A Curse so Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer, this paper investigates what kinds of representation are found in young adult literature and how that representation affects the influence and use of disabilities in the genre. This will be done using narrative frameworks and Julia Kristeva’s social paradigm. Disabled characters frequently suffer from narratives that go against progress in disability discourse and lack …