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Essay On Fairy Tales, Disability, And Making Space By Amanda Leduc

1321 Words6 Pages

In Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space, Amanda Leduc writes about the way disability has been portrayed in fairy tales from the first written, to Brothers Grimm, to the Disney films. Leduc’s perspective is very important because she identifies as a disabled writer with cerebral palsy. The major themes addressed are the medical, social, and charity models of disability, the depiction of disability as innately evil, and the particular language used towards people with disabilities.
Leduc continues to discuss the differences between the medical model of disability and the social model of disability throughout the book with examples from her life and other texts. The medical model refers to the idea that the individual with …show more content…

The villains in these stories are commonly marked with an affliction that assists in creating their identity as being villainous. This puts in the mind of someone, especially children, with a disability that they must be someone that people don’t like or are afraid of. A child consuming these stories or movies can only relate to the villain, and specifically because they differ from a perfect being, who is more than likely portrayed by the main character and heroine. Leduc recounts never having any Disney princesses to relate to growing up, and suspects that many other children like her feel the same way. She writes “As a disabled woman, I don’t know what it means to have your body represented onscreen in a way that isn’t somehow tied to magic. If the disabled body isn’t evil or mistaken (the hairy Beast, the green skin of the Wicked Witch, the disfigured face of Red Skull), it is always redeemed in the end” (Leduc 197). Disability is often portrayed with magic in some way, insinuating that disabilities of any sort are unnatural and can only exist in the same realm as a supernatural power. Because magic is often the way that the characters’ afflictions are resolved, it gives a false sense of reality that one’s disability can be cured if they follow the correct course of action. These stories don’t take into account the realistic struggles that one with a disability endures on a daily basis, “What messages do we internalize, as disabled children, when we see a world that looks so easy on the screen and then struggle with the world in real life?” (Leduc

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