Examining representations of mental difference, this collection focuses on the ways that adaptations (including remakes, reboots, and other examples of remixed narratives) can shape and shift the social contexts and narratives we use to define mental disability. The movement of narratives across media in adaptation, or within media but across time and space in the case of remakes and reboots, is a common tactic for revitalization, allowing storytellers to breathe new life into tired narratives, remedying past inaccuracies and making them accessible and relevant for contemporary audiences. Thus, this collection argues that adaptation provides a useful tool for examining the constraints or opportunities different media impose on or afford narratives, or for measuring shifts in ideology as narratives move across cultures or through time. Further, narrative functions within this collection as a framework for examining the ways that popular media exerts rhetorical power, allowing for deeper understandings of the ways that mental disability is experienced by differently situated individuals, and revealing relationships with broader social narratives that attempt to push definitions of disability onto them.
Whitney Hardin is assistant professor of communication at Kettering University. Julia E. Kiernan is assistant professor of communications at Lawrence Technological University.
Introduction Whitney Hardin & Julia E. Kiernan Part I: Imagining and Broadening Narratives of Disability Chapter One: The Prosthetic Self: Drag and Disability in the Figure of RuPaul John W. Gulledge Chapter Two: Adapting Medical Reports into Narrative Film: Autism, Eugenics, and Savagery in Truffaut's L'Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child, 1970) Joy C. Schaefer Chapter Three: Remaking the Image of Autism: Why and How Comics Should Reboot Autistic Representation Robert Rozema Chapter Four: An Atypical Interaction with a Typical World: Viewing Coming-of-Age through the Lens of Disability Studies in Robia Rashid's Atypical Anamika Purohit Chapter Five: "But can we agree that he's unwell?": Narrative Resistance in Legion's Approach to Mental Disability Julia E. Kiernan Chapter Six: Diagnosing Mental and Moral Disability in Post 9/11 Popular American Film Narrative Carol Donelan Part II: Renegotiating and Resisting Narratives of Disability Chapter Seven: "A document in madness"? Disability Erasure in Contemporary Rewrites of Ophelia Lindsay Adams Chapter Eight: "You're all about 'crazy'": Rendering the Visibility of Trauma in Alias and Jessica Jones Whitney Hardin Chapter Nine: Subspaces Run Through Your Head: Scott Pilgrim, Intertextuality, and Visualizing the Traumatized Mind William Guy Spriggs Chapter Ten: Minding the Gap: Adaptation of and Mental Disability in Quiet Life (1990, 1995) Rea Amit Chapter Eleven: Adapting Autism in Telenovelas: Venevision's La Mujer Perfecta and the Trace of Esmeralda Martin Ponti Chapter Twelve: Female Representations of Autism and Disability in Telenovelas: La Mujer Perfecta Andrea Urrutia Gomez Index About the Contributors
