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I wanted to look at recently written young adult fiction because I think the genre affects the way young people learn to think about disability. Sometimes the young adult audience can have a lot of personal self-doubt or feelings of inadequacy themselves, and I’m sure I’ll be hypothesizing about how that kind of audience receives a disabled hero. Especially a hero like the one in Turner’s Queen’s Thief series, who actually spends the whole first book as an able-bodied thief. Shapeshifting goes on throughout the books, as the hero’s body changes drastically in the second book when he has his right hand cut off by a queen who catches him (repeatedly) stealing from her. The hero has freedom to shapeshift because he’s a member of the upper class. He goes from being a thief to a queen’s thief, to a courtier(?), and, after incuring his disability, he’s a librarian, then a thief again, then a king, then finally a public hero. The loss of the hand temporarily inhibits the shapeshifting that has been the primary use of the character’s body up until that point. I think the hero’s flexible identity appeals to young readers as well.
I also want to get at some of the intersections of mental disability caused by acquisition of physical disability, because I think some of that is going on with the character. The treatment of the hero’s sexuality is downplayed, in keeping with the young adult fiction genre, but the hero’s community within the novel is vocally doubtful about the “happiness” of the marriage because of the unsightliness of the hero’s disfigurement and the imposition of having a disabled leader of a country during wartime. They begrudge their queen’s having to put up with sharing power with him, when he’s not someone who is honest. The third book is fairly devoted to the disabled hero’s attempts to win over a society that is not accommodating.
So far I’ve found a few helpful psychological, mythological, and historical perspectives on amputeeism. I’m trying to find out if Turner’s representation of amputeeism is accurate in the ancient Greece-esque setting. Apparently, in some minor stories, Persephone is called the “handless maiden,” which I may be able to relate to the hero’s nocturnalism and willingness to go live in the underworld with his mate. This form of punishment encouraged the assessment of a person’s character by observing his physical body as a signifyer. Obviously, in this time period there’s no option to transplant or hook on a bionic hand. For this character especially, the internal vs. external placement of blame is complicated because it’s the wife who is directly responsible for ordering his hand to be cut off, but he tries to keep her from blaming herself. There’s another book scheduled to come out next year.
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