Ever seen the Allstate commercial? “I’m a random windstorm. Shaky, shaky.” Well, sometimes that’s how life feels when you’re a kid with disabilities. Because I’m both very random and my life can be, well, pretty shaky.
If you looked at me as a teenager, particularly during my freshman year in high school, I would not have stood out from my peers. If you looked closer at my dominant right hand, though, you’d see there was a significant problem.
July has officially come to an end, and with it, the blog’s daily post schedule.
Writing disability respectfully can be difficult, especially in the midst of large, seemingly contradictory conversations about representation. How should frustrated or concerned authors approach this?
Marketing departments choose to focus a book in a certain way when they write these summaries, and summaries for kidlit featuring autism often seem to focus on the same things.
Predictably, many of the tropes relating to D/deaf and hard of hearing characters deal with communication methods and degree of hearing loss. Most, if not all, of these tropes have to do with people’s assumptions and wishful thinking about hearing loss.
According to pop culture, mentally ill people are magically more creative, filled with a manic drive to create art that pushes them to the brink until they finally explode.
During April 2015, we’re holding an event dubbed Autism on the Page. Why is this event important? And what can you expect from us?
It’s hard to believe, but it’s been a whole year since Disability in Kidlit was first launched. We’re so excited for this milestone and so grateful for all of your support.
What concerns me is that disabled characters are often integrated in the form of tokenism, meaning one token character that could be considered “different” is included in the plot. And even then, such characters are frequently depicted in stereotypical ways, despite being created by authors who may have the best of intentions.