Disability in Kidlit’s Three-year Anniversary Event!
What was originally intended to be a one-month event has now reached its third birthday, and we could not be more ecstatic!
What was originally intended to be a one-month event has now reached its third birthday, and we could not be more ecstatic!
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.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I could finally understand that from the time of my diagnosis, my education was not going to be “complete,” because I did not have the full access I needed. It was as if intensive speech therapy and itinerant teachers were more important than having a sign language interpreter in my classes.
“How did you manage to capture that voice?” beta readers would ask. “How did you know to describe those particular feelings?” I was starting to have a few self-revelations about that.
When we see institutions in YA, we usually see them in one of two contexts: a “sane” person wrongly incarcerated in one, or a spooky (often old, sometimes abandoned but haunted by ghosts) asylum filled with “crazy people.”
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?
An estimated 1 in 7 women suffer from chronic pelvic pain; it’s bizarre and disappointing that despite these statistics, there are distinctly zero characters with this condition.
Romanticization is a common element of mental illness narratives, including many in the YA category; what kind of message does that send?