Darla Nagel
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Lightening the Shadow

Book Review for Disability Advocates October 2020

10/2/2020

2 Comments

 
Amanda Leduc’s Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space opens our eyes to how the portrayal of disabilities in fairy tales sets children up to shun disabled people, and she advocates for more accurate narratives of these excluded people. She weaves in her personal account of growing up with cerebral palsy, which keeps the book from becoming a scholarly work inaccessible to the majority of readers. You’ll never view the Disney princesses the same way again. This book was educational even for someone who has spent 10 years creating and sharing her own narrative of life with a disabling chronic illness that doesn’t have the classic fairytale happy ending, an ending which, according to Leduc, is not only unrealistic but also psychologically unhealthy.

Great quotes from the book: “We exist in a world where happiness is synonymous with not being disabled—anything less than this comes across as undeserving, simply through virtue of not meeting the able-bodied ideal” (page 210). “This conceptualization of disability—at best merely a metaphor for psychological ills that can be overcome, at worse a punishment or judgment that can be reversed through magical or spiritual means, though only if one deserves it—does a disservice to the actual lived experience of what it means to occupy a different body in the world….denying the lived reality of what it means to be a disabled body in the world denies the possibility of growth on the disabled person’s terms” (page 216).

Girl with cerebral palsy walks
A girl of color with cerebral palsy walks. Photo: Exceed Worldwide, Flickr Creative Commons
Darla Nagel is a biomedical copy editor who has an invisible chronic illness. She wants to educate healthcare professionals and encourage patients. If you want to receive quarterly updates from her, email darla.nagel{a}gmail.com.
2 Comments
Jake Kemp link
6/25/2022 08:44:21 am

Great reading your ppost

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Darla Nagel link
6/25/2022 01:35:33 pm

Thank you for reading, Jake! You can read all my book and article reviews here—https://www.darlanagel.com/blog/category/book-reviews—and my disability advocacy posts here—https://www.darlanagel.com/blog/category/advocacy. Have a blessed day!

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    Author:
    ​Darla Nagel

    Darla copyedits biomedical research and writes natural health magazine articles while living with an invisible chronic illness. She has a big appetite for chocolate despite being a health nut.

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