SF 101: A Guide to Teaching and Studying Science Fiction

Any group that cannot negotiate a place for itself in the imagined future is already obsolete”

considering the material conditions and kind of body that is being “left behind.”

Vulnerability is positioned, then, as that which impairs agency in the ‘damaged’ other while inspiring moral action on the part of the secure self to make good the perceived lack”

A DS reading of prosthetics and other medical modifications in SF must be careful not to idealize the transformative potential of such technologies while neglecting a discussion of the bodies most often targeted for and affected by such interventions.

There is a great deal of pressure to rehabilitate, or to “make normal,” the disabled person or otherwise risk condemnation from both the medical and social communities.

“Utopian visions are founded on the elimination of disability, while dystopic, negative visions of the future are based on its proliferation”

when scholars make arguments about the representation of disability in SF, they must also be cognizant to not ignore or discount the lived realities of people with disabilities.

approach disability “as something to think with rather than about” because “disability is mimetic.

SF has long commented on what characteristics determine a “quality human being;”