SF 101: A Guide to Teaching and Studying Science Fiction

obsessed with disability as it is with space travel

Disability studies does not treat disease or disability, hoping to cure or avoid them; it studies the social meanings, symbols, and stigmas attached to disability identity and asks how they relate to enforced systems of exclusion and oppression,

cultural sidelining—theoretically and practically—of people with disabilities in the academic engagement with genre;

also a normative construct—as bodily or cognitive difference should not be equated with the sense of deficiency that attends the word—

aura of deficiency and lack

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

Impairment itself,

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.