Adaptations of Mental and Cognitive Disability in Popular Media

Whitney Hardin, Julia E. Kiernan

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2022
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781978754553
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Examining representations of mental difference, this collection focuses on the ways that adaptations (including remakes, reboots, and other examples of remixed narratives) can shape and shift the social contexts and narratives we use to define mental disability. The movement of narratives across media via adaptation, or within media but across time and space in the case of remakes and reboots, is a common tactic for revitalization, allowing storytellers to breathe new life into tired narratives, remedying past inaccuracies and making them accessible and relevant for contemporary audiences. Thus, this collection argues that adaptation provides a useful tool for examining the constraints or opportunities different media impose on or afford narratives, or for measuring shifts in ideology as narratives move across cultures or through time. Further, narrative functions within this collection as a framework for examining the ways that popular media exerts rhetorical power, allowing for deeper understandings of the ways that mental disability is experienced by differently situated individuals, and revealing relationships with broader social narratives that attempt to push definitions of disability onto them.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Imagining and Broadening Narratives of Disability
• Chapter 1: The Prosthetic Self: Drag and Disability in the Figure of RuPaul
• Chapter 2: Adapting Medical Reports into Narrative Film: Autism, Eugenics, and Savagery in Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child, 1970)
• Chapter 3: Remaking the Image of Autism: Why and How Comics Should Reboot Autistic Representation
• Chapter 4: An Atypical Interaction with a Typical World: Viewing Coming-of-Age through the Lens of Disability Studies in Robia Rashid’s Atypical
• Chapter 5: “But can we agree that he’s unwell?”: Narrative Resistance in Legion’s Approach to Mental Disability
• Chapter 6: Diagnosing Mental and Moral Disability in Post-9/11 Popular American Film Narrative
• Part II: Renegotiating and Resisting Narratives of Disability
• Chapter 7: “A document in madness?”: Disability Erasure in Contemporary Rewrites of Ophelia
• Chapter 8: “You’re All about ‘Crazy’”: Rendering the Visibility of Trauma in Alias and Jessica Jones
• Chapter 9: Subspaces Run through Your Head: Scott Pilgrim, Intertextuality, and Visualizing the Traumatized Mind
• Chapter 10: Minding the Gap: Adaptation of and Mental Disability in Quiet Life (1990, 1995)
• Chapter 11: Adapting Autism in Telenovelas: Venevisión’s La Mujer Perfecta and the Trace of Esmeralda
• Chapter 12: Female Representations of Autism and Disability in Telenovelas: La Mujer Perfecta
• Index
• About the Contributors