This presentation is about the importance of stories. More specifically, it’s about the importance of speculative stories: stories that throw us out of our usual habitat and show us the myriad worlds that may be possible. And in a disability setting, particularly stories that foreground bodily variation in ways we didn’t imagine.
The focus of my talk is Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix (2015).
The novel appropriates and transforms the discourse of abnormality in the heroine Phoenix' trajectory from obedient and naïve test subject to vengeful villain. I argue that Okorafor weaves disability, animality, and gender into narratives of extraordinary bodies that do not readily conform to the function that Mitchell and Snyder (2000) call “narrative prostheses.” Rather than letting the disabled body act as a “crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potency, and analytical insight” (ibid. 224), disability appears as an undramatic feature of Phoenix’s life, and has to be understood in conjunction with other dimensions of her identity. This intersectional analysis will thus address what is at stake in portraying disability as mutually constitutive of other features of identity, such as gender and animality, in a work of science-fiction literature.