Regulating Affect and Reproducing Norms: Alice Munro’s “Child’s Play”

The article investigates processes of cultural and social reproduction and asks a couple of questions. What kinds of attitudes, beliefs, and storylines are perpetually recreated and reproduced around disabled bodies? How is the disabled body positioned against a “normal” body? Alice Munro’s short story “Child’s Play” is analyzed to demonstrate how socio-cultural reproductive policing technologies seek to maintain able-bodied and heteronormative privilege by way of the normalization and reproduction of negative affect toward bodies conceived as “monstrous.”