Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction by Sami Schalk (review)

In 2000 Sharon L. Snyder and I published our theory of narrative prosthesis. Since that time disability studies scholars have continued to employ its framework while also making significant alterations to the theory as originally formulated—we certainly must acknowledge that a formative expansion and re-shaping of its original structure is underway. Recent efforts to critique the original theory of narrative prosthesis now exist across all three foundational branches and therefore it may be time to think about the felling of the theory of narrative prosthesis. Examples of significant critiques of narrative prosthesis can be found in Ellen Samuel's Fantasies of Identification (2014), Michael Bérubé's The Secret Life of Stories (2018), Jasbir Puar's The Right to Maim (2017), and Ato Quayson's Aesthetic Nervousness (2007). Each of these analyses exposes cracks in the original theory's arguments regarding its critiques of distancing mechanisms in civil rights movements (Samuels), a focus on characterization rather than innovations at the level of storytelling structure (Bérubé), essentialized features of bodies deemed deviant instead of the effect of toxic exposures that debilitate racialized/queer demographics over time (Puar), and uneasy oscillations between aesthetic and ethical domains as the structuring orientation of the literary approach to disability (Quayson). Consequently, new works in disability studies have effectively begun to destabilize the foundations of the theory of narrative prosthesis in recent years.

Sami Schalk's new book, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction (Duke UP, 2018), provides another important critique of narrative prosthesis to date. The book draws from the critiques of the aforementioned works and claims to collate them into an alternative methodological approach to disability representation, one that proves more flexible in analyzing black women's contemporary writing about disability, race, and gender in the realm of speculative fiction. Most significantly, Schalk argues against the "increasingly common trend in Disability Studies" to refuse productive interpretations of disability as metaphor particularly when "these metaphors are connected to or blended with material issues of disability and impairment" (56). According to Schalk, narrative prosthesis "has since become the primary way in disability studies to critique a representation for negatively relying on disability to further a narrative's plot or theme at the expense of abstracting disability out of material existence" (39). Contrary to this argument the author argues "that black women's speculative fictional representations of disability engage in a variety of ethical, narrative, and political concerns about (dis)ability, race, and gender that requires reading disability as metaphor and materiality, directly changing a common interpretive trend in disability studies" (41).

Schalk convincingly argues that thinking through disability metaphors in black women's speculative fiction is a necessary component of intersectional analysis as oppressive systems such as racism, sexism, and economic exploitation prove mutually compounding (Erevelles's useful term). Thus, metaphorical deployments of disability can oscillate between material experiences of difference and the exposé of wider systems of social dehumanization. Second, her application of an intersectional approach surfaces out of her employment of Robert McRuer and Alison Kafer's concept of "crip theory": "by 'including within disability communities those who lack a "proper" (read: medically acceptable, doctor-provided, and insurer-approved) diagnosis for their symptoms' and by 'departing from the social model's assumption that "disabled" and "nondisabled" are discrete self-evident categories'" (9).

Our theory of narrative prosthesis argued that literary characterization's dependency on disability as a marker of significant deviation from the norm no longer exclusively serves as the basis for thinking disability's ubiquitous presence in literary art (or any other form of creative expression for that matter). Rather, what McRuer has called the "stretchiness" of crip theory expands more essentialized notions of disability to integrate non-normative experiences of nonapparent disability as well as those debilitating conditions that lack a formal diagnosis (205). Along these lines...