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

The impact of Sami Schalk's first book cannot be overstated, neither can its importance to the field of Disability Studies. This is not at all to suggest its significance is limited to this yet-expanding field; certainly, scholars of Feminist studies, African American literary studies, and science fiction studies, among others, would benefit from Schalk's work. The scholar's grounding in Disability Studies is especially noteworthy, for it strengthens this taut text's clarion call for Disability Literary Studies to begin the work of understanding (dis)ability, a "reference [to] the overarching social system of bodily and mental norms that includes ability and disability,"¹ beyond its interpretation in white-authored texts; it is also a call to feminist scholars to engage (dis)ability as an integral, orienting lens that enriches feminist analysis and methodologies.

As a discipline, Disability Studies is dedicated to the disruption of a history of ideas about physical and mental (dis)abilities and to the critique of (dis)ability as a social construction used to control, label, and evaluate bodies. Due in great part to the range of nonrealist, new, and/or futuristic landscapes, and bodies that occupy their narratives, Disability Studies provides an effective lens to interpret speculative fiction. As such, Schalk's work quite convincingly analyzes novels by Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and other Black women speculative fiction writers. She does this through a constellation of frames that approach (dis)ability, race, and gender as simultaneously constituting one another in the formation of academic and popular discourses and people's experiences in relation to these identities, especially Black disabled women. Informed by theories of intersectionality and crip theory, Schalk draws on Black Feminist scholars, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Barbara Christian, and white disability scholars, including Margaret Price, Alison Kafer, G. Thomas Couser, and Robert McRuer, for a sustained engagement with and beyond these theoretical storehouses.

Bodyminds Reimagined is written in such a way that both well-versed scholars and students uninitiated in the field of Disability Studies can interact with the complex theoretical framing. Schalk's use of first- and second-person language invites readers into a conversation, while it also serves as the author's acknowledgement that these ideas rise out of her lived experience and collective receptions and readings of Black women's speculative fiction. The book is composed of an introduction that outlines the writer's intentions for the work, four chapters that draw on genre-specific theoretical framing and literary analysis, a conclusion, a detailed notes section, bibliography, and index. The chapters are written in such a way that they build on one another, but each can still be read and taught apart from the larger text.

Each chapter advances Schalk's argument that Black women's speculative fiction offers critical ways to rearticulate and complicate representations of body-minds, the interrelated nature of the mental and the physical, in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability. In Chapter One, "Metaphor and Materiality: Disability and Neo-Slave Narratives," Schalk details the literary-critical traditions of the neo-slave narrative and disability as metaphor in speculative fiction; she subsequently combines these discourses to explicate Octavia Butler's Kindred. This reading method is useful and exemplary of the critical intervention Bodyminds Reimagined performs in understanding (dis)ability and its relationship to race and gender, for this "process of conceptualizing and historicizing the metaphorical use of disability in a text is essential to the study of representation of disability and Blackness as well as disability and other systems of oppression."² Schalk implies at the end of the chapter that Butler's neo-slave narrative has the range to represent (dis)ability in ways that its generic predecessors could not, particularly in the slave narrative genre, and due especially to the damaging political discourses about disability that would have undermined the goal of their writers to...