Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc

Reviewed by: Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc Jeana Jorgensen (bio) Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space. By Amanda Leduc, Coach House Books, 2020, 160 pp. Amanda Leduc’s Disfigured weaves together the many threads linking fairy tales, storytelling, and disability in a way that is both sensitive and informed. Although not from a university press and hence not as scholarly as other books typically reviewed in these pages, I highly recommend Leduc’s book to fairy-tale scholars nonetheless for its keen insights about the genre we study. After I had read and been blown away by Ann Schmiesing’s work on disability in the Grimms’ tales (Disability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, 2014), I figured that it was the seminal work applying disability studies to fairy tales. But Leduc’s book complements Schmiesing’s in truly wonderful ways. Leduc is one of the rare writers outside the field of fairy-tale studies who takes into account much of our existing scholarship (she cites Schmiesing, Jack Zipes, Maria Tatar, and others) when writing about her own approach to fairy tales, and that alone is a delightful novelty. Further, Leduc synthesizes existing work on fairy tales by putting it into dialogue with personal narrative and lived experience, sharing extensive portions of her own medical history and life as well as including excerpts from interviews with other disabled people. Leduc covers many of the basic tenets of disability studies—the medical model of disability versus the social model of disability, ableism, inspiration porn, and so on—thereby continuing Schmiesing’s quest of bridging the long-overlooked gaps between fairy-tale studies and disability studies. Leduc’s case studies overlap with Schmiesing’s to some degree; Hans My Hedgehog and the maiden without hands make appearances, but so do the Little Mermaid and other Hans Christian Andersen creations as well as modern-day superheroes, often the kind best identified as supercrips. Beast bride and bridegroom tales play a large role in Leduc’s analysis, in part due to Leduc’s framing mission of unpacking the longevity of symbolic connections between [End Page 133] beauty and goodness, ugliness/deformity and badness. I found much of value in these segments, for instance when Leduc reminds readers of a quotation from Villeneuve’s “Beauty and the Beast” wherein Beauty, not knowing she had initially disenchanted a prince, says: “When I accepted him . . . I believed that I was taking pity on something below humanity” (quoted at 140). Immediately after this segment, Leduc shares excerpts from her interview with a Canadian artist and activist who has a face that formed differently in utero, relating how she was dehumanized in school and how she used stories for escapism until she realized that she was different enough from the norm that she was not guaranteed a happy ending. This juxtaposition of tale materials with lived experience is striking, and Leduc does it throughout the book. As Leduc notes in her conclusion, the heart of her study is this: “If society is not used to seeing disabled people in stories, society becomes used to not seeing disabled people in real life” (230). Of course, representations that are so highly patterned as to become stereotypical are also problematic, and Leduc does a thorough job of exploring the nuances of disability representation in fairy tales and their popular culture forms (many Disney characters such as Scar and the Hunchback of Notre Dame are brought up throughout the book). Intersectionality informs Leduc’s approach as well, since she is careful to note how much a disabled person’s positionality can affect their access to resources that nondisabled people may take for granted. I can envision teaching excerpts of this book, as the language is accessible throughout, and I imagine students would be familiar with the more recent case studies, especially those drawing on Disney. But Leduc has done her homework and seems just as at home writing about the French conteuses and the Grimms as about modern-day pop culture phenomena. Even if you are not teaching a fairy-tale class anytime soon, I highly recommend reading this book, especially for nondisabled scholars...

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