Raising a Question Mark: Disability and Textual Recalibration in Canadian Fiction and Film

This study considers how the disabled child is alternately depicted as a question mark of uncertain form and value and as a prosthetic aid to narrative in Canadian fiction and film. Since Lee Edelman’s manifesto against “reproductive futurism” in 2004’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, children have been the site of discursive debates about the future in queer theory and beyond. Drawing on disability studies scholarship about literature, this thesis positions the disabled child at the frontier of these discursive debates about what viable lives can be projected into the future. Examining depictions of the disabled child in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Canadian fiction and film, I argue that disabled children are chimeric figures who both facilitate and disrupt narratives of generation and inheritance. The disabled child, I show, glances back on a preceding generation’s yearnings and malfeasances while giving shape to a future that is often frightening but is nevertheless charged with ambivalent potential. My first chapter highlights the depiction of arrested adults frozen in childhood by physical and cognitive disabilities in Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage (1938) and Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising (1941), novels about the state’s relationship to the vulnerable citizens under its custodial powers. My second chapter examines how Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974) and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981) focus their critical gaze on the state’s violent dereliction of care toward its vulnerable citizens through the precarious figure of the racialized disabled child who embodies either a redemptive or an impaired future. In chapter three I examine how the long hand of the state extends into physicians and families in texts since the 1990s, proposing that Barbara Gowdy’s short story “Sylvie” (1992) and Kathleen Winter’s novel Annabel (2010) privilege the singularity of disabled children despite medical interventions to police them. Finally, chapter four evaluates science fiction and horror as capacious generic venues to think about the polysemous nature of the disabled child, juxtaposing David Cronenberg’s film The Fly (1986) and Vincenzo Natali’s Splice (2010) to show how eugenic anxieties about disability are simultaneously past, present, and future.

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