This collection combines adaptation and disability studies to examine the ways that popular cultural remakes, reboots, and adaptations navigate representations of mental disability and health. The chapters analyze the ways that narratives of disability are framed not only by worldviews but also by the media which structure and inform them.

Examining representations of mental difference, this collection focuses on the ways that adaptations (including remakes, reboots, and other examples of remixed narratives) can shape and shift the social contexts and narratives we use to define mental disability. The movement of narratives across media via adaptation, or within media but across time and space in the case of remakes and reboots, is a common tactic for revitalization, allowing storytellers to breathe new life into tired narratives, remedying past inaccuracies and making them accessible and relevant for contemporary audiences. Thus, this collection argues that adaptation provides a useful tool for examining the constraints or opportunities different media impose on or afford narratives, or for measuring shifts in ideology as narratives move across cultures or through time. Further, narrative functions within this collection as a framework for examining the ways that popular media exerts rhetorical power, allowing for deeper understandings of the ways that mental disability is experienced by differently situated individuals, and revealing relationships with broader social narratives that attempt to push definitions of disability onto them.

Introduction

Whitney Hardin & Julia E. Kiernan

Part I: Imagining and Broadening Narratives of Disability

Chapter One: The Prosthetic Self: Drag and Disability in the Figure of RuPaul

John W. Gulledge

Chapter Two: Adapting Medical Reports into Narrative Film: Autism, Eugenics, and Savagery in Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child, 1970)

Joy C. Schaefer

Chapter Three: Remaking the Image of Autism: Why and How Comics Should Reboot Autistic Representation

Robert Rozema

Chapter Four: An Atypical Interaction with a Typical World: Viewing Coming-of-Age through the Lens of Disability Studies in Robia Rashid’s Atypical

Anamika Purohit

Chapter Five: “But can we agree that he’s unwell?”: Narrative Resistance in Legion’s Approach to Mental Disability

Julia E. Kiernan

Chapter Six: Diagnosing Mental and Moral Disability in Post 9/11 Popular American Film Narrative

Carol Donelan

Part II: Renegotiating and Resisting Narratives of Disability

Chapter Seven: “A document in madness”? Disability Erasure in Contemporary Rewrites of Ophelia

Lindsay Adams

Chapter Eight: “You’re all about ‘crazy’”: Rendering the Visibility of Trauma in Alias and Jessica Jones

Whitney Hardin

Chapter Nine: Subspaces Run Through Your Head: Scott Pilgrim, Intertextuality, and Visualizing the Traumatized Mind

William Guy Spriggs

Chapter Ten: Minding the Gap: Adaptation of and Mental Disability in Quiet Life (1990, 1995)

Rea Amit

Chapter Eleven: Adapting Autism in Telenovelas: Venevisión’s La Mujer Perfecta and the Trace of Esmeralda

Martín Ponti

Chapter Twelve: Female Representations of Autism and Disability in Telenovelas: La Mujer Perfecta

Andrea Urrutia Gómez

Index

About the Contributors