Disfigured Quotes

“Why, in all of these stories about someone who wants to be something or someone else, was it always the individual who needed to change, and never the world?”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“Being disabled puts us on a level of intimacy with our own bodies that in some ways remains, ironically, inaccessible to the able-bodied.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“The inability to imagine a happy ending outside of the confines of the fairy tale is exactly that - a failure of imagination.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“Disability isn't visited on us in response to a grand, overarching narrative plan, but rather is a lived, complex reality that reimagines the very nature of how we move through and occupy space.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“Give me a story about a disabled man or woman who learns to navigate the world and teaches the world, in turn, to navigates its own way around the disabled body. Give me power and also weakness, struggle but also reams of joy. Our lives are made of this fabric--our stories deserve nothing less.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“...I am struck by how these pitiers unknowingly give voice to the deepest of truths: they cannot imagine this kind of life.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“It's so good of you to love them. The Beast, Shrek, the Ugly Duckling and eventual swan. The woman in the wheel chair, the main who wears the mask. I could never do that. And if you do it, that means I don't have to."”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“It's hard, too, to acknowledge that I feel this way while also simultaneously existing in a place of enormous privilege. My disability affects all aspects of my life, but it is also relatively mild.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“Disability is not a monolith--every disabled person's experience in the world is different, and the way that we all navigate the world is likewise varied and complex.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“The evil stepmother is a fixture in European fairy tales because the stepmother was very much a fixture in early European society–mortality in childbirth was very high, and it wasn’t unusual for a father to suddenly find himself alone with multiple mouths to feed. So he remarried and brought another woman into the house, and eventually they had yet more children, thus changing the power dynamics of inheritance in the household in a way that had very little to do with inherent, archetypal evil and everything to do with social expectation and pressure. What was a woman to do when she remarried into a family and had to act as mother to her husband’s children as well as her own, in a time when economic prosperity was a magical dream for most? Would she think of killing her husband’s children so that her own children might therefore inherit and thrive? [...] Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the fear that stepmothers (or stepfathers) might do this kind of thing was very real, and it was that fear–fed by the socioeconomic pressures felt by the growing urban class–that fed the stories.

We see this also with the stories passed around in France–fairies who swoop in to save the day when women themselves can’t do so; romantic tales of young girls who marry beasts as a balm to those young ladies facing arranged marriages to older, distant dukes. We see this with the removal of fairies and insertion of religion into the German tales. Fairy tales, in short, are not created in a vacuum. As with all stories, they change and bend both with and in response to culture.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“If society is used to not seeing disabled people in stories, society becomes used to not seeing disabled people in real life. If society is used to not seeing disabled people in real life, society will continue to build a world that makes it exceedingly difficult for disabled people to participate in said world, thus perpetuating the problem. In this world, there is no need for a wheelchair ramp because hardly anyone who wins an award will need one to get onstage. But what if we took it for granted that anyone, regardless of ability, might be able to achieve, and built our stages and our environments accordingly?
It is time for us to tell different stories.
It is time for a different world.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“Most importantly, it's a message that assumes absolute and unrealistic able-bodiedness. No one with glasses. No crutches, no wheelchairs, no visible differences from girl to girl apart from the colour of their eyes and hair. Perfectly symmetrical faces abound. Some of the princesses – Mulan and Merida in particular – are athletes, with the kind of unrealistic body control and power that even able-bodied people often struggle to obtain. The message is that heroism isn't possible without physical 'perfection,' especially for girls.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“For many of us with physical disabilities, the forest is often a dangerous place to be. There's no hope of taking a wheelchair into the trees unless there's a clearly marked and flattened path; it can be difficult to navigate a forest even with a guide dog at your side. I'd wager than the forest presents trouble perhaps even for those whose disabilities are often deemed invisible--it can be a dark place, filled with all manner of smells and sensory onslaughts, a place where even the able-bodied can lose themselves.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“Fairy tales and fables are never only stories; they are the scaffolding by which we understand crucial things. Fairness, hierarchy, patterns of behavior; who deserves a happy ending and who doesn't.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“If society is used to not seeing disabled people in stories, society becomes used to not seeing disabled people in real life. If society is used to not seeing disabled people in real life, society will continue to build a world that makes it exceedingly difficult for disabled people to participate in said world, thus perpetuating the problem.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“I do not want to walk like everybody else. I do not want to be like everybody else. But sometimes it feels like that's all the world wants you to be.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“I have nothing to prove to the world because the world has everything to prove to me. It is the world’s responsibility to make space for my body, my words, my lopsided gait – our bodies, our words, our ways of moving through the world – to hold my childhood dreams of being a princess and a superhero close and help me understand that there is no need to want to be either. To start telling different stories about a body that might just look like mine, and reshaping the world to fit them.

I am already enough. There is no need to be more.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“Once again we place the onus of recovery - successful completion of the quest - on the individual, and place much less emphasis on the role and responsibility of the community to offer the help that it can. Once again, we support and perpetuate a culture where the emphasis is on the cure rather than societal change - where the aim of the narrative is to eradicate the disabled life rather than change the world so that the disables life can thrive.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“In effect, it is possible to be disabled both by society and by pain; to struggle both as a result of the overwhelming bias in favour of the able body and as a result of the unique nature of one’s own body and its different challenges in the world. Disability and able-bodiedness are both merely points on an enormous spectrum of human variation, and the work of being in the world at all entails being on this spectrum in some way, shape, or form.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“Look at you, getting coffee, getting groceries, going on trips in an airplane. Pretending that you're as able-bodied as the rest of us! It's all just so inspiring.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“It is useful , for purposes of the superhero narrative, to see how the sheer force of Rogers's soul is matched in the end by his physique. But what does it mean to know that Steve Rogers's capacity for doing good is only reached once he is given a body that speaks to his soul's power? What does it mean, as a disabled person, to watch Steve's struggle and realize that your own potential will never be fulfilled in the eyes of the world – to realize that the world expects so much less from you as a result of your body that even the simplest of actions is treated like a galactic event? A broken body with a bright, pure soul. A superhero who is a superhero simply for getting up and getting coffee down the street. The disabled body is less ; the disabled body must therefore be content with less, no matter how bright one's soul might be shining.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“...the nostalgia that keeps drawing us back to the brightness of Disney films and their ilk also has its dark underpinnings.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space