What is DisabilityMonstrosity?
DisabilityMonstrosity is an acknowledgement that the concepts of disability and monstrosity are fundamentally connected, and the theory of one relates to the theory of the other. There's even a technical term for this - "teratology," to this day, means both the study of monsters and the study of (so-called) birth defects. I developed the term DisabilityMonstrosity in 2022.
Did you know? The English word "monster" originally referred to people born with physical disabilities.
The Scharnke Process
The Scharnke Process is a prompt to help people think about DisabilityMonstrosity in media that they consume or are involved with. There isn't a right or wrong answer to any of the questions, or a result to the process, that a piece of media "should" fit into.
1. Does the piece of media depict any persons or characters with any disabilities?
2. Does the piece of media depict any monsters?
If [YES] to EITHER or BOTH, proceed to 3.
3. Do the person(s) or character(s) with disability have any traits of a monster?
4. Does the monster have any traits of a disability?
Arguably the first film genre that represented disability in its early years is horror.
(Disability in Film Genres: Exploring the Body and the Mind, by Samuel James)
See, there’s a thing with surviving disability in horror. If you survive your monstrous, evil disability in a horror movie, if you come back, it is not because you have been accepted by the loving arms of your understanding community. It is because you are a force to be reckoned with. You are going to wreck someone’s day, and it’s going to take a lot of different protagonists over the course of several profitable sequels to defeat you. You, my friend, are One Scary Lady if you are surviving your grisly and justified demise at the end of a horror story.
(On Horror, Disability, and Loving Both at Once, Lee Foster)
I am guilty of a more monstrous crime.’ He took a step toward his father. ‘I was born. I lived. I am guilty of being a dwarf, I confess it. And no matter how many times my good father forgave me, I have persisted in my infamy.’
‘This is folly, Tyrion’, declared Lord Tywin. ‘Speak to the matter at hand. You are not on trial for being a dwarf.’
‘That is where you err, my lord. I have been on trial for being a dwarf my entire life.’
‘Have you nothing to say in your defense?’
‘Nothing but this: I did not do it. Yet now I wish I had.’ He turned to face the hall, that sea of pale faces. ‘I wish I had enough poison for you all. You make me sorry that I am not the monster you would have me be, yet there it is. I am innocent, but I will get no justice here.
(A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin)
How many times have you told me you're a monster? So be a monster. Be the thing they all fear when they close their eyes at night.
Leigh Bardugo, (Six of Crows). Bardugo said, about the character being addressed the above quote, ‘I think I wanted to write someone disabled and ferocious, because that’s how I wanted to feel.’
Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human knowledge...
Jeffrey J. Cohen, Monster Culture (Seven Theses) in "Monster Theory: Reading Culture"