The Government of Disability in Dystopian Children’s Texts

This book takes up the task of mapping discursive shifts in the representation of disability in dystopian youth texts across four historical periods where major social, cultural and political shifts were occurring in the lives of many disabled people. By focusing on dystopian texts, which the author argues act as sites for challenging or reinforcing dominant belief systems and ways of being, this study explores the potential of literature, film and television to act as a catalyst of change in the representation of disability. In addition, this work discusses the texts and technologies that continue to perpetuate questionable and often competing discourses on the subject.

Dylan Holdsworth is a casual academic at Deakin University. He was awarded his PhD in 2017, and his research interests include disability, gender, genre, children’s and young adult literature, and Australian literature. He has published chapters in Disability and Masculinities: Corporeality, Pedagogy and the Critique of Otherness (2017), Affect, Emotion, and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (2017), and Migratory Men: Place, Transnationalism and Masculinities (2023), as well as an article on crip-trans ghosts in paranormal horror cinema in Writing from Below (2023) with Tom Sandercock.