Disfigured : On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

Early introduc- tions to the Grimms’ first editions of the tales praised the ‘robust’ and ‘healthy’ nature of many of those who shared stories with the Grimms – a nature the brothers saw as crucial to the storytelling. [...] Almost all fairy tales involve some kind of quest, whether it’s physical – as in the case of the Grimms’ ‘Two Travellers,’ where the tailor and the butcher are sent on a quest by a witch in order to find and marry a princess – or spiritual, as in the case 27 of the Grimms’ ‘The Maiden Without Hands,’ where the titular character wanders alone through the woods with her severed hands tied to her bac [...] In the Norwegian version of the fairy tale ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon,’ the main character must journey to the castle where her husband is held captive and save him from a troll princess; in Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid,’ the mermaid must kill her beloved prince in order to regain her voice and return triumphant to the sea. [...] And yet the power of magic in the tales also, strangely, has the opposite e ect – instead of imbuing the reader with a worldview in which change is possible and things can turn out positively for the disenfranchised, the prevalence of magic in fairy tales serves to reinforce the class and societal structures already in place, as well as traditional ideas of what it means to have a functional body [...] In demanding the space to tell our own stories, in advocating for the social model of disability and for its di erent ways of viewing the world, disabled people are taking back control of the narrative, and urging the world to rethink the idea of the individual triumph, doing the work of dismantling the narratives that have been told about disabled people for thousands of years.