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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

"Mutant and Cyborg Images of the Disabled Body in the Landscape of Science Fiction"

Hydra vs Leviathan

23:11 / 18.08.06

Does anyone on here know where it might be possible to find this essay? It's linked on the "References" section of the Wikipedia article on X-Men as "available online as a Word document", but the link when clicked only results in a Server Error message.

I'd fucking love to read this, as this exact subject is a minor obsession of mine, and i strongly suspect it would contain really good source material for a thread i'm (very vaguely) planning about disability identity politics and its relationship/parallel to gender/sexuality identity politics, ideas of "mutancy", "deviance", "biodiversity", etc... Barbelith seems just about the only place i can think of where there's even a remote chance someone will have read or even heard of this...

Anyone read this essay, or know where to find it?

08:17 / 19.08.06

Natty, there's a link to the essay on the author's page. Unfortunately it leads to the same server error message as the link from wikipedia, but maybe she would furnish you with a copy if you showed an interest?

14:11 / 19.08.06

Are you at a university or do you have an ATHENS, MUSE or JSTOR password/login? If so, you might be able to find the essay via Web of Science, Muse or JSTOR, if it's ever been in a journal - if not, I'll have a search for you. And then we can figure out a way to get it to you.

Otherwise Shrug's suggestion is good - I've found most academics are happy to share their work with people who ask.

Looking forward to the thread, also - the disabled cyborg in sci-fi is an idea that tiggles familiarly at my brain, but I can't remember where I came across it.

14:53 / 19.08.06

It seems to be available here, Natty Ra Jah.

Hydra vs Leviathan

21:20 / 20.08.06

Thanks elene, perfect... must have just been a broken link...

On first, quick reading of the article, i'm actually slightly disappointed that it doesn't mention a lot of the works/characters that i think of as paradigmatic of the mutant/cyborg to disability parallels... Fecteau talks about the X-Men, but oddly fails to mention that Professor X is himself disabled, and doesn't mention Tod Browning's "Freaks" (despite talking about the actual freak shows, and referencing "Nosferatu" which is at least as much horror rather than science fiction)... also, i think i'm going to have to presume that, as an American, she hasn't heard of Doctor Who (surely "Genesis of the Daleks", and the character of Davros generally, is the paradigmatic disabled mutant/cyborg story and character)...

Still, there's plenty of meat there for further exploration of the subject...

(Mieville's Remade and Wyndham's Chrysalids also come to mind, as further examples of the Cyborg and Mutant paradigms respectively which didn't get mentioned...)