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Amanda Apgar

The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future

The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future

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  • More about The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future


The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future explores the narratives of parent-memoirists who have written in resistance to their children's exclusion from culture, revealing that they write their children into dominant cultural narratives about gender, race, and class, reinforcing ableism.

Format: Hardback
Length: 216 pages
Publication date: 30 January 2023
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press


Parents often find themselves in a bewildering situation when their children are born with disabilities or become disabled in childhood. They find themselves suddenly in a new world, without a roadmap or a sense of community to guide them. Without narratives to make sense of their experiences, they struggle to understand the challenges they face.

The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future is a book that explores the narratives that have emerged from a community of parent-memoirists who have written in resistance to their children's exclusion from culture. These memoirs, despite their diverse disabilities, share several remarkable similarities. They are generally written by white, heterosexual, middle or upper-middle-class, able-bodied parents, and they depict narratives in which the disabled child overcomes barriers to lead a normal childhood and adulthood.

In her book, Apgar demonstrates that parental memoirists write their children into dominant cultural narratives about gender, race, and class as they tell these stories. By reinforcing and buying into these norms, Apgar argues that "special needs" parental memoirs reinforce ableism, even as they are written against it.

This book offers a powerful exploration of the complexities of parenting a disabled child and the ways in which cultural narratives shape our understanding of disability. It challenges us to think critically about the ways in which we communicate about disability and to work towards creating a more inclusive and equitable society for all children.


Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780472075690

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