Disabled characters and disability stories in most media are based on what individuals who are non-disabled think it would be like to be disabled. As such, it is able-bodied people’s imaginations that animate and inform representations of disability and people with disabilities in popular culture, which are in many ways foreign to the real, authentic lived experience of disability. Likewise, by uncritically relying on the normalized, essentialized discourse of ableism, many dystopian films and novels that are set in a dystopian world reinforce marginalization, medicalization, and closeting of disability, validating the ableist prejudices of the normate majority. Yet, there are also other works that are set in a dystopian world highlight disability from the perspective of disability studies and challenge ableist view of disability.

Given that it is needless to say that disability plays an important role in dystopian literature and film since disability is an inevitable reality of this world, “Disabled Bodies and Ableism Ideology in the Dystopian World” have selected for a collaborative session three presentations that insightfully examine how disability is represented from an ableist perspective, or resist current ableist thinking, in particular, in a dystopian world. The papers on this panel share interest in disabled bodies and ableism ideology in a dystopian world and productively discuss disability in relation to ableism, trans ableism, transhumanity, and posthumanity, which is expected help the audience achieve an intersectional understanding of disability. These presentations engage with critical questions about what it means to be disabled or non-disabled, and what it means to be fully human.

Hyun-Joo Yoo thoroughly examines in “Disabled Bodies and Ableism Ideology in The Hunger Games film trilogy” how The Hunger Games film trilogy in the most obvious and the subtlest ways, expresses widespread ableist concepts and perspectives of disability and people with disabilities. Through the visual representation and characterization of disability and disabled people from an ableist perspective, The Hunger Games film trilogy contributes significantly to the continual perpetuation of disabling, negative stereotypes of disabled people, which are already so ingrained in our ableist society. Besides, the film trilogy’s hiding disability in the closet and omitting the disabled characters that appear in the novel trilogy from the story reflects our society’s concerted, deliberate, but problematic efforts to ignore the existence of disabled people and reaffirm ideological differences between the self and the Other. In a seemingly unproblematic and unidentifiable way, The Hunger Games films solidify and promulgates the hegemony of normalcy and fixate the hierarchical dichotomy between non-disabled/normal/fit/beautiful/valued and disabled/abnormal/unfit/ugly/devalued people, which would encourage the rationalization and validation of the persistent silencing, exclusion, and segregation of disabled people from mainstream community life, and ultimately, bring destructive, undesirable impact on the empowerment of people with disabilities in both the filmic and real world. Given this, using a critical disability studies perspective, her paper aims to unmake the ideology of ableism in The Hunger Games films, to deconstruct it, and to bring it out in the open for all to see.

Given that Queer Theory and Disability studies have many intersections, Rusty Rust tries to construct a line of inquiry into disability studies that considers transgender theory in ”Trans Ablisms.” The idea that disability studies shares common space with Transgender Studies is not new; however, it has not been fully fleshed out. People who do not recognize tangible limbs as parts of their bodies may experience dysphoria, many autistic people are trans, and there are many themes of disability/transness in literature. Most notably, the recent dystopian novella Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones by Torrey Peters, depicts a future where all people depend on hormones and thus the experience of marginalization focuses primarily on class. This is a site of future thinking in which there is no disability and themes of access render this a narrative that is clearly within the realm of disability studies. Rusty discusses in ”Trans Ablisms” how Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones shows that transgender theory and disability studies have many sites that overlap and are rich for exploration especially with regard to bodily autonomy, access, and external regulation/social construction of identity. By recognizing these overlaps, we as scholars and activists can build coalitions and fight more effectively for institutional and social change.

Sarah Sydney Lane’s “Apocalyptic Embodied Minds: Romantic Representations of Mental and Physical Diversity in Contemporary Science Fiction” analyzes how, reversing Victorian anxieties about the links between “decaying” morality and psychosomatic degeneration, contemporary science fiction texts—Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (2014), Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy (2003)—deploy evolutionary and biological discourse to foreground the adaptive and aesthetic potential of psychological traits, social behaviors, and biological constitutions deemed undesirable or “atypical” by the medicalizing community. Furthermore, these texts embellish/burden their anti-heroines with psychoanalytically recognizable sexual perversions, as well as psychotic, borderline personality, and depressive traits, in particular. Provocatively, contemporary writers of science fiction, similar to some psychoanalytic circles, suggest that these strange bodies and mental defensive strategies might not be “deficits” but should rather be seen as superior adaptations to a challenging, unstable late-capitalist environment. This paper shows how VanderMeer, Bacigalupi, and Atwood situate the categories of the human and posthuman along a continuum from pathological to healthy, and thereby blur distinctions between “disabled” and “able” using the discourses of the “new biologies.” In other words, these texts construct romanticized figures of mental “illness,” sexual “delinquency,” and posthuman kinship that fulfill the role of the seductive “anti/heroine,” while the stereotyped identities of success are associated with the slow and boring march towards personal and species extinction (e.g. extraverted, hyper-rational personalities embedded in white, cisgender male human bodies). Furthermore, this paper speculates on the cultural consequences and affordances of these revisioned images of the mentally ill anti-heroine, and asks what is the Western cultural desire hidden metonymically within the “apocalyptic embodied minds” of these science fictions?