Crip Worldbuilding in Young Adult Speculative Fiction

If you were building a world from scratch, what would you do with disability? Drawing from literary, queer, and critical disability studies, Crip Worldbuilding interrogates key tropes and disability metanarratives, such as miracle cures, blind prophets and disability hierarchy, and protagonist exceptionality.

If you were building a world from scratch, what would you do with disability? This book explores representations of disability in speculative young adult literature published in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada from 1987-2024. Key texts include Isobelle Carmody’s Obernewtyn novels, Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, and The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White. Drawing from literary, queer, and critical disability studies, Crip Worldbuilding interrogates key tropes and disability metanarratives, such as miracle cures, blind prophets and disability hierarchy, and protagonist exceptionality. The concept of speculative worldbuilding is reconsidered as a form of accessible (or hostile) architecture. In doing so, fictional worlds become environments to which models of disability may be applied. Kavanagh-Ryan asks: how does speculative fiction for young adults imagine crip futures? What can the tropes and narrative expectations of the genre tell us about current and future ways of being crip in the world?