Splitting and Animalistic Metaphor in Young Adult Literature That Portrays Tourette Syndrome

• In Event: Critical Theoretical Approaches in Children's and Young Adult Literature

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how literary texts generate knowledge about ways human differences are socially constructed and reinforced as “normal” or deviant. Informed by Critical Disability Studies (CDS), multiple models about disability informed our analysis of characters identified with Tourette Syndrome (TS) in five young adult novels. While there are progressive portrayals of TS in each text, we illustrate one of the pervasive disability tropes found throughout them all—the psychodynamic construct of splitting. Calling attention to depictions of TS as the embodiment of an animal—most often a dog—that splits off into a bad/dangerous side usually subsumed within a character’s “normal” self, we argue this ableist trope furthers long standing metaphors of disability as a flaw to be feared.

Authors

• Melissa Schieble, Hunter College - CUNY

• David J. Connor, Hunter College - CUNY