So I read “a cool moonlight” and instinctively compared it to “Wonder” and “Challenger Deep.” I kept thinking about the different ways that each protagonist connected with, talked about, and navigated their disability. A major concept within disability studies is “normalcy” and how socially-constructed and artificial it is. Normalcy operated very differently in each of these novels, and Auggie, Caden, and Lila all dealt with normalcy in distinct ways. For example, sometimes normalcy was desired as goal for the disabled characters, other times it was considered unnecessary.

I was fascinated by the ways that able-bodied characters interact with the disabled characters in these books, and how each author uses these scenes to depict, satirize, or ignore societal ableism. The secondary source I chose explores interactions between able-bodied adults and disabled children. The article makes use of Freud’s uncanny, continuing some of the themes of the minor Gothic mode discussed in the McGillis article and that we talked about in class.

The source I chose is from a book called “Disabled Children’s Childhood Studies” (I attached the whole book here because it has some amazing sources that some of you may be interested in). But for this assignment I am most interested in Chapter 13: The Disavowal of Uncanny Disabled Children: Why Non-Disabled People Are So Messed Up Around Childhood Disability by Dan Goodley and Rebecca Lawthom (pages 164-179 of the book, or 180-195 of the PDF).

Most of “a cool moonlight” explores how a disabled child deals with the able-bodied world, so I thought this source would be an interesting way to look at the other side of the book. How do the able-bodied characters deal with Lila? In what ways is “a cool moonlight” potentially more utopic than “Wonder” or “Challenger Deep”?