ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the wildly popular American young adult Hunger Games trilogy as a means of tracing the causal link between the rumored voracious foreigners who want to consume children and the benevolent Facebook clickers who want to rescue them. The fantastic premise of the Hunger Games dramatizes how long-standing attitudes towards both disability and altruism create a powerful, but largely invisible source of coercion in global markets. People continues fascination with individual bodies, whether those of endearing disabled children, or of their own in illness or old age, dismantles the universal registers in which they need to administer human rights and the humanitarianism that proposes to further them. The chapter draws from the futuristic premise of The Hunger Games trilogy to explore how a nineteenth-century model of sympathetic giving honed in medical and humanitarian approaches to disability has become layered with a modern neoliberal story of plucky individuals who can win the competition for resources and applause.