ABSTRACT
This chapter combines art, comics, graphic-novel memoirs, and music to explore how disabled people use these to create what Disability Studies scholars like Margaret Price and G. Thomas Couser call counter-discourse that challenges society’s negative representations of disability. These disabled artists, musicians, and media creators are fighting against their erasure in cultural narratives. This chapter discusses graphic novels and graphic-novel memoirs by disabled people such as Cece Bell’s El Deafo (2014) that became an AppleTV+ three-part animated series for children in 2022, French writer and blogger Julie Dachez’s Invisible Differences about her autism diagnosis as an adult (La différence invisible published in French in 2016 and in English in 2020), and the disability story of Barbara Gordon (Batgirl/Oracle) who became a paraplegic wheelchair user in the 1988 Batman comic with her true disability story being told in 2020 by the Dutch autistic YA writer Marieke Nijkamp when she wrote The Oracle Code. This chapter also illustrates the natural convergence of graphic-novel memoirs and music through the work of Krip Hop Nation’s Leroy Moore, who was interviewed for this chapter. After reading the graphic-novel memoir of disabled rapper MF Grimm (Percy Carey), Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm, Moore saw the intersecting power of comics and hip-hop music. Moore created his own graphic novel in 2019, in which he includes some of his own real-life story as a disabled Black teen watching rap music unfold in 1980s New York City, and the graphic novel also focuses on a superhero story of a young, modern-day, wheelchair-using Black woman, Roxanne, who “brings disability Justice into Hip-Hop.” The chapter also discusses research by Australian music scholar Anthea Skinner about the Krip Hop Nation-inspired animated music video by Kounterclockwise for their song, Whip (2013), which Skinner says illustrates disabled solidarity and resistance. Finally, the chapter examines the many instances that disabled musicians, past and present, have pushed a counter-discourse in their lyrics and performances to resist the discrimination and ableism they have experienced.
