https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i2.015
Parenting Under an Ableist Panopticon: A Study on Jodi Picoult’s Handle with Care and My Sister’s Keeper
Rashida Muneer Chalilakath
Research Scholar
Department of English
Providence Women’s College, Kozhikode
Affiliated to University of Calicut
Dr Shanthi Vijayan
HOD and Assistant Professor
Department of English
Providence Women’s College, Kozhikode
Affiliated to University of Calicut
Abstract: This paper argues that Jodi Picoult’s novels, Handle with Care and My Sister’s Keeper manifest how parents of disabled children live under an “ableist panopticon” – a system of invisible surveillance that forces families to comply with ‘able-bodied’ social norms. Drawing on Michael Foucault’s expansion of Bentham’s concept of the panopticon and Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory of “compulsory able-bodiedness”, we contend that the legal battles in both novels spring not from the inevitabilities of disability but from the mothers’ internalized imaginaries of uncertainties, hardships and social exclusion for their disabled children. Forcing them to pursue cure, normalization and legal remedies, the ableist panopticon converts uncertainty into obligation. The study exposes the infirmity of this ableist panopticon and shows that the lawsuits – whether medical emancipation or wrongful birth — are just effects and not solutions, unnecessary corollaries that rein scribe, rather than dismantle, ableist perspectives.
Keywords: Ableist Panopticon, Crip theory, Glass Child/Saviour Sibling, Wrongful Birth and Compulsory Able-bodiedness
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