Random post is random -- or: "A Braindump in Three Cut-tags."

( Lyrics to a song (an *educational* song) that have been stuck in my head for 5 whole days... almost non-stop! )

Send help.
___
( Idea I had for a Disabled Character-Centric TV show that I think would be awesome )

And all the disabled characters on the show would be played by disabled actors, rather tha TABS in cripface -- and yes, even actors with CP, who have funky posture, and trouble speaking, maybe... Hey, a girl can dream.
___
( I realized, either last night or this morning, that the definition of the word 'geek' has *not* changed all that much, since the 1510s )

...And 'round and round it goes... This last cut brought to you by a word-geek.

"Discovering images of disability in folklore..." can be downright depressing.

*Sigh*

I'm currently working through Google's auto-translation* from the German of "Das Mädchen ohne Hände" (The Girl Without Hands in good English Translation).

It's ... not as happy a story of disability as Thumbling was. Full of Fatherly abuse of daughter to save his own skin/soul, this one, with the added ableist trope of: "Pray to God, and be good, and you'll be healed (YAY)!"

But as I'm rereading it for the first time in (a while), I'm struck with how well it corresponds to what I wrote on monsters, disability, and being "marked" as a bad omen, a while back (here), especially as "monster" originally meant someone with missing limbs -- okay, so this daughter had her hands chopped off instead of being born without them. But in the realm of motifs and story tropes, that's splitting spider web strands. So it's useful in building up my thesis-oid** of the place given to the "Disabled Class" within larger society.


So, as I'm reading through this, I'm formulating the critique / response to it that I'll write as an afterword. And I'm wondering whether to critique previous critiques (notably from the Jungian mytho-psychological crowd) that interpret the loss of her hands as a purely metaphorical thing, rather than something that some women actually have to live with -- yes, even back in olden days (because we all know that only the "Whole" healthy person the 'true' default, and anything that deviates from that is merely symbolic. Right?).

Or should just focus on my own interpretation, and skip critiquing past critic?

Thoughts?

---

*It's my modus operandi for making sure I don't subconsciously plagiarize someone else's work -- I'm already familiar with the English versions, in the back of my head, so I can turn around the funky missed translations of words' second and third meanings -- I'm not trusting the 'bots blindly... Mostly, as I'm reading, I'm thinking: "oh, yeah... I see what you did there..." So I can be sure my reading / interpretation of the story is my own, and not colored by another translator's ideas of what's pretty or sensible... especially since I'm pretty sure that all the translations easily accessible out there are/were crafted from a point of able-bodied privilege...

**A thesis-like thing -- kind of amorphous and shifting -- without actually being a proper Thesis.