Title: HandiLand
Description: HandiLand looks at young adult novels, fantasy series, graphic memoirs, and picture books of the last 25 years in which characters with disabilities take center stage for the first time. These books take what others regard as weaknesses -- for instance, Harry Potter's headaches or Hazel Lancaster's oxygen tank -- and redefine them as part of the hero's journey. HandiLand places this movement from sidekick to hero in the political contexts of disability rights movements in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ghana. HandiLand moves through the public spaces young people with disabilities have entered, including schools, nature, and online communities. How does Afrofuturist science fiction shed light on the Flint water crisis? How does Harry Potter strengthen fans struggling with depression? How does Wonder offers strategies for entering a new school with a visible disability? As a disabled person and parent of children with disabilities, Wheeler offers an inside look into families who collude with their kids in shaping a better world. The theoretical strengths of HandiLand include its environmental ethic, its concept of the prosthetic community, and its vision of disability as a spectrum of privilege. Disability serves as a model for environmental thinking that transcends the human mastery of nature and the borders of species. Too often, young characters have to earn their inclusion through exceptional charm, spotless character, heroic feats, or white privilege. The only way to transcend this tokenism, Wheeler argues, is to grant all young people access to a prosthetic community, defined as a cluster of living beings, objects, resources, technologies, and ideas that enable a decent life. The lack of prosthetic community leaves children vulnerable to sexual assault and police brutality.

Young people with disabilities live on a spectrum of privilege according to race, class, gender identity, and type of disability. Wheeler invokes the fantasy of HandiLand, an ideal society ready for young people with disabilities before they get there, as a yardstick to measure how far we've come and how far we still need to go toward the goal of total inclusion.
Subjects: Children with disabilities, Juvenile literature, Children with disabilities in literature