MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In Suzanne Collins’s dystopian trilogy The Hunger Games, the state deliberately inflicted impairments upon adolescents and then forced them to re-cover their disabilities. The Capitol thus constructed a country in which the compulsory re-covery of disability reinforced the dominance of able-bodiedness. THG overall treated disability as a temporal, context-based aspect of bodily existence in which the state consistently inflicted impairments onto tributes’ bodies, then forced their reliance on temporary “cures” that would make them able-bodied enough to die in an “entertaining” bloodbath rather than in a slow, “boring” deterioration of health. This state-regulated set of “cures” compelled most district residents to embrace compulsory recovery as the only way their children would live to experience another morning. The state exercised almost supreme control over the access to and use of compulsory recovery. Whereas most characters were subsumed by this individualized “healing” of disability and debility – which forcibly rendered people as able-bodied or passing as such – some characters resisted this push toward “cures.” In setting out to assuage American anxieties about resilience in the face of disabilities and extreme trauma, the narrative dismissed these important characters as never fully “healed” when they resisted compulsory recovery. Positive identification with disability through communal interdependence was also dropped out of the narrative’s conclusion. This presentation will therefore explore: What does it mean to be disabled in Panem? What does it mean when some forms of disability – debilitating hunger and state-induced injuries, for example – are enforced, expected norms and thus avoid becoming disabled identities? What happens to disability as an identity when starvation and other forms of disability and debility are in fact mandated by the state through the enforcement of hunger and the Hunger Games throughout the districts? What new identities and modes of resistance can people with disabilities create in these circumstances?