Abstract

SOUZA, Renata Junqueira de  and  RODRIGUES, Sílvia de Fátima Pilegi. Thematization of Disability in Children’s Literature - Perspectives on the Characters. RLEC/LJCS [online]. 2021, vol.8, n.2, pp.119-138.  Epub May 01, 2023. ISSN 2184-0458.  https://doi.org/10.21814/rlec.3477.

This study aims to discuss characters with physical disabilities in children’s literature. The discussion is relevant once the theme has been placed in books produced for children in Brazil, especially since 2008, with the National Policy for Special Education in the Inclusive Perspective (Decreto nº 6.571, 2008). Although the issue had already appeared in some literary works in earlier periods, usually with a stereotyped approach. Children’s literature publishers, faced with various institutional policies and programs, found a lode in the topic of special needs. Undoubtedly, social and political pressures for inclusion interfere in literary productions and their insertion in the school context. In this sense, analysing works that do not reinforce stereotypes or refer to disability as heroic overcoming, resignation and acceptance of fate, placing the characters in conditions of subordination and/or that inspire pity or divine will, can collaborate to broaden perspectives on what it is stigmatised as a disability as well as the limits and possibilities of the human being in different conditions and potential. Comparing children’s books that bring these two aspects - overcoming and accepting the real versus resignation and heroic overcoming - may help readers and children to understand the disability as part of normality and open good perspectives for discussion on the subject with these readers under training.

Keywords : physical disability; children’s literature; inclusion; text comprehension.

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