Spoiled Identity and the Curated Self: Narrativising Stigma in Parents' Memoirs of Raising Disabled Children

This chapter examines the negotiation of disability-related stigma in 21st-century Anglo-American memoir culture. How, it asks, do parents deploy a life-narrative approach to negotiate a perceived spoiled identity arising out of the arrival of a disabled child in their lives? I argue that the possibilities of self-curated social media technologies and the related ecology of the memoir industry offer opportunities to narrativise parenthood differently, aimed at taking account of and resignifying a perceived loss associated with the stigma of disability. Moreover, as theorists of memoir and disability including Apgar (2023) and Couser (2004) have argued, the production of memoir allows privileged parents to recuperate the social and reputational capital whose loss is associated with the devalued personhood of the disabled child. I explore some of the challenges and opportunities afforded by memoir culture to the representation of disability-related stigma.