Issue 1 (67) 2026

2026

Publication date: 14.05.2026

Description

The publication of this volume was financed by the Jagiellonian University in Kraków – Faculty of Polish Studies.

Cover design: Maciej Godawa.

Licence: CC BY 4.0

Editorial team

Editor-in-Chief Monika Świerkosz

Executive Editor Tomasz Kunz

Scientific editor Monika Świerkosz

Issue content

Przez niepełnosprawność

Monika Świerkosz

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (67) 2026, 2026, pp. 1-9

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.010.23312

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Articles

Niepełnosprawność jako metoda badania historii kina. Głuche widzostwo

Magdalena Zdrodowska

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (67) 2026, 2026, pp. 11-34

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.001.23303

The article provides an overview of theoretical concepts within the “disability as method” paradigm applied to the analysis of cultural texts. It discusses approaches such as cripistemology, dismediation, crip technoscience, disability expertise, crip wisdom, and crip authorship. I argue that these concepts are connected by a shift in focus: from analyzing the representation of disability in literature, film, or media, to considering disability and the knowledge arising from its experience as analytical tools. The article proposes a case study applying this disability-based theory: I re-examine the introduction of sound in cinema at the turn of the 1930s, considering its impact on American deaf viewers through Arseli Dokumaci’s concepts of “shrinkage” and “activist affordances.” On the one hand, the transition to sound negatively impacted this audience, shrinking their film environment and depriving them of the affordance of film comprehensibility. However, it also had a generative dimension, leading to the emergence of a specific deaf audience. In response to losing access to sound cinema, deaf viewers adopted activist affordances such as lobbying film producers, sustaining the circulation of silent films, practising cosmopolitan spectatorship, arranging live sign language interpretation, and watching films after reading reviews in deaf journals. To describe these practices, I introduce the category of deaf spectatorship.

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Otwieranie świata. Doświadczenie niepełnosprawności i ucieleśniona geografia

Klaudia Muca-Małek

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (67) 2026, 2026, pp. 35-54

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.002.23304

The article explores the concept of the geography of disability as a critical-emancipatory perspective that has been evolving since the 1990s within disability studies and, more broadly, within spatial studies. This perspective represents a response from spatial researchers to the call for critical meta-analysis, enabling the recognition of connections between the experience of disability and space. The relationship between a person with a disability, their body-mind, and space is reflected in many cultural texts, including emancipatory narratives based on personal experience, which serve both cognitive and emancipatory functions. Examples of this type of narrative include autoethnographies or travel narratives authored by people with disabilities, such as the travel accounts by Marek Kalbarczyk, Patrycja Polczyk’s autoethnography, and the autobiographical essays from the anthology Placing Disability. Personal Essays of Embodied Geography (2024). Both the geography of disability and these narratives emphasize the interdependence between disability and space, and between embodiment and emplacement. Recognizing and discussing this interdependence serves as a valuable complement to epistemic and activist efforts advocating for the rights of people with disabilities.

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Remembering the d/Deaf holocaust in Contemporary Fiction by d/Deaf Artists and d/Deaf-community Allies

Katarzyna Ojrzyńska

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (67) 2026, 2026, pp. 55-79

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.003.23305

The article briefly presents the history of the d/Deaf holocaust and reflects on contemporary examples of historical and historically allusive works of fiction made by artists who identify as d/Deaf or as d/Deaf community allies. The analyses shed light on how d/Deaf communities in English-speaking countries and Poland have striven to reclaim their history by rewriting it from their own perspectives, presenting it to signing and non-signing audiences, and often accentuating d/Deaf gain, cultural contribution, and resistance. They also show that while these works often highlight the d/Deaf characters’ ties with other oppressed cultural minorities, they tend to avoid identifying them with/as disabled victims. Set against this background, my reading of fragments of Kaite O’Reilly’s play peeling that address the d/Deaf holocaust and the limited reproductive autonomy of contemporary d/Deaf women and women with disabilities, aims to open up space for reflection on fostering alliances and solidarity between d/Deaf and dis ability communities.

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Chór kobiet o niepełnosprawności. Filologiczna lektura peeling Kaite O’Reilly

Anna Piniewska

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (67) 2026, 2026, pp. 81-106

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.004.23306

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between the social dimension – which shapes contextually conditioned perceptions of disability and encompasses diverse practices of treating people with disabilities – and the dramatic dimension, which stages and deconstructs ways of speaking and thinking about disability. In other words, the play brings social discourse into the dramatic world, addressing these practices through specific artistic strategies. The material for this analysis is peeling, a play by Kaite O’Reilly written for three actresses with disabilities. This reading is framed within critical and feminist disability studies. It primarily addresses the issue of multi-layered violence against women with disabilities – whether institutional, cultural, or eugenic. The author makes functional use of literary references to Euripides’ The Trojan Women, pointing to parallels between the metatheatrical narrative and the actresses’ lived experience. This experience is articulated through a variety of means and forms of expression, which are analyzed in the article.

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Crip Futurisms and the Decolonial Cyborg: Disability, Technology, and Indigenous Relationality in Zainab Amadahy’s Speculative Novel Resistance

Paula Wieczorek

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (67) 2026, 2026, pp. 107-121

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.005.23307

This paper examines Zainab Amadahy’s speculative novel Resistance (2013) at the intersection of disability studies and Indigenous Futurisms. It argues that the novel presents disability not as an individual deficit, but as a condition produced by settler colonialism, extractive capitalism, and militarized state power. Drawing on concepts such as debility, the curative imaginary, and disabled ecologies, the article shows how Resistance exposes the biopolitical management of injured bodies and degraded environments. At the same time, the novel offers an alternative framework grounded in Indigenous epistemologies of relationality and care, reframing dependency as a source of collective resilience. This reconfiguration culminates in the figure of Marco Chang, whose embodiment articulates a decolonial cyborg and a practice of crip technoscience, in which assistive technologies support communal survival rather than cure. By bringing disability studies into dialogue with Indigenous Futurisms, the article advances a vision of future worlds grounded in vulnerability, care, and ecological justice.

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Ciało – proteza – tożsamość. Saga księżycowa Marissy Meyer jako transhumanistyczna opowieść o kobiecej cielesności dla młodych dorosłych

Weronika Kostecka

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (67) 2026, 2026, pp. 123-142

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.006.23308

This article analyzes Marissa Meyer’s The Lunar Chronicles through the lens of critical body studies and the concept of hybrid identity, treating the series as an example of Young Adult (YA) literature that employs the motif of the cyborg female body to explore adolescent identity dilemmas. It examines how the technologically modified body of the protagonist functions as a site of tension between transhumanist, posthumanist, feminist, and postfeminist discourses, and how it reflects social mechanisms of control, exclusion, and stigmatization. The article combines literary analysis with concepts drawn from transhumanism, posthumanism, corporeal feminism, and postfeminism, as well as reflections on disability discourses. The discussion leads to the conclusion that the cyborg heroine exposes the contradictions inherent in transhumanist projects: she is simultaneously “enhanced” and discredited, a victim of biopolitical control and somatophobia, and perceived as a threat. Her body reveals cultural mechanisms of constructing norms of femininity and the postfeminist logic of tethering female self-acceptance to the male gaze. At the same time, the protagonist embodies the posthumanist fluidity of subjectivity and negotiates the meaning of prostheses–both in her body and memory– as elements of her identity. Ultimately, the article demonstrates that YA literature can serve as a laboratory for critical reflection on technology, embodiment, and power.

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Stawić czoła ableizmowi. Analiza szwedzkiej książki obrazkowej Rullstolsskolan

Hanna Dymel-Trzebiatowska

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (67) 2026, 2026, pp. 143-162

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.007.23309

The article outlines the context of Sweden’s egalitarian and inclusive policies, encompassing legal and linguistic regulations regarding disability, and briefly surveys the representation of disability in Swedish children’s literature. The core of the article is a multimodal-cognitive analysis of the picturebook Rullstolsskolan (2018), written by Pia Hammargren, Sara Hansson, and Jenny Tollstern, with illustrations by Theo Johannesson. The analysis focuses on the depiction of child characters with mobility impairments, power dynamics, children’s agency, and the presence or absence of ableist beliefs. Published by Funkibator, a publisher specializing in disability themes, the book proves to be free of ableist biases. The authors do not base the verbal-visual narrative on the category of “difference”–a common trope in other children’s books–thereby offering valuable insights for future picturebook authors.

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Widzialność nienormatywnych ciał. Radykalne uwidacznianie i ukrywanie bohaterów z niepełnosprawnościami w grach wideo

Joanna Pigulak

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (67) 2026, 2026, pp. 163-183

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.008.23310

This article examines the representation of non-normative bodies in video games through the lens of disability studies. It focuses on visibility understood not merely as aesthetic presence, but as performativity embedded in gameplay mechanics. Using Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (MachineGames, 2017), Dishonored 2 (Arkane Studios, 2016), Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (2017), and selected installments of the Mortal Kombat series (NetherRealm Studios) as case studies, the analysis highlights strategies of exposing and concealing disability. I argue that while these games often reinforce stereotypes (heroization, masking, fetishization), they also hold emancipatory potential. By making non-normative bodies central to both narrative and gameplay, they renegotiate cultural notions of normativity and agency.

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Elephants and DJs: Komiks and Disability

José Alaniz

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (67) 2026, 2026, pp. 185-209

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.009.23311

The article is an excerpt from a chapter in José Alaniz’s book Resurrection. Comics in Post-Soviet Russia (Columbus: Ohio State University Press 2022). The essay analyses post-Soviet Russian comics which represent mental/physical disabilities, by both non-disabled and disabled authors. It presents some key issues pertaining to disability in contemporary Russian culture and discusses the challenges of disability representation in the verbal/visual medium of comics in Russia. The essay focuses on the work of Yulia Nikitina, especially the short comics story Schism, and the first Russian graphic novel on a disability theme, I Am an Elephant by a disabled writer Vladimir Rudak (who uses a wheelchair) and non-disabled artist Len Uzhinova.

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Files to download

Title and imprint pages PDF Table of contents PDF About the Authors (pl) PDF

Słowa kluczowe: d/Deaf, disability, disability studies, film history, affordance, deaf spectatorship, disability, geography, voyage, emancipatory narratives, embodiment, emplacement, decolonialisation, the d/Deaf holocaust, disability, memory, eugenic sterilization in Nazi Germany, Nazi extermination of people with disabilities, contemporary literature and film by d/Deaf artists and their allies, disability, eugenics, violence, theatre, metatheatre, communication, inclusivity, The Trojan Women, Euripides, peeling, Kaite O’Reilly, Zainab Amadahy, speculative fiction, Indigenous Futurisms, postcolonial disability studies, social communication, female body, cyborg, young adult literature, transhumanism, The Lunar Chronicles, ableism, disability, Sweden, picturebook, Funkibator, difference, video games, disability, visibility, representation, disability studies, disablity game studies, Russia, Comics, Disability, Amputee, Post-Soviet comics

Funding information

The publication of this volume was financed by the Jagiellonian University in Kraków – Faculty of Polish Studies.