Rappresentazione della disabilità e letteratura per l'infanzia: la retorica del supercrip

This essay aims to highlight the specific children’s literature language and how it influences the disability portraits outlined in the books for young readers. There is a close correlation between social representations, collective imaginary and the building of identity, especially in the children’s literature field. For this reason, it is socially and pedagogically relevant to analyze which rhetorics of disability are implicitly transmitted to children. This contribution resumes Giuseppe Vadalà’s study (2013) on the most common rhetorics in disability representation and applies it to deepen the supercrip portraits traceable in Italian children’s literature with an historical perspective. The investigation shows that supercrip characters are very frequent today and in the past; it also suggests that supercrip representations, inauthentic and far from reality, contribute to the disability social exclusion dynamic.