Why Jordan Doesn’t Have “Dyslexia”: Refusing the Romance of Literacy in My-So Called Life 

In Episode 7 of My So-Called Life, "Why Jordan Can't Read," the show's central character Angela Chase learns that her crush Jordan Catalano has a learning disability and tries to explain it to him. What does not happen: a montage of scenes in which Angela tutors Jordan in reading, interspersed with a lot of making out. We can assume that the same girl who has authored a romantic poem about an oak tree in Episode 6 would yearn for exactly this scenario -tutoring and improving her illiterate working-class partner. After all, the absent fantasy that an Angela could teach a Jordan how to read is one that pervades the historical imaginary of heterosexuality - it's the just the kind of scene that would be well known to a bookish white American high school girl thanks to its prevalence in the Victorian novel. In Wuthering Heights, in contrast to Heathcliff's violent self-education, Cathy 2 badgers the scruffy family scion Hareton Earnshaw into literacy, motivating him to correctly enunciate the word "contrary" with slaps and kisses, a domesticated sadism that presages the moral reform and class consolidation of the novel's ending. In Great Expectations, the highly motivated Biddy improves Joe by at once teaching him to read and marrying him, a rise in status that lets Pip finally recognize him not as a fellow child or a figure with the sensitivity "of a woman," but as at last a "man."1 Social class fully explains the reading challenges of these belated learners; reading difficulties are not inherent; they are also not alleviated so much by self-help as by the interventions of young women. Such scenes, in Lauren Berlant's terms, make "hegemonic promises about the present and future experience of social belonging that ...can best be tracked in terms of affective transactions that take place alongside the more instrumental ones."2 Teaching reading is a core erotic scenario of upward mobility.3

Aligned with these narratives, Angela understands Jordan's inscrutability in class terms. In Episode 2, she gazes at him obsessively, imagining "he was from a poor family and couldn't afford new shirts." Though they are in the same English class, she reflects that she cannot envision him "trying to diagram my sentences," as erotic as that would apparently be. In Episode 7, Angela writes a letter documenting her desire for him, only for her best friend Rayanne to lose the letter and Jordan to find it. He returns it to Angela claiming not to have read it because, he says, "it just didn't hold my interest." Initially offended, Angela soon realizes Jordan cannot read the letter. She eagerly normalizes his condition as "dyslexia," assuring him knowledgeably that many people like her uncle "have it," and encouraging him to accept his condition, value his intelligence, and persevere. Jordan's response is opaque and ambivalent: "I can read . . . it's just slow." Refusing the term "dyslexia" as if it means total illiteracy, Jordan distracts Angela from her attempt to diagnose him with a strategic embrace. Following this interaction, Angela doesn't attain an opportunity to elevate her working-class beloved. Instead, she does his homework for him. 

Romantic pedagogy narratives converge with more recent debates about the legitimacy of the label "dyslexia" - debates that, by the 1990s, were often sparked by the term's association with middle-class privilege. Considering this context, this essay argues that My So-Called Life offers a resistant view of disability, asking "why Jordan can't read" while questioning the value of disability labels. Ultimately, the intransigence of his situation is best explained as an outcome of the show's more general ambivalence about personal transformation, as well as its defense of desire for its own sake. 

Contrary to some accounts, Jordan is not just an autochthonous 90s slacker, merely representative of working-class challenges to a Boomer pseudo-intellectualism.4 My So-Called Life clearly establishes that Jordan's masculinity is enmeshed with his status as a disempowered learner (the inverse of Angela's neighbor Brian Krakow's nerdiness), and the show offers several possible reasons for this enmeshment: class barriers, institutional failure, Jordan's keen nose for stigma, and neurobiological factors. In Episode 6, Jordan throatily defends Mr. Racine, a substitute English teacher, as "the best teacher I ever had" because Mr. Racine sees Jordan's illiteracy, laments the fact that he has had no advocates, and demands better. But Mr. Racine doesn't have a transformative impact outside the single episode in which he appears. The in-world questions we might ask of about a realistic show set after the implementation of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, which established civil protections and accommodations for medically documented disabilities—like why Jordan seems to have neither an IEP or a 504 plan—are unanswerable except by noting that theirs seems to be an under-resourced school that lionizes its most privileged students.  

Angela's diagnosis of Jordan is not unreasonable; Jordan flies under the radar during a time when labeling learning disabilities had become common. Compared to previous decades, the 1990s saw strengthening school supports for students with learning disabilities, including dyslexia, and encouraged labeling conditions to secure support.5 In 1995, dyslexia had a definition that accords with much of what we know about Jordan's encounters with written language:  

a specific language-based disorder of constitutional origin characterized by difficulties in single word decoding, usually reflecting insufficient phonological processing. These difficulties in single word decoding are often unexpected in relation to age and other cognitive and academic abilities; they are not the result of generalized developmental disability or sensory impairment. Dyslexia is manifest by variable difficulty with different forms of language, often including, in addition to problems with reading, a conspicuous problem with acquiring proficiency in writing and spelling.6

Evoking this "variable difficulty with different forms of language," Jordan experiences some verbal memory challenges, whether getting his own song lyrics stuck in his head or struggling to remember the lofty words Brian writes for him to say to Angela. Perhaps the way Jordan closes his eyes when he leans—"like it hurts to look at things," Angela imagines—reflects early formulations of dyslexia in the 1870s as "word blindness," and even anticipates subsequent research in the early 2000s on the impact of visual processing deficits on reading.7  

Yet Jordan faces what Anita Ho terms "the dilemma of labels": while a diagnosed learning disability would quality Jordan for legal protection it would also open him to stigma.8 Jordan resists the bias associated with (openly inadequate) academic support. Over the course of the season, several of the teachers moving through the revolving door of this embattled public high school show bias against Jordan for his reading difficulties. Jordan worries "they're going to stick me back in remedial. ... I'm not in the mood to be treated like dirt." He is keenly aware of the social liabilities the "remedial" label involves, and to his mind, there is nothing validating about naming his situation. The lack of institutional consistency makes the possibility of meaningful support seem hopeless, and reinforces Jordan's strategy of "maintaining a low profile and avoiding attention," a common thread in dyslexia memoirs that record effective childhood survival tactics.9 Clearly, the way Jordan's reading difficulties have been (not) managed have impacted his self-esteem and even his gender expression—the kind of problems advocates for learners with disabilities describe as endemic.  

Jordan's non-acceptance of the term "dyslexia" seems to anticipate some aspects of the anti-labeling move in the early-2000s "dyslexia debate" about the over-generality of the diagnosis. Anti-labeling advocates highlighted disputes about which of the range of cognitive deficits and sociological factors associated with dyslexia can be understood as casual; skepticism about the coherence of dyslexia as a category stemmed from ambiguities about which causes seem to have the most robust explanatory force, along with the possibility that it is a diagnosis sought by the middle class as validation, the documented bias teachers and students show to students with disability accommodations, and the potential for specific diagnoses to distract educators from developing systemic solutions to educational policy.  

The wide range of causes and impacts, Margaret J. Snowling explains, produced skepticism about the legitimacy of dyslexia as a diagnostic category and reinforced a "pessimistic view is that it is not remediable."10 For our purposes, it's worth dwelling on the fact that the anti-labeling perspective has made much of dyslexia's middle-class connotations. The notion that reading difficulties were a middle-class phenomenon has its seed in the Victorian novel, and as Philip Kirby argues, concern about whether dyslexia tells us more about class status than true disability has dogged efforts to formalize a term for reading difficulties since the 1870s.11 Yet Kirby compellingly suggests that "the history of dyslexia shows that the role of concerned parents in its history has not been a sinister plot to acquire undeserved funding, but a necessary reaction to the absence of state support for reading difficulties and so any other pathway to assistance."12 My So Called Life clearly suggests that Angela's parental involvement, annoying as it is to her, helps secure her strong academic performance (at least in her humanities courses), whereas a lack of or only punitive parental involvement, paired with absent institutional support, costs Jordan. He most certainly does not have the kind of over-invested parents that critics of the term "dyslexia" often blamed for the term's incoherence, while the middle-class Angela's use of the term highlights its class associations. Perhaps one of the very reasons Jordan refuses the label is that it seems to index a position of class privilege he does not identify with. Angela reacts to Jordan's reading challenges with the clear expectation that he will receive her labeling of his condition with gratitude, an expectation that many disabled people encounter. As J. Thomas Courser points out, "One of the social burdens of ... disability is that it exposes individuals to inspection, interrogation, interpretation, and violation of privacy."13 While overall the show presents Angela's "inspection" of Jordan as a sign of her generally positively coded and sympathetic openness to "othered" people's lives—a curiosity entirely consistent with the romantic narrative inherited from the British novel—Jordan's guarded reaction makes it look more like an "interrogation." 

Although Jordan's experience accords with some anti-labeling rationales, it also somewhat fits reactions against that approach emerging from the field of disability studies. Some disability theorists defend the term "dyslexia" while disputing narratives of overcoming, emphasizing that the label can help identify patterns of lived experience among struggling readers.14 This approach places special importance on the dyslexia memoir, a genre that has a particularly fraught relationship with what Arthur Frank calls the "narrative of restitution," in which an impairment is overcome, given memoir's relationship with the written word.15 Jordan has a one-liner memoir, of sorts. He receives peer tutoring from Brian Krakow later in the season and Jordan finds himself able to claim rather proudly, "I'm a rudimentary reader with low literacy skills!" His new impulse to describe his own condition reflects the boost to self-confidence some advocates of the term "dyslexia" cite as a rationale for its use. Jordan has a way of expressing himself while avoiding both classist and pathologizing labels. However, it also avoids any implication that he will progress. And there might not be much progress, since tutoring is constantly interrupted by Brian's desire to learn heterosexuality from Jordan, not to mention their rivalry over Angela. The explicitly middle-class characters' love lives center around Jordan but derail this potentially meaningful educational support. If Jordan's tutoring "worked," the show would support both self-help and educational intervention, and perhaps make Jordan a more convincing partner for Angela. If it did so, though, the fascinated absorption of teen desire in its own right would matter less. Romance disaligns with pedagogy, and pedagogy is no guarantee of improvement. 

This resistant view of disability, in which a "restitution" narrative remains basically unavailable to Jordan, reflects My So-Called Life's broader ambivalence about developmental arcs, an ambivalence heightened by the show's cancellation after a single season, as well as its episodic structure, but not fully explained by these production factors. Its anti-developmental pull is partly due to its static picture of class; characters of all ages are uncomfortable and inept when they cross class boundaries. Though cross-class friendship is explored and even fetishized, boundaries ultimately feel untraversable. Angela distances herself from her working-class friends as the season progresses after conflicts that, as Michele Byers argues, highlight intractable communication barriers.16 Moreover, a resistance to self-improvement narratives is also palpable in the show's defense of teen eroticism's dreamy, static temporality, and its inherent rather than socially symbolic value. Though Angela's pedagogical fantasy, animated by hegemonic investments, is one dimension of her desire, her other imaginings are (perhaps unsurprisingly) better explained by the Judith Butler of the 1990 Gender Trouble, for whom gender is performance secured through repetition, than by the Berlant of the 2000s, for whom gender's affective structure upholds and obscures hegemony. If, as in Butler's account of gender identity, a "good-girl" persona like Angela's "is part of hegemonic, misogynistic culture," it is also a denaturalized "fantasy of a fantasy" ongoingly and non-progressively "instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies."17

Angela is not, ultimately, an advocate of progress - and especially not for herself. Early in the season, Angela and her friends debate the ends of their desires. When Angela wonders why she is obsessed with Jordan, Rayanne tells her, "there is no because; you just want him." Angela takes a different view, in which her erotic trance is desired in itself. She tells Rickie, "I need it just to get through the day. ... Maybe I'd rather have the fantasy than even him" (Episode 2), admitting that her own fantasy, itself, is the object of her desire. She reflects in the next episode, "If we all did what was in our hearts the world would grind to a halt" (Episode 3). And although Angela gets the opportunity to act on her desires over the course of the season (these statements come in early episodes) she nonetheless continues to prefer "dreamy interludes" over direct encounter. Many of these interludes, like Angela's note to Jordan (read only by and thus seemingly in some ways addressed to Rayanne), are mediated by written or spoken narratives that showcase Angela's own literacy and articulacy. After Angela decides not to have sex with Jordan, what Rayanne and some critics take to be Angela's sex-phobic reversion to "innocence" can also be understood as the sense that for Angela, fantasy is a more creative channel for desire because it defers action.18 

Dislodging Angela's pedagogical fantasy also, at least partly, displaces the possibility that her relationship with Jordan has a socially hegemonic function. The stasis of Jordan's condition hinges on the relative stasis of Angela's desire; a connection consonant with the show's larger picture of the murky trajectories of self-improvement, especially against the backdrop of class reification. If disability, like desire, looks recalcitrant—resistant to naming, explanation, and overcoming—in My So-Called Life, it is in the service of this deepest investment: in a girl, dreaming, alone.  

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Elisha Cohn (@elishacohn.bsky.social) is Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University. She is the author of Milieu: A Creaturely Theory of the Contemporary Novel (Stanford, 2025) and Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (Oxford, 2016).

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